Models, tall models, skinny models, Russian models, French models…sounds exotic? Yeah, not so much. Covering fashion week in New York sounds like a pretty glamorous assignment but it could hardly be further from it.

Shooting fashion week has more in common with running a marathon than it does running a sprint. There are 8 days, some 75 shows in the tents, dozens more off site, plus preparation photos. We shoot the models backstage and the designers getting ready, we shoot the front row celebrities arriving and we shoot the show from the pit.

The pit could also be called the pit of despair. Imagine taking 200 photographers with all their requisite gear, cameras, laptops, ladders, monopods, boxes and cases, putting them in a space that realistically 50 photographers could work comfortably in. Throw in 14 hour days, little regard for hygiene and an open bar in the evening and you have a recipe for a sociological experiment gone awry.

I personally shot dozens of shows and filed hundreds of photos. The images after a few days begin to homogenize and making something different becomes a real challenge. As a photographer I am always trying to redefine my visual narrative and create interesting dynamic photos.

Enter my newest toy, the Sony DSC-T77. It is advertised at Sony’s thinnest camera and with a Zeiss lens it makes pretty impressive photos. Add to that the huge screen and the fact that it is totally silent, has an awesome macro mode, live screen for shooting off the hip, shoots in black and white with a wide exposure latitude and you have a powerful documentary tool.

It is a strange thing when a photographer pulls up a big camera with a fast lens, it tends to put people in a defensive mode, they know you are professional and think you might have some ulterior motive for taking the photograph. Pull out a little camera and they think you are just taking pictures, the subjects are much more at ease and working with the little camera is more fun. Kind of like Jim Young using his Holga, you are never quite sure exactly what you are going to get.

Photographers have always looked around them at what is available to them to best do the job. Many photographers like Young bring Holgas with them or a Leica or Contax G2. They use these tools to create a different kind of image, one that is different than their bread and butter cameras, their Canon Mark III or 5d Mark IIs with their L lenses.

I will be experimenting with this camera more and more (I am really enjoying taking pictures on the subway system here in New York as I ride back and forth to Brooklyn and taking photos out of taxi windows).

Ok, back to the marathon.

Click here for a slideshow of images.

Do you remember the days of black and white film?
Life before digital and the preview screen?
How about shooting one frame per minute?

I have made several trips with U.S. President George W. Bush to his ranch in Crawford, Texas over the last couple of years.

Crawford is a small, sleepy town, population 705, a place where time has seemed to have passed them by. There are no hotels, one small flashing traffic light, and definitely not a Starbucks to be found.

A Holga is a $25 toy, plastic, medium format rangefinder camera with one fixed exposure, and I have been using it for about 7 years. I brought some 120 Tri-x film on a visit when we had a couple days with no planned coverage of the President, just to kill some time and have some fun.
But I realized that a lot of the images that I was trying to make had more of a horizontal look than the traditional square 6×6 images produced by the Holga, and thought they might work better as “sprocket” pix. If you put 35mm film in a Holga, it will expose the entire negative, including the edges numbers and sprocket holes.  I thought it might be an interesting photo project to shoot some views of this town whose notoriety is home of the “Western White House” and the impact his presence would have on their town.
I wanted the images to have an old dusty, historical look to it. And with Bush nearing the end of his presidency, it might be interesting to make a picture package on the town that will probably slip back into its quiet world, probably losing its most famous resident when he retires down the road to Dallas.

Shooting with a Holga is a very patient process. The viewfinder is nowhere near the image you end up with, especially with sprocket photographs. The angle is much wider than it looks, having to correct for the parallax error, mentally blocking out the top and bottom thirds for the 35 mm film….ughhh, never mind, click! F/8 @ 1/100th second. Turn the winder knob 36 clicks, and you are ready for the next frame.
Sometimes that is the best thing to do with a Holga, just trip the shutter and move on. Don’t over analyze it.
It is after all… a toy camera!

But what I love about it is the simplicity of it all. Film, plastic lens, and a black box.  The basics of photography.  It’s not 10 fps, 15 second photo ops, or rocket science for that matter.
The anticipation of the film to come back from the lab days later, getting a loupe and seeing what happened. Isn’t what this is all about? A simple image from a moment in time. Trying to create something from nothing, and having some fun in the process.
If you don’t slow down every now and then, the world just might pass you by…..

Click here to view a slideshow of the images.