I Photo New York
The first time I went shooting in New York was the first weekend back. I packed my tripod and camera and headed down to the lower Westside to shoot the flea markets. As I soon as I got there, I set up my tripod and started shooting gifs, but unlike Chicago, people didn’t go around me, so after 10 minutes of getting bumped and elbowed, I put the tripod away and started shooting stills. I made my way up Broadway and shot for hours. When I got home and looked at the pictures I was so happy with them that I erased a marketing website I was working on (www.theweblicist.com) and posted my first series of pictures of New York. In one day I went from an animated gif maker to a New York City Street photographer and blogger.
Photography and web design went perfectly hand in hand for me. I shot in a different neighborhood, sometimes two or three, everyday and finished the pictures, gave them proper and descriptive names, and organized them categorically. After a couple of years I had a few hundred different series and was starting get a nice following. Then one day I was shooting an interesting building at 110th and Broadway that was covered with gargoyle heads along its edge. An older woman walked up to me and said that she grew up in the building as a little girl. She pointed out that the gargoyle heads were telling the story of the first chicken soup, from the farmer to the table. When I got home I published the pictures and the story on my site. A writer from New York Magazine saw the post and put it in his online column and linked to my site.
I got a lot of traffic from it, but most importantly, Google sent one of its bots to check me out. At the time, they were developing their image search engine and were experimenting with ways to tag the pictures. They even had people in laboratories sit across from each other, looking at the same picture, typing words to describe it. When they typed the same word, it became the image tag, i.e. farm, river, etc. When they came to my site, they hit a gold mine, not only were my images categorized by neighborhood, landmarks, events etc., the file names were all long and descriptive. They indexed my entire site and for a very long time, all you had to do was type “NY” in the image search and hundred of my pictures would dominate the pages of the response. My traffic grew exponentially both in New York City and around the globe.
One day I got an email from a self-professed fan of my website asking me if I would be interested in licensing some of my pictures for a music video. I said sure. It turned out he was redoing the entire “Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas Show” and ended up licensing over 80 of my Christmas images to flash on the screen and across the walls for the Rockettes opening number, “Christmas In New York”. Not only did I make my first sale, but also my family got to go to the pre-opening night dress rehearsal with the families of all the people in the production. We were a wild bunch. I even got give out walloping howl when my pictures exploded across the hall, without raising any eyebrows.
For many more years I worked on becoming a better photographer and web designer and everything I did, for the most part, was for the digital screen. That was until I enrolled at New York City College of Technology and learned to use a printer.
In one of my first class, the final assignment was to design and publish a book. It could have been any kind of book, but I naturally wanted to make a photo book. It had been a while since I had to sit down and actually curated a collection of photos and I forgot how daunting a task it could be. After hours and hours of looking through photos I settled on people watching as the subject of my book. Form there I worked my way backwards through my collection so that I would have the highest resolution shots. I put together a year of photos; laid out the book, wrote the copy and printed a first draft through blurb.com. I made revisions turned it in and bought a bunch and used them for Christmas gifts. I didn’t have time to do a cover though until the end of the next semester. I did the cover, registered the copyright, bought ISDN numbers and submitted a copy to the Library of Congress. Although for sale on blurb, I used it mainly as a business card and gave out as many people as I could, including one to my neighbor next door.
Before I went to design school I did everything for online viewing, but as I learned to use a professional roll printer I went out and bought one and started printing my stuff in large format at home. I used to stay up half the night printing and one night there was a knock on the door. I had given the woman next door a copy of my book, and her husband, who ran a growing real estate company, asked me if I would shoot pictures of him for his bio portfolio. I said sure, invited him in, he saw the table full of prints I was making, asked me if I would sell them, I said yes, and he bought the whole stack. After shooting his bio pictures he started buying prints to decorate his new real estate offices popping up all over the city. Since I had covered almost every neighborhood multiple times I had plenty of stuff too choose that would match the neighborhood of the office or building he was opening. The more I sold to him, the more books I gave away and I ended up with corporate and personal collectors all over the city.
But it was Google search that came calling again. I got a phone call from a woman representing the designers of the remodeling of the Park Central Hotel. She wanted to know if I would like to sell a print of a picture on my site of the flowering trees in the Conservatory Garden in Central Park. I said sure, she said they needed it to be 12 foot wide and 5 foot high. I told her the file was not large enough to do that and that I was sorry.
The following week she called again and asked if I consider renting a professional camera and reshooting it. I looked in to it, but since spring was three months away and I would have to learn to use the camera to make panoramas, renting would be cost prohibitive and I passed again.
She called back a third time and I had been doing some research and figured what I would need to buy and priced it out. She agreed to raise the fee by that amount and I agreed to do it.
I went and bought The new camera, lenses, and a Manfrotti Pan Head for my tripod and set out to the park. It was still winter so I had some time to learn how to use the equipment before the flowers bloomed. I shots scenes throughout the park, stitched them together in Photoshop, and gave them to the agent as proof of my practice. She shared them with the designers of the building and in the end, they decided to give me all the spaces on the 1st floor lobby walls, plus both sides of the entryway; seven different scenes professionally printed and mounted on 22 large glasses frame panels. It was one of the most stressful projects I ever did because I had no command over Mother Nature. Spring was really late that year and the trees in the Garden were refusing to open which was fraying everyone’s nerves. But God smiled on me and gave me a perfect day to shoot when the blossoms dropping in the early morning sunlight. I got my shots, processed them and turned them over to the client.
I am still an avid printer and am on my second Epson but I have turned my attentions lately back to the weblicist, now known as www.IphotoNewYork.com, It has passed its ten year anniversary and now has over a thousand different photo series, but needs an updated narrative on the site and a redesign, which I hope to have done over the next few months.