With over 7 million views on YouTube, many of you might have already seen this. It's 12 year old Greyson Michael Chance's performance of Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" at a school recital at the Cheyenne Middle School in Edmond, Oklahoma. In addition to his amazingly original interpretation, there's also the pleasure of watching the gradually building reaction of his classmates!
Photo: Anthony Devlin/PA
There's nothing like a good group photograph! Note the precision with which the braided uniforms have been positioned and the perfect symmetry of the composition. Yesterday, in the midst of waiting to see who would be Britain's new Prime Minister, Queen Elizabeth II posed for an official photograph with the Grenadier Guards in Wellington Barracks after presenting the regiment with their new colors.
As you can probably see, I'm in London (for the week). I'll give a full report when I'm back.
Pip pip!
A change of pace here. Adobe just released Photoshop CS5 and their new Content-Aware Fill takes digital retouching to a new level. Is there an annoying person or object in the background of your picture? Simply lasso the object you want to remove, select the Content-Aware Fill option, and let the program work its magic.
There are dozens of other nifty features, but this one looks like the killer app.
Photoshop CS5 is $699 for the new program and $599 for an upgrade from previous versions.
Patrick Robinson of The Gap. Photo: Tommy Ton for style.com.
As anyone in the business will tell you, there's nothing harder than shooting the red carpet at an event. But when vogue.com gave the assignment of covering Monday's Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute gala to Tommy Ton, he had the intelligence to move away from the pack and the eye to capture a more relaxed and interesting point of view. Here are a small selection of his pictures - the rest can be seen here.
Mila Kunis
Alexa Chung
Chanel shoes
Lady Gaga performing inside the Met.
I did say I was going to refrain from posting my own pictures ... but as I was walking the dog the night before the above event, I passed the Met just as they were erecting the canopy for the gala. It all seemed so surreal and strangely lit I hussled home to get a camera to record the scene.
A week ago, I had the pleasure of going with Allure Magazine’s Picture Editor, Nadine McCarthy, to Marilyn Minter’s studio for a pizza lunch. Nadine had commissioned Minter before, and as alert readers will remember I have already raved about Minter’s work. (Click here) but I had never met the artist and Nadine had never been to her studio.
It was quite an experience! The minute you walk into the studio, you feel you’ve gone through the looking glass and entered an artsy version of Santa’s workshop. There’s a merry bustle of activity as young assistants and painters go about their work.
It wouldn’t be giving anything away to say that much of the painting is done by assistants (mostly her former students) who Minter has trained in her specific painting technique which consists of layering enamel paint on aluminum and then finishing it off with fingertips to soften the paintbrush lines. But the basis of all of Minter’s recent work is all photography and her trademark pop color images of mud splashed stilettos, glittery facial features and body parts are pinned up all around the large studio.
It takes a particular talent to come up with something as fresh and distinctive and timely as Minter’s work and the more I look at it, the more important and accomplished I feel it is.
Minter, meanwhile, is a bundle of energy, charm, intelligence, and extroversion. Completely without pretension or vanity – when I asked if she felt any kind of association with that other famous alliterated Marilyn she replied – “I was born in 1948 when nobody even knew who Monroe was!”. I asked if she would autograph a skateboard of my daughter’s – one of three she designed for Supreme – and she immediately zoomed off to find just the right red marker with which to sign it in a way that was both beautiful and personal.
She was also happy to let me snap away, so I can share these pictures with you.
Marilyn Minter and Nadine McCarthy.
Back in New York (nearing 90 degrees) and biking to work I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of sunbathers on The Great Lawn. I'll get back to real photography next week!
