location

This post should have been posted a long time ago, but life made it hard. In early April 2016, I booked a photographic helicopter tour over San Francisco. I was waiting for the right condition to go fly, and when I could not book the time I wanted on a short notice (the helicopter was already booked), I made a bet and booked September 26th. My thinking was that September is the warmest month in the area, if I can hit a nice day it would be awesome. That was a lucky bet, because September 26th was one of the warmest day and evening of the entire year. We were twice lucky when the small helicopter I had booked was not available, I got upgraded to the bigger one (Robinson 66), which made possible for my wife to tag along for a small price increase.  It was so...

A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go and photograph the old train station (on 16th street) in Oakland,CA. This train station was abandoned in 1994, when the newer train station was built. For over 50 years, this station was the main train station for the city of Oakland, CA. It connected the Pacific Railways to the local elevated electric tram. Think of this: in 1912, Oakland already had an elevated electric tram. There is almost no furniture left but the main hall is beautiful and so photogenic. The building is a private property, you can’t trespass but there is a couple of meet-ups that regularly organize private days there. It’s really cheap and you get a good 90 minutes to explore the building (almost by yourself). Here some of my...

Every year, I try to look back at the past year and see what I have accomplished, what I have not done I wanted to do, what I have done I didn’t plan for. In numbers, 2016 has been an incredible year, I kept 33809 images (I probably took over 60K images knowing my kept ratio around 50%), I have traveled to Turkey, France, South Africa, La Reunion and Cuba. I did 32 headshot sessions over the year. That was the good side, on the not so good side, I have only done on aerial shoot this year, I was planning more and I did not do ANY sunrise over the Golden Gate Bridge (some improvements are needed in that section). No need to say it but reducing so many images to just 10 is really tough. Here the images that have a special importance for me in 2016: I have also...

It has been almost 4 years since I have last visited Cuba and Havana. My first time around, it was harder to get to Cuba, you had to fly a charter plane, you had to travel with an officially sanctioned tour operator. This time around, we flew with JetBlue, we were still part of a group but that was a small group focused on dancing salsa and rueda. I was expecting huge changes in 4 years and that was not the case, Havana is still Havana. Everything here works on a different time scale. The main difference seems to be that there are more newer cars than last time but there are still plenty of old ones too. It seems there is more signs for “casa particular” (room for rent to tourists) and there is definitely more “palavar” (private...