Picturedujour.com

Pictures from my recent trip to Memphis, TN:

Clouds shot from the car on the way to Memphis.

My friends Bob Mehr and Derek Erdman like hanging out with me because I’m funny and entertaining.

A painter at Odessa.

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Filed under: exhibits, live-music, portraits, travel by newberry
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Julius Von Bismarck, a prankster genius in Berlin, devised a diabolical contraption for sabotaging photographers: the Fulgurator. (Found via boingboing.net) He gave me permission to run the images below, which illustrate the workings of this badass gizmo.

Filed under: gear, strange by newberry
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What role did my storefront windows have in the engagement of Elizabeth Peirce and Lance Marshall? Funy you’d ask that. Lance and Elizabeth live in my neighborhood, where they often take walks–their route going right past my studio storefront, where they’ve been known to stop and look at the photographs I have displayed there. So Lance asked me to photograph him with wedding ring and proposal note, and I hung a large print of it in the storefront window, along with the other photographs that are normally there.

On Tuesday, June 3rd, they took a walk, stopped at the window, and Elizabeth said yes. Congrats dudes!

Here’s the proposal photograph:

And here is Lance with his fiancée, Elizabeth:

Filed under: celebrations, portraits by newberry
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Ana Gagliardi is single and had a brilliant idea for an art show. She asked 12 photographers to “interpret” her and uploaded the portraits to her Match.com profile, as well as exhibit the prints at Gallery 101 in Chicago. The show will be up until mid-July; the gallery is by appointment only. You can reach Gallery 101 at 312-624-8291. My portrait is below; it’s called “Expectations.”

Filed under: exhibits, portraits by newberry
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The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego has an exhibit of exquisite images by South African photographer Gary Schneider. Here are a few:

Photos © Gary Schneider, courtesy of Museum of Photographic Arts.

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A good read from The Guardian:

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Because it’s a movie-plot threat.

I’ve definitely experienced this paranoia; since 9/11 I’ve been told not to take photos numerous times, in situations that wouldn’t have been an issue before. The thing is, if you wanted to take pictures for dastardly purposes, it would be quite easy to do it surreptitiously–why would you walk around with a big ol’ SLR when you could use a hidden video camera, or use your camera phone while you pretend to text someone. I can understand that people feel jumpy and there are very real threats out there, but freaking out about someone photographing a building just seems silly.

And another thing. Once at a Whole Foods store I spied a swell looking stack of oranges that I decided to take a snapshot of with my little point and shoot. Mere seconds elapsed before a staff member told me I couldn’t take photos in the store. In this case, I’m guessing the fear is not of terrorism, but probably more a corporate competitive issue. It seems that all chains have that policy.

Filed under: news by newberry
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From ITproportal.com:

Kodak’s CEO, Antonio Perez, warns that the company might have to raise the price of its photographic paper and chemicals by as much as 20 percent over the forthcoming weeks as the demand for raw materials cause the costs to soar.

Prez said that the entire traditional photography market would be effected by rising prices as aluminium, silver and oil, vital ingredients for the sector, shot up in the last year.

This, added to other costs related to distribution, logistics and shipping expenses, is putting extra pressure on Kodak’s bottom line.

The forthcoming price raise could prompt photographers to either rush to deplete existing stocks at current prices or switch to the digital alternative which would be yet another blow to the ailing traditional photography industry.

– article by Desire Athow

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From tomorrow’s New York Times:

…this week the Indianapolis Museum of Art plans to announce that it has acquired a trove of work and correspondence by Weegee, the crepuscular, stogie-smoking New York photographer whose visceral pictures became a template not only for artists like Diane Arbus but also for much of the uncomfortably close tabloid imagery that exists today. The museum described the acquisition as a partial gift and partial purchase from the dealer.
The trunk is assumed to have once been the possession of Wilma Wilcox, a social worker who was Weegee’s companion and lived with him from 1957 until his death in 1968. Upon her death in 1993, she bequeathed the bulk of his work — thousands of prints and negatives — to the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. How the trunk full of prints and 62 letters to Ms. Wilcox from Weegee (born Usher Fellig in what is now Ukraine, and later known as Arthur Fellig) ended up in Kentucky is a mystery that neither the Indianapolis Museum nor the dealer, Steve H. Nowlin, has solved.

“People who work in the daytime are suckers,” he once said. Before the publication of his first book, “Naked City,” made him famous in 1945, he lived in a cheap room near police headquarters and was said to be so accustomed to working on the run that he once developed a picture of a prizefight in a subway motorman’s cab while rushing back to a newspaper office.

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Filed under: exhibits, street by newberry
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A few weeks ago I got hired to photograph a stand up comedy performance. It was to be filmed for a DVD release, and the producer called me a few days before the show to tell me I’d need a sound blimp–my camera noise would be picked up by their microphones. I’ve shot on film sets before, but it was usually during rehearsals or in between takes, so camera noise wasn’t an issue. I called around town and couldn’t find a blimp for sale or to rent. The only place that I know of that makes these is in L.A. So I did some Googling and found this site, which illustrates how David Buzzard made his own blimp from a Pelican case and a length of plumbing pipe. I made my own based on that idea. Since the aforementioned site doesn’t go into detail, I thought I’d share how I did it.

Disclaimer: I did this for my Canon EOS 5D with 80-200mm f2.8 lens and it worked out well. I have no idea how this will work with other bodies and lenses.

1. The main parts: a Pelican 1150 case, with foam, and a length of 4″ PVC pipe. At Home Depot I found that they had precut 2′ lengths. The pipe comes in (at least) two thicknesses; I got the thicker-walled version, because I thought that might insulate the sound better. I’ve heard that most of the camera noise travels through the lens. Tip: look for pipes where at least one of the edges is smooth–you’ll need a smooth edge to glue to the case.




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Filed under: diy, gear by newberry
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At long last, from Nasa, the photography how-to we’ve all been waiting for. And all you need is a camera High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera and a $720 million dollar multipurpose orbiter. Check your basement or your garage–you’ve probably got those lying around in there somewhere…

( Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Filed under: diy, film/video, gear by newberry
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