Best Album Covers: January 2022

Continuing the series of posts where once a month I’m sharing some of my favorite album covers from music released on the previous month. Here are the ones released in January of 2022:

Best Album Covers: November 2021

Continuing the series of posts where once a month I’m sharing some of my favorite album covers from music released on the previous month. Here are the ones released in November of 2021:

Best Album Covers: October 2021

Continuing the series of posts where once a month I’m sharing some of my favorite album covers from music released on the previous month. Here are the ones released in October of 2021:

Best Album Covers: September 2021

Continuing the series of posts where once a month I’m sharing some of my favorite album covers from music released on the previous month. Here are the ones released in September of 2021:

Best Album Covers: August 2021

Continuing the series of posts where once a month I’m sharing some of my favorite album covers from music released on the previous month. Here are the ones released in August of 2021:

Best Album Covers: July 2021

Continuing the series of posts where once a month I’m sharing some of my favorite album covers from music released on the previous month. Here are the ones released in July of 2021:

Best Album Covers: June 2021

Continuing the new series of posts where once a month I’m sharing some of my favorite album covers from music released on the previous month. Here are the ones released in June of 2021:

Best Album Covers: May 2021

Continuing the new series of posts where once a month I’m sharing some of my favorite album covers from music released on the previous month. Here are the ones released in May of 2021:

10 favorite Newsletters

Continuing the celebration of my first 100 subscribers, here are 10 newsletters that inspire me to keep going:

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01 » A list of 10 things, by Austin Kleon

02 » Maker Mind, by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

03 » BrainPint, by Janel

04 » Dense Discovery, by Kai Brach

05 » The Slice, by Nic

06 » Creativerly, by Philipp Temmel

07 » The Curious Bunch, by Vidya

08 » The Land of Random, by David Nichols

09 » Plan Your Next, by Nate Kadlac

10 » Adventures in Life, by Coach Willis

» bonus: Snubsta

Best Album Covers: April 2021

Continuing the new series of posts where once a month I’m sharing some of my favorite album covers from music released on the previous month. Here are the one released in April of 2021:

Best Album Covers: March 2021

Continuing the new series of posts where once a month I’m sharing some of my favorite album covers from music released on the previous month. Here are the one released in March of 2021:

Best Album Covers: February 2021

Continuing the new series of posts where once a month I’m sharing some of my favorite album covers from music released on the previous month. Here are the one released in February of 2021:

Soul, by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers

Pixar's most recent animated film is another masterpiece that instantly became my favorite movie of 2020 and one of my favorite from the studio of all time.

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A journey into finding our purpose in life, something that we all think about it at some point, but that artists and creative people will easily identify since the main character here is a jazz musician. Beautifully animated, trippy at times, with an equally incredible soundtrack, alternating jazz music from Jon Batiste, with electronic ambiance composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. {available on Disney+}

Best Album Covers: January 2021

Starting a new series of posts today, where once a month I’ll be sharing some of my favorite album covers from music released on the previous month, starting with the releases from January of 2021:

Song Exploder and the Magic Behind The Scenes

Over the last decade working as a freelance photographer, one of my favorite things to shoot was the behind the scenes of creative people working on their medium. From musicians to architects, to filmmakers, I’m always fascinated by their thought processes and love witnessing art being created right there in front of me. As much as I enjoy photographing many other things, that was always a sweet spot for me.

Mars Motel @ Virtue and Vice Studios | 2018 | © Leo Mascaro

Mars Motel @ Virtue and Vice Studios | 2018 | © Leo Mascaro

 

With that in mind, it’s easy to understand why Song Exploder was meant to become one of the most inspiring things I would watch this year. Song Exploder (the Netflix show) is based on the Podcast of the same name with the premise of “A podcast where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.” — I think you know where this is going, right?

 
 

After having listened to a lot of episodes and binge-watching the first season of the tv show, it’s pretty obvious to me that they both act as perfect companions, in the sense that it’s impossible to choose one format over the other. The beauty of the podcast is relying on your ears to put all the pieces together and imagine the whole situation in front of you. At the same time, the advantage of the tv show is being able to see everything that they’re talking about translated into (incredibly produced) imagery. At the end of each episode (in both formats) the song is played in its full version for the first time and, like magic, it’s like you can finally connect all the pieces and from that moment on, you will never listen to that song the same way anymore. And while in the podcast you get to close your eyes and pay full attention to the song, in the tv show we are gifted with an incredible visual experience (unique to each episode) of the song and lyrics, like this one from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Wait for It”:

 

This is an excerpt from the Netflix show "Song Exploder" in which the musicians talk about the certain songs, and how it came about. In this episode Lin-Manuel Miranda talks about the song "Wait for it" from the smash hit musical "Hamilton". and this animation plays in the end with the entire song. Executive Producers: Hrishikesh Hirway, Morgan Neville Executive Producer: Caitrin Rogers Co-Executive Producer: Dominic Musacchio Editor: Lee Rosch Post Producer: Will Mavronicolas Assistant Editors: Richard Andrews Madison Cazares Production Co: Tremolo Productions My role was to create the animation segments for the Li-Manuel Miranda's episode for "Song Exploder"

Reconnecting with Photography

Earlier this month something really incredible happened: I finally reconnected with Photography! Not that I haven’t been thinking about Photography during these 6 months of quarantine (should we even be calling this thing quarantine still?). I’ve been actually involved with a few photography-related projects through these months, but for some reason, I was feeling a bit lost about my own personal creative work.

