Porter Gifford Photography
Before relegating last year’s portraits to the archives for safe-keeping, I wanted to share a few of my favorites.
While not exactly “outtakes”, these images appeal to me because they don’t really qualify as traditional beach portraits, and I like them enough to spend a few more minutes in their company before putting them to bed.
With hopes that everybody’s bandwidth for things political is not entirely stuffed, I wanted to share a few images from the New Hampshire Primary.
Since I am close to being stuffed myself, I spent my time in the Granite State trying to push back against the campaign’s spoon-fed images with as much visual fortitude as I could muster.
This is the emailer I sent out to clients this year…
…and this is the family’s holiday card.
Using the time-honored method honed in beginner’s photography classes everywhere, my daughter and I hip-shot our way through the shadowy canyons of Manhattan over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Hip shooting is pretty much just what it sounds like – shooting pictures from the hip, without looking through the viewfinder. It’s a great way to free oneself from the constraints of formal composition, and to enjoy the random fortunes of luck.
It would appear from the results that my daughter usually holds her camera vertically, and I hold mine horizontally.
When I was a kid growing up in Cambridge, a fixture in the rollicking by-ways of Harvard Square was a story-telling man dressed entirely in blue. His name was Brother Blue. When I was very young, his idiosyncrasy seemed a little scary, but it didn’t take too much growing up to realize what a gentle spirit he was. His ubiquity in Harvard Square was comforting, and I often stopped to listen to his freely-told tales in the shop doorways of Brattle Street.
I recently photographed an MIT grad named Kevin Brooks, who is doing his part to keep the legacy of Brother Blue alive by combining the traditional methods and culture of storytelling with modern technology. I photographed Kevin telling a story at the Out of the Blue Gallery in Central Square.
The assignment was for Lee Caulfield at Technology Review. You can see the story here.
…because it’s so much fun.
I took these shots last summer at a sleep-away summer camp for children with diabetes, and at a day camp in Boston.
When summer begins, its possibilities seem endless. When it ends, it was always too short.
Such was the case with a story I started this past summer on the local surfing scene. It started well enough, but then life, work, and days of flat calm intervened.
The result is a story fragment that shows potential.
I will no doubt finish it next summer…
