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So last week was a bizarre week. I got a call last Saturday to see if I wanted to accompany a pair of journalists from Time Magazine's The Drive website as their videographer in a new 2016 Camaro on a road trip from Portland to San Francisco for their Find New Roads campaign. The thing is, we had 36 hours to cover 800 miles...
Read MoreI recently spent an incredible week in the Pacific Northwest, the reason of which will come in a more detailed post next week, but while I was up there, I couldn't help but capture a few scenes of the foliage beginning to turn. Coming from Southern California, it's always a treat to be able to capture some fall colors, and just wanted to share those with you here as a bit of a peaceful meditation. Hope you enjoy.
Read MoreSo this was it. I had 3 more days left before I had to make my way back to Colombo and begin my 36 hour journey back to U.S. soil. I had two choices…I can head down to the beach and just marinate for a few days, or I can continue the cerebral stimulation and head to Kandy, “The Cultural Capital of Sri Lanka.” Against most of humanity’s better judgement, I chose the latter.
Read MoreNot again. No way was I going to miss my ride this time. It was pseudo-palatable to eat the 10 bucks for ticket I bought for the missed train ride they day before, but after not being able to secure another ticket for the next 3 days, if I was to stand any chance of making it to Nuwara Eliya in the highlands, I would be forced to hire a private driver...
Read MoreIt was over. The main reason I found myself in Sri Lanka was all over. Here we sit at the train station waiting for our ride back to Colombo, reflecting upon the events of the past two weeks, and quietly wondering how we’d say goodbye to each other. After all, we had become family over the past few weeks and bonds had certainly been formed. And here we were, in the middle of Sri Lanka, in a village that none of us may very well ever see again, and wondering if we’d ever even get to see each other again.
Read MoreWhen you think to yourself you’ll be taking a trip that would last a little over 3 weeks to the Southeast Asian island of Sri Lanka, and 10 of those days would be spent traveling through, and experiencing some of the lushest landscapes and most culturally significant areas in all of Asia, you wouldn’t think that the most memorable and enjoyable part of the trip would be the other 12 days. The ones spent isolated in a 2-structure walled-in compound built by the World Bank in the outskirts of Vavuniya, one of the most impoverished communities in the country that lay right in the midst of some of the least exciting topography on the island.
Read MoreSo I had this crazy dream last weekend. A dream where I was sent to Hawaii to go whale watching off the shore of Kona with Chris Robinson, the Editor-In-Chief of Outdoor Photographer Magazine. A dream where I found myself taking a helicopter tour over the big island with Chris Gampat, founder of The Phoblographer, marveling over Hi’ilawe Falls, one of the United State’s tallest waterfalls, and where I imagined myself zip-lining through a rainforest canopy of Koa and sycamore trees with Videomaker’s Editor-In-Chief Mike Wilhelm and Big Picture Big Sound’s Editor-In-Chief Chris Boylan.
Read MoreIt was 5am, just 4 hours after the airport finally dropped off my lost luggage at our Airbnb rental in Colombo, and just 15 minutes before we were to board a 7-hour train from Colombo to Jaffna, the northern most city in Sri Lanka. After our brief, but efficiently utilized, 20 hours of living it up in Colombo, it was time to put our foot on the clutch and get ready to switch gears. Jaffna sits at about 50 kilometers from the southern tip of India and was one of the hardest hit areas of the bloody decades long civil war. As a matter of fact, the very train I was sitting on had barely been open a year after being shut down for over 20 years, effectively cutting off the north from the rest of the country.
Read MoreSo I just threw one of the images I made in Sri Lanka on my mobile phone as the background. Kinda dug it. Figured I’d share it.
Read MoreIt was the most meaningful and rewarding work I’ve ever done.
Bold statement for a man well into his thirties? Perhaps. But I’ll start from the beginning. I received an email from a friend that simply said “What are you doing the first two weeks of February.” Mind you, this was closing in on the last week of January. 48 hours later, a round trip ticket to Colombo, Sri Lanka in my name arrived in my email box.
Read MoreA client I’ve been doing some work with the past few months that you may have seen me post about here a few times, tattoo artist Jun Cha, had the opening gala for his new design/tattoo studio, Monarc Studios, last Thursday at The Well in Downtown Los Angeles. Whether you like body art or not, check him out, he’s insane: www.MonarcStudios.com. At the very least, I’m quite confident you’ll appreciate his work as an artist.
