Noah rings in the New Year. Ever the trooper, he was up with his older buddies (and parents) until almost 10pm, Then woke up on cue about 30 seconds before the stroke of midnight. After a quick kiss and half a glass of champagne we had leftover from our dinner party, off I went to rock Noah back to sleep as fireworks (and probably a few interspersed gunshots) rang out across Grant Park. Happy New Year to everyone!
So I was again drafted this year to take the class and individual photos of the Grant Park Cooperative Preschool this year. Some 1600 images later, here are all the photos! For those parents coming here to Trotz.com to peruse the images for purchase (all funds benefit the Preschool), please follow the links below to review the galleries. As some of our little ones were less than cooperative, you may find photos of your tots in non-consecutive order in the galleries - so leaf through them to be sure you’ve seen all there is to see! It was again a pleasure, if somewhat challenging, working with the kids and the other volunteers to corral and capture these images all our kids - I hope you enjoy the fruits of our labor!
To order prints: please download the order form here (Microsoft Excel file, 26kb or Adobe PDF, 34k). Order forms should be turned into either GPCP office in the envelope marked with “Fall Pictures Orders” with check (made out to GPCP) or cash by Tuesday, November 25th. Order forms are also available at the offices.
In the slideshow above, you can see a photo set the Obama campaign’s long-time photographer David Katz posted to Yahoo’s photo sharing site that I use all the time for my images, Flickr. I think it’s fascinating (and progressive) that the Obama campaign elected to have these posted to a social media site like Flickr, but unfortunately - the photos are simply not as good as they could or should be. They are not sharp, they are poorly framed, many have motion blurring and really come across as looking like snapshots. In short, the image fall far short of what I’d expect to see from a professional who might have had this sort of access to - dare I say it - history. In the past, someone like David Burnett or Jacques Lowe would have captured these sort of intimate moments - fulfilling the dual needs of being not only attuned to the intimacy of the access they’d been given but also fully capable of capturing truly compelling and high quality images of moments which will never happen again. But here, the images don’t stand alone very well. And that’s really too bad.
Early this morning, Turner launched the new NBA.com - and our intrepid ads team was there at the dawn of crack (5ish) to make sure our piece of the puzzle went smoothly. Check out the site, it’s pretty spiffy, if you’re into that whole basketball thing.
We passed an important milestone. We became (drumroll please) - soccer parents today. We succumbed to the pressure, and signed Sam up for YMCA soccer in the 4 and under age group. Our friends the Casson’s son was there, as was the Ferguson’s little girl too. I also ran into my old buddy Lee Clontz who’s older son was playing in a nearby field. I guess this is a taste of things to come. Sam even scored a goal during his match - we were quite proud!
We headed to Boston on Friday to attend a family Bar Mitzvah, and managed to spend time with lots of family, imbibe a fair amount of seafood, pick a slew of apples (good for Rosh Hashannah next week) and have a generally great time. See the slideshow above.