Everything changed when I had to go to the UES for a dentist's appointment and thought I should bring my camera with me just in case. After the appointment, I decided to walk back home instead of taking any kind of transportation, and since I was so close to Central Park, I couldn’t think of any better way to do it that didn’t include walking through the park. I got in by the 72nd street entrance and started to walk with no route in mind, just to see where it would take me. At that point, I was still not feeling particularly inspired by anything on my way enough to turn the camera on and start photographing, until about 5 minutes later when I realized I was walking towards the Bethesda Terrace, one of the most popular areas of the park that also happens to be one of my favorites to photograph. Noticing how empty it was (compared to how things used to be) I knew I had an opportunity there, especially when I put my eyes on the lonely musician seated right in the center of everything. What a perfect opportunity for a symmetrical shot, right?

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This ended up being the first photograph I took intentionally, without any pressure or restrictions, after 6 months of isolation. After that, I kept walking south throughout the park and through Midtown, stopping for some other photo opportunities here and there, and time just flew by. I can’t remember the last time I felt that connected with a creative activity of any sort!

Here are a few more shots I’ve taken since then:

(All photos taken with a Fujifilm X-T2 + Fujinon XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR)

Why I deleted my 50K Instagram Account

Instagram was one of the first apps that I downloaded when I bought my first iPhone, 8 or 9 years ago.

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I knew about the platform by seeing some friends re-posting their pictures on Facebook and being intrigued by the retro look of the filters and frames that you were allowed to add before posting a photo on the app. It was one of those things that you know you’ll enjoy it even before putting your hands on it. I was working with video editing and motion graphics but was becoming more and more interested in Photography.

As I was expecting, the minute I started using Instagram was love at first sight, and for many many years was by far my favorite social media of all. Back then it was a very different time and you were only allowed to post pictures that you took with the smartphone you had in your hands, and that was definitely part of the fun. All of a sudden everybody had a “camera” in their hands and the device limitations really forced people to be more creative with their content. For me (and for a lot of other people I know) that experience was one of the big pushes I was waiting for to start paying more attention to Photography in general and later start a career as a Photographer from the scratch.

The rest is history, as people say, and by now (in 2020) everybody knows what Instagram is and what it has become. I was never the most popular on the platform, but at some point I had accumulated ~50k followers, which sounds very impressive for a lot of people (spoiler alert: it is not). The majority of my followers came from the early days of the network when Instagram itself used to select a few people to become “suggested users” for a couple of weeks here and there, and that would make new users discover you as soon as they created an account. That generated a big boom on the numbers, of course, but at the same time not all of those people were genuinely interested in your content, and most of them didn’t even become super active users.

Fast forward to the present, and Instagram hasn’t brought me any joy for a long time, and for a couple of years, I thought about a lot of different strategies to prevent me from deleting my account altogether. And then at the end of July, I decided to do what crossed my mind so many times: I started a new journey!

This was the caption I wrote with the inaugural post:

Hello friend,

It’s day 136 of isolation and, yesterday, I decided to do something that was in my mind for a really long time: I deleted my original Instagram account, the one that I had for almost a decade, where I once accumulated 50k followers and posted a couple of thousand pictures.

About a little over a month, when I got really close to doing it, I decided that the best thing to do was to just delete the app and take a big break from it. That was definitely a smart decision but yesterday, when I logged back into my account, I realized that absolutely nothing had changed and all the same issues were still bothering me. The pressure of finding an incredible photo to post, a number of followers that didn’t say anything about myself or my work, and the constant hustle that the platform has turned into.

Then I realized that the only way to go back to enjoy this place the way I used to when I first joined, was to delete who I was trying to be and just starting all over again. I thought about simply creating (another) new profile, but I knew the main one was always going to be on the back of my mind, and I definitely didn’t want that to happen.

So this is my new home. From now on it will be about who I am, what I’m interested in at the moment, without trying to please anyone, or anything. Without chasing any trends, numbers, illusions. Without any rules to follow.

This is my new journey.

Before I Became A Photographer

It’s been 13 years since I graduated from college and 8 years since I quit my last job to become a full-time freelance Photographer. But that wasn’t my aspiration from the beginning…

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Before I became a Photographer, one of the things I wanted to do in life was to create “opening title” sequences for movies and tv shows. During my last year of college (as a Graphic Design major) I was already completely in love with movies and motion graphics, which I would later work with on my post-college jobs. My admiration for Opening Titles started when I was exposed to the work of the late Saul Bass, especially his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho, Vertigo, and the big-screen adaptation of West Side Story, by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. That, combined with all the possibilities that computers brought to the job in more recent years, got me fascinated with the idea of exploring this interesting art form. While I did work on a couple of small projects here and there, I (unfortunately) never took it seriously enough to turn that admiration into a profession.

But that didn’t stop me from enjoying and getting excited whenever I see something well designed and executed! If you have access to HBO, I’m assuming you are aware of their new take on Perry Mason? Even though period movies/tv-shows were never my favorite type of stories to follow, two things grabbed me on this new version: the gorgeous lighting throughout all the episodes, that a lot of times makes me question if I’m looking at one of Edward Hopper’s paintings and, equally interesting, the brief seconds where they display the title of the show, with a very classic and elegant font choice. For just a few seconds, the characters walk in front of the titles as if it was just another prop in the scene. It’s such a small detail that adds so much to the experience! Check out some examples here.

If you, just like me, appreciate this art form, you will probably enjoy getting lost within the incredible database that the Art of the Title has to offer. You can thank me later!