The Naked Eye

Architectural Photography for Marni

2009-07-03T17:35:00.021-04:00

Marni is a remarkable Italian fashion house with a worldwide presence and a spacey, futuristic design aesthetic in all its stores.

Marni hired me to photograph their new boutique in Miami's Design District on the day it opened.

We started before dawn and shot for a couple hours before the media interviews and pre-opening party began.

The sweeping, swooping space seemed to demand ultra-wide angle lenses, so that's what I used.

A big slideshow of my Marni images is here.

Making Lightroom User-Friendly

2009-05-24T21:44:00.011-04:00

Adobe asked me to analyze some of its programs, so I wrote a pretty tough critique of Lightroom 2 with suggestions on how to make it easier to use.

It's super-technical, photo-geeky stuff, but you hardcore digital darkroom workers out there may find it provocative and controversial.

Check it out here

Recipe For A Rainbow

2009-05-24T20:26:00.013-04:00

Take a little rain, spread warm, late afternoon sunshine over Miami Beach, and capture quickly with a little point and shoot.

Then incline camera for second helping, and walk 90 degrees from the direction of the light to adjust the apparent end of the rainbow to where a bystander waits for the light rain to stop:

Then darken the bottom lightly in Photoshop as the clouds move by:

No Excuse Justifies Torture

2009-05-13T13:21:00.020-04:00

I just received an email from former congressman Harold Ford Jr., now the chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, defending remarks he made on cable TV saying it was understandable that after 9-11 "enhanced" interrogation "methods" were used to "gain valuable and in some cases actionable intelligence", but that he really doesn't approve of torture.

Here's what I wrote back:

Dear Harold --

I don't buy it -- what the Cheney-Bush administration did was torture, pure and simple.

It was an extremely counter-productive, nationally and internationally illegal, war crime that overall made our country less safe.

And, if that's not enough for you, it was morally wrong, too. It was disgusting.

Please don't use Orwellian euphemisms like "enhanced interrogation methods."

If hooded men took your father, stripped him naked, chained his arms and suspended him by the chains from the ceiling, and kept him in this "stress position" for days so it felt like his arms were being pulled out of his shoulder sockets, while at the same time his captors dropped the temperature in his cell to shivering, near freezing, levels, and played such loud sounds 24 hours a day to prevent him from getting any blessed sleep for days on end, would you say, "My dad received enhanced interrogation techniques"?

Or would you say "They tortured my father."

Or let's say they took your wife, threatened her with snarling dogs and forced her into a cramped, totally dark, sweltering coffin-like box too small for her to lay in without scrunching her body up, and then put in crawling insects and left her there for days to stew in her stinking bodily wastes, would you say,"Oh, well, they just gave my wife some enhanced interrogation?"

Or would you say, "They tortured my wife."

Of if they took your son, blindfolded him, and then tied him to a long wooden board, stuffed a filthy rag into his mouth and up into his nose, and then inclined the board and began pouring water, or maybe some other liquid, up his nose and into his mouth through the dirty rag so he couldn't breathe, and water was entering his sinuses and lungs, so he felt as if -- and in fact was -- starting to drown, cutting off his oxygen; and then they repeated this waterboarding over and over again, saying that they would stop it only when he confessed to X, Y or Z . . . would you say, "Yes, they gave enhanced interrogation methods to my boy"?

Or would you say, "Those bastards, they tortured my son. "

And one of the worst, most mind-bending things about the Cheney-Bush administration's worldwide torture program was that American service-people, contractors and other government operators did a lot of this torture stuff to completely innocent people who, unfortunately for them, were swept up indiscriminately in massive round-ups by non-local language-speaking GIs in Afghanistan and Iraq, or who were denounced and turned over to the Americans by local tribal rivals or gangsters in exchange for locally huge cash rewards.

Tragically, many, many -- quite possibly a majority -- of the unfortunates imprisoned in places like Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Gitmo -- are not terrorists. Torturing terrorists is wrong and counterproductive in so many way, but torturing hundreds and thousands of the innocent people in those prisons was the totally inevitable result of an unjust, unwise and cruel policy that came down from the top as implemented by people lower down on the food chain, some of whom became more and more sadistic.

Also ironic is the fact that waterboarding has been employed since at least the Spanish Inquisition to extract false confessions from prisoners -- the so-called "intelligence" it produces is notoriously unreliable -- people will confess to anything under the torture -- and least one known U.S. torture victim told the Cheney administration what they wanted to hear before the invasion of Iraq -- that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. That was "valuable . . . actionable intelligence."

Look, Harold, this was a disaster on all levels, moral, legal and practical, and you simply cannot triangulate on this.

Please remember that now as a result of this stupid and despicable U.S. torture policy, there are many thousands if not millions of people in the Muslim world who now can say. "Those bastards, the Americans, they tortured my husband . . . or my father . . . or my son . . . or my cousin . . . or my uncle . . . or my neighbor's father . . . or my neighbors son . . . they tortured our people."
This was bad policy on all levels, Harold, don't excuse it or try to sweep it under the carpet. It's too big.

Chris Matthews is right -- you're trending toward Cheney-world.

I have a lot of respect for your political abilities, Harold, but please, please rethink your position on this and stop excusing the inexcusable.

My Best Regards,

Bill Wisser

(The historic photos in this blog post are, of course not copyrighted by me, but I believe that republishing them here is a fair use under copyright law, especially those images that were taken by U.S. government employees at the Abu Ghraib prison.)

The White Tulip / opening party

2009-05-02T22:22:00.005-04:00

The White Tulip is a florist shop in Miami Beach's stylish South Beach district. I shot the opening with fast lenses and no flash. The DJ was drag legend Elaine Lancaster.

The Kent Hotel Video Remix

2009-04-25T17:57:00.005-04:00

Here's a video I made with stills from my photo-shoot at The Kent Hotel last week.

This Miami Beach landmark on Collins Avenue was designed by architect L. Murray Dixon in a streamlined Art Deco style in 1939 and was recently renovated.

Photos from the shoot will be used in the hotel's new website and other advertising collateral.

