With bright leather chairs and stark, futuristic walls, the Philips Lighting Application Center looks like a set from a Devo music video or the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. The construction firm E. Allen Reeves commissioned me to photograph the facility in Somerset, New Jersey.
Philips uses this space to host lighting seminars for designers and other clients. The room’s unique construction helps demonstrate how different types of light and light bulbs affect our perception of color.
Color is just an illusion.
In one demonstration, all red wavelengths of light are eliminated from the room. Without red light reflecting off them, the previously loud leather chairs appeared mud brown to my eyes and to the camera.
Mood lighting.
In another display, viewers compare two identical office mock-ups lit with different types of bulbs. You get a sense of how something as simple as lighting can alter your workspace and even your mood.
A new perspective.
The chairs sit on a revolving platform, which rotates throughout the demonstration to show different sections of the room.
New Wave meets wavelengths.
The strong colors and minimalistic setting gave the room a futuristic feel that made me think of New Wave music videos from my youth.
As an architectural photographer who is fascinated by light, I loved photographing this room.
Photo by Ezra Stoller. Design Research, a store in Cambridge, Mass., 1969, designed by Benjamin Thompson.
Currently there is an exhibit of the work of Ezra Stoller at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York City.
Stoller (1915-2004) was a pioneer of modern American architectural photography. He photographed for such famous architects as Frank Lloyd Wright and Erro Sarrienen.
I love how the inside merges with the outside in this twilight photo. I also love how this photograph breaks some of the “rules” of quality architectural photography. There is a dead tree, a parked car and melting puddles of snow, which are all elements that shouldn’t be in a “perfect” photo. These elements provide context and also make the image more real.
Stoller’s career aligned with the ascendancy of modernism in architecture. Grand and simple forms predominate in his tonally beautiful black & white work.
With the Super Bowl, watching the ads can be as entertaining as the game itself. The Chrysler ad for their trucks really stood out for me because it uses still images and no live motion.
The advertising world is shifting toward using more video and less stills. The number of ad pages in print magazines is shrinking. On the competitive advertising stage of the Super Bowl, ads with big budgets compete using lots of computer generated high powered imagery, and big stars. So this simple TV spot grabbed my attention because it was different.
With the authoritative voice of Paul Harvey laid over nostalgic imagery of farmers and farms, it’s a very soft sell. The product, Dodge trucks, doesn’t even appear until halfway into the spot.
The ad shows a wide range of people in its salute to the hard working lives of farmers. Farmers who will use Dodge trucks in their selfless pursuit of growing our food.
We’d like to think that things from 2000 years ago don’t impact our modern technological world, but they do. The calendar on my iPhone reads January, named after the Roman god, Janus, a two-headed god who looks forward and backward. Janus was the god of transitions, beginnings and endings.
In the spirit of Janus, I have been looking back at 2012 and forward to 2013.
In 2012 I had the opportunity to photograph twins, who I have known for many years–Lee and Laurence Tamaccio. They are both architects and I have worked with them each separately, Laurence at Design Destinations, and Lee at Buckl Architects, but I had never been with the two of them at the same time.
Laurence and Lee Tamaccio.
Having seen and spoken to each of them separately, in my mind, Lee and Laurence were as identical as two people could be. When I got together with both of them for a photo shoot in Center City Philadelphia, I suddenly realized how different they were from each other.
January is the month of new beginnings and New Year’s resolutions. It is a time for reflection on the past, and a time for optimism about the future. While many resolutions are doomed to fail, some will succeed. Good luck in your New Year.
Fisher Fine Arts Library, designed by Frank Furness. This photo appears on the back cover of University of Pennsylvania’s new book.
The University of Pennsylvania recently published a coffee table book. My photographs of the Fisher Fine Arts Library, an amazing red Victorian building designed by Frank Furness, were chosen for the front and back covers. This building made with red terra cotta is an endless visual treat to photograph.
The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has a vibrant urban campus with a variety of old and new spaces. Thirty-nine of my photographs appear in the 130 page book, along with the work of other photographers.
