Mos Def at Fete in Providence, Rhode Island

HipHop star Mos Def at Fete in Providence, Rhode Island on Dec. 10, 2011. 

Finally Tikal, Guatemala

     La Ruta Inka ended in the accent Mayan city of Tikal and of course I was really pumped to get to see this fascinating place.  The day we got to Tikal we decided not to go in till the next day since we had arrived late and wouldn't have that much time to explore.  I was told for 50 bucks I could get snuck into the park before they opened and see the sunrise from the highest temple.  That night we camped right outside and there was a down pour, I thought it wouldn't of been worth it to go in for the sunrise since you probably wont be able to see much,  but I did swear to my self to go back and see the sunrise.

    The next day some friends and I got a group together, got a tour guild, and started our hike into the jungle to get to the temples.  As soon as we started walking the tour guild told us that everything we saw when Tikal was at it's prime had no trees at all and was just building after building like NYC.  As you hiked you could see a hill after a hill after a hill and a nicely made rode between them, this is because each of them hills are temples/buildings under all the dirt.

     You can't image the size of the largest temples until you see them in person.  Just image hiking on a trail threw the jungle and then getting to a clearing wheres there's a stone wall and you look up and you just can see any end to it.  There are only a few temples you can go up on but the climb up them is quit an adventurer it's self and then the climb down scares the shit out of you.  The steps you use to go up are straight up into the air, they're more like a ladder then steps.  The average height of the temples are about 20 floors high, so just imagine climbing up the side of a 20 floor building on a ladder and then when you get to the top there aren't any railings and then you have to climb back down that ladder.
  

     The hypothesis why Tikal was abandoned is that all the trees you see below were all cut down by the Mayans to build temples and buildings.  So because they had cut all the trees down area dried out and it was uninhabitable.  What blows my mind is the fact that 100s of years later Mother Natural has taken this area back and you can barley see the huge city that was once there.

  
   The image below was taken from same spot that was used for Star Wars.  I've post a clip below from the film so you can compare.

   If you zoom in to a small section of the middle of the left side in the image above you find these two little guys below.  Tikal is a real jungle and there are no cages at all, the animals are in the wild and roaming freely.  

  
    I'm a huge Patriots fan and when I seen this lady, with a Pats hat, in Tikal, the middle of a jungle, you best believe I was pumped.  It was just great benign able to be at the NYC of the ancient world and then seeing another Pats fan there what more could I ask for.

"Angel" from Queens visits Rhode Island

     A few weeks ago I got a call from James Diossa, a high school friend that is now a Central Falls councilman.  He called me telling to get my gear ready and that he was going to pick me up because he needed me to photograph a radio interview at Latino Public Radio with Jorge Munoz. 

     Jorge Munoz is a school bus driver form Queens, NY and after work he makes food and then parks on Roosevelt Ave. in Queens to give out food to people that are hungry.  He's been has benign doing this since 2005 and recently Obama honored Jorge with the Presidential Citizens Medal.  It was great honer to have been able to have met Jorge, you should check out the video below and the his web site to learn more about him and the great help he does. 

  

My image as Prov College basketball player's FB profile pic

    A couple of months ago I shot the last Providence College home game vs Rutgers and I posted the images on my Facebook page.  I also friend requested the PC players and then tagged them on my shots.  Threw out the next week I was getting notices that people were using my images as their profile pictures, when I check who it was it was the PC players, I guess they liked them.  (To check out more images form this game click here.)

 Dre Evans

 Vincent Council

Kadeem Batts 

Marshon Brooks

Antigua, Guatemala

     When I was in Guatemala I had a chance to stay a few days in Antigua.  Antigua was on of the first cities in the Americas built by the Spanish.  I really didn't like it that much, it looked really old on the outside but when you really walked around you can seen it was kind of fake.  The buildings look really old on the outside but when you walk inside they look like boutiques you would see on south beach.  It felt like a movie set or like going to Disney Land but it does has tons of history and thats what makes it worth visit.
 

   Like I said there's tons of history in Antigua, you can just see it in the architecture.  There are tons of churches all around the city and the one below stood out to me.  The Spanish would have the Mayan people build the churches and at this church they had them make grapes for the outside design.  But instead of making grapes the Mayan they made the design look like corn, that is very important to the Mayan culture.

