Marco Garcia, Author at Marco Garcia Photography

A hot dawg

I shot Yukako holding a hot dog in like 2005 or six. It was during our first trip back to NYC after moving to HNL. I can’t remember where we were but its late night and I had a wave of nostalgia. I guess it was from the recent March issues of Bazaar and Elle mags I found downstairs the other night. I paged through them looking at photo credits and didn’t recognize any of the new names in the magazines. Photo big shots like Burbridge, Meier, and McDean were all replaced by unknown names. Probably young guys with photoshop skills and computer visions.

Digital has opened the world to anyone who has a camera and a computer. So many people are creating work all over the world which was once only done by by a select few in New York. The once iconic names of photography are being knocked over by the masses. What attracted me to photography was the elitism of a small clan of professionals who set the bar high and limited those who could enter their ranks. Maybe not so much attracted me but more frustrated me as I sat on the fringe once as an assistant…hoping for that break to assist the elites. No amount of trying helped as it seemed more a trivial game based on whims and so and so’s. New York was good for that. Maybe I just didn’t know it at the time.

Feels like anyone with a camera now is a professional. The barrier is lower and the work is, I dare to say, improving. Indeed, but hints of banality creep off the pages as photoshop filters and plug ins are taking over where skill with lighting, cameras, and film once danced harmonically.

Everyone now is a hot dog. But are they tasty?

Hokulani Bakery

It seems like such a long time ago although I shot the images for Entrepreneur Magazine in 2008, but the shot of Tushar and Ana Dubey of Hokulani Bake Shop remains one of my favorite pictures mainly because I think I clearly captured their existence at being: Tushar with the frosting on his nose and Ana with her nose for baking. The picture took no more than a few swipes at his nose for their relationship in business and love to clearly shine through.

Entrepreneur really knew their stuff as they spotted Hokulani Bake Shop as an up and comer. Amazing their writers spotted and predicted they would go to the top.

Tonight we attended their celebration and screening party for their bakers and bakery, Hokulani Bake Shop for winning the recent Food Network’s Cupcake Wars. It was great to see their little bakery started at Restaurant Row gain national and possibly international attention for having some of best bakers and cupcakes in the Pacific.

Let the victorious eat many a cupcake and may they sell a million more.

SALUDOS! and BADHAI HO! (I hope that means congrats in Hindi as I hope I didn’t call Tushar a donkey…well, maybe I really meant to.)

If you’ve never had one of their cupcakes, please visit one of their three locations, Restaurant Row, the Hyatt Waikiki and at downtown’s Pioneer Plaza. At their website (http://www.hokulanibakeshop.com/) you can see their audition tape where their bakers, Angela Chandler and Nicole Ferriman, made it big for the shop.

I hope this shameless plug gets me a cupcake or two!

wain wumbling reather!

Around 9pm or so last night, lighting flashed across the sky like an AC/DC song. A few seconds later, a low in the distance rumble rattled the windows. It really felt like a bomb. BOOM. I saw my lanai windows shake and rattle. It was awesome. I figured I’d pull the camera out and snap a few images.

I had a hard time with the lighting as it seemed the storm was actually right above our building or rather, just close enough but not in my camera view. I can’t go out to the street because there are way too many high rises around me and a late night trip up to Tantalus for a view risks myself and cameras being subjected to a tax by the locals in the name of reparations. Besides, it was raining. So, with my limited views, I set up my camera and walked away. I set up in a few locations in our condo finding the lanai shot was the most graphic and luckily I got a strike.

By far, my favorite shot was from last night through a closed window in the bedroom. The rain was pouring through so I shut the window but as I did, my camera fired off a frame and I caught the rain drops and purpled lighting sky. I like this shot. It doesn’t have a strike but for me, it has all the elements of living in a Honolulu tower at night…during a storm.

NOTE: I am no longer going to allow discussions or comments on my blog. In the last year, I’ve gotten over three thousand spam emails offering me everything from viagra, porn, gambling, and dating a nice girl from China. Its too much to bear, rather wade through just to see what you got to say. From now on, keep it to yourself.

Lining up just right.

