“Out of Step: Faces of Straight Edge” Now Available as eBook
Four years after my book “Out of Step: Faces of Straight Edge” was published it is now available as an eBook for your iPhone and iPad. The book has been optimized and reformatted for the devices but the material remains 100% true to the first edition. Check it out here and please write a review! Thanks. -Ray
Digital promos available upon request.
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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RayMJones.com v3.0 is Live
Version 3.0 of my portfolio website raymjones.com is finally live and what a refreshing update it is. For the past three years I worked with two friends who designed and built my portfolio site. Everything was custom flash and making any updates involved editing the XML which, needless to say, can be tedious. Recently both of those friends have become very busy professionally and personally. So after much deliberation I decided it was finally time for a complete redesign.
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Self Promo Redesign: Part One
With a huge career move on the horizon so comes a to do list a mile long. At the top of my list is a complete redesign from top to bottom; portfolio, website, blog, promo material, logo. Everything must be fresh. I approached my friend, the designer Callum Preston about working with me on the branding. Callum is an Aussie who moved to the states recently and lives in Seattle. Very very talented. We also share common roots in our punk/hardcore youth which for both of us, I think, to some degree informs our design sensibilities. More on that to come.
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Photographing Coney Island in the Dead of Winter
There’s no denying Coney Island has a special place in American history. It has a long reputation for being a day-trip getaway for New Yorkers where one can do anything from ride Deno’s Wonder Wheel to see a side show act or just sit on the beach. But it seems like every year we hear new stories of the classic attractions at Coney Island being threatened by aggressive developers. For now though, the boardwalk is still intact and the Mermaid Parade is still happening.
On a recent family trip to the New York Aquarium on Coney Island with my beautiful wife and two-year-old son, I took a few minutes to walk the boardwalk and take a few pictures. It was a cold and snowy day, a perfect chance to see the dormant side of Coney Island.
Best of 2010. . .
“Best of” is not completely accurate; favorites would be more like it. I didn’t shoot nearly as much as I would have liked in 2010. I don’t mean just taking pictures, I mean investing energy in projects that I am passionate about. And that is my number one resolution for 2011, to completely release my creative side and go all out.
Some of my favorite shoots from this year were the Banker horses on the Outer Banks, the New York City Marathon and a story in progress about a person struggling with gender.
More on nytimes.com: Around the Grill and Barbecues, High and Low
Here’s to 2011 and another wonderful year. Love you family, thanks for the support.
Digital Cellular Pictures
Below is a picture I made while waiting for my train yesterday evening. The subject was far away and my camera was disassembled in my backpack. Luckily the Camera+ iPhone app allows zooming, though as you can tell not very well. The body language of the subject and the atmosphere still make it a memorable picture for me. I’ve also updated the series on my website called “Digital Cellular” which contains pictures shot with my iPhone.
Wild Banker Horses of the Outer Banks
Earlier this summer escaped New York for a few days to vacation on the Outer Banks of North Carolina in a little town called Corolla. As a kid growing up in Chesapeake, Va. the Outer Banks was a familiar place. I often went on weekend trips with friends and family to places like Ocracoke Island, Nags Head and Kitty Hawk. Ocracoke Island was always my favorite.
The vacation was short but I was able to steal away for a few hours to go horse searching with Wesley Stallings of the Corolla Wild Horse Fund, the herd manager of the 88 wild horses that live in Corolla. The horses are descendants of the original Colonial Spanish Mustangs brought to America by the conquistadors over 500 years ago.
Mr. Stallings is responsible for the general well being of the horses which travel in family groups on the 7500 acres of dunes and beach. Everyday he sets out in his four-wheel drive truck searching for the horses. He records all sightings and makes notes of every detail he can observe from the horses for identification purposes. There are no roads on the land where the horses live only trails.
Mr. Stallings says the biggest threat to the horses is development. The Outer Banks is a fragile ecosystem but it’s remoteness also makes it a desirable place for large rental beach homes. Developers continue to build large homes on the very land the horses have lived on for over 500 years.
Towns like Corolla and Duck exploit the uniqueness of the horses by using their image on promotional fliers and signage yet official protection for the animals is still lacking. Mr. Stallings’ primary goal is to get the horses officially recognized as the state horse and then seek federal protection.
A Pregnancy by The Joneses
A Pregnancy by The Joneses from Ray Jones on Vimeo.
When I found out we were pregnant, my natural instinct as a journalist was to immediately begin documenting our entire journey of bringing a life into this world. On January 18, 2009 our son Julian was born. This video is a gift to him.
http://www.raymjones.com
http://www.jennjoneshair.com
Photography Tattoos
Jenn from the new KEH blog recenly wrote a post about people with photography related tattoos. I’m not sure how she learned about mine. But I sent her a pic and told her about it. And if you’re not familiar with KEH, it’s like the B&H of the South. The have an insane amount of used stuff. I’ve never been to their store though. I think it’s in Marietta or something. View the post.
Raymjones.com redesign complete!
About a year ago I finally realized that something had to be done with my website. It was a quick and dirty html website that I built while in college to have a public place for my work to live. Finally I said enough was enough and I approached two friends of mine who I knew were both great at what they do. Kyle Chalk is a visual designer at the mega firm R/GA and Ryan “Tank” Moylan is a freelance web designer/programmer. Both are old friends and heavy hitters in their fields working on huge high profile projects regularly. So for the past year I’ve been working closely with both of them on redesigning my website. Our goal was to create a slick website that was easy to navigate and where the pictures were the centerpiece. Today the site is finally live so please check it out and let us know what you think.
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.”
Simon Høgsberg
Simon Høgsberg
A friend of mine pointed out to me European photographer Simon Høgsberg the other day. He has an interesting style and I like that he writes alot about what he shoots. What I really found compelling was his project titled, “We’re All Gonna Die – 100 meters of existence.” Apparently what he did was stake out a spot on a walking bridge or path and shoot from the same spot every day for 20 days. He then stitched the images together into one giant panorama. Very compelling and the usability works well too. Check it out.
Yellow is the New Pink Interview
Wow I’m really on top of things. I was interviewed a while ago by a music blog called Yellow is the New Pink. The interview was about my book Out of Step: Faces of Straight Edge and my involvement in the hardcore/punk music scene. Well I just came across the interview today. Being interviewed about yourself is strange and awkward, at least for me, but it forces you to think about things in a different perspective.
yellowisthenewpink.com
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.
01/04/09 Brooklyn
Just another day in Brooklyn with my camera. Still trying to learn my way around the 5D Mark II and it’s menus.
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- Brooklyn.
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- F Train.
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- Raver and I.
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- A pregnant woman and lots of drinks.
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- Orthodox Transfiguration Cathedral