Photography Sharing Redefined: 500px

500px is taking the online photo sharing community by storm!

I’ve been gone for too long my friends, but I am back to tell you all about a site that has dominated my browser for the last few months. The site I want to talk to you about is called 500px. 500px is a photo sharing website which has attracted AAA photographers from all walks of life, due to its simplistic sharing design, feature set, and incredible image quality. The first thing you notice as you arrive to 500px land from FlickRville is how cleaner images look on 500px. They just pop off your screen. 500px combines their image quality with a like it/dislike it image rating scale, which almost ensures that great images always rise to the top. Though as of right now, most images you find in the popular section feature foreign women with very large breasts. I can only complain so much about that one.

I’ve slowly been adding images to my collection and toying with the idea of ditching FlickR and 4ormat.com entirely to build my online portfolio on 500px. For $50 dollars a year you can become AWESOME which gives you access to unlimited uploads, multi page portfolio layouts, google analytics, ad free pages, custom domain and much more. It’s a great value in comparison to other portfolio based websites.

Ioana adds another great image to her astonishing 500px collection.

However, my favorite part of 500px is looking at the marvelous artwork of my fellow photographers. Surfing through 500px can be a very painful experience. Every image seems to be crafted by imaging gods. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “bad” photo on the site. 500px is full of some of the best images covering a range of different subject matter. Though “Nudes” may dominate the Popular section of photos, the Editor’s choice section features some of the most astounding photographs from the wild life, landscape, and portraiture arenas I’ve ever seen. A great feature is the ability to buy high quality prints at a variety of sizes and canvas style.

A lot of people have been shouting from the rooftops about how FlickR is going the way of VHS, I’m not exactly on that bandwagon, but I’m reaching to jump on it. With 500px taking off and Google+ luring people like Trey Ratcliff to their yard, FlickR seems to be in need of a refresh. Will they refresh it? Only time will tell.

P.S Check out my 500px photo collection here!

P.P.S: $10 off your 500px AWESOME upgrade with the promo code “FRIENDS” Can’t say I never did anything for ya!

PoTD: The Street Artist

Street Artist

It’s been a while since I’ve done a PoTD thing on this site, or even posted a simple set of pictures. Well I’ve come to break that trend here today. I went out and surveyed one of the nicer sides of Queens today looking for something to shoot. I stumbled across this brilliant graffiti artist, whose name I forgot to grab, and got him to pose for two shots. I also screwed up by not having proper business cards on me. How professional and swanky can you really appear when you have to write down your url on a folder… with someone else’s pen! But I digress.

Oh and before you rant about how illegal what he’s doing is know that it isn’t. 5 Points, which is located in Astoria, is one of the few places in NYC where it’s perfectly legal to practice graffiti, granted you ask permission first. The place is full of incredible art ranging from comic book icons to music murals and everything in between.

More pics to come at my 500PX page! 

On Writing

Recently I received a very kind email from a kind fellow named Andrei Butyanko about a particular part of my iPad 2 post. After checking out an example I posted from the CeltX app featuring a snippet of my work, Andrei sent me an email inquiring about how I write and how I sift through my ideas. I decided I’d write a proper blog post to share some of the ideas I shared with him and see what works for some of you guys.

I’ve been writing stories for as long as I can remember. Some of my more grandiose story ideas as a child came from my time sitting in the backseat of my grandmother’s car as her and my mother dragged me from department store to department store. Back then all I had was a composition notebook, a pencil, and my imagination. I didn’t have the technical know how I do now. I couldn’t keep my words firmly between the lines printed on the crisp white pages. I didn’t know what a screenplay was or even what a three act structure was. And you know what? It was better that way.

Life with the iPad 2

Its taken awhile for me to sit down and write this blog post, which am in fact typing on my iPad 2, but it’s finally here. I held out on the iPad one. I wasn’t as negative on it as some journalists who dismissed it as a giant iPod touch. I embraced the idea of such a notion, but I wanted to wait for the app store to develop. There were not enough iPad only apps for me, or at least ones that lived up to the device’s potential. My feelings lasted all of a few months, before I had the burning desire for a tablet device. What sparked the sudden desire you say? The laptop.