The music is by the great Cuban Mambo king Perez Prado from a circa 1952 video clip found on YouTube. And my photo assistant on the shoot was Adam Dalziel.

South Beach bouncing back

2009-01-13T00:36:00.006-05:00

Recession? Unemployment? Stock market plunging? Worldwide crisis?

You'd never know it on Lincoln Road, Miami Beach's main shopping street.

Business seems to be booming -- in 16 years, I've never seen the street more crowded, never seen so many chi-chi shops.

The art busines seem to be booming there, too, with several interesting new galleries open. But my sentimental favorite is the decades-old Art Center South Florida, two buildings of artists' studios.

Originally the buildings were small department stores during the Art Deco era -- they were remodeled into inexpensive studios for artists, starting in 1984 under the leadership of potter Ellie Schneiderman, but many Art Deco details remain like these sleekly graceful, modernist stair railings.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T23:28:00.006-05:00

Fireworks at the birth of 2009 in Miami Beach.

Ocean Drive was closed to cars; the restaurants set up extra tables and chairs on the pavement and people danced in the street. It was a huge, happy, peaceful, multicultural crowd of all ages: many families with babies in strollers, as well as many young couples, of course. And the vibe was an Obama-like calm, an easy-going warmth.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-28T01:17:00.005-05:00

Model Sharlene, hair and make-up artist Yajaira, and I created a retro glamour Christmas card this year.

The space Blogger allocates for photos -- only 400 pixels high -- is really too small to adequately show the 900-pixel high card that I e-mailed to some 700 of my closest friends and associates.

But here it is at the reduced size with, however, our very full-size best wishes for a very happy holiday season and a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!

Art Basel Miami Beach

2008-12-27T23:01:00.006-05:00

The most magnificent art fair in the Americas, replete with Picassos, Mirós and astonishing works by up-and-coming artists like Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, Art Basel Miami Beach is always a treat to photograph, and this year was one of the best Art Basels ever.

Here's a link to some of my photoreportage of the week-long, city-wide event. I shot partly for Florida Trend magazine and partly for myself and for an art gallery -- and also for The Station, a satellite art exhibition in Midtown Miami that presented one of the greatest hits of the whole festival: a stunning, hallucination realized into a hyper-reality, a horrific yet funny and wonderful installation by Freeman and Lowe called Hello Meth Lab With A View.

Here's one of my images of part of their sprawling installation:

A Box Of Chocolates

2008-09-14T15:12:00.013-04:00

Beautiful chocolates from Godiva in my studio this week. In a box. With gold and silver backgrounds. And very macro close-ups.

Bread and Butter

2008-08-13T01:14:00.004-04:00

Food photography has been my bread and butter lately, and here's a photograph I made of . . . bread and butter. With apricot jam. I created this and many images of burgers, sandwiches, strawberries, pasta, pizza, pineapples, cookies and more with super-skilled food stylist Mary Ann Burt.

To see our work, just click here.

Be a Wok Star

2008-07-12T17:30:00.022-04:00

My friend Eleanor made me a Wok Star.

Born in China, raised in Hong Kong, and educated at fancy schools in England, Eleanor Hoh speaks with a deliciously plummy English accent.

She's been an actress/model in many commercials and ads around the world, and a vivacious TV show hostess in Miami.

Now she also runs a cooking school that teaches people how to make extremely tasty, but quick Chinese stir-fry food in traditional, very thin, cast-iron woks.

These woks, which she imports from China, are almost like art objects -- as if Brancusi had sculpted a Chinese frying pan.

I'd cooked with woks before. In fact, I already had two in my kitchen, but they were steel woks. Old-school, cast-iron woks are hard to find in this country.

But -- as I soon discovered after getting one of Eleanor's super-thin, super-light, cast iron woks -- cast iron cooks better, cleans easier and makes crisper stir-fry vegetables than the more Westernized steel models.

As for teflon-coated woks -- don't even think about it.

Anyhow, as a sort of bonus, Eleanor gave me one of her beautiful, seasoned woks after I did some food and product photography for her, a few samples of which are in this blog entry.

Eleanor says anybody can become a Wok Star with her lessons, which she gives in person and on DVD. Check out her website, eleanorhoh.com

Florida Governor Charlie Crist

2008-07-12T16:52:00.023-04:00

Florida's liberal Republican Governor Charlie Crist held his second annual "Serve to Preserve Summit on Global Climate Change" and alternate energy recently, and I covered it, making the above photo of him

Crist is hard to classify -- but he's a smart politician and he's leading Florida into increased use of alternate energy and a wide variety of energy-saving technologies.

Way different from Bush-Cheney's fossil fuel-centered policy!

Crist also seems worried about what rising sea levels from global warming might do to Florida's 1,197 miles of coastline and the people living along it.

On the other hand, when he came into the spotlight recently as a possible vice presidential running mate on John McCain's ticket, Crist changed his tune on off-shore drilling. McCain is for drilling.

Crist used to be against it; now he's for it.

Ted Kennedy

2008-05-25T23:45:00.011-04:00

The recent outpouring of respect and affection for Ted Kennedy -- even from hyper-partisan, conservative Republican opponents -- surprised me.

I thought our national politics had become so debased, so pickled in vitriol and so dependent on big lies, nasty distortions and sneaky half-truths, that respect and affection for liberals was virtually unimaginable from the culture warriors of the right.

But there on C-SPAN were right-wingers like Republican leader Mitch McConnel praising Teddy as maybe the greatest senator of all time.

The tributes went beyond pro forma sentiment or opportunistic sentimentality -- they appeared heartfelt. Everyone on the Hill seems to really like and respect the senior senator from Massachusetts, the third Kennedy brother, the liberal lion as they call him, the last crusader from the flawed yet still mythic court of Camelot, a senator since 1962.

Here's a picture I made of Teddy years ago, when he was running for President.

Neon, the Night and the G9

2008-04-06T23:13:00.016-04:00

It was built in 1948 in New Jersey, but it sits today in Miami Beach on the corner of Washington and 11th, a big silver slice of gleaming, open-24-hours-a-day, Americana: the 11th Street Diner.

