'Tis the season! As the cold weather sweeps in bringing a snap to the air and the smell of woodsmoke to the suburbs, I end up standing in the street with shivering subjects, pretending it's warm! But, that's part of the fun of this kind of work - the illusion of perspective. Here, we needed a generic image for advertising use (guess the theme?).

Dusk in Manhattan is a fun time to shoot, especially when working with gels on your strobes - if you play the color balance game, you can get a cool blue for the ambient while keeping your human subject in adjusted, warm light. The catch to shooting in NYC is that you can't use stands or tripods without a permit. We didn't have one as the idea was a bit spontaneous, spilling out to the sidewalk from inside. So, my 1st Assistant , Kate, is just out of frame holding a battery-powered strobe to light our scene. Guerilla shooting, love it - keeps you sharp!

I needed to supply a series of images of campus buildings for NYIT in Old Westbury, in both daylight and evening settings. The night shoots were fun, especially on this particular cool Sunday - little foot traffic, and lots of challenges. There are a few ways to make an image like this, but my choice was a single, long exposure with the camera on a tripod. Throughout the exposure, while wearing all black, I walked through the scene with a strobe in my hand, popping it again and again at the building to bring the outdoor light levels up to what was being recorded in the gallery within the windows...all the while invisible in the final images, as I never stop moving and remain unrecorded in the shot. Took some trial and error, but I love the result.

My assistant Adam and I had a blast a few weeks back working with the Nassau County Coors Light Girls for their local ad campaign, which we had to schedule on an evening to make sure all of our student subjects could make it. We shot just up until midnight, and went home with about 300 great photographs to promote their team of go-getters.

The trick to these shoots going smoothly is having a great production team, which in this case was simply named "Andrea." She was great - kept everything moving at the pace we needed it to, and was amazing at posing and arranging the gals - not to mention she had all the props ready to go by the time I popped the first test flash. Thanks everyone - !