Interests
Photography
Here we see Yours Truly about to get on the tour boat to Alcatraz, late 1990s. At left is a old 1980s 35mm Pentax Program A SLR equipped with a 35-70mm lens. The SLR at right is a circa 1996 Canon A2 equipped with a 20mm Canon wide angle lens and a Canon Speedlite 540EX flash. The latter camera body was soon replaced with a Canon (an EOS 3 to be exact), a 550EX flash and a Tamron 28-105mm lens was added to my collection of "glass."
Alcatraz on Velvia film.
Some of the now-abandoned buildings of Alcatraz have a surreal quality, enhanced by the distortions of a 20mm lens. It's a scene that could have been painted by Giorgio de Chirico.
Even a single cloud and some panes of glass on a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper can engender an interesting, highly stylized image.
At the 2003 VON show in Boston (shortly after I founded VON magazine for Jeff Pulver), my room to meet with CEOs and VPs was so huge, I couldn't help but set up this amusing shot of myself with my Sony digital camera.
This is a 140-degree panoramic shot taken with an old Widelux camera in 1998. Yours Truly was attending (and partly officiating) one of Harry Newton's tradeshows (by that time owned by CMP) at the Dolphin Hotel in Disney World, Orlando Florida.
Segmented or "stitched" panorama of CT Expo 1999, Los Angeles Convention Center.
A 20mm wide angle lens comes in handy when dealing with skylines and foreground architecture.
At the top of the Avenida da Liberdade in Lisbon, Portugal is the Parque Eduardo VII, named after the British king who came to Lisbon to confirm the alliance between Britain and Portugal. One one side of the park is the Estufa Fria, which consists of 8,100 square meters of extraordinary greenhouses. The "cold" greenhouse contains winter plants, the "hot" one houses tropical species and the third one specializes in fleshy plants. Visitors can also stroll by an adjacent pond, around which are usually some noisy peacocks.
Nearly all of my publicity photos of the 1990s and early 2000s were taken by Daniel S. Baliotti, who had been one of the world's great sports photographers of the 1970s, and who then branched out into fashion and other types photography (winning seven design awards). He taught Harry Newton photography in a class back in the 1970s and briefly worked for Harry's Telecom Library in the late 1990s. He had one of the few Nikons in the world with a motor drive that could take 11 frames a second, part of a small batch built by Nikon for select photographers shooting the 1974 Olympics. I've always been a fan of Canon equipment, so Dan and I have had some spirited Nikon vs. Canon discussions over the years. This photo, taken in Dan's studio, is definitely my favorite. He took it with a medium format Bronica 645 and Fuji Provia 100 film.
Photography, perhaps the most egalitarian of the arts, has interested me over the years. In both my film and digital camera eras, I tended to use state-of-the-art Canon equipment and lenses (okay, I did own a Sony digital camera once, and I have one Tamron 28-105 lens for my Canon EOS 3). It infuriated me when Kodak stopped making Kodak 25 (the greatest transparency film of all time), and Royal Gold 25 (their equally fine-grained negative film). I had to switch over to Fuji Provia 100F, Fuji Velvia, Fuji NPH 400 negative film (for photographing expos using a slow-sync flash), and the occasional portrait shot using Agfa Portrait Film.
In the old days, every magazine had an in-house photographer to take product shots. These days, companies hold onto their products and send digital photo files (.tif, .jpg, etc.) For shots of expos and visitors to Harry Newton's Telecom Library in the 1990s, I became the in-house photographer for Computer Telephony magazine (later called Communications Convergence). That was nice since I had abandoned photography after I had left college.
Fortunately, Harry Newton's Telecom Library was situated at the edge of New York City's "photo district," so once I took a photo I could call upon some of the greatest photo finishing talent in the world. For example, it was the great sports photographer Daniel S. Balliotti who introduced me to Baldev Duggal, who designed and built the first Dip-and-Dunk processing machine, and whose company, Duggal Visual Solutions, was the first to introduce RGB drum scanning and electronic retouching for photographers. Once, at a photo expo in New York, Dan introduced me to Ray DeMoulin of Eastman Kodak, who, ironically, was rather partial to the subtle pastel shades of Konica negative film.