Category Archives: C: Friends

Industry Friends: Yair Shahar

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(photo by Yair’s wife)

I’ve been thinking about posting a series of short posts about people in the industry I know and admire. First up is Mr. Leaf himself, Yair Shahar. I’ve known Yair for about five years. We first met in New York City when a group of photographer friends got together.

Yair is a straight-ahead Israeli. I like that. A couple of years ago, I was transiting though London from a shoot in Denmark and Yair, Julian Calverely, Paul Freeman, Sun Lee, Julian C-T and myself had lunch at Rules, an old school charming restaurant with their own game farm. The food was incredible. The conversation was good and I dashed off to Heathrow via the Express for a 5:00 PM flight back to the states.

Yair is the go-to guy for Leaf products – in Europe, Israel and for some, in the states. More than once, I’ve emailed him asking for advice on how to get the most out of Capture One with my Leaf Aptus. Yair was patient with explaining the finer points of Lens Cast Corrections and how to solve this unique challenge with my technical field camera.

I’ve been riding my bike quite a bit with another photographer friend in the DC area. Quite a few other photographers/producers/reps who I know are also into biking. Yair is into it big time. I’ve been meaning to write this post about a race in the UK that he was participating in.

Here is a note from Yair about the race.

It is not really a race however if you set a goal then it becomes one….the ride is from Oxford to Cambridge, the two most famous university cities in the world and it goes over 88 (142Km) miles of beautiful English countryside. I did parts of it in the past and there are some steep hills along the first 30-40 miles

My goal is 6 hrs. Not sure it’ll be possible as I plan to make 3 pit stops; 2 sort ones of 5 minutes and a longer one of 20 minutes, so I have to cover 142Km in 5.5 hrs riding.

Currently I can do 60-70 Km at an average speed of 24.5Km/h which is about 2Km/h too slow, sounds like nothing but in 2 months of training I’ve only managed to improve . The question is if I can keep that pace…I prepared a rough schedule of the weeks left until the ride and I will need to get to a state where I can do about 100-110Km quite easily.

Need to lose another 5Kg to make it easier on the hills and to allow myself to carry some food and extra water. We intend to spend the day before in Oxford and stay the night there. The kids will love to see their dad on the start line and they will come to meet me again on the finish line in Cambridge

I’m updating my blog and FB regularly with some pics and logs from my iPhone GPS app. Looks like I’ll be investing in a proper Garmin that is more reliable…

Here is a link to Yair’s blog. He writes about biking, running, friends, travel and of course, Leaf digital backs.

http://www.bhf.org.uk/get-involved/events/view-event.aspx?ps=1001138

Yair’s fundraising page: http://www.justgiving.com/yayapro

Photographer | Musician | Photographer

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My friend Wolf Hoffmann is a location portrait photographer based in Nashville. Wolf is also a genuine Teutonic Guitar God. Wolf is the lead guitarist for the hard rock/metal band Accept. Accept disbanded in the mid-nineties and Wolf pursued photography and worked for my friend Mark Tucker, a killer portrait and lifestyle shooter, who is also based in Nashville.


Wolf and Accept at the Rams Head Live in Baltimore on September 24th.

I’ve known of Wolf’s guitar work since the early days of Accept, having seen them in the mid-eighties at the long defunct Bayou in Georgetown. My favorite disc of Wolf’s guitar work is his Classical album. A reworking of classical pieces into a rock format, all of the pieces hold up to the new treatment. My favorites are In the Hall of the Mountain King and Arabian Dance. When the disk was released, I sent Wolf an MP3 of In The Hall of the Mountain King/Bolero recorded by SRC for their Milestones album. He was surprised that a classic Michigan band had recorded this piece. Of course, the Bolero that they recorded was the Jimmy Page penned version that he wrote for Jeff Beck.

Wolf started shooting pictures as a hobby while touring with Accept. They were huge in the eighties and considered a major player in the German hard rock scene. Recently they reformed with a new singer and are touring to support their new album which is selling exceptionally well. They played as the opening act for AC/DC in Germany and are set to headline a festival in Japan in a few weeks. On Friday night we sat down in the tour bus and caught up for a bit. The conversation meandered from musician friends to photographer friends and how he balances the two interests in his life. Wolf arranged for me to have a photo pass for the show and it was fun to shoot from the pit. The last time I shot backstage at a rock concert was for the 1980 Rush/Rory Gallagher tour. A friend of mine was buddies with Alex Lifeson and he arranged for me to shoot pictures from stage right during a show in New York.

Wolf and I have talked about how many photographers also play a musical instrument. Or musicians that also shoot images. In my teenage years I made the decision to pursue photography full-time rather than putting my efforts into guitar. Although I still play occasionally, it is more for relaxation than a serious effort. I grew up with the guys in Pentagram, the classic hard rock/metal/doom band that hails from Arlington, Virginia. I spent more time photographing these guys than playing guitar and I knew, photography was where my life was headed, to be in back of the camera rather than playing guitar.

I know a lot of photographers and artists who also musicians. Randy Santos of Silver Spring plays guitar in HotWire, a local blues rock band. My friend Michael Barry is a amazing bass player (Grande Hotel/Metropolis) who is a very fine artist and owns with his wife Leslie ArtInsights, a Animation and Film Art Gallery in Reston, Virginia. Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash owns Nash Editions a fine art printmaking studio in Southern California.

There is a connection between visual communications and music for many people. I don’t know what it is, or how to describe it, but it is there.

Wolf hamming up for me when I shot in the pit on Friday night.

Wolf shot the images for the new Accept disc Blood of Nations. Mark Tucker shot some amazing images in a Nashville junkyard for the band which are being used in Press Releases and I’m quite sure, something incredible in the near future.