Read MoreThis is it. This is the one. I’ve found the one! Actually, the one found me! The Samsung NX1. If you’ve been holding out on investing in the mirrorless market because of your trepidations as far as performance as compared to traditional DSLRs, now’s the time to let go. It’s been exactly a year since Samsung invited me into their Imagelogger program, and in that short year, everything changed. I mean everything.
Read MoreAs another year comes to a close and we prepare to spend quality time with the family and friends, I wanted to take a quick short and sweet few seconds to thank every one of you for the support, the warmth, the encouragement, the inspiration, and the all around positive energy you’ve brought into my life over the past 365 days. It’s been truly humbling and everything that has kept me going, encouraging me to get out and make another picture, write another post, keep doing the thing. I can only hope that I’m able to reciprocate even a small part of that. Happy holidays all you beautiful people. Click "read more" to find a couple of my favorites from the past 12 months. They’re high-enough-resolution versions for your desktops and mobile thingies and whatnots.
Read MoreThanksgiving 2014. Elastic sweatpants. Turkey. Football. Right? Nope. Not this year. This year, we decided to do a thing. A different thing. After 3 plus decades of hosting and cooking and working all week for Thanksgiving dinner, mom decided this year, she needed a break. She wanted to get pampered instead of pampering everyone else. And while we’ll miss the insane gastronomical heaven we’ve been so accustomed to, we knew that it was well-deserved, and, well, what better way to give thanks and enjoy your family’s company than to hop in the car and test how long you can survive each other? A Sedona, Arizona Thanksiving family photo…uh...road trip? Let’s do this!
Read MoreThe holiday season is upon us, and chances are, somewhere in your family there’s a budding photographer. You’ve been watching as they hone their eye through an iPad lens or the pictures that mysteriously populate your smartphone’s camera roll when your phone goes missing for a few hours (or days). And now, you’re realizing this is a skill and talent they might want to hone further. It’s time to step up their game and begin their gradual and comfortable transition into some more serious hardware. Here are 6 of the best cameras for budding photographers in your family.
Read MoreSo I was recently challenged by a fellow Samsung Imagelogger, the talented portrait photographer Jess Anderson, to take the Black & White Photography Challenge. Basically, I had to post 5 black and white images in 5 days. Anyone that knows me or my work knows that color plays an enormous role in the images I choose to make, so this was definitely a bit intimidating. In addition to a few of my favorites from those recent 5 days, what follows are 5 things I learned and experienced in my little black & white journey.
Read MoreI can’t believe it’s been a full year since the last one. That photo contest that I was honored to place 2nd and 3rd in last year, the National Park Service sponsored “Spirit Of The Mountain” photo contest? Well, it’s back. I just submitted my two entries, the two you see above, "Family Time" and "Pole Position,” two images taken within the past 12 months in the Santa Monica Mountain Range.
Read MoreSo this Samsung Imagelogger journey has been an extremely unexpected ray of light that just keeps shining brighter as the months go on. In addition to the cameras and gear (as if that wasn't enough), another huge benefit of this thing is the ridiculous exposure and opportunities we get. Some of us got to go to Photokina on Samsung’s behalf, some of us gave away free NX30s in Times Square a few months ago, some of us had our images used in promotional material and ads, some of us ended up on a safari. Well, this week, some of us had the humble pleasure of taking over a full special issue of Rangefinder Magazine, a pretty influential magazine in the photography industry.
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"Everything You Can Imagine Is Real." -Pablo Picasso * Mmmhmm - This Week's Motivational Kick In The Yahoo! * Design!
I woke up this morning a bit ragged. Today it was much harder to open the eyes, due in no small part to the fact that I was planning on making the drive back from Big Sur to Los Angeles. As I was unzipping my tent and cursing under my breath that I couldn't at least indulge in a cup of coffee on my final morning here due to the fire ban, there comes my aunt, as if on cue, straight out of the bushes at the other end of the campground, holding bright sunny fresh to-go cups of coffee! Boom!
She had made her way into town to come back and make our day! I took it as a sign.
There was no way I was leaving today.
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