photojournalism

Good thing I look at local news. Just yesterday I saw that Lena Dunham and crew were going to be in my town (New Paltz!) filming an episode of the HBO show Girls (Disclaimer: I really love this show, and was a bit starstruck in seeing Lena Dunham). I took a walk over to the SUNY New Paltz campus where they were filming today to see what was happening and to try to grab a few pictures. From the information I gleaned, and what I remember from the end of last season, the episode that was being filmed was actually taking place at The University of Iowa, where Lena’s character, Hannah, just got into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Even some of the signs and buildings on campus were rebranded with Iowa, as well as the clothing of the student extras.

Seeing a production like this shoot what looked like about 2 minutes of footage over the course of a couple of hours was really interesting; The amount of people involved, the sheer size of the equipment and the number of takes just to get what seems like a fairly basic scene correct. Also interesting — feeling like I was a photog for TMZ for an afternoon 🙂

All shots were taken with my favorite camera these days, the Olympus OM-D E-M5, and most of them from today had the E-M5 paired with probably one of the most underrated lenses in the system, the Olympus 40-150. This is a cheap cheap cheap consumer level lens that can deliver excellent results in good light. In the past couple of weeks I’ve been consistently amazed by it.

Last week, a co-worker and I went down to the Photo Plus expo in New York City to see some of the new products hitting the market and to lust after equipment that we could never afford. After a few hours there and a good Chinese food lunch, we found ourselves with about 5 hours to kill before meeting friends for dinner. Rather than hit a wine bar for…5 hours…we decided to get on the train and head down to Wall Street to see what was going on with Occupy Wall Street. After a few wrong turns, apparently thinking that we can just get off at the Wall Street stop and our bodies would be guided to Occupy Wall Street, we finally checked a map and arrived at Zuccotti Park. It was a pretty nasty day with cold rain and wind, so the protests weren’t really in full force (I was hoping to catch a drum circle or two to make me feel at home). Nevertheless, we spent about an hour walking through the area, listening to conversations and taking some pictures. Here are a handful.