1) I mentioned this over on my other blog but forgot to mention it here. Professional Entertainer Luke Burrage interviewed me for his podcast called Luke’s Creative Podcast. It’s a series of conversations with people Luke thinks exemplify creative thinking. Other people in the 10-episode series include jugglers, musicians, and a comic book artist.

It’s a very extensive interview, and goes in depth into all my various projects, past and present. It’s long and hopefully not too boring. If I had Superfans, they’d love this. My mom did.

The whole podcast series is also available to download free from iTunes.

2) Colleen Wainwright, aka The Communicatrix interviewed me for a lecture she gave at the ASMP’s Strictly Business seminar last year. I’m flattered and complimented that she spent several minutes of her talk on me and my projects. Now she’s taking her lecture on the road and will be presenting it in New York next month. Tickets and more info are available at the ASMP website, along with a schedule of when she’s coming to other cities.

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Categories: General

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Categories: Things

I took the last couple months off to have a baby, but now I’m back in the swing of things, so here’s the latest video from my Inventor Portraits series. This is Ernest Nussbaum, inventor of the Practicello.

The Practicello is a full height cello that breaks down to fit in carry-on luggage. It’s not intended to be good enough to play in a concert, but its just meant for cellists who want to practice while they travel without needing to pay for an extra seat on the airplane to bring their instrument. And since it doesn’t resonate as loudly as a cello with a full body, it’s not going to annoy the people in the hotel room next door.

Here are some more photos from our shoot:

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Categories: Inventors, People

One of my side projects is a blog called Sunday Magazine where I reprint articles from the New York Times Sunday Magazine exactly 100 years ago each week. One of the articles from this weekend in 1911 is especially relevant to me as a photographer, so I thought I’d write about it here.

This weekend in 1911, the magazine ran an article celebrating the 100th Birthday of John William Draper, who took the first portrait photograph, an image of his sister Dorothy. Here is how the article appeared:

To read the whole thing, you can download the article as a PDF.

In Draper’s day, all photos required long exposures, so the subjects needed to sit extremely still. Draper experimented with putting white powder on people’s faces to lighten them up a bit for the picture. And he also realized that if a person sits still for a 30 second exposure, they can feel free to blink during that time without worrying about ruining the image. But any other movement must be considered and eliminated:

“The hands should never rest upon the chest, for the motion of respiration disturbs them so much as to make them have a thick, clumsy appearance, destroying also the representation of the veins on the back, which, if they are held motionless, are copied with surprising beauty.”

Here’s some more of Draper’s advice for a portrait sitting:

“It has already been stated that pictorial advantages attend an arrangement in which the light is thrown upon the face at a small angle. This also allows us to get rid entirely of the shadow on the background or to compose it more gracefully in the picture. For this it is well that the chair should be brought forward from the background from three to six feet. Those who undertake daguerreotype portraiture will, of course, arrange the background of their pictures according to their own tastes. When one that is quite uniform is desired, a blanket or a cloth of drab color, properly suspended, will be found to answer very well.”

While Draper took the first formal portrait, Louis Daguerre actually took the first photo of a person. He captured a photo looking out over a street in Paris. It was a long exposure, so people moving through the frame were not captured. But one person stood still long enough to register in the image while he was getting his shoe shined.

Note: The Times actually celebrated Draper’s birthday a few days early. He was born on May 5.

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Categories: People

It’s been way too long since I’ve posted one of these. This is my portrait of Steven Sasson, inventor of the digital camera. He was the 32nd inventor in my project. I shot him in October at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, just a couple weeks before President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Technology.

When he initially mentioned that the first digital camera held 30 pictures, I assumed that was due to the storage capacity of the digital tape. It was really interesting to hear that he picked 30 as an artificial limitation, and his explanation why.

Here are a couple photos from our shoot, as seen in the video:

Update: A few people have commented on the upholstery, so I thought I’d expound on that a little bit:

The only room made available to me for shooting at Kodak was the lobby, which wasn’t very inspiring. I talked my way into getting one more room to look at, a conference room that had slightly more visual interest: there were some cameras scattered around in displays, a conference table, a giant pot with huge sunflowers, and a few chairs. I tried to find a way to shoot in there that didn’t scream “conference room” and that probably hadn’t been done already, since I know they’ve used that room for media before. As soon as I saw this chair parked near a coffee table, I knew I had to use it. The pattern immediately reminded me of the Bayer pattern used in modern digital sensors. (It’s the checkerboard-like arrangement of red, green, and blue receptors — do a Google image search for “Bayer pattern” and you’ll see what I mean). I figured that most people wouldn’t notice the connection — Steve said he’d never heard anyone point it out before — but to me it was as relevant a prop as if I’d picked it out myself for the shoot because it speaks directly to the invention. Now every time I see it, I smile and wonder if there are any other people out there who see the connection, too. I think of it as a subtle inside joke for technically minded.

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Categories: Inventors, People

I was in Arizona a couple weeks ago to shoot two more people for my Inventor Portraits Project. My parents live in Arizona, so I took the opportunity to visit them and go through some old boxes that have been taking up space in my old bedroom.

