9-11

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In remembrance of those we lost 7 years ago. Where were you when it happened?

I was sleeping. The day before I had been laid off from an ad agency I’d been working at for a few years. Big merger, you know the drill. Anyway, that night, for some odd reason I shut off my cell phone and locked the door to my room. My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, was trying to call me to tell me that she was ok since she worked in Manhattan. She couldn’t get through to me. I slept while the city was in chaos. I was awoken by the sound of my cousin pounding on my door. When I opened the door she had this look of dread on her face and told me that two planes crashed into the towers and one of the them went down. She said it was an act of terrorism. I imagined the tower falling over like a tree and destroying multiple city blocks. I ran to the TV and saw what had happened. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. I never imagined something like this happening in the city I was born and raised.

At that time I lived in a quite area of Queens. I remember going outside to see if there was chaos on the streets. There wasn’t. It was like any other day. It was such an erie feeling to see all that madness happening on TV, only a few miles away, and then looking out my window to see a warm, sunny, quite day.

It’s a day I will never forget for the rest of my life.        

Sun Silo

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I used to be obsessed with photography, so much so that I was about to leave my career in graphic design to pursue a career in fashion photography. It didn’t end up that way and I’m glad, but I still have a great love for it. I use to have a nice pro camera and would snap tons of photos a day, but now I have a basic point & shoot that I use for family pics and I haven’t shot a nice photo in a while.

Recently I’ve been messing around with the camera in my iPhone and in certain situations I’ve been somewhat impressed. For instance this shot I took today of the NYC skyline. The light was amazing and it was the perfect time of day where the sun was creating some amazing silhouettes. So I launched the camera app and snapped away and got some excellent results. The resolution of the camera isn’t great at all but this photo is pretty much straight from the iPhone with some slight tweaking in Photoshop. You can see a couple of more photos from this series including a nice panoramic shot I stitched together in Photoshop.

On a side note, a lot of photographers frown upon the use of Photoshop to enhance photos. I think that’s a load of rubbish. I started shooting before the digital crazy and I love film but in the digital age, using Photoshop to adjust an image is the same as using a darkroom to adjust an image. Photoshop is the digital darkroom of today. Just how photographers keep the film soaking in the chemicals longer for different results, I adjust the levels, curves, color balance, saturation, etc. in Photoshop to achieve my results. In the end it’s all the same but just using a different tool.