I’ve gotten very jaded about taking photographs at tech events. It’s the same people, in the same types of rooms, all standing in a similar fashion. Thus, I will no longer just blast all my event photos up, as most of them will have been already taken by numerous people.

On the other hand, there are always those few select gems that end up with at the end of the night. I’ll only be posting those. Armed with my spy lens, I discretely took shots around the crowd. I particularly liked this photo of Ed, senior developer on the Scribd iPaper team.

During my trip to NYC, I decided to focus my attention back onto street photography–something that I’ve always been passionate about, but have had little time to pursue. And, what better place to rekindle the joy of capturing people than in NYC?

Joanne got me the super nifty spy lens from Photojojo, which lets me stealthily take photos of people on the street without them noticing. I’m much more confident when using this lens, and it lets me capture moments that would never take place if the subjects knew the camera was aimed at them.

My first adventure was shooting people in the MoMA. Using the lens takes some getting used to (more on that later), and shooting people who are stationary and staring at art is good practice.

On a funny note, one of the security guards, after watching me shoot for quite some time, noticed that I wasn’t using an ordinary straight lens. He came up to me immediately exclaimed that I was shooting “laterally”. I was stunned that he was such an astute observer, and shared with him some of the shots I made. He was genuinely amused, as he had never seen such a thing before.

I’m hoping to restart my photoblog sometime in the future, but, for now, here are some shots from the MoMA (all using the spy lens).

In photography, the angle and composition of the shot is important — one could say that it’s more important than the camera, lens, or even the lighting. Getting in the right position often takes significantly more effort, but, it’s what you need to do if you really want the best shot.

On the flip side, the composition of the photograph can be used to alter the perception of the picture in interesting ways. The following are some amusing examples of this (hosted by Scribd):

The slit-scan effect is a cool technique in photography and video where a slide with a slit is moved across the imaging device. Basically, you can do weird effects that treats each row of the image in an independent manner. For example, in the image of a hammer thrower above, the slit was moved across the film instead of a shutter, and produces an image whose rows slice the thrower at different points in time. It’s a startling effect.

In the video below, the same effect is used in video. A woman turns around in place, but, instead of seeing it all happen at once, we see her body impossibly contort as the slit scan is performed. In this case, it’s a digital version called the “time displacement” effect.

And of course, this effect has been used in various other media, like this music video from the Belgian band Goose below (effect start at 1:53). Also, they have a giant version of the rotating window optical illusion. Fun stuff.

Yesterday night was the first NewTeeVee Pier Screenings, which was organized by the beautiful Joey Wan. I got the chance to cover it as the official GigaOM photographer. The night turned out to be fabulous, and I got a lot of great shots in, including some long exposure photos like the one above. You can also view the whole set on Flickr.

Since this was my first semi-professional gig, I decided to rent some good equipment. I got the Canon 85mm f1.2, 35mm f1.4, and 580EX flash. The 85mm was unbelievably sharp and fast. I’ve read so much about this lens before, but it’s a whole other world when you get your hands on it. I was able to get shots that were previously impossible. The 35mm is a favorite among the photography socialites Lane Hartwell, Scott Beale, and Thomas Hawk. It’s a great walk around event lens that is both wide and fast.

In the end, I really enjoyed shooting the event. Since it was outdoors and unlit, the venue presented a unique lighting challenge. It was especially difficult to get large group shots in such a dark environment. I ended up doing some long exposures (one of my favorite techniques), which came out reasonably well.

Let me know what you think. And also, if anyone needs photography done for an event, send me a line at “jamesjacobyu (at) gmail (dot) com”.

Recently, I’ve been a little obsessed about stock photography. I’ve been spurred on by websites like istockphoto, where your photos can be bought by designers to incorporate into their creations.

I’m a big fan of isolated on white pictures, like the eggplant photo I took above. Once you get the proper lighting, the isolation isn’t too difficult. The key is to totally drown the background (I use a poster board) with as much light as possible, while keeping the object under normal lighting. This totally saturates the background when capturing the image while keeping the object at a decent light level. This results in those clean looking images you see in the magazines, movies, and commercials. I’m still using my two megapixel dinosaur of a camera to take this, so it really doesn’t take expensive equipment. Currently, I have two light sources, but will hopefully make myself a soft box sometime.

There’s just something about capturing the essence of an object all alone at a gratifyingly minimalistic state. You can check out my current gallery of works. It’s still rather meager compared to the “real” photographers who are members of the site. For now, I plan on just working on honing my basic photography skills. Then, I’ll hopefully upgrade to better equipment. The good thing about istockphoto is that they have actual experts look at every single one of your photos to check and make sure they are up to a certain standard before letting it into the library. They’ve given me really good advice about technique, and take the time to really critique my photos. It’s really a great resource.