The menu is just what you'd want from a diner: not gourmet, but real diner food: omelets and toast, open-faced turkey sandwiches, biscuits and gravy, malteds, American coffee and apple pie a la mode. Big portions. And OK, yes, they have some tofu and salmon things, too. And a full bar. This is South Beach after all.

I've photographed the place quite a few times, including a lit, medium format shot done inside the diner and featuring a sexy, sassy blonde named Christine Lyons wearing a vintage-style waitress uniform -- she actually worked at the diner while also running an indie record label on the side. I think she was a singer, too, if I remember correctly. That shoot was for Amica, a terrific Italian fashion magazine, and I later also used that shot in my now out-of-print book South Beach, America's Riviera, published in 1995.

Anyhow, Friday night I was walking home after a fine swordfish dinner with an old friend at Grillfish, when the diner loomed up at me in all its Streamline Moderne glory, and I couldn't resist photographing it again, this time with a little pocket camera I carry with me all the time now, the Canon G9.

This 12.1 megapixel baby fits in the palm of your hand, but it's surprisingly heavy for such a little thing, almost 10 ounces. An astonishing amount of very high technology is packed inside; and despite some design compromises and at least one design blunder -- the incredibly inaccurate optical viewfinder -- the thing's a gem.

I made the above image hand-held (!!!) at 1/10th of a second at f3.2 and ISO 400 at a focal length equivalent to 70mm.

The camera's built-in image stabilization helped me to get a sharp image at such a slow shutter speed, and the image was much less noisy than I expected. That is is to say it was less grainy than I expected. (Grain, or noise, is a problem with small digital sensors cranked up to high sensitivity in low light).

The G9 has become a cult cameras for many of us -- it's so light you can take it anywhere, and it has a superbly sharp lens, with a zoom range equivalent to 35 to 210mm.

You can buy one for around $450, plus you'll need a high capacity memory card.

The above image was handheld at 1/5th of a second with the G9 at f3.2 and ISO 200; but it got rather noisy when I goosed up the saturation in Photoshop -- still nice, though

The worst thing about the camera is the optical viewfinder, which seems to point in a somewhat different direction than the lens! It's worse than useless -- it's positively misleading, a huge mistake in a semi-pro camera. Of course, there is an excellent 3" LCD screen for focusing and composing, but a good optical viewfinder is also needed, especially when you want to jam the cameras against your brow to help keep it steady for those slow hand-held exposures.

I'd be willing to pay about $35 more to also have a good optical viewfinder in a camera like this. Also the high ISO performance should be improved. The grain becomes really horrid at ISO 1600.

Even so, this is an amazing piece of technology.

Jiussana Goes Glamour

2008-03-09T23:20:00.008-04:00

The lovely Jiussana, who used to a be a pop star in Mexico and now is in the clothing business in Miami, came to my studio last week for glamour shoot with a retro feel.

We took our inspiration from old pin-up photos and illustrations from the late 1940s and early '50, especially the sexy calendar art paintings of Geoge Petty and Alberto Vargas.

Hair and make-up was by Yajaira. We shot over 400 images.

And you can see a few more of them here.

Doorways in Time

2008-02-21T12:54:00.032-05:00

Back in the 1930s and '40s, before air-conditioning was commonplace, most houses in Miami Beach had screen doors -- beautiful Art Deco screen doors.

Though South Beach's historic district is supposed to be protected from changes that destroy its unique character, quite a few of the elegant old doors have disappeared during the last 15 years.

I think many rusty or broken ones were simply junked by owners who didn't recognize their value.

Others, however, remain; and some have even been restored.

Illustrated here are three old ones that remain in or near Miami Beach's now booming South Pointe area

When I first saw this neighborhood at the southern tip of Miami Beach, back in 1992, it was a slum; and many old cottages, small apartment buildings and little hotels were in ramshackle disrepair alongside a few that hip entrepreneurs had fixed up. Now the neighborhood has been revived with ultra high-end, high-rise condos ringing the waterfront; and some of the older buildings have been lost. Many still remain, though, along with their remarkable doors.

I made these pictures yesterday afternoon with a little Canon G9 that when I'm not shooting professionally with my big cameras, I carry with me everywhere.

The Postcard Aesthetic

2008-02-13T03:05:00.030-05:00

After scanning, captioning, key-wording and retouching numerous vintage postcards from the 1900s through the 1960s for my new stock image archive, I'm beginning to see real life as a series of postcard views.

I mean that the postcard aesthetic has infiltrated my photography -- at least for now -- and I like it. Here's a recent example of my postcard-influenced photography:

There was a layer of unreality, of fantasy, to the classic postcards of yesteryear.

During the golden age of American postcards -- roughly from 1930 to 1950 -- picture postcards were generally made from black-and-white photos that were heavily retouched and colorized, often by a staff artist for the big postcard companies who had never actually seen the subject of the photograph in person.

So the airbrush artist pretty much guessed at the colors -- and modified them up as he saw fit, as he imagined them.

In some cases, when, for instance, a hotel commissioned a postcard company to create a card for the hotel, the postcard company would ask the client to write on a translucent sheet overlaid atop a black-and-white proof what the various colors should be -- so the staff artist could paint, or airbrush, in the approximate colors, in a sort of paint-by-numbers fashion, using the color descriptions written by the client on this overlay as his map.

All this resulted in a fantasy universe of imaginatively colored and airbrushed postcards featuring beautiful colors laid over the black-and-white photo which then became a nearly invisible base underneath all the paint.

For instance this Cuban postcard published in 1945 of gorgeous Cuban landscape seems to show a deliciously darkening sky over a vibrant layer of orange glow from the below-the-horizon sun. But I've seen three other postcard versions of this exact same photo in cards published in the early 1900s, in which it's clearly daylight and the totally blue daytime sky had big fluffy clouds, but they appear to have been painted out in this version.

