So this is a little uncharacteristic of me, but this time, I’m going to try to go easy on the words and let the images tell the story. Yosemite is just one of those places…the type that no matter who or what you are, will be affected by it. It’s simply impossible to turn that final curve on Highway 41 and exit that 1/4 mile tunnel 30 miles past Yosemite National Park’s South Entrance, without feeling like time slows down, at least for a split-second, to work out whether or not your eyes and senses have failed you as you try to come to grips with the sheer scale and beauty of the surreal valley that lies before you.
I know I'm still not completely caught up on the Sri Lanka adventure posts, but I've spent the past week in Yosemite National Park and wanted to throw a lil' bit of that paradise your way. Here's an image from Wednesday afternoon in Yosemite Valley, just as the sun began it's descent.
It 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.
When 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.
So 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.
It 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.
It 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.
A 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.
Last week saw the 24th Annual International Los Angeles Photographic Art Exposition, otherwise known as Photo LA, take over the entire 2nd floor of Downtown Los Angeles’ L.A. Mart Building. Over 15,000 visitors checking out more than 50 gallery exhibitors from all over the world over the course of 3 days. And with it, I had the honor of having one of my images, ‘Don’t Turn Your Back,’ taken in Yosemite, selected to be displayed by the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) Los Angeles chapter.
So a few months ago, I got the incredible opportunity to photograph legendary tattoo artist Jun Cha’s new studio in Downtown Los Angeles. It was for his new website so I haven’t been able to share them yet until the site went live. Well, as of this week, it’s now live at MonarcStudios.com. This guy is the real deal. I mean, people fly him out to crazy places like Thailand and Hong Kong to get inked by his gifted hands. If you read this blog, you might remember my post on minimizing reflections in interior photography, and I posted an image to demonstrate the effect. That was from his studio and from this shoot. The studio’s delicate decor is as elegant as the art that Jun permanently adorns his subjects with. Everything from
While there are definite similarities in regards to methods and approach when photographing any sort of real estate, there are also important differences to keep in mind, especially when photographing commercial real estate and properties. In the residential real estate realm, they tend to use the images for a few weeks or maybe months until the space is sold, but in commercial real estate, these images are used to sell the business for perhaps years and years, and they might live on a website for just as long, offering the potential client or customer a visual representation of the space.
This 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.
As 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.
My first cover came from my 1st first! Huh? So I wrote a bit about my image Pole Position taking 1st in this year’s challenge category in the National Park Service ‘Spirit of the Mountains’ photo contest. Well, apparently they’ve decided to use that image for the cover of the new Winter edition of “Outdoors” magazine, the National Park Service’s quarterly publication covering events and hikes and news for Southern California’s Santa Monica Mountains.
Thanksgiving 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!
It’s just one of those things. One of those crazy things. While every lens wipe and filter might look the same to the untrained eye, photographers obsess over every detail down to the thousandth of a second. No exaggeration. Literally. Thousandths of a second. So, while the heart might be in the right place, there are certain things that, if you give a photographer as a gift, may do more harm than good. Here are 5 of those things:
In case you’ve been (understandably) hiding under a rock the past 5 days, you’re already aware…it’s that time of year!! The holiday shopping madness has begun. We had Black Friday and Small Business Saturday and ‘Something or another’ Sunday and Cyber Monday and Cyber Monday Tuesday. Well, now that you’re dressing your wounds and nursing your bruises, I bring to you…Wasim Wednesday! Best of all, you don’t have to go anywhere or do anything other than use the very device you’re reading this one. A collection of fine art prints and canvases from the past 12 months shot by yours truly.
The 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.
