My dad was a cop. One of New York’s Finest. He served for eleven years before retiring as a Detective Lieutenant (Auto Crime) when we moved to the Philippines in ’82. Whenever someone would ask what my dad did when we lived in New York, there was always a sense of pride in my reply. Every kid thinks his dad is Superman, but how many of them actually threw people in jail? How many had guns and dress blues and medals?
It snowed today, the earliest New York has received at least an inch of snow in recorded weather history. I’d write more but honestly, not much else really need be said. Besides, after a night out (like a little bit of snow is gonna stop anyone) I’m in dire need of some thawing out.
It’s raining out. Despite the fact that she isn’t even here yet, Irene has officially taken hold of New York City. Stores stripped bare, the streets so empty you’d think the Ascension had happened while you were napping. At home and bored, listening to the rain pelt the streets outside, I decided to hop into a ZipCar and do a little cruising.
When I had arranged my last trip to San Francisco, the very first thing I did after booking my flight was send out an email to Paciano Triufo, Ann Borja, and Roczane Enriquez, photographers and make-up artist (respectively) extraordinaire and good friends from my theatre days with Bindlestiff. I’d always wanted to work with on a shoot but had never had the chance, so when the chance presented itself, I hopped right on it.
I had another shoot just last night, this time with a coworker and friend who wanted some good photos of herself. We had planned on hopping over to a park and getting some nice fun little shots in the sun. The weather, however, had other ideas, for which I’m eternally grateful.
It was gorgeous out on the last weekend before I left for Boston (in case you were wondering why I haven’t updated in a while) so naturally I decided to spend that day indoors at The Met. While wandering the floors of the museum, I happened upon The American Wing which. As I stepped out into the open square where most of the statues were standing, I noticed something that hadn’t registered with me before.
Last week, comrade-at-arms Tasayu (previously) approached me to do some head shots and portraits over at at the “Institute of Higher Burning” and graffiti landmark 5 pointz. Never one to turn down an opportunity to check out new locations (and just explore), I was in from the word go.
I got together with Terresa again on Tuesday night for a second shoot, this one a glamour / nude shoot. And just as the shoots with Joyce and Jorge Luis gave me an opportunity to run my home studio through the ropes, this session with Terresa gave me a chance to see how many other locations I could milk out of my apartment.
Photography can be a pretty expensive endeavor, especially when you’re still starting out and slowly building your arsenal. “Do what you can with what you’ve got” becomes your mantra, and “DIY” quickly joins your panoply of other photography acronyms. My little in-home studio won’t work very well for more than one person, and living with a roommate means that I have to set and strike it whenever I need to use it (rather than just keep it up 24/7), but for what it is, it does a pretty good job. And for one-person shoots, it performs admirably.
Like most people who grew up outside of the States, I grew up with a very specific view of the country that lead the world, which I developed through exposure to its greatest export, popular culture. The only difference was that my view was time-shifted by a few decades. And while I recognized that America was made up of fifty states that were home to millions of people living in thousands of cities, it only ever came down to one of them: New York.