Some postcards for Miami Beach hotels were notorious for airbrushing out all the crowded surroundings -- so there were no competing hotels next door in the picture. Some of these cards also moved the hotels closer to the beach, eliminating for example, a street that separated them. Sure, that's amusing to see, but also pretty dishonest and I suppose it offends my sensibilities as a former hardcore journalist for newspapers and magazines.

But in my current role as an advertising and fine art photographer, I like some other liberties that the airbrush artists took. I like their slightly muted, yet luminous color palette -- probably enhanced by the fact that the postcards' paper has over the decades now oxidized and slightly yellowed, giving a gently reddish-brownish-yellow undertint to the proceedings. I like what some anonymous artist did with that Cuban landscape photo.

I found technical means of creating similar looks with modern cameras and image-processing software.

The soft old colors of those vintage cards - and the inevitable, if often artifical, red-orange-yellow sunsets glowing low on the horizon, sometimes lighting up the underside of big fluffy clouds -- has made me want to do similar retouching in Photoshop.

Here, for instance, are images of Miami Beach palm trees I shot with my new G9 camera -- before and after I gave it the postcard look:

The G9 is brilliant, small (4 x 2 x 1-inch) camera from Canon with a 12-megapixel sensor and a fine lens, plus image stabilization and a host of other features, including the ability to shoot richly detailed and highly malleable RAW files.

I carry it with me everywhere (unless I'm carrying one of my big, heavyweight cameras). It fits into a cargo pocket or a little waist pouch

Anyhow, I added the lilac and yellow colors to the sky of these G9 palm tree images -- and it looked to me like a 21st century hommage to the postcard artists of an earlier day.

You can see more of my images -- some with a soft, and some with a bright, color palette -- on my new e-commerce-enabled, stock photo site at digitalrailroad.net/billwisser

Jai Pakistan . . . Jai Democracy!

2007-11-06T04:24:00.006-05:00

Snuffing out the Constitution, muzzling the press, arresting liberal lawyers, firing the Supreme Court, outlawing public gatherings of more than three people, beating up protesters, suspending elections -- all in the name of protecting the nation from terrorism . . .

Meanwhile -- even as the Pakistani police, army and spy agencies imprison the moderate, secular, cosmopolitan, and democratically-oriented professional people and human rights activists -- the fanatical jihadis, the Taliban and Al Qaeda all grow stronger in the rough mountains of the Northwest Frontier Province. Now the extremists have even become powerful in the splendid resort valley of Swat, not to mention in the major cities like Karachi and Lahore.

Crushing Pakistan's democratic elements under the boot of the army will only strengthen the terrorists.

A growing democracy with economic opportunity, education and equality before the law is the best antidote to Islamo-fascism, but Musharraf is going in a tragic direction. It's horrible to see democracy being strangled in its crib. Even worse is to see anti-democratic encroachments on our own Constitution and Bill of Rights here in the United States, all supposedly for the same reason: to fight terrorism.

But here, too, our unfettered American democracy with its Bill of Rights, guaranteeing freedom of speech and assembley, due process, and right of privacy from government spying -- our profound civil liberties as conceived by the Founding Fathers remain the world's best defense against tyrants of any stripe, foreign or domestic.

We must stand for democracy here and abroad. This is an historic moment of enormous consequence. We must stand for democracy with all our hearts. This is what those patriotic songs they taught you in school and the Pledge of Allegiance are about: freedom and justice for all, the land of the free and the home of the brave, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

I made the above image more than 20 years ago in Lahore, Pakistan, the artistic capital of the Punjab -- the land of the five rivers -- at the monumental Moghul fort there; these mosaics are more than 350 years old.

Jai Pakistan -- Long live Pakistan! Jai Democracy -- Long live Democracy!

Sleepless in Miami

2007-11-06T01:40:00.000-05:00

Saturday night Miami Beach was more interesting than usual with art installations and live performances all over town nearly until dawn -- part of what was billed as a $400,000 "Sleepless Night" of culture.

Hookers were still click-clacking in their heels on Collins Avenue; and clueless teenagers, hip-hoppers and twenty somethings were still lining up to get into overpriced clubs on Washington guarded by hulking bouncers in suits -- a far cry from the glorious times of yesteryear (some 15 years ago) when the clubs were still cool, the crowds hipper, and achingly beautiful women in drop-dead gowns or drag queens in wings -- door goddeses they were called -- guarded the doors, deciding who'd get in.

Anyhow, the lure of the neon got to me, so I took some fast lenses (a 50mm f1.4; a 28 f1.8; and a 135mm f2) plus a 17- megapixel Canon 1Ds Mk3, and walked about for couple hours.

I shot architecture more than people -- though there were some cute kissing couples in Plaza de España, where Dana Keith's great Miami Beach Cinematheque put on an outdoor showing of the 1929 Surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou accompanied by a live performance of a flamenco troupe.

Even so, it was the architecture, the approximately 70-year-old Art Deco architecture, that drew me the most; and I photographed it handheld, mostly with the 28mm wide-angle, and then made the perspective more rectalinear in Photoshop, adjusting away distortion and making the lines more true.

The Sigma lens, the 28, is big and heavy, and I didn't think it would be very sharp wide open -- but it was, and yet had a creamy quality, abetted by some High Dynamic Range post-processing I dd in Photoshop.

I hadn't shot with my fast lenses for a long time -- I've been using f2.8 and f4 zooms and tilt-shift lenses mostly. But this was a return to my roots: I used to do photojournalism with a fast 50, a 28, and a 135; I love those focal lenghts.

Crocodile! On a golf course

2007-07-15T16:30:00.000-04:00

I've been photographing golf courses lately for TDI International, a company that builds and renovates golf courses. During a recent shoot at Deering Bay Yacht & Country Club, we saw this crocodile.

As I inched closer to it, the creature seemed motionless as a stone statue. I kept shooting photos with a long lens. I walked a little closer.

I heard a golf cart approaching -- suddenly the monster whipped around -- who would have thought it could move so fast -- and dived back into the pond.

I moved pretty fast, too -- backwards.

By the way, this was a saltwater crocodile, not its cousin the alligator. Fore!

