friday, may 3rd marks the premiere of the “maron” show on IFC. i am beyond pleased to have photographed the ads for the show. aside from just generally enjoying what marc does, this is one of the stranger routes i’ve taken to a job. read all about it here. short version: i have my wife and rodney dangerfield to thank. possibly in that order.

this week marc is pretty much ubiquitous, getting geared up for the launch of the tv show. we shot the ads back in early march, and i thought this an apt time to post a few of the out-takes from the session. there’s a lot to be said about them, and about many other things, but at the moment i’m running on way too little sleep, way too many days in a row. so this will have to be revisited sometime soon. also, look for a special all-maron section on the main site shortly, too.

mostly, i want to thank the great team at IFC and cold open for making this shoot happen, and my ever enduring thanks to marc maron, himself, for sticking his neck out for me when this shit mattered.

thanks to nancy at ifc, noah and colleen at cold open, our fabulous producer, kori and whoever left a bunch of dead balloons in marc’s backyard. that was pretty fortuitous. thanks, always, to dana, for setting the bar high.

pat is 95 years old and still plays tennis. daughter of LA times sportswriter bill henry, pat won championships in nearly every age bracket into her 80s, starting with a U.S. girls’ championship in 1935.

when i was in high school we briefly lived in a house with a tennis court. i tried once. i don’t know how anyone does it, let alone someone in their 80s. it seems like a great way to get hit in the head and/or break your ankle.

it’s sad to consider – but also highly possible – that some people in their 90s are better athletes than i am.

sammy lee, 92, was the first asian man to win a gold medal for the united states (london, 1948), and the first man ever to win back-to-back gold medals in platform diving (1948, 1952). according to wikipedia, when sammy was a kid non-whites weren’t allowed to use the public pools so his coach dug him a sandpit in the backyard and had him doing jumps into the pit to practice. this sounds like the kind of thing people on wikipedia make up to mess with you, and also like the kind of thing that could be true. meeting sammy i could definitely see some of the spirit that would lead a 12 year old kid to jump into a sandpit over and over again, in the hopes of getting to an olympic pool.

before he was an olympian sammy also completed a medical degree, becoming a doctor in the army medical corps.

sammy and i share the same birthday, though i’ve only been on a diving platform once. to get down i took the stairs, clinging to the rails for dear life. you’ve got to be a little nuts to jump, i think. forget about doing a backflip.

i’ll be giving an APA sponsored talk at the santa monica apple store next tuesday, january 15th, at 7:30pm. dennis dunbar and anthony nex approached me several weeks back about kicking off their apple store lecture series. it will be interesting to speak in a functioning, busy retail store. usually i’ve done these sorts of things in lecture halls and classrooms where people are quiet in the background, or just asleep. of course, i’m sure apple will be nice enough to give me a cut of anything sold during the time of my presentation. right?

this event also persuaded me to get off my butt and finally put together a proper gallery of my instagram portraits on the main site. you can see those here.

you can find me on instagram at @msgphoto and get a sneak peek at my ramblings on the subject at this old post, here.

my thanks to dennis dunbar and heidi goverman of APA, and to the illustrious anthony nex and charlie hess for recommending me.

andre rogatko works with biostatistical data and computer modeling to help researchers determine accurate doses of medication for clinical trials of cancer drugs. often these trials use predetermined, or historically determined dosage information which is often not right for the specific individual taking the drug. it can be hard to know if your drug works when you’ve been taking the wrong amount. using a wealth of statistical information both about the patient, the type of cancer being treated, and the medication itself, dr. rogatko can come up with a dosing strategy that’s much more effective.

removing a brain tumor can be tricky and delicate work. one of the difficulties is that it’s often hard to tell if you’re cutting out aggressive tumor cells or healthy brain tissue. people like to say we only use 10% of our brains, but aside from just being wrong, i’d bet even those people wouldn’t want any of the other 90% cut out unnecessarily. so, once you get in there, saw through the skull and pop the lid, how do you know what to dispose of? like most things in the modern world, if you’re pramod butte, you shoot lasers at the problem.

pramod works in fluorescence spectroscopy. see, when you shine a laser at a tumor at a certain intensity, for a certain duration, the light that reflects back from healthy cells is very different from the light that reflects back from unhealthy cancerous cells. so, in the operating room with a laser the size of a pen, pramod butte can provide surgeons with a roadmap of where to cut, what parts of your brain are killing you actively rather than just making you crave nachos and milkshakes like the rest of your brain.

