Gratuitous celebrity reference, with pictures!
(Editor’s note: I love seeing the site stats go up whenever I post something with a famous person’s name in it. Well, I love it, and it makes me sad and disgusted in a way. Nothing against the celebrity personally, but why doesn’t anyone jump to this site when I write about the 4,000 men and women killed in the war so far? -End editor’s note)
At the risk of appearing like a (fill in the blank), here are a few photographs that I took when seeing Stephen Colbert at his recent appearance for the New York Times “TimesTalks” series, held in New York on November 16. It was really fun: I had thought this would be mainly a publicity spot for the book but actually he talked about it very little. It was really a regular interview, and he did it nearly entirely out of character. There were a few “Stephen” cracks in there but it was mostly all him. Lots of good questions from the audience too, as contrasted with the tiresome repeats he always gets.
I like the way these came out even more because I did various forms of editing in Photoshop. It’s amazing what just cropping and lighting can do. The originals were much less nice, to my mind, even as photogenic as Stephen is, and it’s pretty dang hard to get a bad shot of him. There’s one or two where part of him was covered by by someone standing in front of him, but a little pixel magic can replace missing arms. Point being: don’t trust what you see in magazines. If you think those models really look like that, trust me, you are WRONG. I might do a little before-and-after tutorial to show just what it’s possible to do and how you can make even bad photographs pop. (Not that these were “bad” to begin with. If you want to see a bad one and how it came out after PSing it, I have plenty of those of myself!)
Anyway, enough about Photoshop. I know you all just want to see the pictures of our favorite former shortest-campaign-ever presidential candidate. Don’t lie.
Stephen at the Times Center, Nov. 16, 2007:
Hmmm, I should have edited that phantom hand out in the last one. It didn’t look so odd to me before. Live and learn I suppose.
Photo credits:
Stephen Colbert at TimesTalks (four images): © Meow House Media 2007. All rights reserved.
December 5th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Wow, you got some really nice shots there! I love his smile in the last one.
That was a fun night, and the fact that they gave us wine afterwards did not hurt at all.
December 5th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Why thank you. Yours were nice too. I thought I took a lot more but only about 6 total came out. I don’t know if the camera was recharging or refreshing or whatever it is that they do; I’m sure I hit the shutter way more than 6 times! Maybe I was sneaking into the wine BEFORE the signing? (hehheh)