I photographed Laurie Burt, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner, on the steps of the State House in Boston for Governing Magazine. The story is about greenhouse gases and what northeast states are doing about them.
I have been meaning to go out and make pictures of a Boston snow storm for at least the last few times we have had the white stuff fall. Yesterday I finally went out and did so. My plan was to go downtown and photograph hoards of people hustling though the falling flakes. I was thinking about shooting kind of loose along with a telephoto lens to compress the falling snow and people. Unfortunately Boston being the heat island it is made that impossible. The five miles from my house to downtown is all it took to turn the snow falling in my neighborhood into rain. So I headed back toward my place and decided to photograph in the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain. I did not get to make the photo that I had in my head since there was almost no one there but a dog was kind enough to help me out.
by vickmark
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I was happy to see my photo of Harvard Law Student Edward Guo run as the secondary art on the cover of the Feb. 22, 2011 edition of the New York Times! The story is about a website that Mr. Guo created called the International Music Score Library Project that makes available to the public over 85,000 scores of music free of charge. It is a similar format to Google Books and is completely crowd sourced by users who voluntarily upload scores.
I meet Mr. Guo at the Loeb Music Library on the Harvard Campus where we started shooting in the stacks. We then took a short walk to Harvard Square and made a few extra images. I used a Westcott shoot through umbrella with a Speedlite as the key light and a on-camera mounted Ray Flash ringlight as fill to light all the images.
by vickmark
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I photographed Harvard Professor and Department of History Chair James T. Kloppenberg author of the book “Reading Obama” on campus in Cambridge, MA last fall for a story in the New York Times. Mr. Kloppenberg was a great person to photograph as he was very friendly and accommodating. I really enjoyed our discussing during the session.
When I am shooting a portrait I always try to engage the subject as an attempt to produce emotion or gesture from them. Emotion and gesture are in my mind probably more important in a good photo than composition, light or any technique. The first photo above was my favorite image. We were joking around as I was taking photos when Mr. Kloppenberg pulled out a tissue. The photo was made when he went to put the tissue back in his pocket. An unexpected moment that made the best image. I said to him that I thought that was going to be the photo that runs and it was even though we spent another 30min. shooting. I love the photo editors at the NY Times as they almost always pick my favorite images to go with the story. The images are all natural light aided by a large Calumet silver reflector mounted on a light stand and boom.
by vickmark
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by vickmark
no comments