In my closet, I found a photo of me that was taken almost 30 years ago. It had been taped to a piece of green construction paper and placed in a cheap plastic frame around 1982. It hung that way on a wall in my bedroom for about 15 years. When it was hung up, it looked like this:

By the time I took the photo down in 1997, indirect sunlight had faded the construction paper from green to a sort of salmon-like orange. I digitally restored it to the original green for the image above, but actually the background had faded like this:

When I found it in my closet during my recent visit, I decided there was no reason to keep the photo in the bulky plastic frame any longer. It should go in an album, or a better frame. When I separated the photo from the paper, this was revealed hidden underneath:

How wonderful is that? Over all that time hung on the wall, sunlight had bleached the construction paper everywhere it could. But since it couldn’t penetrate the darker areas of the photo, the corresponding parts of the construction paper underneath remained their original color.

Any light-sensitive surface can be used to make a photo, and I’ve seen everything used from leaves to grass. But I don’t remember seeing photos printed on construction paper, even though I know they’re sometimes used to make photograms as an activity for kids. But I did a little googling and found a couple other people who made a print on construction paper using similar methods, although deliberately and not over quite so long a time.

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Categories: People

I’ve never been big on landscape photography. I just don’t respond to it the same way I respond to photos of people. But it’s not that I dislike nature. To the contrary, I often spend my vacations on nature trips, preferring a good hiking or nature destination over visiting yet another big city. Naturally I get the urge to shoot the landscapes where I go, but I don’t show them very often, so they sit in my archive and personal albums.

As Labor Day approaches this weekend, and summer travel time is coming to an end, I was going over some of my landscapes and decided the blog is a good place to show them. So below are a few images from New Hampshire, the Canadian Rockies in Alberta, Northern Arizona, and the Galapagos Islands.

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Categories: Places

Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

I’ve photographed 30 inventors for this project so far, but Brent Farley is among the most interesting. He’s certainly the most prolific. I normally start one of profile posts with an invention name and patent number, but Brent has so many inventions that I couldn’t pick just one. So before I say much more, why don’t I show you this video profile I made that sums him up pretty well:

Here are some of the photos I shot of Brent:

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Categories: Inventors, People

Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: William Walsh
Invention: Convertible Pizza Box
Patent: No. 7,051,919
Brand Name: Greenbox

The Green Box is a brand of environmentally friendly food containers. The inaugural product, the Green Box Pizza, is made from 100% recycled materials and features several patented design elements. The top half is perforated to split up into 4 plates. The bottom half folds up into a container for storing leftovers.

Will says that back in college he and his housemates were watching football and eating pizza, and nobody was using plates. So he tore up a pizza box and handed out improvised plates. His housemates were amazed, but he dismissed it, assuming everybody did that. He says, “I thought it was standard operating procedure.” Ten years later, people were similarly amazed when he tore up a pizza box at a friend’s daughter’s birthday party. This time, with the wisdom of a business degree and a minor in mechanical engineering, he decided there might actually be a way to turn this practice into a business.

“I went to a local restaurant, I bought 50 or 100 pizza boxes — the guy thought I was out of my mind — and an exacto knife, and a straightedge ruler. I spent 3 or 4 days in my apartment creating different options, like different alternatives how I could utilize this base material to do something else… I came up with 4 or 5 different designs, and I took the best function from each design and came up with this current design.”

Now I’m hungry.

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Categories: Inventors, People

Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: David Palmer
Invention: Massage Chair
Patent: No. 4,746,167

You’ve seen the offspring of David Palmer’s invention in shopping malls and convention centers around the world. In 1986, he debuted the first portable massage chair. It was heavy, and made of wood. It collapsed down to a “chair-in-a-box” for portability. The modern incarnation is much lighter, more comfortable, and even more portable.

Here’s David relaxing in an early version of the massage chair:

And in the modern version:

David explains why he’s in the massage field: “I’m focused on making touching a positive social value in our culture. It’s what I call the orphan sense. We’ve got five primary senses and of them the one that’s been ignored most — by academia in terms of research, by the media in general, by society in general — is definitely touch. Touch has the most negative associations attached to it and I’m out to change that because I think that touch is essential to our health and well-being, to our development as children, as infants, and it’s long overdue that we take the pathological aspects of touch and turn them into something positive. We’ve got a very pathological relationship as a culture to touch. And that’s mostly manifest in our relationship to sexuality in this culture. So I’m out to make touch something that is much more comfortable for people at large, and also something that people can utilize in their daily lives for their health and well-being. I think that massage is something that should be in every home, that family massage as it’s done in certain cultures, like the Japanese culture for example, is something that should be taught in every grade school as far as I’m concerned. That’s a basic life skill that people should have.”

