Sleepless in Miami

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A Fashion Shoot for Millo Designs

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

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

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

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

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.