It’s kind of weird and kind of cool following a bus with your picture on it.

Lately I’ve been looking at a a lot of fantastic photo sites as well as individual photographer’s blogs. Let me just say, you can waste way too much time in front of the screen looking a great work.

This morning on Facebook one of Greg Miller posted this link to a post on 500 photographers which urges photographers to step away from the computer and go make some art. Great post. I then proceeded to spend an hour looking at pictures on 500 Photographers.

Forbes magazine is one of my oldest and best editorial clients. My first assignment for Forbes was 26 years ago (yep,I’m that old). This past fall, I photographed three assignments for them. Here’s a couple of them:

“Sean Campbell and Scott Swigart of Cascade Insights in Oregon City, Ore. conduct competitive intelligence searches in the technology sector. They often come across juicy info on employees’ LinkedIn pages: university students describing product features they worked on during summer internships (that haven’t yet been publicly disclosed); an AT&T sales representative’s boast that he worked with one of the company’s biggest Wi-Fi clients, volunteering that it was Nintendo’s $6 million account. Even senior executives slip up, as when Hewlett-Packard vice president of cloud services Scott McClellan outlined the details for HP’s planned cloud computing platform on his LinkedIn profile—while official reports were still extremely vague. Before he could delete the overshare, the news media picked up on it, and rivals Microsoft and Amazon got the lowdown.” source Forbes

Ken Westin, founder and CEO of Gadget Track from an editorial assignment for Forbes Magazine. Gadget Track software can help locate and recover lost and stolen mobile devices, digital cameras, laptops, iPhones, etc.. Photographed on the Broadway Bridge in Portland Oregon this past October.

Winter roses, photographed on January 4, 2012 using out of date Polaroid Type 67 (I think)

Heidi Kirkpatrick presented her work today at Portland Art Museum’s Brown Bag Lunch series. All I will say is that she is amazing and deserves to be a rock star in the art world. Here’s some good places to start if you haven’t seen her work before:

http://www.lenscratch.com/2012/01/heidi-kirkpatrick.html

http://www.23sandy.com/kirkpatrick/catalog.html

http://www.panopticongallery.com/artist/heidi_kirkpatrick/#Heidi_Kirkpatrick_24.jpg

And her site here: http://heidikirkpatrick.com/

I thoroughly enjoyed seeing this excellent exhibition curated by Julia Dolan. Julia has pulled together a wonderful cross section of work from the museum’s permanent collection featuring a broad range of artists, famous as well lesser known, even including a couple of old friends, from deep into the history of the medium to present day.

In her introduction to the exhibit she states “As the works on view make clear, windows, mirrors, and doorways in photographs function at times as purely visual devices and at others as metaphors for substantial concepts. Whether transparent or opaque, they serve as gateways to guide viewers toward new and ever-changing territory, in both our interior and exterior worlds.”

So of course I came home with the thought to reconsider my own use of windows, doorways and mirrors. An examination of my portrait work will reveal that I often use windows as a compositional element, often placing a window in the background or even directly behind the subject. In another body of work, I have photographed through the window of my car, often in motion, sometimes using the window itself as part of the composition.

Here’s some of my own examples from over the years:

Prague, 1987