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Categories: Inventors, People

I hate to make one of those blog posts that explains why it’s been a while since there have been any new posts. But rest assured I haven’t abandoned this blog. I had a busy start to the year, doing some shoots for a corporate client. Meanwhile, my inventor portrait project is still going strong. I’m up to 27 inventors so far, and I’ll be posting more of them soon. I’ve photographed several entrepreneurs who you’ve never heard of, and a few people whose inventions you’ve definitely used before (and may even be using right now). So keep an eye out for updates on that front.

In the meantime, I thought I’d say Happy Birthday to Adobe Photoshop, which turned 20 years old last week, by posting the first image I ever digitally altered. If I remember correctly, this was from back in 1994, with Photoshop version 2.5:

I used to walk past this statue nearly every day in college, and I was impressed by how lifelike its face was in every detail except for the eyes. So I brought my friend Nick with me one day while I photographed the statue, and then photographed Nick in the same light. I made prints in the darkroom and then scanned the prints. Using Photoshop 2.5, I digitally put Nick’s eyes in the statue. It almost makes the statue look like real a person wearing makeup.

Okay, so it’s pretty rudimentary. But I was young, and enjoyed playing with the new technology.

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Categories: Things

In conjunction with Time Magazine’s 50 Best Inventions of 2009 issue, they’ve featured a gallery of my inventor portraits on Time.com. This includes a couple of inventors I have not yet featured on this site.

Here is the gallery at Time.com: Inventors and their Inventions

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Categories: Inventors, People, Photo Essay

Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Tami Galt
Invention: Folding wagon
Patent: No. 6,491,318
Brand Name: Fold-it & Go

Tami Galt is a mom, and her invention is sold in toy stores, but it wasn’t inspired by her kids. She was looking for an easy way to carry groceries at the market, and thought a little red wagon would be cute. Unfortunately a little red wagon wouldn’t fit in her car. So she came up with a collapsible wagon that stows away in a bag, and can easily be transported.

And here’s a video I made about Tami and her invention:

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Categories: Inventors, People, Video

Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Joe Carolan
Invention: Guidance system for rescue personnel
Patent: No. 7,196,614
Brand Name: Quick-Finders

Joe Carolan is a volunteer firefighter who has a solution for a serious problem: In a smoke-filled burning home, firefighters can’t see very well, and a stranger’s home is unfamiliar territory. Half of all home fires occur while people are asleep, and 64% of children who die in fires die in their bedrooms. So Joe invented Quick-Finders, a two-part system that helps firefighters quickly identify bedrooms. The first part is a sticker that goes outside the front door. It lets the firefighters know that your home has Quick-FInders. The second part is a reflector you stick to the baseboard on the hinged side of a bedroom door. When firefighters shine their flashlights through the smoke, they will see the reflectors (which are designed to catch light from any angle) shining back and know where the bedrooms are.

The Quick-Finders website: www.quick-finders.com

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Categories: Inventors, People

I love the feel of this photo, with all the nondescript people in their nondescript clothes.

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Categories: People, Places

Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Tom Roering
Invention: Amphibious recreation vehicle
Patent: No. 7,329,161
Brand Name: Wilcraft

Tom Roering is an ice fisherman who invented a cool product: a lightweight amphibious vehicle that is also an ice fishing shelter. It’s called the Wilcraft (“Wil” stands for water, ice, and land). If it falls through the ice, it floats. It has room enough for two people to comfortably fish together. It can be adapted as an ice rescue vehicle. And it fits on the back of a pickup truck. Take a look:

Photos of Tom and the Wilcraft. Each image can be enlarged by clicking:

The Wilcraft website: www.thewilcraft.com

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Categories: Inventors, People, Video

I felt bad taking this photo digitally:

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Categories: Places

Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Art Fry
Invention: Repositionable stationery
Brand Name: Post-it Notes

As told on Post-it manufacturer 3M’s website, “The idea for repositionable notes struck Fry while singing in the church choir. His bookmark kept falling out of his hymnal, causing him to lose his page. So… Fry used a portion of his working hours to develop a solution to his problem. Now the world is singing the praises of his pet project: Post-it Notes.”

You can read the whole story of Post-it history at 3M.com.

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Categories: Inventors, People

Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Pam Turner
Invention: Easy-to-thread sewing needle
Patent: Pending
Brand Name: Spiral Eye Needle

About 10 seconds after Pam Turner showed me how to thread her Spiral Eye Needles, I was an expert. It usually takes me longer to thread a needle than it does to sew a button, but it really is impressively easy with Pam’s invention.

Pam says she remembers her mother having problems threading needles when she was young. Her mom used to say, “We went to the moon, why can’t somebody fix the needle?” Pam decided that if nobody else was going to do it, she had to.

Pam used to actually make the needles herself, using a grinder in her home. But now she has a manufacturer, and business is taking off.

The Spiral Eye Needle website: www.spiraleyeneedles.com

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Categories: Inventors, People

I often carry a point-and-shoot camera with me for unexpected moments I want to capture, but these days I find that the iPhone camera is filling that niche more and more. It’s always with me, even when my cameras aren’t, and its fixed focal length, uneven focus, and low resolution remind me of popular toy film cameras like the Holga, yielding similarly interesting results.

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Categories: Places