Aptus 12 | 80 Megapixels

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I so want one of these puppies. Just a mere 32K in U.S. dollars. But then again, clients are concerned that the 33 MP files from the Leaf 75 are too big. So maybe not. But can you imagine the size of the prints you could make? The detail you could see in aerials would be unbelievable. Couple it with an Alpa and a Schneider Digital Lens and that would be lethal combination.

British Journal of Photography Story about the Aptus 12

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UPDATE: A English photographer friend has shot with this back. (Julian Cornish-Trestrail) Check out this!
http://www.captureintegration.com/2010/09/20/leaf-aptus-ii-12-aptus-ii-12r/

Paper Negs at Usher’s.

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David Burnett and Chris Usher have invited me to several informal photographer get togethers. I’ve always been out of town when they happen. Last night was a special occasion, Mr. Burnett was filming on his Canon 7D, a video project that involved shooting a paper negative with Chris Usher’s gigantic 8×10 field camera. I rode my bike to Chris’s place, about a mile and a half up and down Russell Road.

Chris loves film, loves large format and loves shooting with antique cameras. Most of the crew in the photograph shoot large format custom cameras. (I don’t, I have, but I really love shooting with the D3X and the Alpa 12 Max)

Anyway, Chris loaded up a few holders with Oriental Number 2 RC paper and set-up his 8×10 in his backyard.

1 Second Exposure on a Cooke Convertible lens with a Zone 6 field camera.

From Left to right: David Burnett, Chris Usher, Matthew Gerard, Robb Scharteg (seated) Me, Dave from Chrome and Simon Bruty. Kit Putnam from the now-closed, but fondly remembered Black and White lab, shot the picture.

Matthew made an AMAZING Bar B Que and Kit brought homemade ice cream. Simon brought the beverages and it was a quite enjoyable evening. Mary Ann Golan was absent from the shoot but present for the festivities.

Wayne, Stevie and the game

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Last Friday, a group of bluegrassmusician friends from Southern Virginia played at Lisner Auditorium in DC. Three days later they came back to DC for a rare off-night in the middle of a three week tour.

Wayne Henderson is a well-known guitarist and luthier. The waiting list for Wayne’s guitars is close to ten years. Eric Clapton had to wait four years for his. Allen St. John wrote the book – Clapton’s Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument. Besides being an incredible guitarist and luthier, Wayne is a big time Boston Red Sox and MLB fan.

Stevie Barr, the ace banjo player and founder of No Speed Limit along with Wayne are friends of mine that I met a few years ago on a shoot along the Crooked Road in Virginia.

Stevie and I were speaking a few weeks ago and I suggested that we go see a game while the tour was in town. I expected that Wayne, Stevie, my assistant Audrey and I would head off to Nationals Park to the Nats versus the Rockies. Ten musicians from the tour came along and we had amazing seats, courtesy of Wayne, that were near first base and a few rows up from the rail.

One of the beer and soda vendors grew up near Wayne’s home town of Rugby (population 7) and had a wonderful time discussing old-time music and telling the crowd around us that Wayne was a famous musician and luthier. (which he is)

One of the joys of location photography is to paraphrase Jay Maisel, “The license to steal experience.” Before photographing Wayne and Stevie, I knew very little of bluegrass, although I did know of Wayne from photographing Jane Alexander and her work at the NEA the year that Wayne was given an award by the National Endowment for the arts.

Oh yeah, the Nats won! 5-2.
P1030176 Wayne Henderson, Audrey Lew, Stevie Barr
P1030182P1030204P1030219Stevie after trying to chase down a fly ball.
P1030236A few musicians from the tour with Ms. Lew.
_1030167.tifWayne, Mr. Jefferson and Stevie.

PhotoDeck – The time has come

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PhotoDeck is written by my friend Jef Maion, a brilliant French photographer and IT guru. It is set-up to be YOUR stock site. As an example: Let say an art director went to your site and wanted to see your stock collection of images that you did not place or were not accepted into the Getty or Corbis collections. They can easily do that by clicking on the area of your site that you have set-up as stock. It is completely seamless.
photodeck

Set up a page on your site called archive or stock or whatever you choose to call it. When you set up your photodeck page – you can make it look exactly like your web site. You use CNAME to have the address as archive.acephotographer.com. Your client never leaves your site nor are you sending them off to Getty or another agency. Take a look at the video and the site. This is a killer approach written by someone who knows how to create a site that is elegant, functional and simple. http://www.photodeck.com Videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/jfmphoto

Basically you are creating your own fully ecommerce stock site with delivery of your images directly from your site. It is clean, simple, easier to use than the other options and it works. You keep your client on your site and offer something unique to them without them having to jump ship (your site) to go look for your stock images.

200 Best Advertising Photographers Book

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Just got the word that I was selected for the next edition of the book. This is pretty cool. Hopefully, this along with the new (soon) version of the web site with the (soon to be published book) will change the perception of the work I shoot and where I am going.

I am honored and grateful. I have several friends who were also selected, including Mr. Bad weather, super dramatic landscape himself, Mr. Julian Calverley. Jules has eight pictures in the book!

Early 1900′s Russian Color Photography

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My friend David Burnett sent me this link to a collection of images posted by the Denver Post of early 20th Century Russian Color photography.

http://tinyurl.com/russia-color

Peasant girls, Russian Empire. Three young women offer berries to visitors to their izba, a traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the Sheksna River, near the town of Kirillov; 1909 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Peasant girls, Russian Empire. Three young women offer berries to visitors to their izba, a traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the Sheksna River, near the town of Kirillov; 1909 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).