Recently in Heroes Category

On Monday I had the opportunity to shoot another subject from my wishlist.  So I took a zipcar out to the Wellesley, MA headquarters of Kurzweil Technologies.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ray, he's an inventor/futurist/author who's got 16 honorary PhD's and is a recipient of the National Medal of Technology, which is a really big deal.  He pioneered text to speech in the 70's, designed synthesizers for Stevie Wonder in the 80's, takes 150 nutritional supplements a day so he can live long enough to live forever when The Singularity hits in about 30 years.

Very nice man, and I left with some signed copies of his books too.  Double-win.

On Friday I took the train up to Mount Kisco to meet and shoot recording and mix engineer legend Mick Guzauski. Mick is one of the top guys in the biz and has been around since the 70's, not to mention he's got 8 Grammy's in his front hallway and enough platinum records on his walls to tile my apartment. Plus on top of that he's a really nice guy.

Mick's the guy who recorded "That's What Friends Are For" and Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good" to start with. On top of that he's mixed everyone from Ray Charles, Earth Wind & Fire, Talking Heads, Michael Bolton, Christina Aguilera, and a bunch of Clapton records just to name a few.

He even played me some of the 5.1 surround mix of Thriller which was never released because of what I can only imagine are legal reasons. Sufficed to say, it was insane.

Oh, and then he took my out on his boat after. Thanks Mick!

This is the first of a series of portraits of what I'm calling 'heroes' of mine.  A list of people who inspire and interest me that I think would make great subjects. You can see the list and explanation here:  http://heroes.billwadman.com/

Matthew Carter
For those of you who have ever used the fonts Verdana, or Georgia, or Bell Centennial, or a myriad others, thank Matthew Carter. He's the man who designed them. And yes he still uses the G3 on the right, because apparently the version of Fontographer that the heavies in the business like to use is still OS9 only. Oh, and he was a terribly nice man.