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New York, this Summer.

I look for light in my loneliness

As lilac floats through my bedroom window with the morning blue,

As the sun and I dance on saltwater,

And as the night time bike ride breeze sings softly.

I think I've found it, though, in my New York summertime,

blooming beside the faces of the ones I love.

- Andrew / July 7

#Hasselblad #new york city

Love opens the door of ancient recognition. You enter. You come home to each other at last. As Euripides said, "Two friends, one soul."

- John O'Donohue, Anam Cara

Having lived in the same house with, made art with, grown up with, fought and made up with and laughed and laughed and cried with Dan and Carrie time and time again, their wedding in Nashville was certainly an emotional landmark for me. I travelled down to Nashville with a group of of a dozen close friends to witness their vows of commitment, and together my friends and I all grew up just a little bit. We danced and swam and stomped and sang and shared one big house for a weekend of joy and celebration. I'm so grateful to be growing up with these beautiful creatures.

#crowellandknobler #Hasselblad #nashville

Driving through Ventura, California, the scene of the migrant workers harvesting produce is a common one. The crop rows flying by such are mesmerizing sight that it's easy to forget how painstaking it is to pick up fruit in the blazing sun for 12 hours a day. They appear not as people, but as fixtures in a glowing landscape.

I'm not sure why this day was different but I decided to pull over from Highway 1 and chat with these three gentlemen. I stepped into the painting I so frequently drive by, and saw how worn their faces were and torn and scraped their hands were.

I got back into my rental car SUV and drove. They crossed the highway and continued walking.

Shot with Hasselblad 500cm, TRI-X

#Hasselblad #ventura california

Lindsay, on a Saturday, after The Little Prince exhibit, and before Robert Cappa exhibit

#Hasselblad #lindsay branham #madison square park

Rick "The Gursh" Gershon.

I've had the honor of collaborating with Rick "the Gursh" Gershon, a fantastic cinematographer, this year. Through weeks of emotionally charged, rough and tumble, two camera verite coverage and days and days of driving together, a friendship has bloomed which is near and dear to my heart. On our last trip out to California we took a few hours one afternoon along the coast and I got to take him to my favorite beach from where I grew up, "El Matador."

#Hasselblad #el Matador #rick gershon #california

Where the Wild Things Are

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him “WILD THING!” and Max said “ I’LL EAT YOU UP!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything.

That very night in Max’s room a forest grew and grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through the night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.

And when he came to the place where the wild things are they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws til Max said “BE STILL!” and tamed them with the magic trick or staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all and made king of all wild things.

“And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”

“Now stop!” Max said and sent the wild things off to bed without their supper. And Max the king of all wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

Then all around from away across the world he smelled good things to eat so he gave up being king of where the wild things are.

But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go–we’ll eat you up–we love you so!” And Max said, “No!”

The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye and sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through the day and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot.

by Maurice Sendak

Garrett Combs is the subject of a documentary I've been shooting with MediaStorm about a veteran's recovery program called Save a Warrior. While spending long days with Garrett and his family at his house in Ventura, and walking with him day by day at Save a Warrior, we became real friends. I came to know him as more than a family man and a veteran. He's a filmmaker, an advocate for justice, and a gutsy storyteller.

Towards the end of our filming, we started to talk less about his personal history in war, and more about how he was feeling ready to turn the camera on his own experiences. While I can't reveal too much about what he's working on now, I can say that when someone is scarred by blade of injustice, and that person has the tools to share their story with world, I am reassured that there is light within the darkness.

You can see Garrett's work here: http://www.gcphotofilm.com/

Photographs: Garrett Combs, his son Freeman Combs, and his family with his wife Lindsey.

Shot with Hasselblad 500cm / 80mm / f2.8

100ASA Fuji Provia Slide Film

#Hasselblad #save a warrior #mediastorm #gcphotofilm

Nomadique took a retreat upstate to plot our vision for the year. Our goal setting and art show planning were interspersed by dancing on a frozen lake and exploring ice caves.

The people in these photos are my friends who I find myself growing up with. I love them so.

Also, these are the first exposures with my Hasselblad. Turns out, loading film in the blistering snow is an exciting way to get to know a new camera.

#nomadique #hasselblad

Images from last winter.

A few years ago, while making a commercial for the online dating service, Date My School, I was on the look out for on the street footage of couples falling in love. While riding the F train home one night I saw, Samara and Alixa, a beautiful couple, madly in love. After convincing them I wasn't a pervert, they permitted me to take some shots.

While editing the video, I somehow misplaced the footage, thinking it was erased, and wasn't able to incorporate the video. After two years, I saw them, at my friend Andrew Butler's one man show Rags Parkland. I hardly remembered how I knew them, but I remembered, and told them and they said "WHERE"S THE VIDEO!?" We laughed and turned out we had a lot of mutual friends. I thought I could search for the video and perchance I still had it. Low and behold it was there, buried deep into the recesses of a dusty external hard drive. So I pulled the footage up, cut this little video together, and sent it to them. I think they were happy, and likely thought, rightfully so that I need to be a little more organized.

