"Tempe By Air," Arizona, January 2005


"Christmas in the Citi[Corp]," New York City, December 2004

For the "Tiny" assignment, I couldn't go with just one. What? It's not the first time. Unsure of what I'd use, I first thought of the model train shots I took in December. Then I came across the aerial shots from the Arizona trip and liked those too. I love taking pictures from airplanes. I insist on getting a window seat whenever I can, and I always stow my camera under the seat in front of me, rather than in the overhead compartment. This is why. Had the camera been above my head, I couldn't have reached it to shoot the pictures as we were taking off.

On another note, SI.com has a great spring training feature, a photo series taken by Oakland A's pitcher Barry Zito.

"Forty Channels," Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, November 2004

I've been busy lately, so I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, and I haven't kept up with the Photo Friday challenges. But after looking at just a few of the shots so far, I think "Glow" will be one of my favorites.

I love the possibilities -- the play of sunlight on winter fields, neon signs on empty streets, light refracted through droplets of water. For my own, I went with the glow of television, partly because I like the ethereal light emanating from behind the partition at the other end of the room.

There's so much more I feel I could do with this theme. Once some of this preseason baseball stuff dies down, perhaps I can get to it.

"Jeter! Jeter!" Houston, Texas, July 2004

There were many who expressed "obsession" with pictures of coffee or chocolate, while a lot of people shot something they're obsessed with shooting — signs, the moon, etc. And at least one of a bottle of Calvin Klein's Obsession.

This shot serves both purposes for me. The image depicts the obsession of the fans; it also represents my personal obsession with baseball. The game is the reason I started shooting. At one time I wanted to be a sports photographer. I realized the other night that I'm much better off doing it for a hobby. I enjoy it more that way, I'm sure.

"Former ALCOA Factory," Edgewater, New Jersey, March 2005

There are three overriding categories of photographs that people seem to consider ghostly: blurry people in motion, long exposures in which a subject (or the photographer) moves into the shot and pauses before moving away, and cemeteries. There were also at least three images of jellyfish in the first 400 listed that I looked through as I endured a slow day at work yesterday.

While I was flipping through them, one-by-one, using the link viewer, iTunes shuffling in my ears, this page came up just as "Clocks" by Coldplay began and I felt the song — particularly the intro — fit the image perfectly.

So when I got home -- at 2 a.m. -- I set up the tripod on the balcony and shot a few 4-second exposures of the abandoned ALCOA factory adjacent to the cemetery next door. It's the factory moreso than the tombstones that I wanted to capture.