Benson Photo's Blog

I love my iPhone that I started using in July 2009. As a location photographer, having email and the web in my pocket is a big plus. However, checking email on an iPhone and a desktop meant weeding through as many as 50 spams per day on each device.

Email I don't Miss

Enter Google Apps for domain names. I was able to configure my email with Google’s gmail servers and still keep my gregbenson.com domain name in my email. I set up my iPhone, my desktop and laptop computers for IMAP email. Now I see virtually no spam and if I read an email on my desktop, my mobile phone shows it as already being read. Not having to scroll and delete interminable spam emails saves me time and aggravation.

To use Google Apps you can sign up here.

New Jersey State Taxation Building

Today, Tax Day, April 15 found me in the capital of New Jersey, Trenton, photographing an office building. As coincidence would have it, the state Taxation Building was nearby.

Down the street at the New Jersey State House, tea party protesters gathered to protest taxes.

I don’t know anyone who loves taxes, but as Ben Franklin said, “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.”

Tea Party Protesters in Trenton, NJ

Protest at New Jersey State House.

Protest at New Jersey State House

Observant visitors might notice that there have been a few minor changes to the blog’s layout, and that the blog has also gained a search feature (see right sidebar).

Blogger’s recent announcement that it would stop supporting publishing blogs via ftp forced us to scramble to re-set up the blog using WordPress. The happy news is that this change adds more functionality (the blog is now fully searchable), and we are no longer at the mercy of our blog service pulling the proverbial rug from under our proverbial feet.

All direct links to blog entries should be the same as they were before the change, so bookmarks and external links should not be broken. As with all changes there might be some minor things that we will be continuing to tweak over the coming weeks, please let us know if anything seems odd or is broken.

Webdesigner Depot is toasting Photoshop on it’s 20th anniversary with a wonderful trip down memory lane that traces each of the many versions leading up to the current CS4.

Greg can fondly remember version 2.0 that came on a floppy disk and ran on a Mac with an 80MB hard drive.

For me the journey starts in 1998 with Photoshop 5 and 5.5 which was released just a year later and included the new “Save for Web” feature. This all coincided with my first year at Drexel University.

I had never owned my own computer until that time and Drexel’s policy required all students to have one of their own. I jumped in headfirst and stumbled through many clumsy attempts at webdesign, inescapably leading to Photoshop, image slices, and the “Save for Web” function.

“Save for Web” was also part of ImageReady, a companion program to Photoshop that has since been absorbed by Photoshop itself. At that time it never would have occurred to me that my new passions would eventually lead me back to my childhood love of photography.

One fun thing that Webdesigner Depot does not cover is that each of the more recent version of Photoshop have shipped with the “About” screen Adobe used in-house during the development of that version. This easter egg can be seen if you hold Command+Option+Shift while clicking on “About Photoshop” in the menu (substitute Control for Command on a Windows machine). My favorite was always Venus in Furs from Photoshop 6. A short history of these hidden splash screens can be found here. The current version, Photoshop CS4, has the above Stonehenge hidden screen.

While reading news about Google Books proposed copyright settlement, I decided to check out Google Books. On their home page are covers of various books and magazines including the tabloid, Weekly World News. That prompted me to recall a Weekly World News headline from the past, “Actual Photo of Jesus Found”. Searching Google Books with the phrase, “actual photo of Jesus Weekly World News”, bingo I found it.

The article claims that a photograph of Jesus had been found that was taken by a primitive Roman “camera obscura.”

Since it is established that the first known photograph was taken in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, it is a pure hoax to report that a photograph exists from Roman times. However the tabloid Weekly World News has never let facts stand in the way of a good story.

Just to see if Google Books could find high-minded material as well as low brow tabloid material, I searched for Eisenstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and found the 1921 English translation of his work.

While writers and publishers debate the pros and cons of Google capturing and distributing their content, for the end user, Google Books provides a treasure trove of low and high culture to rummage through.

Fall is upon us. Leaves are changing colors and dropping to the ground. While wandering the narrow streets of Center City Philadelphia near 11th and Spruce Streets, I shot these autumn ginkgo trees. Ginkgos are one of my favorite trees.

They are descended from very ancient trees and are one of the oldest types of deciduous trees. Their simple fan-like leaves have a simpler vein pattern than oaks or maples. Resistant to pollution, disease and insects, they thrive in urban environments. More information can be found at Wikipedia.

Two weekends ago while visiting friends at the New Jersey shore, my wife and I paid a visit to an architectural salvage yard, called Recycling the Past, located in Barnegat, NJ. Their enormous lot is a treasure trove of building pieces. As a fan of buildings I was in heaven. There are Victorian mantelpieces, signs from 1950s amusement parks, terra cotta decoration from 1920s buildings, 15-foot stone columns from a closed state mental hospital and on and on.

Recycling is in vogue. We recycle cans, paper and glass at curbside to minimize trash put into landfills. The reason to recycle buildings is more complex.

In America buildings often have short life spans. A thirty-year baseball stadium is obsolete, whereas in southern France I visited a Roman stadium 2000 years old that is still used for bullfights and rock concerts.

When a house or commercial building is deemed too expensive to renovate or unsuited to its site’s next use, then it’s knocked down. Pre-World War II buildings often have a level of craftsmanship and quality of materials that current buildings frequently lack. This makes the well-crafted fragments of older buildings valuable to buyers who can appreciate and afford them.

My emotions ranged from delight and wonder at seeing beautiful salvaged objects that may find new homes to sadness and melancholy contemplating the decay and destruction that led to these objects being orphaned from their original settings.

Enough claw footed bathtubs to shoot lots of Cialis TV ads.

Detail of copper panels from an old Atlantic City school.

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.

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.

Benson Photo is launching our blog. We are: Greg Benson, a commercial photographer since 1982, Fernando Gaglianese, digital editor and assistant, and Tanya Hopkins, office manager and assistant. On this blog we hope to post our thoughts on topics related to commercial photography. Stay tuned for the next installment. Benson Photo’s home page is gregbenson.com