I really like riding my bike down to the Santa Monica Pier for free music on Thursdays during the summer months. Last week was the final one for this year and one of my new favorite bands, Best Coast was playing. I brought my camera along for fun and made these images. I know it’s out of order, but the first image above was the last one I took that night. It was a beautiful, still night and the colorful lights from the buildings on the right just looked so perfect, and contrasted so well with the powerful orange glow of the city in the background. Check out the gallery for more great images I made from Venice and Santa Monica. Continue reading “Free Music Thursdays in Santa Monica”
[dc]H[/dc]is self proclamation “I’m kind of famous at Burning Man”, I’ve learned was accurate as news of his untimely death spread like wildfire through that community. I knew John Pedone as a colleague and fellow technician in the film lighting industry, and for a short time a decade ago, as a room mate. I only recently became aware of his impact on the legendary annual gathering of artists and misfits in the desert, as he proudly showed me photos of the camp he co-founded there years ago. His status at Burning Man became apparent to me posthumously as I began hearing about his motorcycle accident from some of the unlikeliest sources–all attendees at one time or another at the desert festival. That he was well-known amongst a large group of creatives in southern California doesn’t surprise me as he was one of the liveliest people I have known: well-traveled, adventurous, artistic, friendly and energetic. He created colorful light shows for raves and live performances, insanely huge structures for Burning Man, jumped from airplanes and scaled rock walls.
John and I worked together on more than a few projects over the past decade, the last, and probably coolest one being a 360° video for a new album by Gun’s ‘N Roses guitarist, Slash.
John lived life at full speed and last Friday he was remembered by a gathering of friends and family who came to say goodbye in a way that I’m certain he would have truly appreciated.
[dc]W[/dc]ith clear blue skies and perfect temperatures we lit out of Los Angeles like a couple of rogues after a bender which left a heap of twisted metal and broken hearts in our wake. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite so dramatic, but every once in awhile it’s really nice to just get out of LA in a testosterone fueled way, you know–rattle the bones and shake the cobwebs off, and this weekend my brutha from anutha country, Jakob, was in town from Copenhagen and we got on a couple of Road Kings and headed north on the coast highway, breathing in the salt air, wind on our faces, feeling every bit the Kings of the Road. Continue reading “The Road Kings”
A technique I have been wanting to try for a long time now has been balancing a beautiful sunset with a good exposure on a person in the foreground. It’s not entirely simple as the subject should not be lit flat like from an on-camera flash, and the proper balance has to be found. This is my first attempt and I did not have the flash set up properly and didn’t have all the equipment I would have wanted because we just happened to be driving by the beach when we saw this sunset and ran out to grab some photos, but I made do and these are the images I came up with. Thanks to my buddy Bret for being such an accommodating victim. I learned a few things just from that brief foray and will refine the technique from here.
Nicky dives from atop a stack of speakers onto the head of Cassandro. This, of course, riles Cassandro and his teammate, who consequently takes it out on Nicky and her teammate, which covers up the fact that Cassandro has climbed up to the balcony. If it sounds crazy, it gets even crazier…
What’s he going to do from the balcony? Well let’s just say it’s Mexican wrestling and payback es una perra! Click on the video at the right to see the whole thing.
This is the scene as I saw it Thursday night at the Mayan Theater. It’s Lucha Va Voom and that means Sex and Violence all in the name of fun! The wrestling is staged, the dancing girls real, the booze is cheap and the comics are pure cheese, and I couldn’t stop smiling all night.
I’ve been to Lucha Va Voom several times and have had the opportunity to photograph a couple of the shows, including the legendary girl fight. If you’ve seen it you know it’s high energy fun, and if you haven’t you ought to one day. I have some galleries dedicated to Lucha: wrestlers, burlesque and the girl fight. Check them out and get a print or coffee mug with your favorite Luchadore or luchadorette.
And if Lucha Va Voom seems interesting to you, check out my photos from the LA Derby Dolls roller derby matches.
I had a job last year shooting some images of Steven Spielberg for the opening of Universal Singapore. Here are a couple of those images. Click on them to see a larger version.
Steven Spielberg at Universal Studios
Steven Spielberg at Universal Studios
Steven Spielberg at Universal Studios
He was quite nice and very easy to work with. We had a great conversation about the next film he is going to direct about the Lincoln administration on the road to abolition. At the time Liam Neeson was going to play Lincoln and Spielberg seemed pretty excited about it. Since then, the lead role has gone to Daniel Day-Lewis.
I spent 48 hours in Delhi India which is a world of contradictions. Overcrowded and loud, traffic zips by you at breakneck speed, or is at a complete standstill. Driving seems tactile: all flashing headlights and blaring horns mixed in with a little dare-devil-may-care attitude. Brand new, high tech architecture rises out of dirty, broken-down streets. And yet there are moments of complete serenity.
In Hollywood everyone is looking for the perfect headshot: an image actors use to market themselves and/or their looks to producers who may be angling to cast someone in a production. This is a very subjective area of photography. Every agent has their own opinion or idea of how their “client” should look in a headshot. Some photographers say it is a scam. I had an inspiration to create some of my own, with a little playful angle.
One of my clients came across some images from her days as a model in New York and she wanted to have one of the 35mm slides blown up to a 44″ wide print. This presented a couple of challenges and some fun creative choices to mull over.
First, we decided to send the slide out to West Coast Imaging and have a Tango Drum scan done to create the 200mg file rather than rely on interpolation/sharpening techniques to get the image big enough. Once we had a nice, large file to work from I began the process of smoothing out the tonal range and adding some contrast. Very little retouching was needed, but I wanted to maintain the vintage look of the original slide without dating it so I pretty much cleaned up the noise in the background by smoothing the highlights, then I smoothed out the skintones with a median filter.
The resulting image looked great on a monitor. I printed it on Somerset Velvet paper which has a pretty high D-Max and incredible tonal range. The final print measures 43″ wide by 37″ high and it is every bit as beautiful as the image above.
Have you ever had the notion that kids are much smarter than adults? I mean really young kids. It’s as if they have a certain natural wisdom they are born with that sometimes gets corrupted as they grow older.
This is Vayle. I made this image while I was visiting her parents in Portland. I first thought this moment was perfect because the way the sun back lit her and made her white-yellow hair glow, and how the light played off the hardwood floor. Then I notice that this is both a child in motion and one who is very focused. And as I look into the eyes in this image I see knowledge well beyond this child’s‘ couple of years. It is as though she is secretly saying; “click that shutter now camera boy, because in 1/60th of a second I’ll be gone.”