as if this weren’t amazing enough, the hope is that in time this sort of technology can be used in place of invasive biopsies to detect other types of cancers, as well. and you thought lasers were just for disintegrating people from space or driving cats crazy.

in some cases certain kinds of brain cancer can be far more resistant to drug therapies than other kinds of cancer. as i understand it (not very well, mind you) the brain is surrounded by a tight network of cells called the blood-brain barrier, and while this serves to keep harmful things out, it can also make it difficult for potentially beneficial anticancer medications to get through, too.

strangely enough, dr. ljubimova and her team at cedars-sinai medical center discovered that levitra – the erectile dysfunction drug – helped in delivering a particular anti-cancer drug to the brain. when levitra was given along with chemotherapy researchers saw a significantly increased survival rate. now, before you go anxiously clicking on all those erectile dysfunction drug spam emails you’ve been getting keep in mind that this has been demonstrated in mice, so far. we’re still waiting on conclusive trials from human subjects.

also keep in mind that i am just about the farthest thing from a scientist, and i’m pretty sure that i only half-understand the things that really smart people tell me while i’m messing around with lights, trying to take their picture in a very brief time span. so, you are duly warned. essentially, i hope you don’t need levitra, and i hope you don’t have a brain tumor. but if you have to get a brain tumor, maybe a little pharmaceutical-induced priapism would do you good. merry christmas.

today, december 28th, 2012, is stan lee’s 90th birthday.

i recently unearthed this old 4×5 polaroid negative i shot of stan way back in 1997, at the marvel offices in westwood. this was an important day for me. i had just started my photo career in earnest, and here i was, in the office of one of my heroes, just blocks away from the westwood village arcade, where i spent the small part of my childhood that wasn’t involved in reading comics. the fact that i was just 24 years old and already i got to shoot stan lee – i was pretty sure it was the beginning of great things. never mind the fact that i was getting paid only $50 to do the shoot, and was spending easily twice that on materials in the first place.

i had what i thought was this great idea to photograph him with my old 4×5″ speed graphic, since he deserved the classiest of treatments. stan never took those 70s sunglasses off, so i defaulted to doing a profile shot. i got everything set up, got stan in place, went to take the photo and. . . the camera broke. the shutter wouldn’t fire at all. to stan’s great credit, he allowed me to come back the next day, after having the camera repaired, and let me try the shoot again.

after the story was published, i made an 11×14″ print of this photo and sent it to stan lee’s office. a week or so later i got a thank you note back from stan, with a picture of spider man on it. fifteen years later i still have this note on the bulletin board above my desk. i was so stoked about it i almost didn’t mind when i went to shoot stan again a few years later and he didn’t remember meeting me at all.

still, it was stan lee – the man who made a nervous, awkward freelance photographer into one of the greatest superheroes in american history. stan has doubtless been photographed hundreds of times in his long and rich life. i’d imagine a large number of those photographers have to be thinking about peter parker, right? i mean, how could they not.

thanks, stan. happy birthday.

every once in a while i come across a subject who is just extraordinary. we talk of people being photogenic and usually that’s misconstrued as someone who tends to have flattering pictures taken of them. truly photogenic people are rare, though. those are the ones who look good even in pictures that may not  otherwise be kind to their vanity. usually this comes from being open as a person, it comes from self awareness, from the ability to confront situations – even unpleasant ones like being photographed just a couple weeks after having a stem cell transplant – with honesty and directness and gratitude.

jeff is a clinical psychologist and professor. he has worked with patients experiencing a whole range of medical difficulties – from counseling couples who’ve lost pregnancies, to leading support groups for people living with women who’ve been diagnosed with cancer, to (most recently) counseling patients with cardiovascular and pulmonary problems.

jeff himself has had three bouts with lymphoma in the past five years. i photographed him for cedars-sinai’s discoveries magazine just a short while after his second bone marrow transplant. he doesn’t refer to it as “fighting” cancer. he refers to himself as being “engaged” with cancer. it’s a long road. the cancer treatments, the uncertainty of it, the hope of being in remission and even the uncertainty of things remaining that way – all of it becomes a part of your life.

it was supposed to be a fairly quick, straightforward portrait, but i found myself unable to stop pressing the button. even in a simple set up, no tricks of light, no complexity at all, jeff had the ability to be more open, more honest, more vulnerable and more – yes – photogenic, than anyone i’d seen in a long while. there was never a hint of falsehood in anything he showed the camera. maybe this comes from his time working with patient support groups, maybe from his mindfulness practice. either way, it was a quiet, simple astonishment, and an amazing gift to be given from a subject that clearly had better things to do than submit to the indignities of being photographed.