Versace - 10 years later

2007-07-15T15:29:00.000-04:00

Ten years ago today, Gianni Versace was murdered on the rich stone steps of his Ocean Drive palazzo, his tragic and senseless death marking the end of a Miami Beach era.
I wrote about this a year ago in two related posts, here and here

"The Most Beautifiul Pool in Florida"

2007-06-30T02:30:00.001-04:00

In 1940, as America teetered on the brink of a catclysmic World War, several luxurious Art Deco hotels were placed on Miami Beach's Collins Avenue like a string of gleaming pearls on a necklace. One of the most luminescent of these architectural gems was The Raleigh Hotel, designed by L. Murray Dixon.

The hotel's most magnificent features are the intimate Martini Bar and a spectacular swiming pool.

I first photographed the famous Raleigh pool around 1993 for the now defunct South Florida Magazine:
This photograph from that shoot later appeared in many magazines around the world, as well as in my book South Beach, America's Riviera, and in the Miami Design Preservation League's Miami Beach Architectural Guide

In 2002, one of the most astute hoteliers of our day, André Balazs, bought the hotel from a South Beach revival pioneer, Kenny Zarrilli, who had made The Raleigh emblematic of the Miami Beach renaissance, filling it with fashion shoots and hipsters in the 1990s. Ten years later Balazs polished Zarrilli's somewhat funky Raleigh into something even more chic.

Recently, one of The Raleigh's sales executives came across my 1993 picture in Switzerland, and asked me to update my photograph to show the pool and pool area as it looks today. So last week I rephotographed the pool for about an hour from the wrap-around balcony of The Raleigh's penthouse -- a rather spectacular perch.

In the 1940s Life magazine hailed The Raleigh's pool as "the most beautiful in Florida." Some say it still is.

When I processed my raw files from this shoot in Adobe's Photoshop CS3, I interpreted the colors to be a little warmer than they actually seemed to the camera at mid-day (the camera made everything too blue). Then I opened up the shadows quite a bit and burned in some highlights. Next I worked to make my colors reminiscent of those I see in vintage postcards. I also converted some of my images into black-and-whites, and then into duotones: a little blue in the shadows plus a little rose in the highlights, and then a little platinum gray everywhere.

In the era of chemical-based photography, I would have made many of these adjustments mechanically in the old-fashioned, wet darkroom, by manipulating with my hands the amount of light falling from the enlarger onto the light-sensitive paper, or by washing the print in various chemical solutions. Nowadays, I do the equivalent of all that and more in my computer, in the virtual workspace of "the digital darkroom."

Many people seem to believe photography is a completely literal and realistic medium -- as if the camera were a perfectly objective mechanical eye, a conclusive truth-recording machine.

But from its very beginning, photography has always been an interpretive art, and every photo is merely a representation of reality, not reality itself.

So many choices and limitations are inherent in the tools:

The optics, the filters, perspective adjustment, timing -- and countless other technical and compositional choices make the entire process of capturing, processing (or "developing"), and then printing the image intensely, hopelessly, subjective.

The more skilled the practitioner . . . the more he or she controls or doesn't control the camera, the saturation, the colors, the contrast, the composition, and so forth . . . the more personal it all is. Even photojournalism, where blatant retouching of the sort so common in advertising or fashion would be unethical, nonetheless has intensely subjective aspects inherent in the artistic choices so inescapable in the photographic process itself.

As Picasso said in a different context: "Art is a lie that tells the truth." And putting three-dimensional, moving, noisey, fragrant reality into a two-dimensional medium of shapes and colors is always an approximation, a recreation, an interpretation.

Party time for Southern Wine & Spirits

2007-06-30T00:28:00.000-04:00

In a lovely Mediterranean Revival-style mansion hidden behind an unobtrusive entrance on Miami Beach's Collins Avenue, there was a party for South Florida restaurateurs and the beverage industry, sponsored by Southern Wine & Spirits, the nation's largest distributor of wine and spirits.

A trade magazine, Patterson's Tasting Panel asked me to photograph the party for a couple hours.

These are a few of the images I made for them.

Lighting Secrets

2007-05-13T21:38:00.000-04:00

I love lighting -- and two recent assignments from Wells & Drew, a maker of fine, engraved stationery, gave me an opportunity to create a few hundred macro images: tight close-ups to which I applied several different lighting techniques.

Wells & Drew wanted me to capture the fine texture of the paper and show off the remarkable detail of their beautiful, raised engraving.

So to create an almost tactile feeling in my photographs, I sent a tightly gridded and narrowed spotlight strafing accross my table-top set.

For some images, I also fixed a blue gel (something like a heavy cellophane filter) over one of my lights which I bounced off the studio ceiling, to make the shadows go electric blue, while the white spotlight kept the bright parts of the picture looking more or less natural in hue.

For yet other pictures, I went for a softer, less dramatic look -- no spotlight. Instead, two studio strobes bounced off the white ceiling, plus a softbox from the back to give a little directionality and depth to the textures of the paper, the raised engraving, and the fine printing.

For my backgrounds, I used a variety of things: painted muslin backdrops, white foamcore, and a collection of different colored, woven table placemats that I buy for this purpose at places like Linens-n-Things.

Doing this table-top, still life, product photography is the opposite of many of my other shoots -- no models, no assistants, no stylists . . . just me and my lights in my studio plus some of my 11,000 plus MP3s on the sound system.

Photographing a brochure for luxury condos

2007-01-07T21:41:00.000-05:00

This lovely couple are actually models Brandi Sherman and Dennis Geers on location at the exclusive Fisher Island Resort off the coast of Florida, where I recently shot a lavish brochure for two new residential buildings that are being built on the island.

We had scheduled four days to do the shoot, plus another half-day in a JetRanger helicopter for the aerials, but we only got good weather on two of the four days, so we had to scramble.

