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Sometimes I get roped into stuff while I’m working that I don’t always think is the best idea. After a long day of photographing on set for this music video I became a part of the whole thing. The director made me move around, ducking and bobbing like a deranged Steve Sands, while snapping as many pictures as possible. Thankfully, you can hardly even tell it’s me and it doesn’t look anywhere near as silly as it felt.

I really liked working with the family. They were from the North of England but had moved to the Barbados for the good life.

“No Reservations” is the perfect mix of a cooking show, travel show and documentary. Thankfully unlike lot’s of other Travel Channel shows, Anthony Bourdain isn’t a ‘hippy-dippy traveller’ who loves everything and patronizes the locals. He comes across as more of a journalist that eats than a food critic. How do I become his travelling photographer for all the shows??

I’ve written about Brian Ach’s Photographer Project before (go HERE to buy a copy). Jason Kempin is an old friend and coworker, I edited his images at Bonnaroo Music Festival in 2006, and now I occasionally shoot alongside him at events. You really learn how good a photographer someone is when you edit their raw take. I like this portrait of him with his Gimme! coffee and his responses are spectacular.

I’ve been trying out this paparazzi thing over the past few days. It seemed like a worthwhile time to enter into the game as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are in town. Angelina is filming “Salt” on location near Chelsea Piers so I headed over to try and get some shots. It was possibly the coldest and windiest day this year. I found a bunch of photographers bundled up on a pier jutting out over the Hudson River. I joined the group and began the long and arduous wait for her to leave the set. They were filming inside a boat, so there was no way of getting her in action.

I only really meant to stay for at most half an hour before heading home, but it soon turned into one of those mind games where I kept convincing myself that in five minutes she was going to pop out of the boat in a bikini and wave to us all in a triumphant gesture. I waited 2 hours. Finally the whole crew exited the set trailed by her in a small crowd, wrapped in a big down jacket with her hair in her face. The best picture I got, uncropped mind you, was this one (with some delicate photoshop work it gets better, but only a little!) -

Then, after both my shoots today, I got a call from an assignment editor that she had an exclusive tip on Brad Pitt playing with his son Maddox in an arcade at Times Square. I headed straight over from my New York Stock Exchange closing bell with Carson Daly (well worth visiting the NYSE if you can) to try and get some pictures. Again I was planning on getting a picture of Brad waving at me while Maddox played away on Dance Dance revolution and several other fun and wacky scenarios. I arrived at the arcade, walking around looking for someone with a big gross beard who could resemble Brad Pitt. Right as I was about to give up he walked straight past me with Maddox in tow, heading for the shooting arcade. This was my big chance… “No Pro Photographers,” grumbled his security and I was accosted by the arcades security and shown the door. Yet another failed couple of days for Benny where I felt like a perverted scumbag who stalks celebrities for the chance to make a few dollars. I should probably stick to the event photography as a means of income and go back to working on my fine art photography.

This is how the pros do it. A Nikon D3s, 600mm Lens and a ski mask (optional).

We just got back from seeing “Up in the Air” with George Clooney and Vera Farmiga. We’d planned on seeing it before Christmas and then yesterday while returning or exchanging items at the Westchester Mall I saw Vera Farmiga buying a coffee at Starbucks and later having lunch with her friends around a table. I don’t consider my current profession to be that of a “Paparazzi” but have once or twice visited film sets to get some street shots. I hated doing it, even though I made some money and kept an agency happy with the pictures. Here is my dilemma: most days I love my job and am really happy to be a working professional photographer covering events throughout NY for agencies like Getty Images, however when I see celebrities out on the street (or shopping malls) I feel the need to grab pictures of them, stalk them and ask them to pose for me. Exclusive pictures of Vera Farmiga shopping with her kid the day after her movie has been released would have been worth plenty of money, but I would have felt like a scumbag taking them. So all I got was this fuzzy iphone picture of the scene outside Sephora and I left the mall sulking about not being a perv with a big lens!

So here’s the problem… I love taking pictures and making money is pretty awesome too and recently I’ve been able to do both which is really great. It’s just that there are a few side affects:

1) I don’t ever take pictures for fun or of my life outside of work.

2) I don’t ever use either of my beautiful film cameras (Voigtlander R3A and Mamiya 7ii).

3) I can’t even go to a shopping mall on Boxing Day without thinking about work.

P.S. – The movie was pretty good. Not amazing but worth watching on DVD or maybe even HBO. The previews always show all the best parts. Bah!

