Best of Pictures 2011
The holidays are approaching and 2011 is coming to a close. This is the time of year I look back on all the pictures I made throughout the year and ask myself are any of them worth entering in a contest. I’m never satisfied with my work and am often frustrated that I didn’t do more. I tried to keep my selection this year to ten images but I couldn’t get past 11. So here are my favorite pictures of 2011. These are in a visual arrangement not chronological.
Starting off with a bang, the birth of our second child. Our boy Hudson a.k.a. Sonny was born on July 25. I documented the whole pregnancy and labor with a fifty-five year old Nikon S2 rangefinder. In this image my wife Jennifer labors in the jacuzzi tub of our room at the birthing center at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan.
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Oscar Pistorius for The New York Times
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of photographing Oscar Pistorius, a South African sprinter and model of the new advertising campaign for Thierry Mugler A★Men fragrance for the Styles section of The New York Times. On the track Oscar is known as Blade Runner, “the fastest man on no legs.” A double amputee, he runs on J-shaped prosthetics made of carbon fiber. As you may recall I recently finished a longer documentary story on another double amputee athlete named Damian Lopez Alfonso. Oscar was a very amiable man, very easy going and so fun to work with. Here are a few flicks from the shoot.
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DIY Bike Building in The New York Times
On a recent evening in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn I photographed Jason Henkle building a road frame by hand in the basement of his apartment. The space he was working in was no bigger than a closet. But driven by a love of bikes and gifted with a mathematician’s brain he was well into his fourth bike built from scratch. Henkle’s story is part of larger piece in this weekend’s New York Times, Metropolitan section and published on the Spokes blog Saturday. Check it out here and follow Spokes on Twitter here.
New York City Marathon, Round Three
This is my third year going to the New York City Marathon, which took place this past weekend. The race is in it’s 41st year and draws thousands (45,344 this year) of athletes from around the world. Among road races, the NYC race is well known for its unique atmosphere and energy. The runners start on Staten Island at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the temperature usually hovers around 40 degrees. During the 26.2 miles of the race runners make their way through countless neighborhoods in the remaining four boroughs. The race ends in Central Park, this year on the west side near 67th Street.
This year my colleague Jon Huang and I wanted to build off of our concept from last year, Faces at the Finish. We wanted to take it a step further and capture an even more intimate portrait of the NYC marathoner. After working out our last minute credentials and figuring out a location to set up the “studio” the only thing we had to do was pray for good weather.
I had a well formed vision of what I wanted the pictures to look like. I used my Canon 5D Mark II and Canon 135 1.4. We set up a 5×7 foot white backdrop and two Alien Bees 800W strobes powered by two Vagabond battery packs. We didn’t have access to power and since we were going to be shooting for several hours power management was a top priority. The Alien Bees lights are compact, light and efficient and my first choice for location shooting. We shot at about 1/2 power and the battery packs held up great.
We aimed to photograph at least 100 runners beginning with the Elite Women who started rolling in around noon. We had to wrap shooting at 3 p.m. to break down and head back to the office to start producing in order to get the piece up that evening. Jon waded through the crowd of runners and grabbed people as quickly as he could. Then while I photographed them Jon began entering their info into an Excel spreadsheet. We made it a point to keep everything as organized as possible so our job of producing little would go as smoothly as possible.
Jon worked his magic with the final product and presentation on the website. Again we wanted a fluid and smooth way to deliver the pictures. I think we achieved our goal. But check it out and see what you think.
Secrets of the Centenarians
What’s a centenarian? The dictionary defines it as “pertaining to or having lived 100 years.” Almost 100,000 people in the U.S. today are over the age of 100. That’s a big deal. Even in this age of advanced medicine and extreme technology it’s considered by many a rare achievement to live so long. While many people look to religion or inner spirituality to extend their lives other opt for more superficial solutions to make them appear younger.
I recently spent a day with with a wonderful 100-year-old woman in Charlotte, N.C. named Hazel Miller for a feature in The New York Times called “Secrets of the Centenarians.” Ms. Miller was born in Athens, Ga. in 1910 and moved to Charlotte with her family in 1925 during the depression to look for work.
Today she lives at Atria MerryWood, a senior living center, and spends her time line dancing and china painting among other things. And she still drives herself around. She says the only secret to making it to 100 is just to keep living.
New York Fashion Week
I was gratefully able to attend a fashion show this season and given backstage access. I’m not so much interested in fashion but the whole production of shows and the industry as whole does fascinate me. So I was given about 30 minutes backstage at Nanette Lepore’s show on Feb. 17 and I had a great time. Afterwards I watched the show from a seat and shot a few more pictures. You can see the entire gallery at www.raymjones.com. And check out the Bryant Park retrospective video that I also worked on called, Finding A Stage.
