Dan Savage For Pride Magazine

This gorgeous image was taken by famed photographer Marius Bugge for my Pride Magazine 2011 cover story on Dan Savage. (Marius also shot our last two covers with Dan Choi and Rachel Maddow.) This year's issue of Pride will begin appearing in the usual locations this weekend and I'll post an excerpt from my interview shortly. By the way, I had to flee back inside the studio when Dan leapt up on that 18th floor railing for this shot, which embiggens nicely.

The Bodega Cats Of New York City

New York City's thousands of bodegas are ruled by thousands of cats. And now there's a Flickr group devoted to them.

Photo Of The Day - Solar Eclipse

The Boston Globe's Big Picture blog has a great series of photos of Tuesday's solar eclipse. The above image was taken by a telescope on a low-orbit satellite.

RELATED: The Big Picture has been named to Regator's Top Ten Blogs Of 2010. And so has this here website thingy.

Photo Of The Day

Hit this link for 19 amazing examples of high dynamic range photography.

Photo Of The Day

(Via - Boing Boing)

A Day With HIV In America

Via press release:

POSITIVELY AWARE, a leading magazine devoted to HIV treatment, today announced that “A Day With HIV In America,” a photo essay published in the new November/December 2010 issue of the print magazine, is viewable online, tying in with World AIDS Day on December 1. Taken in cities and towns around the country on September 21, 2010, this series of 100 photos – of which only 26 were selected for the print edition - puts a human face on AIDS by depicting a diverse range of HIV-positive Americans as they live their everyday lives.

View the 100 photographs here.

Photo Of The Day - Liberty Strike

Check out the Boston Globe's amazing recap of the images submitted for National Geographic's 2010 photography contest. The size of this post doesn't do the larger version justice.

Patti Smith Wins National Book Award For Memoir Of Life With Robert Mapplethorpe

Punk legend Patti Smith has won the National Book Award for Just Kids, her "sweetly evocative" memoir of her life with the late legendary gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Accepting the award to applause and cheers, Ms. Smith — clearly the favorite of the night — choked up as she recalled her days as a clerk in the Scribner’s bookstore in Manhattan. “I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf,” she said. “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.” “Just Kids” was published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Here's Smith speaking about the book at the New York Public Library earlier this year.

Photographer Jeff Sheng's DADT Exhibit

The End Of Kodachrome

The photographer granted the final roll of Kodachrome has turned in his film.

What should a photographer shoot when he's entrusted with the very last roll of Kodachrome? Steve McCurry took aim at the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Terminal and a few human icons, too. Paul Simon, the crooner synonymous with the fabled film's richly saturated colors, shied away. But Robert De Niro stood in for the world of filmmaking. Then McCurry headed from his base in New York City to southern Asia, where in 1984 he shot a famous portrait of a green-eyed Afghan refugee girl that made the cover of National Geographic. In India, he snapped a tribe whose nomadic way of life is disappearing -- just as Kodachrome is. The world's first commercially successful color film, extolled since the Great Depression for its sharpness, archival durability and vibrant yet realistic hues, "makes you think," as Simon sings, "all the world's a sunny day."

Back in 1973, Kodachrome was the very first 45 I ever bought.