New Images: People Portfolio

After poring over many hundreds of photographs we have finished selecting images for our Portraits section. Because there were so many interesting images we wanted to share on the web we chose to not only update the galleries but also to expand them from one to three pages.

In these photographs you can see that as an aid in making the final selections we printed small "thumbnail" prints that we pasted to boards with correction tape. This makes it possible to group images, slide them around a table, regroup them, and keep making quick changes during the selection process.

Much of photography as a discipline is about selection. What subject to photograph? What parts of the scene are left in or out of the frame? Which images from the day's take are shown? When the final shot is chosen, does it then also get cropped to simplify the message?

Choosing images to show in a portfolio applies the art of selection to yet another end. Please take a look at the images we selected, we hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

Weather or Not: Sunny, Blue Skies, and Dry

A few weeks ago we shared some photographs of University of Pennsylvania's Weave Bridge to make the point that even though sunny days are generally the best days to shoot architecture the sun can also create unwanted, distracting shadows.

The following is a great example of why sunny days are, as a rule, best for architecture:

One could not ask for better conditions to photograph this office building in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The direct sun's contrasty light gives the brick facade an attractive color and makes strong, but open shadows that give an otherwise simple structure a sense of volume and presence. The beautiful blue sky also has a nice balance of soft, wispy, white clouds.

The weather does not often cooperate and can wreak havoc with deadlines. Above is a comparison between an unretouched shot of the same building during a cloudy and damp day, and the same shot with an example of the sort of retouching that is sometimes necessary. Even though the added sky improves the shot; the pavement is still very wet. It is clear that returning to the site when the weather was best yielded the better image.

New Images: Architectural Details

Over the next few weeks we will be updating many of the sections on our website. Today we have added a new Architectural Details gallery. Please take this chance to navigate on to some of our other galleries if you have not done so because the content will very soon be changing.

Multi-Dimensional Portraits

In late 2008, I was given an assignment to take an environmental portrait of Robert Ghrist, a math professor who teaches in both the School of Arts and Sciences and the Engineering School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

The topic of n-dimensional space is an abstract and esoteric subject. My challenge in photographing Professor Ghrist was to find an environment that hints at spatial relationships.

The newest Penn Engineering building, Skirkanich Hall has a multitude of textures and colors. Working in collaboration with an art director for Penn, I spent time scouting, looking at several places in the building in which to shoot the portrait.

Below are alternate photographs taken during the shoot, including one with a model made with flexible rods that helps students visualize multi-dimensional spaces.

Early Bird Shoot At The Supermarket

We have previously blogged about the importance of choosing the right time in photography. The time when the weather is right, the time of day when the light is right, etc.

But when photographing a retail space another time is very important: the time when there are fewer clients.

Last week Greg photographed a supermarket in Philadelphia and needed to find the time of day when not only would there be few customers shopping but that would also be just after the supermarket staff had restocked all the shelves and had a chance to make their store clean and sparkly for the day's business.

Working with the store manager we were able to make arrangements to arrive at the store at 5:30 AM, a time that was non-disruptive to business and that also worked great for getting our client the images they needed.