While photographing an apartment building in Philadelphia we encountered the Hollywood Photo truck. I imagine the owner of the Hollywood Photo truck makes his/her living photographing at events where every-day-mortals fantasize about being Hollywood stars.
In that spirit, I had to pose like the silhouetted photographer on the truck.
Thanks to my intern Mark Karrer for snapping this shot of me.
Pennsylvania Convention Center at dusk with Philadelphia’s City Hall in the background.
The Pennsylvania Convention Center’s recent expansion brings new colors and light to Philadelphia’s Broad Street. The building’s façade is illuminated at dusk, revealing a web of colored lights, which shift throughout the night in a pattern of different colors.
This stunning addition to the city’s streetscape provides a unique challenge for the photographer: how best to capture these constantly moving lights at nightfall? As sunlight fades and the sky begins darken and change colors a longer exposure time is necessary for each photograph. So in order to photograph the buildings moving lights, Greg worked with the building’s lighting designer, who slowed the lights’ animation during the shoot. The resulting image shows the city as a palette of bright colors, giving a sense of the historic city’s constant motion.
At twilight you can see into the four story atrium.
Another challenge in photographing the center was the limited timeframe to take the perfect image. Twilight is a magical time of day for photographs, but it is a very short window of time, especially to get multiple angles of the same building. To catch the building at its best, Greg worked with assistants, stationed at cameras in two additional locations, who photographed the building during that short window of opportunity.
With the interior lights out, the colored lights jump out at night.
The image is brightened by the newest Claus Oldenburg sculpture: a “paint brush” standing in the new Lenfest Plaza, across the street from the Convention Center. It wasn’t the first time Greg had documented the Convention Center: last year he photographed the building’s massive interior expansion. Seen here.
Broad Street Facade of the Convention Center at night.
When Tabula Creative set out to design a new corporate website for PMC Property Group, I was commissioned to produce distinctive images for the site.
Screenshot of PMC corporate website showing 201 Stanwix in Pittsburgh, PA.
PMC Property Group has a track record of taking older urban buildings, updating and converting them to apartments and other uses. My challenge was to produce compelling images of these buildings.
Screenshot showing exterior of 2100 Parkway, Philadelphia.
For the website project, I photographed buildings in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Baltimore. The website features case studies of projects.
101 Wells, formerly a factory, now apartments, in Baltimore, MD.
It’s great to see older buildings brought back to life. The life of our cities is enriched by re-using historic buildings.
201 Stanwix in Pittsburgh, PA.
In Pittsburgh, a metal-clad 1950s skyscraper, the former regional headquarters of Bell Telephone, has been remade into downtown apartments and a charter school.
Dr. Christine Laine, editor of The Annals of Internal Medicine.
Recently, Hamilton College, located in Clinton, New York, commissioned me to photograph one of their Philadelphia-based alumni, Dr. Christine Laine. In celebration of alumni accomplishments for Hamilton’s bicentennial year, this photograph appears on their website and in their alumni magazine.
Dr. Laine, class of 1983, is the editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine, a widely distributed and cited medical journal that is published every two weeks by the American College of Physicians in Philadelphia. In addition to editing one of America’s major medical journals, Dr. Laine continues to see patients at Jefferson Medical College.
I used the shelves of historic bound copies of the Annals as a background while having Dr. Laine hold a current issue. We set up lighting to highlight her in this environment.
As editor, she is overseeing the creation of an iPad version of the Annals of Internal Medicine.
SunGard, a software and technology services company, hosts a “Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day”. They invited me in to take pictures of the kids.
To make the day meaningful, the children were encouraged to make things to illustrate what each of their parents do for a living.
How do you show that your dad works to protect people’s computers and data? Why, wrap yourself in bubble wrap!
This boy’s pose reminded me of the monsters in Maurice Sendak’s, “Where the Wild Things Are”.
I brought a bunch of brightly colored backgrounds to SunGard’s headquarters, and we hung out with the kids for the whole morning, taking lots of pictures of them with their creations.
It was a lot fun photographing them and feeding off of their energy.
Dressed as a security guard, protecting data.
A FedEx box becomes a “sick” computer server.
Have you taken your daughter or son to work, lately?
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