As I started to grow as a photographer and cinematographer, opportunities started to come my way more frequently. I found myself going on several meetings a month and I became blind sided with this issue. How do I properly display my work in a simple and elegant way? The laptop wouldn’t cut it, too big and bulky, and how bad does it look to whip out a 17″ MacBook Pro during a meeting with a director and sift through your folders trying to find the latest export of that last short you just shot? It looks atrocious. Another issue I was having was with on-the-go productivity apps. I had left the iPhone in the dust for the T-Mobile G2 and discovered that while Android had it’s advantages at the core of it’s experience, it was seriously lacking on the app front. I didn’t have a proper screenwriting app and the note taking app left a lot to be desired (in the beginning). All of a sudden, I needed a tablet.

Technicolor’s CineStyle Delivers the Goods: NOW WITH VIDEO

Magic Bullet Looks at WORK

Us DSLR shooters have to put up with some pretty pesky issues in order to deliver proper content to our audiences/clients. We have a wonky, yet sometimes beneficial form factor, there’s no proper audio ports on the device, no HD-SDI, no timecode, live view goes MIA once you plug a monitor in, and last but not least… horrible aliasing! But to me, the biggest problem of all, is the puny color space and lack of latitude. Well Technicolor has answered the call in the form of a new picture profile setting, dubbed CineStyle.

Original Technicolor Profile to the left, Technicolor LUT to the right.

This profile is incredible. The folks at Technicolor are wizards, they’ve managed to pull out a lofty amount of information from not only the shadows, but the highlights. The CineStyle profile is the flattest, most color accurate picture profile available. It’s not going to turn your 2500 dollar 5D Mark II into a RED EPIC, but it makes it a better camera than it was yesterday and that’s all you can really hope for 2+ years after release. Technicolor also provides a S-Curve LUT for working inside Apple Color and other LUT compatible color grading suites. I used Magic Bullet’s LUT Buddy to do my work, but that proved to be a buggy experience.

EDIT: I’ve finally managed to get the video up! You can see the results in action now!

You can grab the profile here, along with the LUT. Enjoy!

The City of Angels

Hollywood

Hello universe! Its been a while since I’ve posted on my blog, but I’m back! I’ve been hard at work crafting my reel, working on a few shorts, and prepping for a feature I’m going to lens in July. In the midst of all this work, I managed to take a quick little detour to Los Angeles, CA, a decision I’m happy I made. LA is an interesting place to say the very least. For starters there’s like no one ever roaming the streets…ever. It threw me for a loop when I first got there because in being from New York, I’m used to seeing streets crowded with people at all hours of the day. Not the case when nearly everyone drives a car.

My bro Jimi at Venice Beach

The city of smog certainly lived up to it’s reputation when it came to the automobile traffic. But there are more pressing, or interesting things to talk about. LA was beautiful, even the lower income areas were pretty. High 70s and blue skies every day of my visit.  Booming Palm trees, women who were seemingly created by men in operating rooms, and a marvelous selection of tasty food. LA was alright man, it was alright.

While down there I visited my buddy Jared Abrams, formally the face of Cinema5D, who is new site Wide Open Camera is doing all sorts of damage on the web. I helped Jared shoot this quick take video demoing Zacuto’s brand new DSLR rig “The Scorpion”. Lovely little kit Zacuto’s has lined up for people. Extremely well balanced, very robust, and feels rock solid. I also got to check out the EVF, which was very impressive as well. I then got my first taste of Mexico in California at this chill little spot called Tere. Fat burrito, freshly made guacamole, and tortilla chips definitely hit the spot. Oh I also had two little chicken tacos to go with.

My god yummmm

BIgger post following shortly. A follow up to my Life After iPhone write up, titled Life with the iPad 2 =)

AWARDS SEASON: Cinematography

February is here and that means this year’s awards season is almost coming to a close. The Oscar nominees are out and since I’m more of a photographer/cinematographer than anything, I figured I would start my Awards season series of post on Cinematography. I’m sorry if you came here looking for another rant on how Christopher Nolan was NOT nominated for directing. This year has been a great year for films, especially when it comes to visuals. The candidates are Wally Pfister (INCEPTION, Roger Deakins (TRUE GRIT), Matthew Libatique (BLACK SWAN), Jeff Cronenwerth (THE SOCIAL NETWORK), and Danny Cohen (THE KING’S SPEECH). Each of these films is different than the other, not just in subject matter, but in visual approach. BLACK SWAN and it’s heavy use of handheld camera work in combination with the rough look of 16mm helped create a sense of tension through-out. INCEPTION’S impressive camera trickery helped us delve into the surreal nature of the dream world. TRUE GRIT’S visual maturity mirrored it’s young, fearless protagonist played by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld. More importantly, every film looked like it’s cinematography was deeply in tune with the narrative. So let’s start this discussion with the heavy favorite, Roger Deakins.