Getting High at the Highline

Went to the Highline Park in downtown Manhattan this Thursday, and been so busy with school-related stuff that I haven't had a chance to process pictures from it till today.

The trip was pretty fun, if a little bit of a let-down. Only a few flower bushes were blooming and just a couple trees still had their color. If we'd gone a week or two before the place would have been a lot more vibrant and colorful, I'm sure. Still managed to snag a few shots of what few things were in bloom.

The Highline Park is, for non-New Yorkers, an old elevated railway that was disused for the longest time and was eventually turned into a public park this summer. In parts of it they've left segments of the old railway intact and overgrown.

While we didn't quite choose the right season to visit, we did choose just the right time. As we were working our way out of the park the sun was just starting to go down and hit the park in all sorts of interesting ways. Warm light, long shadows and Pauline's natural good looks lent themselves well to a few frames towards the end.

Why did the mushroom get invited to the party?

BECAUSE HE WAS A FUN GUY!!!

Sorry.

I took this purely for the pun. Totally worth it.

It was fun taking this, waiting for a sizable group of people to pass right into the frame while perched on one of the white chairs. Couple weird looks since the campus was pretty empty. But sometimes you've got to look a little weird, I think.

The campus has a meticulously preened face, which makes it hard to find very many different kinds of pictures. Especially when people aren't walking around.

There is one part of campus where I want to do some experimenting with light-painting, but that still needs some work to pull off. That will probably turn up here in a few weeks.

New Head and Hair, Old Brain and Brian

Took a new set of pretty understated portraits today to mark the drastic change on the top of my head. Look a bit less wild, but still a little wooly.

Mike also took these really sweet portraits in his hallway. We were trying to find some space/technique that would work well in his house. It was kind of difficult; any space that was long enough had distracting elements or over-reflective surfaces or some other oddity. He wound up striking gold with a simple single umbrella'd light high up above me at the end of a hallway, with him shooting at the other end. Once I figured out how to open my eyes realistically, we hit paydirt.

After that, I was trying to think of some way of using his bathroom window in a shot. It had this really beautiful design on it, and I thought shooting a light through that would throw a weird color cast on a subject, but it would be believable since it would be in the shot. It turns out it didn't change the color of the light too much (you can sort of see it on the wall), but it did diffuse it nicely while still keeping it pretty hard. A very very very small fill on the right made it a bit more even and less dramatically Rembrant-y.

No One Gives Two Fucks For Bella!

Jaime recently got his killer suit shipped to him all the way from El Passo. It came in a space-age bag made of what looked like bullet proof material and definitely cemented my image of him as a James Bond type character.

He was gracious enough to pose for a couple of scary frames in a kind of scary Dracula-era Bella Lugosi style, and I'm really pleased with how they came out. We also took some normal portraits, which was actually my reason for coming that day.