Pick-A-Photo Tuesday: Palace Bumper Cars

If you haven't already guessed, Asbury Park is one of my favorite places to take black and white photos. And one of my favorite subjects has always been the Palace Amusements building. Since torn down, the peeling, seafoam green walls will live on forever in my memory. Along with the retro artwork that decorated each side of the building...

Pick-A-Photo Tuesday: Dead Roses

One of my favorite techniques is the Polaroid transfer. You take a slide photograph and expose it onto the old polaroid peel away film (the gunky kind)... pull off the paper tab when it's done... and place it onto watercolor paper. The result is absolutely unpredictable. The roses above were left in a vase while on vacation and upon returning, they looked good enough to photograph. The transfer technique really lent itself to the overall feeling of the photo.

Pick-A-Photo Tuesday: Solar Boy

One of my favorite photos, this was a serendipity kind of thing... the subject in the photo was trying on my sunglasses, and a table lamp reflected in both lenses. I said, "don't move!" and got my camera out and snapped this shot. To make it even more interesting, I solarized it during the developing process which gave the final photo really dark shadows and silvery highlights.

Pick-A-Photo Tuesday: Me and Mom

Here's a photo of my mom and I when I was only a couple months old. My dad was an American in the army and was stationed in Munich, Germany. I was born there in the army hospital and my mom and I stayed until I was 9 months old. She liked to make matching outfits for us. Doesn't she look so mod!

Pick-A-Photo Tuesday: Let's Hit The Bottle...

I really enjoy antiques of many kinds, but I have a soft spot (or should I say soft drink spot) for items with any kind of advertising on them... such as these vintage soda bottles.

I photographed them in black and white, hand colored them with dye inks and roughed up the surface with sandpaper to age them a bit. One of my all-time favorite techniques.

Pick-A-Photo Tuesday: Skee Ball

As a child, I loved to go down to the boardwalk arcades and play Skee Ball. For this game of skill you'd throw a clunky wooden ball up a ramp and into a bullseye-style area of rimmed holes with different point values for the degree of difficulty. You typically got 9 tries for each token... enough to rack up some tickets and buy yourself a pencil eraser or a bird water whistle. Boy, things were much simpler then.

Pick-A-Photo Tuesday: Hoffbrauhaus, Munich, Germany

Okay, as a graphic designer, you just can't let an opportunity like this go without a few thought bubbles! It's just one of the many perks of working in Photoshop! But anyway... this is what the Hoffbrauhaus looks like in Munich, Germany, at about 1 a.m. when you get seated with a German rugby team! The guy on the left with the gauze on his forehead, had head-butted someone earlier in the day, gone to the hospital, and received stitches. And so where do you go after you've given yourself a mild concussion...

To the Hoffbrauhaus, of course!