   Also in Antigua there is on of the top Jade factories in the world, La Casa del Jade.  Jade is a precious rock that is used for jewelry.  Jade was a very important item to the Mayans, that the kings wore all over their bodies and even placed them on their teeth to show their power.

The Maya juego de la pelota or ballgame

      The Mayas had a ball game consisting of two teams where the team members had to get a very hard ball that was about 8 pounds threw a ring to score.  The trick was that the only way the players could touch the ball was with their forearm, chest, thigh, and they could not let the ball hit the ground.  But that wasn't the crazy part about the game, at the end of the game one of the teams was sacrificed.  Archaeologist don't know if it was the winning team or the loosing team that had to die. 

      Below is a field located in the ruins of Copan in El Salvador where the game was played .  If you look on the left just where the slanted wall meets the straight wall, there's a circle, that was the goal and if you look right across to the other side you can see the other goal. 

     When I was in Guatemala with La Ruta Inka we had the chance to watch a reenactment of the ceremony before the game and watch the game being played.  I found this cool site where you too can watch the game being played and find out more information about the game(click here).  In the video they show the ball rolling on the ground but every where I was told about the game I was told the ball couldn't hit the ground.  

     The image below is a painting by T. Rutledge the defeat of the Lords of the Underworld by the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque.  The scene is one of Creation: The head of the Hero Twins' father, the Sun God, must pass through the Goal Ring, which represents the Dart Rift in the Milk Way.  Once this occurs, the world comes into being.  The Maya saw Creation as an ongoing event that depends upon the interaction between men and Gods.  For the Maya, Creation was not a singular "event" that occurred in the past, and they held the belief that if men and Gods fail to keep the game going, the ball will stop rolling and this ongoing Creation will halt.

Inked Magazine shoot with Kareem Black

(Image by Kareem Black)

     Back in December I assisted Kareem Black on a shoot for Inked Magazine.  The shoot was to photographer two beautiful ladies in lingerie, show of their tattoos, and they wanted it in this room that was painted all red with a red carpet..  Finding the room wasn't the hard part, the magazine had already found one.  The tricky part was that the room was only seven feet by ten feet so the only things that fit in it was a red couch, a profoto light with a beauty dish on a c stand, the model, and Kareem.  But out side the door was the laptop were the images were coming into and about five other people checking on how the shoot was going.  To check out the article in the magazine and the other photos from the shoot click here.

(Image by Kareem Black)

YO SOY DEL BUS DOS, DEL BUS DOS, DEL BUS DOS!!!

     Threw out the whole trip with La Ruta Inka we spent about 80% of the time one a bus.  There was always 3 buses and the same people would always go on their same bus; bus uno, bus dos, bus tres.  So after some time a rivalry came about which bus was the best and that was bus dos(obviously the bus I was on).

Wide lens VS long lens

    In both thies images images I shot of Christian Herrera, a friend that's a singer, were shot one right after the other, with the same light, same camera, same ISO, same f-stop, and same shutter speed.  The only thing I did different was on the top one I had my 24-105mm lens zoomed in all the way to 105mm and on the bottom image I had it zoomed out at 24mm as well as I got in closer to make his head the same size in the frame. As you can see the top image is more of a straight up portrait; he stands out, the background is nice and soft like a painting.  In the bottom image its more of a charter study or environmental portrait;  the distortion of the wide angle lens makes him look like his coming at you, even tough he's only in a small area of the frame he has a feeling of owning the frame, the background has a feeling of been up in your face and it has some sharpness but that it doesn't distract from him, the main subject.  Another thing that you notice is on the bottem image you see the V shape tree by his right earn, our left, it's reall small but then when you look at the top image that same tree is hug, it's larger then his head.  So there's no right or wrong way to make a portrait you just have to have in mind what it is that you want at the end, and know what are your tools to get that done.

Extra:

The video below is a scene from Good Fellas where the used the zooming in on the lens and moving the camera back to keep the subjects the same size as an effect.  Here you can clearly see what effect a lens has on the background, not just the subject.  

(Starts at 0:26 mark and ends at 0:54mark)