If in the past you searched for cheap prices for cameras online I’m sure you found a bunch of online stores that had really low prices. The problem was that they were just a bunch of crooks that wanted to take advangate of you.

The scam ran this way; You search for your model camera and found  a few stores that had it priced as much as half price off. You order placed your credit card info on their site and order it only to get a phone call from them asking a ridiculous question like “Do you want a battery and charger with your camera” to which you responded; “..uhhh the [insert camera model here] comes with that already….” Then they would say “no it doesn’t come with it and it would cost you $$ to get it.” So at this point you either hung up and cancelled the order or asked for the camera as is to which they would respond sorry out of stock….

Most of these places were in Brooklyn and in-fact they had dozens of online storefronts that were the same company. This happened to me and it really pissed me off, specially thinking that they had my credit card info. I filled a BBB case but nothing came out of it. This week I received a letter from the NY Attorneys office asking me if I dealt with any of these stores and how much did I loose in the process. I’m really happy that they finally got caught. The dozens of offending stores were run by a few retailers:

• 1 Way Photo
• 86th Street Photo Fund
• Best Price Cameras
• Foto Connection
• Sonic Cameras
• Camera Wiz
• Broadway Photo

So if you ever got ripped off by any of these guys contact the NY Attorneys office.

Here’s are some shots of a box of cigarettes that I shot around the same time as the “religious bullets”

Bloody Cigarettes I

Bloody Cigarettes II

I had made this gallery a while back. I really liked the results but have since lost the LightRoom adjustments so these are not finished.
The first two shots were light paitings.

Peace!

[Show as slideshow]

World Trace Center Print

Just wanted to post a photo I shot years ago… Never Forget

I’m running Snow Leopard on both my MacBook and MacBook Pro and I have a warning for you guys…. some of my apps are not working right since the update.

• LightRoom is very un-stable it crashes all the time with my catalogs…
• Dreamweaver CS3 is crashing due to Snow Leopard.
• LaCie – LightScribe labeler does not work after the upgrade, it prints “black” CDs. This is the only labeler that I liked…

I ran the utility to “reorganize” the catalog but its still very unstable… this sucks since I rely on these applications heavily. I didnt see any gain from the upgrade.

*** I’ve been looking at reports of the web about Snow Leopard crashing Lightroom and other apps. If you’re a photographer and need these apps DONT upgrade to Snow Leopard!!!. Apple does it again, something is working great and an update that brings “no new features” changes the OS so much that kills apps you really need.

**** At this point I’m running a backup of my main system and will reinstall OSX 10.5 and try to restore from the backup.

***** Formated drive and installed Snow Leopard from scratch and its will FAILS, Lightroom works fine on my XP stations…. same catalogs. Note to self dont buy a Mac again

****** Fixed partially by re-installing OSX Leopard and formatting drive. YOU CANT RESTORE from Time Machine or it will back the bugs. Right-now I can run LightRoom other Adobe products. Other mentioned apps still dont work. After running Leopard I can tell you that there’s no reason to upgrade from 10.5 performance is the same even on 64b mode.

So it took two weeks to sort everything out and I had to manually install all my programs and find their serial numbers and registration keys, media, etc…