Here are a few more images from the shoot:

The Temple of Taleju

2006-10-15T23:10:00.000-04:00

Bought a new flatbed scanner -- and scanned some old prints I made in a chemical darkroom years ago. Here's one from Kathmandu.
In the background rises the Temple of Taleju -- the goddess who's the protective deity of Nepal's royal family. The temple is exclusively for the use of the king and his priests, except for one day a year, when the public is allowed to enter. Built by King Mahendra Malla in 1564, the great pagoda is 120 feet tall, the highest structure in the old city's series of palace-temple-market squares.

In My Retro Studio: Hollywood Glamour Lighting

2006-10-07T17:04:00.000-04:00

Long an admirer of George Hurrell and the other great Hollywood portrait and glamour photographers of the 1930s and '40s, I've devised techniques to recreate something of that look using modern strobes and digital cameras instead of the tungsten lights and large format view cameras of those days.

Wednesday I shot model Erin St. Clair all day in series of different setups for a real estate ad -- and one of the setups I did was in my retro Hollywood beauty style. Here's my favorite image from that part of the shooting:

Of course the original digital capture was in full color, but I made it black and white in post-processing, then added light touches of color toning to parts of the image, plus some selective diffusion.

And here's a color image from the same session with Erin radiating vibrations of Jane Russell, Marilyn, and Angelina Jolie, all at once.

Hair and makeup by Yajaira Bogari.

Oh, and here's another image I made of Erin with more contemporary lighting:

Nepal is Beautiful

2006-09-27T02:42:00.002-04:00

Remember slides? I still have tens of thousands of 'em -- and every once in a while I digitize some of my favorites.

Here's one's from Nepal:

The woman in the crimson sari is performing a puja, or prayer rite, at the gilded, Hariti Devi pagoda temple on the outskirts of Kathmandu, at a stupendous Hindu-Buddhist temple complex named Swyambhunath, also called The Monkey Temple because of a troop of some 250, semi-wild, sacred, Rhesus monkeys who live amongst the forest and shrines on the hill, overlooking the entire valley.

Hariti is the Hindu goddess of smallpox and other epidemics; and people pray to the goddess for her protection. To Buddhists, she is Sitala, a mother goddess and protector of children.

It's interesting to scan the old slides, and see how even the best ones have less resolution and less detail than the digital images we shoot today.

The Raw Facts

2006-09-20T00:33:00.000-04:00

How can the highest quality digital photos be produced for your next project? I have some answers in a new essay for photographers and clients about how to choose the best digital workflow for the job. It's at my website at billwisserphoto.com

Tiff, raw, jpeg -- today's digital revolution has put on our plates a virtual alphabet soup of technical options called file formats:

I outline the advantages and uses of each format -- and illustrate it all with lots of fun photos -- in fact, you can just scroll through the piece and enjoy the photos without even reading the text. But if you do read it all, you'll learn how to get the most out of your equipment, if you're a photographer, or -- if you're a client -- how to get the most from your budget for photography.

Check it out at: The Raw Facts

The Writing's On The Wall

2006-08-25T22:19:00.000-04:00

A strong tradition in Miami of murals and commercial wall paintings: This one by the artist Lazaro Amaral was commissioned by a Cuban restaurant owned by Gloria Estefan and her husband Emilio.
This painting is gone now, has been painted over, but here's another wall painting, this one in Miami's Little Havana:

Next is a painted storefront in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood:

Finally, a grand and nostalgic mural in Miami's Little Havana idealizes the glamorous and long-gone highlife in Varadero, said to be Cuba's most beautiful beach. The mural is -- or was -- just off Calle Ocho (Eighth Street), Little Havana's Main Street. But this wall painting was fading badly the last time I saw it, and it's probably painted over and gone now, as gone as those aristocratic days in Varadero.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

2006-08-23T01:44:00.000-04:00

This is my Dad, Lawrence Wisser. We just celebrated his 89th birthday. Among other things, Dad and I went for a hike in the woods near his home, visited a winery along with my sister and her significant other, and then all enjoyed a grand meal at a favorite restaurant. And here's one of the butterflies in my father's garden.

A Fashion Shoot for Millo Designs

2006-08-03T21:19:00.000-04:00

I photographed 24 outfits for Millo Designs this week: all beautifully tailored, sophisticated and sexy, many of them sort of harem girl outfits, while others were long, evening dresses.

Very elegant, incredible detailing with diaphanous layers, brocades, and tremendously fine fabrics.

I set up and lit a white background for about two-thirds of the shoot, then switched to a deep black backdrop and more directional lighting, plus a grid spot on a boom for the hair light to give separation and drama.

The pictures are for a buyers' catalog and Millo's website.

We shot all 24 outfits in my studio in 10 hours -- I'm still tired from that and the digital post-production work, but the client loved the pictures. "Beautiful," she wrote, "Congratulations."

Hair and makeup by Yajaira. Photo assistant was the great Adam Dalziel of Model Motion.

The Empire State Building

2006-07-24T22:42:00.000-04:00

Until I was seven years old, I lived only a few blocks from this great building -- it literally loomed large in my childhood, and I used to love to ride the elevators to the top and look at the city spread out below. It was the tallest building in the world back then. I still love photographing it from every angle. This was done with a 1,000 mm lens.

The Death of the Charles Hotel

2006-07-24T20:59:00.000-04:00

Walking on Miami Beach's Collins Avenue today, I remembered the now-vanished Charles Hotel, a Deco gem built in 1938, but demolished in 2004 -- even though it was in a supposedly officially protected historic preservation district.

The owner seemed to let it deteriorate until it was deemed structurally unsound and he could get official permission to knock it down. Now a not-bad, post-modern, low-rise condo building has been erected on the spot.

But the Art Deco panels -- some of the best bas-reliefs in South Beach -- that decorated The Charles are gone forever. Here's what they looked like. The first picture is of the north wall; the closeup is of a more or less identical panel on the west wall, beside what was the main entrance to the Charles Hotel.

Wild Thing, I Think I Love You

2006-07-24T09:23:00.000-04:00

I've been playing with dolls. Yes, this beautiful doll, designed by my pal Sarah Quyen of Chic Boutique Doll Design, was in my South Beach studio recently for a major shoot to help establish her image.

