This was a really fun project/campaign that I filmed for Mr. Porter and USA Network’s Suits. Enjoy!
Campaign for Mr. Porter and USA Network’s Suits filmed in NY, LA, SF, and CHI. Fashion show filmed on the NYC Highline. Sponsored by Vanity Fair.
Produced by Jeff Smith and XA, The Experiential Agency
NY footage filmed by Reuben Hernandez and Jeff Smith on the 5D mark II, 5D mark III, and 7D
Edited by Jessica Thompson and colour graded by Reuben Hernandez
Image copyright Reuben Hernandez. All rights reserved.
This is one of my favorite photos, composition wise, that I took last year. 3 people climbing Mt. Etna in Sicily, Italy. We almost didn’t make the drive to the base due to the snow covered roads but I’m sure glad we did.
EMAIL: Hi! I was looking at your work after my neighbor told me about you. I have recently grown to love photography, and according to a few people I have a good eye and some talent. I am thinking of photography as a future career (I’m a sophomore in high school now) and was wondering if you had any tips or advice for a young, aspiring photographer. Thanks!
MY RESPONSE: To be honest with you, it is very difficult to make a career out of photography. The creative life is not an easy road! Also, technology has made photography more accessible for people and recently there has been a boom of professional photographers. With that being said, I firmly believe that anything is possible if you are talented, nice, work hard, make the right connections, and push the creative boundaries. Building a brand and selling yourself is also extremely important. You have to be a salesperson as well, you can’t just be a photographer and survive these days. Marketing, brand management, and running a sustainable business are also necessary. I wish I could tell you to just create great photographs and make good art, and everything will be fine, but I can’t.
I can share with you some things that have worked for me since I moved across the country. First of all, it’s all about connections. You can be the most talented person but you won’t get anywhere without connections, and other people being connected to your work. Your connections are probably the best way to find work and most likely your first job will be through someone you know or a friend of a friend. Surprisingly, I’ve even had former companies I’ve worked for hire me to do contract work. So network as much as possible. Secondly, use social media as much as you can. A lot of my clients have found me and hired me after seeing my work on Vimeo. I have even landed jobs through Facebook. Third, learn as much as you can and become an expert. Malcolm Gladwell wrote in Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. Apparently, 10,000 hours was a major factor that set The Beatles, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs apart from everyone else. So start now while you’re young. Learn all of the technical components and master them such as lighting, composition, exposure, etc. Even learn how to shoot film and develop it in a darkroom (yes, some people still use films these days :). You want to be the best you can be and stand out above the rest. Often I see professionals posting work that is technically poor or has really bad photoshop work. Shoot constantly and create projects for yourself that will challenge you. Understand that you will fail; learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others. And lastly, always aim to have fun! If you’re not having fun and enjoying it, then something is probably not right.
I used to think that landing a National Geographic assignment would be the holy grail for me. But after following Nat Geo photographers and realizing how dedicated you need to be, I’m not sure I’m cut out for an assignment like that. Those guys shoot an average of 40,000 - 60,000 images per assignment and literally have to live and breath their work. One of my favorite photographers actually told me that he turned down his first National Geographic assignment! So now I’ve had to find other things to aspire to :]
Enjoy the journey and good luck!
Probably my favorite music video of all time and one of my favorite songs. Chris Martin had the monthlong task of studying his lyrics and learning how to perform them back to front.
“He got a tape of the song recorded backward and he listened to it over and over. He’s a very passionate guy, so he got really into it. What we learned later on is about the problems with phonetics, because you have to be very careful with the lip movement so that when you end on a sound your mouth is formed in the right way.” - Director Jamie Thraves
As Thraves put Martin through his forward paces over the three-day shoot, the singer performed the song in a backward gibberish that the director said was akin to the fictional language Hopelandish created by Icelandic mood rockers Sigur Rós. Of course, when the video was in final edits, the roles were reversed, with the film running backward and Martin singing forward. Got it?
More about this radical video at MTV.
Music video by Coldplay performing The Scientist. © 2005 EMI Records Ltd This label copy information is the subject of copyright protection. All rights reserved. © 2005 EMI Records Ltd
For all you creatives out there, this one’s for you. It’s 20 minutes long, but well worth your time especially if you need encouragement on your creative journey. Enjoy :)
The University of the Arts
Neil Gaiman: Keynote Address
134th commencement - May 17th, 2012
Here are some of my favorite excerpts:
Make good art.
I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.
Make it on the good days too.
Fourthly, I hope you’ll make mistakes. If you’re making mistakes, it means you’re out there doing something. And the mistakes in themselves can be useful. I once misspelled Caroline, in a letter, transposing the A and the O, and I thought, “Coraline looks like a real name…”
And remember that whatever discipline you are in, whether you are a musician or a photographer, a fine artist or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, a designer, whatever you do you have one thing that’s unique. You have the ability to make art.
