Woody Allen’s Whatever Works Tribeca premiere photos

Categorized | City, Culture, Internet, Media, Photography

Woody Allen’s Whatever Works Tribeca premiere photos

Posted on23 April 2009. Tags: Creative Commons, David Shankbone, Evan Rachel Wood, Harvey Keitel, Mary Kate Olsen, Photography, premiere, Soon-Yi Previn, Tribeca Film Festival, Uma Thurman, Whatever Works, Woody Allen

Every year I forget how rough the Tribeca Film Festival can be on me, physically. A typical day for me goes like this:

7:00 a.m. – Wake up, jostle about
7:20 a.m. – Walk Little Man
7:50 a.m. – Shower, dress, get ready for work
9:00 a.m. – Arrive at work
5:00 p.m. – Get off work
5:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. – Run all over New York City to disparate locations where premieres are happening to photograph on the red carpet.
10:30 p.m. – Get home and walk Little Man, who is adopted by my building (several neighbors have keys to my apartment), so I feel assured he is not a lonely little guy during the day. My neighbors take Little Man on walks so often, that sometimes people on the street ask me things like, “Hey, isn’t that Pedro’s dog?”
11:00 p.m. – 1:00 a.m.- Upload and Photoshop a few of the photos. By no means am I able to upload all of the photographs I take of different people, so I try to get at least 5 to 10 from the day uploaded to Flickr (for the non-profit news sites) and Wikipedia.
1:00 a.m. until I fall asleep – It’s difficult to wind down from such a day, and I am so over-exhausted that I have trouble falling asleep, so I will usually put on Jon Stewart on Hulu and drift off to sleep before it’s over.

Then I do it all over again, until the end of the festival. On some days, like tomorrow (Friday), I have to wake up an hour early and get to work an hour early so that I can leave early to make a 4:30 p.m. premiere.

It’s taxing, because all of this is physically exhausting, and the lack of sleep makes me mentally exhausted. I become more prickly than usual, sometimes snap at people and always–always–start to question why I put so much work in to expanding the photographic work available to the Creative Commons. I make no money on this photography, nor will I ever since I release it at the highest resolution possible. Besides, I have no desire to be a professional photographer.

The reward is in seeing the work used; in filling a need that exists. It’s also rewarding to see and meet some of the people I have watched on film and television screens my entire life. Most important, over the three years I have shot at the Tribeca Film Festival, I have gained artistic skill in photography, and I am proud of the work I produce (most of it – there’s always a few stinkers, but that’s true of every photographer – we talk about it).

Another reward is that I lose about ten pounds each year during all of this, which helps to prep me for the summer swimsuit season. My diet during Tribeca consists of Xanax, coffee and Saltine crackers. If only I were joking…

It sure can be a hard day’s night, every night, for a week and a half. I am unable to answer most e-mails; I don’t listen to my voicemails; my snail mail goes uncollected and my apartment becomes a Beyond Thunderdome horror of strewn clothing, infosheets, papers, business cards and processed food wrappers.

Below are just a few of the shots that I had time to upload last night from the premiere of Woody Allen’s latest film, Whatever Works (as with all of my photography, these images may be reproduced under the Creative Commons attribution license)