Snow job

The good news, I got a last minute call to do a job before the end of the year. The bad news, it was literally on New Year’s Eve day (if that is it’s official name), and I had to try to drive out of the city in the blizzard. As I have a Volvo, and spent 4 winters upstate, I was not worried, but apparently I should have been. Trying to get out of Manhattan via the Williamsburg Bridge was not happening, so after an hour on Delancy, I took some empty back streets to the Brooklyn Bridge, which was open.

Once I got out of the city, the roads were passable, and I was able to make I to my shoot on Long Island only slightly late. I can’t show the images until after they have run, but look at the March 2010 issue of Consumer Reports to see what I did.

California Dreamin'

Just got back from a week out in San Francisco. While I was out there, I had a bunch of appointments at some ad agencies- I met with: Debbie Mobley at Venables, Bell & Partners, Suzee Barrabee at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Jen Hall at Anderson DDB, Kelly Steblay at BBDO West, Kevin Stokes at Kane and Finkel Healthcare, as well as some folks at some top notch design firms: Robin Raj, Steve Fong, Kristin and the gang at Citizen Group and Jon Schleuning, Gloria Hiek, An Luc and Rob Duncan over at Studio Hinrichs. Thank you to everyone for sharing your time with me.

Ate some great lunches at Henry’s Hunan, referred by my buddy, super DP Andy Lilien. He recommended Marty's Special- a dish made with chicken, bamboo shoots, onions carrots, bell peppers, house made smoked ham, all mixed with a hot red peppers- smoky, salty, delicious, but not for the faint of heart. Another signature dish is Diana's Special Meat Pie, described as “Deep-fried flour cakes filled with meat sauce, Parmesan cheese, vegetables, onions and condiments (with or without hot sauce)”- like China meets Mexico in SF. Not sure why good Hunan is so hard to find here in NY, where Szechwan seems to have taken hold as the premier spicy Chinese cuisine.

I also spent some time wandering through SF’s Chinatown, taking
pictures, and had a sort of déjà vu moment when I realized I had walked the same area shooting some pictures almost 20 years earlier. What was interesting to me, upon reflection, was not just how much things had or hadn’t changed, but how much I had changed. Instead of looking at the scene, and shooting it from a distance, I now go right into the scene, and shot using a wider lens, making myself a part of the action. The other thing is back then it was a manual focus Nikon F3, shooting Kodachrome 64, and of course I couldn’t see what I had shot for days until I sent the film out to Fair Lawn NJ.

20 years later, I can take the slide pages out, hold them up to a light source and see images with no problems of outdated software, unread- able media, mismatched color profiles, improper monitor calibration, bad data... but for better or for worse, there is no going back.