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I made this panorama of the Chicago skyline using a Zeiss 50mm prime lens on my Canon 5D MkII. The full size print is 75″ X 14″

Handheld, long exposure shot of the concourse between United Airlines terminals B and C at Chicago O’Hare airport.

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Monterey Auto Week has got to be one of the finest collections of rolling art on the planet and the pinnacle of the entire week is the Concours d’Elegance where 175 of the finest collector cars in the world roll onto the legendary 18th fairway at Pebble Beach.

I was there this past week to shoot some 3D car footage with the guys from 21st Century 3D, but managed to get a few stills of my own during a frantic week of chasing cars all over the peninsula.
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One of my photos from the Derby Dolls collection has been honored with Nominee status by the International Color Awards’ Photography Masters Cup.

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This is an enormous honor for me as my image has been selected by some of the greatest names in photography, publishing and advertising from National Geographic, Phaidon and Esquire to Christies of New York. As a Nominee my image will be featured in a film presented by World Photographic Arts Films, and may be chosen for publication in The Photo Paper magazine.

This image comes from a series shot during one match between the Sirens and the Tough Cookies of the LA Derby Dolls roller derby league. You can see the entire series here. My focus for this collection was to capture motion through still photography, but I also managed to capture some nice intimate moments. None of the moving images have been photoshopped beyond normal tone adjustments as has been suggested: they are simple “old school” in-camera effects achieved using a flash and dragging the shutter.

Last week I was working on a project being produced by 21st Century 3D which will ultimately be a 3D Imax film about legendary car builder Carroll Shelby. As much an American Icon as his cars are, Shelby is a true original who, over the course of the past nine decades has been everything from fighter pilot to chicken farmer to race car champion and Philanthropist. Without an engineering background he designed and created cars that crushed then world dominating Ferrari race cars and has gone on to develop some of America’s greatest automobiles. So it was rather humorous, as we shot in his Gardena plant, to see his wife drive up in a generic mini van.

I’ve always been a huge fan of his work and had a rare opportunity to grab a couple stills of the cars in his collection.

The film will likely be in production for some time, but keep a look out for it. I’ve been a big fan of Shelby for a long time and after meeting him, and though he is well into his eighties, he is absolutely a larger-than-life character whose story you won’t want to miss in 3D.

In keeping with the theme of Joshua Tree, I was recently driving from Las Vegas to Phoenix along route 93 and stopped by this Joshua Tree when the sun was setting. I thought it was a very dramatic scene and so I made this shot.

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Joshua Tree National Park is a surreal landscape in the high desert called Mojave that is scattered with the foreboding, tree-like cacti from which it is named. It’s unique beauty is also reflected in the myriad of other hearty plants that dot the landscape and is oddly interspersed with other-worldly piles of gigantic rocks.

Toward the end of June the full moon came out and I shot some time lapse of it as it rose slowly over one such gathering of rocks appropriately named Jumbo Rocks.

I moved away from my home town of Berkeley, IL over 30 years ago but still have family there and visit a couple times a year. Oftentimes, when I’m visiting I like to wander around and take pictures of the place, though some of it has changed drastically.

Before the dome or tower, I went to grade school here

I attended Field School in the 1960′s from K through 3rd grade. Sometime in the 90′s the school was sold to the Albanian American Islamic organization and is now one of their midwestern mosques. Of the 330,000 houses of worship in the United States, about 2500 are Mosques and of that number, only 200 were built for that purpose. The rest have all been converted from buildings originally designed to be something else…like a grade school.

I miss the analog world I grew up in. I miss the tactile feel of real film, developed with chemistry, and I miss working in a darkroom where I can see the images emerge from nothing, and where my hands were on the media throughout the entire process. However I have learned to embrace the digital realm we’ve arrived at and I have fallen for techniques and processes that simply cannot be accomplished with film, but one of the things that really irks me about digital is the absolutely fragile nature of the 1′s and 0′s. You know what I’m talking about: corrupt media, incompatible data, “the Avalanche Effect”, or, in real world terms: card falls in lake, bakes in the desert sun, is worn down, or simply mishandled. In short: a lot of hard work has simply vanished. I’m not in the habit of endorsing products but if you work in digital photography, you need to know about PhotoRescue3.

Occasionally you come across a product that is so impressive that you want everyone to know about it, and PhotoRescue3 is one of those products, in fact it is so good the developers don’t want you to have to pay for it unless it can prove to you that your images can be recovered. This just tells me the developers are interested in creating a quality product that simply works.

My sister, who is a fashion photographer in Chicago called me after a shoot recently to say that the SD card she pulled from her Nikon camera and mounted on her Mac was inexplicably showing up as an empty card. Even after putting it back in the camera, it came up as empty. She knew there was data on the card, but somehow between the camera and the card reader on her Mac, it had gotten lost. I suggested she try PhotoRescue 3. She downloaded the free trial version which determined there were in fact images on the card by showing her an accurate preview of the recoverable images–in her case, all of them. So she paid $29 to activate the full version of the software–a pittance in comparison to a re-shoot, and downloaded the images, backed them up and was editing away in no time.

The developers claim that this product may even be able to recover images from a card you erased by mistake, and it recovers movie files as well. You may not need PhotoRescue right now, or ever, but you need to know it is available should the unthinkable happen.

The George Barris Car Show came to Culver City this past weekend and I worked with the 21st Century 3D team to capture all of the fuel injected fun in 3D video.