In the last few weeks, my cameras have covered everything from hydrogen cars, tennis action, a financial planner at the beach on the Big Island, whale researchers on a boat in Maui, and a party at Chai’s Bistro. I’m still patiently waiting for the sun to appear as I have another job in which I need to shoot a house and attempt to have some blue skies in the shot. My head is still spinning with all the variety of images that were flowing out of my computer. Of course, I can’t publish and of the images I’ve shot (except for some tennis) as a majority of is for future publication.

Oh and I also shot makeovers given at a big name make up shop.

One of the more interesting shots I made last week was of a tennis player at UH serving. Jamm Aquino told me of the spot to spot a certain type of shot and I did so. Clean shots and background (dare I say ground) made this a cool moment.

Its not often I shoot sports. The time, effort, and hassle is sometimes too much to bear for my impatient self. I really loved it in college as I shot loads of UT football, basketball, swimming, and the likes. It was great fun. Now…eh.

But those times when everything just lines up perfectly, a good shot is worth that small paycheck at the end of the day.

Mix Magazine

Ah…its so nice to see your name in all caps when it has Photography By preceding it…I’m not being arrogant but I swell with pride after seeing my work published in a travel piece. Its not some of my better work but its work…made from nothing. Well, not exactly but it was made from experience and knowing how to push when nothing is easily seen.

I got commissioned a few months ago by the Oregonian’s Mix Magazine to shoot a travel piece on the best places to dine on Oahu. I shot (and ate) everything from locally made Ono Pops (Mexican style paletas) to fresh opelu (mackerel) at He’eia Kea Pier General Store & Deli. Its not all about eating mind you as I have to spend an inordinate amount of time setting up a plate (well…thats mostly the Chef’s call) but having to direct a chef to create a food masterpiece on the fly, sometimes surrounded by styrofoam, in bad lighting, and customers all around. Its can be pretty tough.

The food shots are very editorial as they are all natural light with fill bumped in from a white bounce or even white table cloths if a proper bounce isn’t around. But mostly the reason I can somewhat capture food well is from all the years of assisting NYC food photographers back in the day. Mostly the training was shooting in studios with top food stylists, fake ingredients, big lights, and sometimes big ovens. You know…the mash potato ice cream or the cooked-with-a-blowtorch-steak. I remember working on a Pizza Hut job where we shot dozens of pies pulled out of an industrial oven in the City’s West Side. Yong Yoo, the then photo assistant extroadinare, and I had screaming fight because the neurotic photographer made us load what seem to be his entire studio into a cube truck, unload on location, and reload the truck in the pouring rain. At the end of the day, we fought about how to roll some immensely large and heavy studio camera stand that was taller than the cube truck up a ramp as the rain poured all around. Ah how I miss those days yet would never go back.

There is something very important about being a padawan (apprentice) in the big cities. I never could have been successful here, especially here in Hawaii without some type of grueling informal training I had in those dreary New York years. Every conceivable subject that can be photographed I probably helped put a studio light on it, or at least rolled a studio stand close to it. Everything from Revlon lipstick, to beer bottles, to celebs and rock stars to rain sets, to shooting in the bloody rain.

(How on earth I go from chatting about Mix Mag to get on this subject…I will never know. Stream of … uhhh…what were we chatting about?)

So in the above picture, the author dances around a rigged rain set with a Fender Strat guitar. My memory dims on what job we were working on other than it had a Korean model in tight shiny pants that fit her very well. I remembered I had this piece of chrome somewhere and fumbled through a bunch of old film files finding it next to a bunch of negatives of Trisha, a model who’s sister I knew from Texas. Funny how I didn’t remember those pictures and funny how I forgot about this chrome. Not wanting to start up a proper film scanner, I masking taped the chrome to my Mac, opened up a white doc in photoshop and made a few exposure on a make shift light table. Not the sharpest but a good illustration, nonetheless. The chrome was lifted from the studio where we worked that week but I just couldn’t resist? The chrome came from the initial test rolls so no one would have missed it. Besides, its me dancing in the purple rain!

Back into the Mix. All those years of New York drudgery made me into the so called photographer I am. Its not the greatest career but its a great living here in Hawaii. I get a job like this Mix Mag job and use all my skills from my shooting years all the while reaching back to those “wet behind the ears” days when I held someones camera.

Literally, I was probably wet. It always seemed like I was…