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I’ve been listening to this bands album over and over and over. They’re another band that I found on La Blogotheque, the greatest music blog out there, even though it’s French!

Plants and Animals – A Take Away Show – Bye Bye Bye from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Plants and Animals – A Take Away Show – Feedback in the Field from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

It’s finally here, so set your Tivo, practice your fist pumping and get watching!!!

This is Scott’s picture in New York Magazine that he took down on the Jersey Shore while I was assisting this summer.

For the actual (non cell phone) pictures taken for Getty Images go here

In photojournalist terms I am very new to this industry but have been amazed over the past 6 months how nice people have been to me. I’ve secretly put in some years behind the scenes at the desk of wireimage, but nothing to compared to most. I hardly knew A.J., but had certainly met him, worked alongside him many times over the summer and exchange jokes about the job.

By Daryl Lang, Photo District News

Nov 3, 2009, 02:44 PM ET

Celebrity shooter A.J. Sokalner, admired by his colleagues for his quiet, passionate commitment to photography, collapsed Monday night outside an event in New York and died a short time later, according to his agency.

Sokalner was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital, said Philip Vaughan, owner of ACE Pictures. Vaughan said an emergency worker told him Sokalner had suffered a heart attack.

Sokalner collapsed minutes after entertainer Lady Gaga arrived at the ACE Awards, an event hosted by the Accessories Council at Cipriani on 42nd Street. He was part of a group of about 25 photographers working a rope line outside the venue, according to friend and fellow photographer Dennis Van Tine.

Gaga was the big star of the night, and photographers waited inside and outside the venue for her arrival at about 9 p.m. Van Tine was inside when he heard from another photographer that Sokalner had fallen outside. Van Tine says he went out and saw paramedics attempt to revive Sokalner for several minutes, then load him into an ambulance. Another photographer notified Sokalner’s girlfriend. She and several photographers gathered at the hospital, where they learned Sokalner had died.

Sokalner was in his late 50s and lived in Manhattan. Vaughan says Sokalner was a hard worker who shot for ACE Pictures on a daily basis. “He was very well liked, he was very well respected,” Vaughan says. “He was a real photographer and he did it because he loved it.”

Van Tine says Sokalner studied the works of great photographers and tried to inject “pizazz” into his images, and was “one of those silent guys who goes out and shoots every day.”

“He was a cynic in the great New York tradition,” Van Tine says. “He knew what was right, he knew what was wrong, he knew who the crooks were.”

I flashed a few frames today with my white balance set to tungsten, so I had to desaturate them to make the images bearable. This got me started with other images and for some reason got me excited about black and white photography. I’m sure this won’t last the weekend, so don’t worry.

I imagine that my conversation with supermodel Helena Christensen (and girlfriend of the lead singer of Interpol) had a subliminal affect. I asked her about her own photography and she told me that she has a show up in the UN right now that she shot in Peru on Polaroid 665 film. Not a bad time to be exhibiting work when a building’s full of world leaders.

In London in 1995, it was not cool to be a Pearl Jam fan, but it wasn’t uncool either. Hardly any of my friends had heard of them. They were all too busy slugging pints over Chumbawumba and lusting after the Spice Girls. So I quietly built my CD collection of American alternative music and only shared it with a few of my friends, not knowing that a few years later I was going to move to the States and my taste in music was not as alternative as I thought. Eddie Vedder’s notoriety in the UK was so poor that in 1996 I was able to talk to him for 10 minutes on a subway platform without anyone interrupting. 

Their new album is pretty good and seems to show some return to the form of the early days. The first single to be released – The Fixer – is a solid Pearl Jam song that I think slips immediately into the classic playlist. I know that it’s not cool of me to have 2 of their albums on my desert island records but I likes what I likes.

Pearl Jam – The Fixer from João Barreiros on Vimeo.

For the full gallery on Getty go here.

There were plenty of ‘ironic’ T-shirts at the Electric Zoo Festival this weekend, and also plenty of dudes rocking the no shirt and bad tattoo look. This guy Eli who worked with the festival wins the best T-shirt contest by far!

For some of my pictures from the 2 day festival go here. It was a long 2 days on Randall’s Island with loads of really loud techno music blasting. I have to admit that I started to enjoy some of the music by the end, particularly Seth Troxler and Tom Middleton. The main acts, Armin Van Buuren and David Guetta, were both on the main stage and I’m told did some amazing sets. It became challenging to get a variety of images from what is essentially the same scenario – a man standing at a table twiddling knobs.