Empire on NYT
The New York Times has a weekly cycling blog called Spokes. One of the primary writers and colleague of mine J. David Goodman has a post today about depcitions of cycling in films. MASH broke new ground with the release of their film a few years ago and with notables like Macaframa, Empire, Bootleg Sessions, The Revival and others we are sure to see more and more beatiful HD films of cycling in our cities. Check out the Spokes post here. Prolly already has a post up as well, you can’t beat that guy.
A Meeting of Dervishes With Fixed Gears
My photo essay finally published in today’s Metropolitan section of The New York Times. Online at nytimes.com there is an audio slideshow with many more pictures as well.
I started hanging out and shooting at Peel Sessions, which takes place every Thursday night under the BQE, last summer. Eventually as my photographs and the ‘sport’ of fixed-gear freestyle progressed I thought it deserved to be put out there. There’s probably hundreds of blogs now about fixed gears and trick riding but there hasn’t been anything in the mainstream media about this extraordinarily evolving sport. Now that everyone is over the ‘fixie’ fad and reporting on how its this crazy hip subculture we can move on to something interesting. I have to thank John and all the other regulars at Peel for their hospitality. Check it out.
Lens, a new blog from The New York Times
We recently, finally, launched Lens at The Times, a photo blog meant to set the bar for all the other photo blogs out there. I think its slick and polished and very well done and the quality of work presented there is spectacular. The best part is that it’s not just about Times photographers, its about great photography anywhere by anyone.
“Lens is the photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web. And it will draw on The Times’s own pictorial archive, numbering in the millions of images and going back to the early 20th century.”
That’s right, 5 Pulitzers
We, The New York Times, won five Pulitzer Prizes today. Specifically the awards went to Damon Winter-Feature Photography for his coverage of Obama’s historic campaign, David Barstow-Investigative Reporting for his reporting on how retired generals are employed by the government as TV analysts, Staff-Breaking News Reporting for coverage of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, Staff-International Reporting for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Holland Cotter-Criticism for his reviews of art from Manhattan to China. Five is pretty huge and of course seeing Damon win is awesome. I think he’s one of the most talented and unique photojournalists working right now.
Photo by Damon Winter
Paradise
Whenever I think about places that I would love to visit, that just seem like absolute paradise, Thailand usually isn’t one of them. But after I read this story in The Times yesterday it changed my opinion. Besides being very well written it tells of a new vegetarian renaissance apparently taking hold in Thailand. I think that will be my first family trip once the little one is old enough. Check it out.
The New York Times
The New York Times – Year in Pictures
Every year The New York Times spends several weeks culling back through everything shot by their photographers that year. This is one of the biggest perks of my job. I firmly believe that one of simplest and most affective things you can do to improve your eye as a photographer is study pictures. Expose yourself to great photography and it’s inevitable that as you refine your sensibility as a photographer your pictures will reflect that. Early on I immersed myself in the books of photographers like Robert Frank, Andre Kertesz, Arnold Newman, Richard Avedon, Robert Capa, Minor White and W. Eugene Smith and to this day I think the way I shoot is greatly influenced by these early experiences. Check out the Year in Pictures, and especially the audio that accompanies Barton Silverman’s image.
New York City Marathon
Today I ran the entire marathon and shot a pano. Ok, half of that is a lie. The marathon though is 26.2 miles and touches all five boroughs. It’s pretty grueling but the elite men and women finish in close to 2 hours. I was stationed at 60th St. and 1st Ave. Beautiful day.
Click for the full 360º panorama.
Here’s a couple other things I saw during the day.
Also, last week I did a drive through of the course with a few other journalists. I thought it would be cool to show a view of the course from the runner’s perspective (sort of) in fast word. So I mounted a camera to the van and shot time lapse pictures. I think had to go back and walk the parts that were closed to traffic.
Click for the timelapse video.
Bittman on what’s wrong with what we eat
New York Times food writer Mark Bittman admits he’s anything but a vegetarian but his talk at TED in Dec. 2007 reaffirms that all it takes is a little education and an open mind to see that a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle can have a much more profound impact than just benefits to your health.
Olympics in Pictures
The Olympics are over, finally. I have a lot of respect for athletes that live lives of discipline and devote themselves ot being the best at what they do. How many of them actually do it sin dope, we’ll never know. But even though NBC was hoarding their exclusive coverage and in the end hurting themselves by forcing people to pirate video, a lot of great pictures were made during the 16 days. I helped produce this gallery of pictures and audio from the games.