But let me tell you: this doll is a real f...ing princess -- what a bitch. She goes by the name "Rapunzel" -- but she wouldn't let down her long, long hair unless I practically begged her. And, at first, her movements were so stiff! But we drank some champagne and I put on some early Prince cuts -- "Do It All Night" and "Head" -- and, man, she really loosened up!

"I just love Prince," she said. Whoa, girl, I can't show some of those pictures we did; Sarah would kill me. But once we were in the groove, we got back into that proper Grace Kelly thing, and just nailed a series of fabu Rapu images for her pre-teen fans. (That's what I call her, Rapu).

Used a cheap, optically uncorrected lens and special lighting to create a dream-like ambience.
Or maybe it was just the champagne that did it.

Rapu, wild thing, I think I love you!

Looking for Perfume River

2006-07-17T17:15:00.000-04:00

These are a few of the backdrops I use in my product and fashion photography. I shot these sample close-ups of them for one of my favorite clients, Perfume River, for whom I'm going to do a series of product shots of embroidered wallets, jewelry cases, and other little bags:

Here are a few more test shots I did today, just quick snapshots, really, to test various color combinations. I like these.

Versace Shot Dead

2006-07-15T00:26:00.000-04:00

Nine years ago today, on July 15, 1997, a madman pumped two bullets into Gianni Versace's face and neck, and the great designer fell dead on the doorstep of his Miami Beach mansion, his blood and brains congealing on the pink steps to his palazzo.

A few minures later, the Washington bureau of a German television network telephoned me asking for quotes and information about Versace -- I spoke with them, then threw a camera bag across my shoulder and sped on my bicycle to Versace's mansion, just a half mile from my studio. The TV choppers and paparazzi were already there in force, buzzing noisily around the scene.

I made some pictures from the street before the police cordonned it off and put all the media beyond a yellow tape across the street. Versace's body was gone.

Versace loved South Beach and it loved him. His presence here had been good for business, too; and his murder, while not the cause of South Beach's decline, hastened it.

People talk about the bloody steps at the scene of the crime, but it wasn't just blood -- it was Versace's brain, his beautiful brain, splattered across the steps that sunny morning, the sticky gray matter dripping and congealing on the coral rock stairs. It was ghastly.

Advertising an Exercise Machine

2006-07-12T13:41:00.000-04:00

Made a series of advertising images Monday for a new exercise machine. The models are Wes Alexander and Amy Lee of Mega Models in Miami. Hair and makeup by Yajaira Bogari. Photo Assistants: Adam Dalziel and Alejandro Borgese. I photographed this in Studio B at Aperture Studios in Miami Beach.

2006-07-08T01:32:00.001-04:00

This neon sign is gone now, but this picture brings back the sexy, funky look and feel of South Beach as it was about 10 years back, when it was so hot and hip. The Chamber of Commerce won't love me saying this, but Miami Beach has for the most part lost its mojo. Sure, it's still a beautiful place -- the beach, the Deco buildings, the bicycle-anywhere lifestyle, the gorgeous light, and subtropical weather remain. But the burning, bohemian, fashion-forward, and independent creative spirit -- the vitality -- that animated South Beach has faded slowly away as the town trended ever more mass-market.

Money -- lots of money -- is being made, surely more than ever before here. But the avant-garde glamour and excitement that is supposedly why people come here has largely slipped away along with the avant-garde, the artists. There's a kind of hollowness to the town now.

The neighborhood is more crowded today, but emptier.

Of course, no location can remain the hot, new, fashionable place forever. It's a contradiction in terms; and South Beach enjoyed an extraordinarily long run of being fabulous, from the mid-nineteen-sevenites through the mid-nineties. A decade or two ago, the town was full of artists and their studios -- now it's got beautiful branches of the Banana Republic and Victoria's Secret stores in their place.

Part of South Beach's decline was inevitable -- an example of the usual cycle of slum-art neighborhood-gentrification-developent-and-exploitation. But I think poor leadership was also a factor, poor stewardship by the politicians and planners. Maybe I'll expand on this in a later posting.

Actually, I've been writing in my head two, new chapters to update my critically acclaimed, 1995 book, South Beach, America's Riviera, Miami Beach, Florida, originally published by Arcade and distributred by Little, Brown.

It's out of print now, but e-mail me if you're looking for a copy. For the revised edition, I want to survey many of the South Beach pioneers and heavy-hitters that I know, and ask them about their perceptions of the changes here.

In any event, the flocks of Amazon-like beauties and Apollo-like gay guys I used to see working out in my gym have almost disappeared. I used to see Cindy Crawford work out there; Madonna also was a member, though she used to have private sessions. The number of fashion shoots in town has declined so precipitously that one production house has mothballed its fleet of RV production vehicles, though big-budgeted hip-hop music video shoots have taken up some of the slack for the production houses and the high-end hotels. But the hip-hop artists have not filled the gap entirely.

The people-watching simply isn't as great as it once was, back when supermodels strutted down Ocean Drive like a runway every day; and you'd see Gianni Versace and his family lunching on Lincoln Road. The town seemed like an enchanted village, or a planet all its own, with magnificent beauties of all sexes, wearing very little clothing, Rollerblading everywhere, like suntanned gods and goddesses on wheels. The nightclubs and restaurants were incredible, and there was music and art in the steets. Energy in the air. You'd see big fashion shoots everywhere. Versace's murder in July of '97 symbolized the end of that era, and the beginning of a coarser, more ordinary one.

Over the last decade, many of South Beach's artists and other creative people have decamped for the mainland, and a Miami warehouse district called Wynwood is up and coming -- but, far from the beach, Wynwood and the other mainland neighborhoods are simply not the same.

