The Finale

to KITE RUNNER

Kite Runner

He say you Kite Runna'!

Went to Astoria Park today to help Mike out with one of his more ridiculous ideas: aerial kite photography. Normally it wouldn't be that ridiculous, but he chose to do it in December, right when a huge blizzard was blowing into New York City.

Mike had plans of constructing the whole rig to do the project, kite and all. He even made a kite, but it was so hilariously bad that it had to be burnt and all evidence of its existence destroyed. Even mentioning "box kite" around him still kinda makes him twitch. One store bought kite, a Canon point&shoot and an e-bay rigging later, we were in business.

Kind of. This was pretty much the story for the first half hour or so. Getting a little lift off the ground, but not enough to lift the line-attached camera rigging, which weighed probably two pounds, very high off the ground.

This was about as far as we got at this part of the park. After running up and down the hill about six or eight times and figuring out just how uncoordinated five people can be, we decided to move the rigging closer to the kite itself so it would be able to accelerate faster. I also quietly suggested we move to the big hill in the center of Astoria Park, the one that looks like where you would want to fly a kite.

At the big hill we had a lot more success, but it still wasn't going that well. Up to this point I'd been shooting stills and video of the other guys taking turns flying the kite, not really getting it very high - maybe 30-40 feet up. I asked if I could give it a go, and promptly took the kite up to something like 80 feet. I'm going to throw all semblance of humbleness out the window here and say that it felt really freaking amazing. So amazing that Mike wasn't able to capture any pictorial evidence of my first or second flights because he was so in awe, but trust me. It was great.

Here is a recreation of my amazing kite-flying ability. It's important that you really blow with a deep breath into the kite, otherwise it just won't gain air.

Once we got it up, we started getting real aerial pictures. I only got to see a couple of them when we went back home to check, but a couple looked really cool. There were also a lot of interesting ones of the camera on the ground looking at our group through the grass, but those probably won't win any awards for aerial photography.

All in all, a good day.

Sometime during the week, the story of how we almost chopped off someone's hand.

It's December! Christmas is almost here!

And oh my god the sky is on fire!!!

St. John's University puts out a crazy amount of cash for Christmas. Outside of St. Augustine they set up gigantic speaker systems, a huge Christmas tree and light projectors that project images of snowflakes onto the front of the library. Every single tree on campus is covered with several rungs of Christmas lights, which must make their already gigantic electricity bill even more ridiculous. And they cap it all off with a huuuge fireworks display on the Great Lawn. Your tuition dollars at work.

But, y'know, it is really pretty.

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.