I was asked to do a couple of hand portraits to raise money for a worthy cause: Write on Sports – an organization that teaches inner city kids to write by writing news articles about sports. Back in 2005 I photographed about 100 people for my MANUAL Project. But I hadn’t done any “hand portraits” …
A time lapse video of making a hand sculpture using the Makerbot Replicator 2. The process was involved: At the Digital Atelier in Hamilton NJ we created a plaster cast of my hand and then made a high resolution scan of the plaster cast. The file had to be edited to cut the hand at …
When I read the shocking news this week that drone maker DJI was buying Hasselblad the venerable camera maker it brought back memories. Not just my unpleasant memories of owning a Hasselblad 500ELM and a few lenses. I loved the image quality but I detested how complex it was to use the camera and how …
How in the hell did I do that? Sometimes when I look back at an older photogram or print that I made I wonder how I got an effect or what kind of process I was using. Fortunately I have my own personal time machine. It works some of the time. It is pretty simple. …
As far back as I can remember my family created and sent our own original Christmas Cards. Yes, my heritage is Jewish, but we never practiced, and like many German Jews in Cincinnati we celebrated Christmas. I have continued the tradition of making my own Christmas cards since I moved out of my parents’ house …
A recipe for a Silver Sunbeam – A glimpse at how I made a 21st century edition of the classic 19th century book of photographic techniques. John Towler’s 1864 “Silver Sunbeam” was a revolutionary book that shared recipes for making those very new and magical things called photographs. The PDF of the 1864 edition The …
That would be me… the innocent bystander. Or I might be a teaching assistant, or the photographer/videographer or even occasionally a LSH (long suffering husband.) We were at Peters Valley Craft Center in northern NJ where My wife Lisa G Westheimer was teaching a Raku firing ceramics workshop. She has been a full time potter …
The photos for this post should be shot through a hazy filter since the story sounds impossible in light of the current state of the stock photography market and the memories are unclear. I was thinking back to when I used to make a decent income from stock photography. Yeah, like Getty Images… but different, …
Some would say I like to make things unnecessarily complicated, and that might be true. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to just press a button and be done with a picture, but I simply don’t know when to leave well enough alone. Take for example my new series Pythagoras… Named for one …
“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” (said to be from Ernest Hemingway, but the quote has been attributed to others and the source probably predates Hemingway.) Regardless of who said it, the sentiment is real. Writing isn’t hard, but writing well is very hard. …