Meanwhile, somewhere along the way, South Beach became not just a place, but a brand:

Martha Stewart introduced a line of funriture at K-Mart called "South Beach"; a Miami cardiologist dubbed his new weight-loss regime "The South Beach Diet," and it became a phenomenon, his book a best-seller; next there was a line of soda pop named "South Beach;" then came a beautifully photographed but terribly written TV detective show called "South Beach;" and Ocean Drive magazine (itself named after South Beach's main street) licensed a stylish line of Ocean Drive fashion sunglasses and even published franchised, satellite edtions of Ocean Drive in such unlikey locales as Canada; while I, myself, wrote and photographed a lavishly illustrated coffeetable book called South Beach.

A million magazines all over the world did South Beach stories, year after year -- about how hip it was, plus where to eat, where to stay, where to party, where to spend your money. I licensed a lot of photos to these magazines! Did a lot of assignments. Photographed a lot of restaurants, boutiques and hotels. New ones -- actually redone Art Deco ones -- were opening all the time. It was great. And I remember when Pavarotti gave a huge concert on the beach; and then the Today show and then Good Morning America did weeks of live broadcasts from the beach. Television crews from all over were everywhere. I was a consultant and on-air commentator for one South Beach show done by a German network. The tabloid TV shows went wild: the nightclub scene, the models, the Deco, the whole place was eye-candy. Some paparazzi guys I know were making fortunes, as was the fashion business. The nightclubs -- including some mafia ones -- were making millions. Of course, it had to end. It was over-exposure.

And as more people came and real estate prices went up, and the artists and quirky one-of-a-kind boutiques were forced out by higher rents and poor planning, and chain stores replaced them -- the demographics of the people coming and the quality of the experience here changed. The character changed.

Meanwhile, more luxury high-rises and corporate-owned hotels have been shoehorned into South Beach, blocking more views, but I feel the sex, excitement, and style they're selling is more a reflection of the old days of 10 years ago, than of the current reality. Nonetheless, there's still a sort of luxury mafia of high-end real estate developers, mega-glossy magazines, exclusive nightclubs, hotels, restauranats, p-r agencies, and a parade of B- and C-list celebrities still incestuously cross-promoting each other here, keeping the image alive. (And some of them are my clients!) And, truth be told, the old magic hasn't totally left South Beach. It still has its moments plus a lot of great restaurants. Moreover, the history of this resort town has always been cyclical.

But the smart, sexy and sophisticated South Beach vibration has weakened enormously, indeed the vibe has fundamentally changed -- as one spring-break, college girl from Tennessee told me this year, "I'm so disappointed. This is the trashiest place I've ever seen!" When spring-breakers come to your town and think it's trashy, things are pretty bad.

2006-07-05T19:58:00.000-04:00

Flying to New York, floating in infinity.

I to Eye

2006-07-05T19:50:00.000-04:00

This beautiful eye is that of the gorgeous and mystical Yajaira Bogari -- a wonderful Miami-based, hair, makeup, and fashion stylist. I made this picture of her for her business card.

I Take Lola In My Way-back Machine To 1948

2006-07-05T14:41:00.002-04:00

She calls herself "Lola," but that's not her real name. It seems like a dream now, but I think I met her early one morning at a fetish party in an out-of-the-way nightclub in an utterly nondescript, little, suburban strip mall someplace on Highway US-A1A in northern Broward, or maybe it was southern Palm Beach, county -- the last place you'd suspect, but suburbia is where the fetish people really flourish. I was thinking of photographing a magazine story about this underground suburban scene and I went up there without any cameras to take a look.

In dark edges of the sprawling club heavy-duty s & m -- torture, really -- was on dispaly. I was a little shocked, even if they were consenting adults, but I was also nonplussed. Most of the scene was merely theatrical. Some of it was what they call the new burlesque, such as a fine-looking, red-headed woman who was a fire-eater -- like in a circus. She was on stage in a low-cut grown eating fire and snapping out dirty jokes with the elan of an old-time Borsht Belt trouper, but with a stripper's figure, and a broad English accent. And many of the scenesters were merely nice goth kids, playing dress-up, like on Halloween. This was before Abu-Gharaib.

Lola was there, too, and caught my eye. She was a college student, but also performed in fetish shows -- she was friends with another girl, the smoldering hot dominatrix Lady Lexi, who I'd also photographed in my studio after seeing her perform a very enthusiastic fetish routine at the lavish tenth anniversary party of Ocean Drive magazine, a last blast of glossy South Beach decadence before the vibe changed.

In any event, Lola, I learned, collected vintage lingerie, particularly from the 1940s, a period of which I'm also fond. So we agreed to do a forties-style photoshoot a few weeks later in my South Beach studio.

In some of the pictures -- the ones I like best -- hairstylist Pep Arques created a 1940s-ish Pompadour for Lola. And the white leopard pattern ottoman on which she perches was made by Rico Fuentes, an uphosterer who also makes the furniture for many Miami nightclubs.

I styled the overall look of the shoot based on pictures I'd seen in book called 1,000 Pinup Girls (Taschen), which features late 1940s and early 1950s photos, drawings, and paintings from a brace of trashy yet somehow innocent, pre-Playboy, girlie magazines published by a pulp-culture figure named Robert Harrison.

Harrison later invented the infamous, voyeuristic and often vicious Confidential magazine, which proved his downfall. But before that rather nasty period, Harrison's undeniably cheesey, yet in a way rather sweet cheesecake titles -- small-format, small-time magazines with breezy names like Beauty Parade, Eyeful, and Wink -- offered acres of monochrome backgrounds and scantily clad pin-ups, many of them perched fetchingly on ottomans, a piece of furniture one rarely sees these days. Some of the photography in those magazines was badly done, but some was great, as were the paintings. To get the period feeling, I had Rico build me a deep red, round ottoman trimmed with yellow piping, a design and color scheme we copied straight from one of the pictures in the pinup book, and used in some of our photos.

I tweaked the files digitally to give tham a poster-y, calendar girl look that reminded me of the color printing of that time. The year I had in mind was 1948.

I also employed a fairly rare, 45mm, Canon, tilt-shift lens, shifted and tilted to produce selective focus: sharp on her eyes, but a little soft and misty around her feet, to give an old-fashioned, large format camera feel to this period piece of a picture.

Fourth of July Special

2006-07-03T12:47:00.000-04:00