philly

Vincent Laforet is the New York Times' first national contract photographer – he was formerly a staff photog for five years. He's been everywhere. Shot everything. Take a seat and take a look at his latest photo essay for the NYT special sports mag PLAY here. It's an audio slideshow of images shot with a tilt shift lens on one of his camera bodies. Tilt shift photography is a trip. What happens is that the plane of focus is literally shifted from a 90° point to something else. Architectural photographers use it and are able to get perfect (or near perfect) parallel and perpendicular lines. In other uses, a sliver of the image can be in focus and that sliver is not a straight up and down or side to side focus, but a diagonal one.

The slideshow is awesome by itself, but I ventured over to his website – which hijacks and resizes your browser and I fucking hate that poorly designed bullshit – to take a slightly deeper look into his work. I ended up at this page over on Apple.com talking about his digital workflow. The digital workflow is a relatively new beast and the technology to deal with it is getting better. Nowadays, from what I can gather, (digital) photographers are being asked to be the photographer and the photo editor. For newspapers, magazines and other publications, they must shoot, download, edit and transmit photos back to the office, but not all 2,000 or however many images s/he took out in the field, but a selection basically ready for print. Laforet had the luxury of asking Apple's engineers (cool) to develop some kind of workflow to allow him to shoot more and edit less. And they came through via scripts which is downloadable here.

Pretty cool.

I don't work for a newspaper on crazy tight deadlines and I don't use Apple. But it's pretty cool.

Some tilt-shift goodness on flickr. There's tons of Photoshop'd tilt-shift in the mix too.

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