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I want to drive you through the night, down the hills…

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Feature Film || Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)

I wanted to put an above shot of every vignette but I realized that it would total 11 photos, one more than Tumblr allows, so I chose the photos that feature an aerial view of the cheers moments.

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Michelle Williams - HoBo #13 by Mark Segal, Summer 2011

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From last month with Bijan and EveryDayDude down by the train tracks.

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Two-Headed Shark

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Court house reflection, Strasbourg, January 2013.

And don’t forget to vote for me in the International Street Photography Awards. The polls are closing in 15 minutes, and it will be a close call for the last spots. Warning, the Facebook like doesn’t count as a vote, you must sign up to be able to vote.

UPDATE: polls close at midnight GMT so you have one hour left to vote!

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La vie aquatique, Strasbourg, January 2013.

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Our friend Benjamin Rasmussen has a new self-published book out entitled Home. It’s got beautiful imagery from seemingly disparate places woven together into his personal narrative. Worth checking out. 

“HOME. is an 80-page book measuring 9.5x13 inches. The digitally printed and rubber bound piece contains four hand screen-printed spreads, 12 pages of inserts and 54 images. The images, made over the last two years in Wyoming, the Faroe Islands and the Philippines, are combined with essays, quotes and an adorable interview with the photographer’s 10-year-old nephew all exploring connection to place and what it means to belong.”

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River House, Serbia by Irene Becker.

The house has remained atop the rock since 1968.

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The party’s over

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Go awol

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A little over a week ago, I flew down to Tucson, Arizona to attend a Mary Virginia Swanson workshop on finding your audience.  The workshop is oriented toward fine art photography and was quite amazing.  She is a gifted teacher and I was extremely happy I attended.  The workshop was full of professional shooters who knew what they were looking for and Swanee helped all of us along the path a wee bit. Whenever I travel to a workshop or on an assignment, my goal is to always set aside time to explore the landscape if the schedule permits. Tucson is known for its incredible light in the winter, plus there is a very fine helicopter pilot based there who I have flown with on several editorial and corporate assignments.  Aerials were definitely going to be a part of this trip. I’ve been shooting a fair amount of medium format imagery the past year, mostly with my Alpa cameras and my trusty Leaf Aptus 75.  I decided to take the Alpa TC  with one lens: the excellent 47 mm Schneider XL along with the Aptus and my new Ken-Lab KS-4x4 gyroscope.  I wanted to see if I could shoot with the Alpa in the air and if the new gyroscope prevented roll in the frame. I shot in Tucson on Sunday the 20th and Phoenix on the 21st.  Fantastic light in both cities - crisp, clean and specular.  I learned quite a bit from the experience.  While the Linhof Multifinder is fantastic, there is a bit of a disconnect between what the camera reveals and the viewfinder shows.  Just a wee bit of parallax that I will lock down before my next shoot.  I am also hopeful that I can upgrade to the Credo 60 back which will give me a slightly wider angle of view with my Alpa lenses. Ah the lenses!  So sharp, scary sharp, sharp corner to corner with very little light fall off that is easily corrected with the LCC tool in Capture One.

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Anthony Mangieri, certified pizza obsessive, has a sterling reputation, a devoted following, and an East Village pizza shop, Una Pizza Napoletana, that’s packed every night it’s open. But until last month, the thing that Mangieri had wanted since he was in short pants had eluded him: a bona fide wood-burning pizza oven handcrafted by the same Neapolitan artisans who built the ones at Naples’ legendary pizzerias like Da Michele. With its meticulously precise proportions, its hand-laid firebrick, and its heat-sucking floor, the oven is the devout pizza man’s holy grail. It’s also nearly impossible to get—unless, as Mangieri says, “you make it easy for them.” This summer, he did just that. He closed Una Pizza Napoletana for three weeks to prepare for the arrival of the 4,000-pound beast, a production that entailed hiring a rigging company, buying a shipping container, wrangling with customs, and replacing his storefront, and that sent one employee to the hospital and ended up costing Mangieri $19,000, all told. Secrecy and inscrutableness among Naples’ pizzaioli and especially its oven builders—of which Mangieri says there are exactly two who count—is a time-honored tradition. Russian spies have nothing on Neapolitan pizza oven builders. In that hush-hush spirit, Mangieri’s keeping his oven builder’s name to himself. But he was willing to divulge the finer points of what makes this thing so great.

1. Tiles From a shop around the corner; Mangieri did the work himself, emulating the classic ovens of Naples.

2. Birth Date Mangieri recorded the date that he laid the last tile: 9-10-07, at 4:30 in the morning.

3. Oven Chamber Firebrick-lined and specifically proportioned in relation to the arch and the pitch of the oven dome so that the flame licks the ceiling and heat is perfectly distributed throughout. This allows the pizza’s top and bottom to cook uniformly in 40 to 90 seconds, at a temperature of 900 to 1,000 degrees.

4. Wood Shavings Mangieri tosses a handful of aspen and pine wood shavings onto the embers just before he shoves a pizza into the oven to give it a smoky fragrance.

5. Wood Estonian white birch. “I like oak too,” says Mangieri, “but I haven’t been able to find any that’s consistently seasoned and burns as beautifully as this does.” With the efficient new oven, he’s using a quarter of what he used to.

6. Base Built by Mangieri from concrete board to support the oven; steel arch is repurposed from the old Una oven’s mouth.

7. Oven Floor Made from refractory material in Sorrento that absorbs the heat and prevents the pizzas from cooking too fast and burning. A layer of volcanic soil lies underneath. “Its job,” says Mangieri, “is also to absorb heat, and as with tomatoes that grow on Mount Vesuvius, to impart a distinct flavor that can’t be duplicated.”

8. Patron Saint Not everything concerning pizza-making is left to art and science: Mangieri keeps this portrait of a patron saint of people who work with fire next to the vent.

One pizzaiolo to rule them all. Sorry New York. Una Pizza Napoletana is my jam.

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Inside the Battle of Hoth, A Military View of How The Empire Strikes Out

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Quentin Tarantino Body Count