I travelled to Jos, Nigeria to film a documentary about the peace building work by an NGO called Search for Common Ground. Jos and the surrounding villages are divided by tribes, financial status, but most simply and prominently by religion. The past decade in Jos has been defined by tension and violence and between Christians and Muslims, and as I documented the work of SFCG I came face to face with the issue.

I photographed burnt down churches and mosques, and interviewed widows and families broken by the violence. With the help of Search for Common Ground, Jos has made great strides in transforming this violence and segregation to peace and unity, but still, the wounds run deep. No one can transform cultural hatred and distrust overnight, and even the most hopeful community leaders we interviewed were still coping with trauma.

Never having been to Africa, nor a conflict zone, this was all foreign and a little frightening to me. The hatred for another culture so similar to your own felt like a totally different reality. The more time I spent there, however, the more parallels I drew between the conflict in Nigeria to the racial divide that defined our country for so long, and still does. We've seen segregation, church burnings, lynchings, and even today, the racial divide breeds distrust and hatred through many parts of our country. I began to see the Nigerians involved in this conflict not as ignorant religious radicals, but as humans born into a culture that can't see outside itself, something we all struggle with on some level.

Search for Common Ground runs programs in 42 countries all over the world employing empathy workshops, athletic leagues, media training to help transform the way the world deals with conflict. I was hired by Discover the Journey and co-directed this film with Jonathan Olinger.

These photographs are of the community leaders and peace makers who work with Search for Common Ground. Their testimonies to fighting violence with peace drastically altered the way I hope to deal with conflict in my own life.

These photographs were shot with a Polaroid SX-70, with film from the Impossible Project.

Last month Felix Thompson of Buffalo Picture House and I loaded up a sedan with more lighting equipment than it was intended for, and drove to Philidelphia to make this commercial.

Over four days we conducted twenty interviews with lawyers and administrative staff of American Executive centers in three ordinary office environments. Conducting five interviews a day in the same room but desiring unique composition for each interview offered a fun creative challenge.

After sitting through hours and hours of lawyers discussing their desire for a cheap collective office environment I was a little run down, but in the end, Felix cut the interviews down to a nice tight story.

Ellis Cinematography Reel 2013

Editing by Joe Greco

Music by Zubin Hensler

Creating a cinematography reel was a big part of my college experience. Every weekend, I shot a new film and explored a new and unknown cinematic territory. With such variety and artistic freedom, I released a new reel every few months. This "REEL" project was ongoing with the goal that when I left NYU I would have a stellar portfolio that could help me get paid work which I was passionate about.

Since graduating, shooting films that both pay me and capture my heart became fewer and further between than they were in film school. In the professional world, the client, agency, and executive producer decide how the finished product will look long before I even speak with the director. In this way, my definition of 'cinematographer' has shifted from "visual artist" to "visual craftsman".

While I find myself longing for the creative freedom I had as a cinematographer in college, these limitations of the professional world have taught me two important lessons. (1) I can only get hired to do what I've proven I can do. (2) I want to direct, not just shoot.

I still enjoy bringing another person's creative vision alive with meaningful lighting and camera movement, however it's the larger creative vision for stories that really moves my heart. I'm hoping to curate my professional identity to balance shooting projects with directing my own, and in that way I think this reel is a healthy balance between the two.

I hope you enjoy this piece, and do let me know what you think!

Warmly,

Andrew

Around the Corner: Making a photo look old

After hearing my roommate Stefan's new song that he made as a gift to his grandmother, I immediately imagined an image of Stefan, dressed formally playing his Mandolin to an old microphone. We joked about how we could oil up his hair and make it look funny, and that maybe sometime we would get around to it. Right before we slipped into the other work we had respectively planned out for our day, we decided to make the photo. We greased Stefan up, grabbed the Mandolin and shot the photo right in front of our house.

I wanted to embrace the genre by making the photo look old. I knew that just making it look black and white wouldn't be enough to make the image look actually old, and would look more like some slick promo shot. I decided to layer the photograph with a an iphone image of a dirty florescent light that i took a few weeks prior for this exact purpose.

Here is the photo made black and white before layering the second image.

Here is the second image shot on the A train where the MTA usually puts advertisement over the light fixture. Without an advertisement it was revealed to be very dirty, perfect for layering!

After layering on the iphone image at different levels opacity (usually around 25%), here is the final image.

Warmly,

Andrew

Last weekend, Brittany and I took a day hike on the Appalachian trail up in Pawling, New York. With a two hour scenic train ride each way, the day had a built in reflection period in addition to the stunning hike vistas. Brittany brought her 5d along and we traded off using it throughout the day. On the way home we decided we could put it all together as a video. This is that video, a little page in our adventure diary.

Love,

Andrew

"City kids discovering snow"

Indian Council Caves Trail

Barkhamsted, Connecticut

March 3, 2013

(click photo to see larger, then scroll right)

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