I was recently approached to cover an upcoming event at Natuzzi SoHo, a showroom for what is apparently the largest leather furniture manufacturer in the world. I stopped by earlier tonight to scout the location and get the lowdown on the location, layout, and lighting (alliteration in the house, what up).

This is Rick. My sister took me to FAO Schwartz to put him together, a birthday gift months in the making. Like me, he enjoys a good Irish whiskey from time to time. Perhaps too much.

I have never seen as many people out with cameras as I did today. At one point I saw about five or six people on the same small bridge, all looking out over one of the railings, shooting The Lake. It was kinda ridiculous.

If someone had told me sooner that a perk to working on heavy snow days was virtually empty trains, I’d have done it a long time ago.

Today’s update will be little more than this shot of a random traveler spotted in Penn Station. He’s not the real Epic Beard Man, but as the original is more of a Beard Man who happens to be Epic and this guy is more of a Man who happens to have an Epic Beard, I figure the distinction is enough to let it pass.

When I die, I hope they use the photo from my “About Me” page, or something similarly silly. I don’t take myself seriously in life, I’d hate to start after I was dead.

The longer you shoot, the more you get used to things like this, these “happy accidents.” Photos where the thing that makes it work the most (or at least one of them) was completely unplanned. It happens more often than one would think. For all the control you try to exert on your shoot, making sure that everything — the gear, the location, the talent, the lighting, the timing, everything — is exactly as it needs to be, randomness always manages to creep in.

I just love that the bridge is called Hell Gate Bridge. It brings to mind images of demons and hellspawn erupting from some portal to the netherworld. Trains go in through one side of the portal, and a massive snakelike demon emerges from the other, wreaking havoc and laying waste to the countryside.

The minute a New Yorker gets on a train, all bets are off. What might pass for a civilized society above ground turns into a free-for-all under its streets. Stock brokers, school teachers, pastors, deacons, and all manner of person shed off their friendly personae when they enter the tunnels of the New York transit system. They are no longer men, they are morlocks in a Wellsian nightmare.

Right beside the cabin is Heinold’s First and Last Chance, a bar frequented by London himself, back when he used to live here. From the look of it, not much has changed since the Call of the Wild author’s days.