Archive for 2010
For future posts to this blog, go to www.jonhillenbrand.com[ READ MORE ]
You know that feeling when you look at older technology and marvel at the intricacies of their jeweled engineering? I have named this feeling technostalgia. Today, I was playing with a very old lens, an 85mm f/2 AI-S Nikkor lens which has no motors, no chips, no auto-focus, no communication with the camera, nothing. But what [ READ MORE ]
Funny how things work in the Corporate World. After 5 years of being blocked, Flickr was recently freed from the shackles of Big Brother’s proxy at my work. All it took was a single phone call from someone obviously much more important than I. Now, instead of having to bring images home on a jumpdrive and [ READ MORE ]
I had to shoot an annual meeting for a women’s group the other day. The client wasn’t asking for anything special, just some images to put on a newsletter, in a website or wherever they could find space. So I took the requisite pairings and crowd shots but then later concentrated on the very pretty country [ READ MORE ]
The red door dustily banged open temporarily scrubbing the dirty grout of the men’s conversation. She paused there in the opening, a sudden wind taking its cue to wrap around her silken form the particles of the failing daylight. Her swollen pout threw daggers at the men, her final words a commandment, a gale force whisper. The men [ READ MORE ]
Some of you will simply not be with me during this post. But today I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone and she mentioned that she was going into a Costco to buy some food in good ol’ American portions. So I excitedly asked her to look and see if they [ READ MORE ]
Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, but at the end of the work day today, the cleaning woman showed up and started speaking with such prophetic wisdom that I found myself listening intently to every sentence in her half-Haitian-half-English tongue. She’s just like an oracle in the old Greek style. She almost never [ READ MORE ]
The BBC, inspired by such films as Baraka, has brought a revolution to mainstream documentary filmmaking, specifically Planet Earth and now Life. Many of the mind-blowing shots are done on location, but several would be impossible to do out in the randomness of the great outdoors. The below behind-the-scenes video demonstrates what it takes (and how [ READ MORE ]
I’m giving a new look to my blog. The photos will be larger, EXIF data like shutter speed, f/stop, ISO and camera type will be posted in the left column and links to other blog entries are now at the bottom of each page. Background and text colors of the blog will change depending on the color [ READ MORE ]
Absolutes of ideology are succulent butter to people who are in the checklist stage of preparing to sail with Greenpeace, pasting enlarged dead baby photos to poster boards, annoying their coworkers into voting for someone or screaming about the dangers of running with scissors. Pretendindians scream about the persecution of their ancestral 16th cousin, twice removed, feeling the [ READ MORE ]
Tonight I had dinner with someone who asked me about having a backup plan if the whole photography thing didn’t work out. I thought for a while and responded that most of my career has been spent in the less-affluent side of things due to the fact that I never wanted to “sell out” and [ READ MORE ]
Morality is a giant flock of birds, every one joining and leaving as necessary to fulfill their immediate ambitions, the overall shape and direction coming from the collective emergence of the many. There are those who would enliven the flock and those who would laugh at its destruction. Today I flow on my own, straggling [ READ MORE ]
After an exhaustive five-minute Google search on egg-related death statistics in America and coming up with almost no usable results, I stumbled across a very interesting fact about the Black Widow Spider. As some of you may already know, the Black Widow Spider is named for her truly confusing behavior of killing off her male suitors after [ READ MORE ]
Tonight as my sister, niece and I looked out from the roof-top deck at the rising dusk, my niece said, “Good morning, night.” Even though she is three, I am inspired by her sideways approach to everyday things. One day, after I sang the phrase, “too many monkeys,” during a long walk, we transformed the [ READ MORE ]
A good photo is knowing where to stand. – Ansel Adams As someone who is often asked for advice on photography, I usually tuck this quote in right after giving an overview of the bucket analogy, three-point lighting and the two-thirds rule. To me, it all comes down to this: knowing where to stand. Today, I thought of that [ READ MORE ]
I just wrote a whole blog post with tags and photos while laying here in bed typing with my thumbs into my “smartphone”. Amazing how far technology has taken us. But after taking the photo, the application crashed erasing the whole post and ruining the whole mystique[ READ MORE ]
I shot Billy Corgan for a benefit concert the other night. Though he was donating his time, he made a few comments to the crowd which reminded me that contempt for the audience is not always made up for by expert guitar picking. This reminded me of the axiom, “Remember Your Audience.” Film school was [ READ MORE ]
Driving with purpose seemed to dry the aqueous pressure behind my eyes as the shrinking distance between my soul and that of my parents stretched the road and all its travelers into panoramic time lapsed smears. I was glad for the speed of other enthusiasts and procrastinations as it hid my my own from those who would [ READ MORE ]
When I lived down in Momence, IL, or “The Kank” as I like to refer to it (Kankakee Valley area about 90 minutes south of Chicago), I often came home to a dark Hill House-esque pink cottage which teased me with its Pepto crust and screwy center. To say that I believed that the house was haunted [ READ MORE ]
Today during a studio shoot, I had an interesting interchange with an older woman who volunteered to be a model for a set of ads we are putting together for the launch of a new wing to a hospital: SUBJECT: “I own my own ad agency, so I know all about photos. And if there are [ READ MORE ]
Sometimes I can feel the neurons in my head recharging to execute a wrong decision once again. And in that shiver of a moment, I sometimes see the long view of my life stretched out before me like bolts of drying linen across the stone floor of time. Thoughts meander around rejected choices like flies [ READ MORE ]
Would it bother you to know that you were created in a lab? That your insides were not the result of slow evolutionary processes but of the genius machinations of a scientist? Sometimes I wish I had a robotic hand like in Terminator 2, but then I look at my natural hand with a certain sense of wonder. [ READ MORE ]
Today I had a great photo shoot. I was tasked with photographing a group of 7-year-olds who all have movement disorders. When I asked for a definition of that, one of the supervisors said that they weren’t especially good at coordinating their left and right sides. So, for example, one of the kids just seemed a bit lax [ READ MORE ]
Or are we merely the beneficiaries and victims of Existence, depending on the flap of the butterfly’s wings? Things happen. Shit happens. Life happens. Ups and downs and gutters and strikes. Why do things happen? Who knows why the vibrations among the atoms of the universe gang up on us or choose to shower us with [ READ MORE ]
I don’t know about you, but I sometimes feel shortchanged by the instruction manual I received when I was born. Oh wait, there isn’t an instruction manual for Life. What the heck?! There are instruction manuals for everything, even chopsticks. The first time I saw those three Chinese pictures on the side of the wrapper, [ READ MORE ]
Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.
