Check out a preview below and then (did I mention this?) you can go vote for it at Blurb.

In the coming weeks I’ll be documenting items from the farm share that my wife and I subscribe to during the spring, summer and fall. I’ll be photographing the raw ingredients and then turning them into a finished dish, hopefully, a simple and quick preparation. This project will be as much a way to stretch my creative photographic muscles as it will be a way to motivate me to use the ingredients we’ve bought. Nothing worse then 10 wilted bags of greens in your fridge.

To start we have the funny-looking garlic scape, which I turned into a Garlic Scape Pesto (scapes, almonds, asiago cheese, and olive oil) to be served with pasta.

Stay tuned for more…

Behind the Curtain by Ryan Donnell

Hey everyone, don’t forget it’s election day today in Philadelphia. Get out and vote…and maybe think about buying one of my great new books!

A magazine sent out a recent request for images of a specific town in Italy. I haven’t been to Italy since I went to my old journalism school friends Matt and Callie’s wedding in 2003. So this stock search was a great chance to root through my old film, reminisce and then get completely manic about scanning a bunch of the film.

Aside from the obvious nostalgic charm of reliving a great trip from your early 20′s, these images have opened my eyes to a few facts:

• In 2003, working as a freelance newspaper photographer, young Ryan really thought he was Henri Cartier-Bresson (though I think young Ryan had some decent chops)
• Older Ryan needs to travel more for fun
• And that there’s nothing quite as luxurious as a Leica M3 paired with a 50mm and Tri-X film. I need to dig that thing out of storage.

I hope you enjoy looking through a few of these old images.

The  über-awesome agency Bransch has highlighted my Behind the Curtain polling project as “inspiration” for it’s readers. I’m quite honored to be keeping company with the likes of Olaf Blecker and the rest of the talented photographers and illustrators represented by the Hamburg-based agency. Thanks Bransch.

And Dear Readers, please go check out their artists. You’ll leave totally inspired.

On a related note, I let WHYY, the local Philly NPR station, use a few pictures to illustrate a great radio piece on unique polling places here in Philly by reporter Kerry Grens.

And get out there and vote people. Google has an awesome polling place search function set up. So no excuses!

My friend and talented photographer Matt Ratajczak just posted a Q&A with me on his must-follow blog, Eat the Darkness. The interview was on the topic of my “Behind the Curtain” polling place project. Matt asked some great questions about the project’s process  and also motivating to work on personal projects. Be fore-warned though…apparently I am a bit long-winded. It’s long. So pull on your Snuggie, pour yourself a glass (or three) of Cabernet and dig in:

http://eatthedarkness.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/behind-the-curtain-an-interview-with-ryan-donnell/

So the wife and I just returned from two wonderful weeks touring Spain and Portugal. I’m not sure that I would classify it as a relaxing vacation (we put close to 1500 miles on our little rental car), but it was a great trip and we saw A LOT of the Iberian Peninsula: Galicia, the Douro wine region, Porto, Lisbon, Seville, the Algarve coast…whew. We drank a lot of Albarino & Vinho Verde. Attempted to deplete the Atlantic of it’s stocks of clams, mussels and octopus. I discovered aguardiente and we watched a lot of World Cup with the locals.

I’m still editing all the images from the trip, but I finally got my film back last Friday. As a teaser, I posted a few low-resolution images to my archive, which is accessible through the slide show below. (Larger, hi-resolution scans are available if anyone needs them.)

Hope you enjoy.

Spain & Portugal – Images by Ryan Donnell

As testament to the power of the tweet, here’s a snapshot from the site’s Google Analytics page:

Wow.

And please check out some of the new images that I made on Tuesday during the primary elections here in Philly. (The Mummer’s Museum! You have to be kidding me!)