Sixthly. I will pass on some secret freelancer knowledge. Secret knowledge is always good. And it is useful for anyone who ever plans to create art for other people, to enter a freelance world of any kind. I learned it in comics, but it applies to other fields too. And it’s this:
People get hired because, somehow, they get hired. In my case I did something which these days would be easy to check, and would get me into trouble, and when I started out, in those pre-internet days, seemed like a sensible career strategy: when I was asked by editors who I’d worked for, I lied. I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely, and I sounded confident, and I got jobs. I then made it a point of honour to have written something for each of the magazines I’d listed to get that first job, so that I hadn’t actually lied, I’d just been chronologically challenged… You get work however you get work.
People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today’s world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They’ll forgive the lateness of the work if it’s good, and if they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as the others if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.
When I agreed to give this address, I started trying to think what the best advice I’d been given over the years was.
And it came from Stephen King twenty years ago, at the height of the success of Sandman. I was writing a comic that people loved and were taking seriously. King had liked Sandman and my novel with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, and he saw the madness, the long signing lines, all that, and his advice was this:
“This is really great. You should enjoy it.”
And I didn’t. Best advice I got that I ignored.Instead I worried about it. I worried about the next deadline, the next idea, the next story. There wasn’t a moment for the next fourteen or fifteen years that I wasn’t writing something in my head, or wondering about it. And I didn’t stop and look around and go, this is really fun. I wish I’d enjoyed it more. It’s been an amazing ride. But there were parts of the ride I missed, because I was too worried about things going wrong, about what came next, to enjoy the bit I was on.
That was the hardest lesson for me, I think: to let go and enjoy the ride, because the ride takes you to some remarkable and unexpected places.
I must admit I got emotional the first time I heard Anne Hathaway singing Dreamed A Dream on the Les Misérables trailer. Maybe it was because it was shown on a giant LCD screen at Bryant Park during Tropfest, and the speakers were right in my face. Regardless, this is another film I’m really looking forward to.
‘Les Miserables’ Official Trailer: Set against the backdrop of 19th-century France, Les Misérables tells an enthralling story of broken dreams and unrequited love, passion, sacrifice and redemption—a timeless testament to the survival of the human spirit. Jackman plays ex-prisoner Jean Valjean, hunted for decades by the ruthless policeman Javert (Crowe) after he breaks parole. When Valjean agrees to care for factory worker Fantine’s (Hathaway) young daughter, Cosette, their lives change forever.
Copyright © 2012 Universal Pictures
Evolution of a Storm 1 of 3 (Taken with Instagram at Esquire Building)
Bon Iver covers I Can’t Make You Love Me by Bonnie Raitt. I can’t wait to see him at Radio City Music Hall on September 19th. Shows have been added on September 21st and 22nd and tickets go on sale this Friday.
It Beats by I Am Lightyear. Buy her EP, All of the miles, and listen to the whole album at
Foolish Things by The Ultimate Bearhug
Download the Ultimate Bearhug for FREE! Jazzy blues-pop act from Southern California.
Magic hour. Tropfest at Bryant Park, NYC (Taken with Instagram at Bryant Park)
Tropfest, the largest short film festival in the world, at Bryant Park, NYC (Taken with Instagram at Bryant Park)
Taking shelter from the storm in a phone booth (Taken with Instagram)
Standing ovations happen every year at the Cannes Film Festival, but rarely are they as long and as loud as the one that erupted following last month’s Cannes premiere of Beasts of the Southern Wild—a low-budget, magical-realist adventure about a little girl and her community struggling for survival on the southernmost edge of Louisiana as a storm rolls in.
All of this was, of course, a bit lost on the film’s star, 8-year-old acting novice Quvenzhané Wallis. (It’s pronounced Kwe-VEN-zhah-nay, and means “fairy” in Swahili, but you can call her Nazie—NAY-zee.) “It felt like I was in a cage!” she says of being in a theater on the French Riviera, surrounded by towering, applauding adults. “It was crazy! They were all looking at me and clapping for seven or ten minutes, just standing up for meeeeee!” Mid-ovation, Beasts director Benh Zeitlin lifted her up, eliciting even louder cheers. “That was fun because the lights were in my eyes, and it was like this”—Wallis squints hard and pretends to go blind. Less fun was the celebratory dinner afterward, when she tried what the menu said was crawfish. “And it was shrimp!” she says, putting her hands on her hips mock-indignantly, then dissolving into giggles.
Click the link at the top for the full article by Jada Yuan.
Beasts of the Southern Wild
I can’t wait to see this film
http://welcometothebathtub.com
“Among the best films to play at Sundance in two decades… Hauntingly beautiful both visually and in the tenderness it shows towards the characters.” - Manohla Dargis, New York Times
The Intouchables, one of the best films of the year so far.
A moving true story of 2 men - a quadriplegic aristocrat who was injured in a paragliding accident and a young man from the projects. When together, they’re inseparable, intouchable… Award winning french movie “Intouchables” starring Omar Sy and Francois Cluzet.
16 year old Birdy covers Bon Iver’s Skinny Love. I expect Birdy to be one of the next biggest UK acts. She’s playing Joe’s Pub in NYC on August 15th.
Domenico DeMarco, 75, has been making every single pizza at Di Fara Pizza for nearly 50 years. It is widely considered the best pizza in NY. (Taken with Instagram at Di Fara Pizza)
Heartbeats by The Knife. I’ve had this song stuck in my head for the past 6 months and finally realized what song it was.