I know I've been mostly absent for a while and for that I apologize, but it's been a bit of a crazy few months. To make a super long story short, as of April 20, I have migrated north to the grand Pacific Northwest. The lush greenery and outdoor lifestyle-driven populations have been seducing me for close to a decade, and I finally decided to take the leap.

Not only have I lived in Southern California all of my life and have been curious about a change for just about as long, but perhaps the biggest driver was to be better positioned to explore the wondrous nature the region has to offer and the people, companies, and organizations that make Mother Earth such a concentrated focus of this region.

So I now proudly call Portland, Oregon my home.

If you're not familiar, at 140 years old, American Forests is the nation's oldest conservation organization, so needless to say, I am completely humbled and flattered to have received an Honorable Mention by American Forests in their 2016 Forests in Focus photography contest. Click here to check out all the beautiful winning images. 

So it started to get real once I was waiting for my connecting flight in Denver, Colorado to Bismarck, North Dakota and I flicked through my Feedly stream. "War Crimes On The Northern Plains" "More than 140 NoDAPL Water Protectors Arrested Overnight" "Police Brutality at Standing Rock Soars With Use of Out of State Law Enforcement" "Brutalized by Police and Jailed in Dog Kennels."

Nazareth.

You might have heard of it.

Well, that's where I was born. That's where my parents both immigrated from. That's where almost all of my extended family still is. That's where I haven't been in over a decade.

Here's one way to start the summer off with a bang: Head to Denmark to shoot virtual reality at northern Europe's largest music and arts gathering, the famous Roskilde Festival, which, this year, included Neil Young, At The Drive In, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Action Bronson, Wiz Khalifa and an all-star cast of over 100,000 professional vomitors and shameless public urinators.

A couple of months ago, I found myself in the fortunate situation of shooting virtual reality footage with a prototype VR camera...in Tahiti. Needless to say, that was an insaneexperience that I will never ever forget. If you want to read about that experience, check out this post, but here, I'm going to lay out a few things Skye Mayring, my partner in Superswell VR, and I, learned about shooting virtual reality, because, let me tell you, it's nothing like shooting regular video.

Citizine gone done published a couple of more of the editorial shoots I did for them, so I wanted to share these ones with you. This time around, I got a chance to hang out for a day with Los Angeles area filmmaker and brand influencer Chris Laughter, where we sampled tacos, candies, libations, dumplings, classic architecture and a whole lotta street shooting through Downtown Los Angeles, and then I was incredibly super fortunate to spend a full day with the insanely WAYYY too much fun travel vlogger Alana Fickes, aka Alana Chan Warrior Princess, where we got crazy at the carnival! 

So this is a project I've had to keep under wraps for almost a half year now, and it's been hot darn damn difficult! I recently found myself shooting virtual reality (VR) footage for a week in March with a prototype high end VR camera system. The idea was to gather footage to demonstrate the system's capabilities at the Samsung Developer Conference (SDC) in San Francisco at the end of last month, as well as Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference (SVVR) in Palo Alto that same week.

That alone was exciting enough. 

But...

So this was a super exciting thing for me and something I'm extremely proud of...a project I've been quietly working on with Earthtones for several years now has come to fruition. It's called WhyMusic In Schools and it's based around a curriculum of using technology and music as social emotional learning tools (SEL) for children at a critical age in their development. In this case it was 6th graders, and after years of putting the thing together, we just got a chance to test it in the Los Angeles Unified School District Incubator School for the first time over the past two weeks. The results? Spectacular! 

So I was insanely fortunate to get the opportunity to spend a week shooting virtual reality footage for the Tahiti Tourism board in French Polynesia on the islands of Tahiti with the infamously fantabulous travelista Joan Jetsetter and uber-mad-scientist pioneering virtual reality engineer Sergi Perdices. While I'll be preparing a couple of thorough posts about that ridiculous experience in the next couple of weeks, I couldn't wait to share a few images with you that I felt might make some solid backgrounds for your phones. A few screenshots samples are above, and if you click through, you can simply right-click and download the high resolution versions to use on your own devices if you so choose. 

Note: So this could quite possibly be the most personal thing I've ever publicly posted. It took me months to draft it and I originally published it on my Ello page a few months back, but figured it was time to post it here, on my own webpage, as well.

This was super fun! Recently, Citizine, that publication that I did the editorial shoots for, asked lil' ol' me if I would go out and shoot my city of L.A. through my lens for a feature story. 

I said "Hell yeah!" 

Then they told me I had to do it all with my smartphone. 

"You sadistic bastards!!"

Over the past several months, I've been blessed to be able to work with some organizations and causes that lie very close to my psyche. As most of you already know, our natural world and the protection of our open spaces is a huge thing for me, and plays a major role in my life. When I was approached by the 50 year old World Forestry Center in Portland, Oregon to help usher them into a new era, defined by reversing the trends of irresponsible mass deforestation and forest exploitation by protecting the health of forests and sustainable community-managed forestry, how could I say no?

Over the course of a recent 4 weeks, I found myself hanging out in the Funny or Die offices with the company's co-founder Mike Farah, sipping cappuccinos and visiting Sunset Boulevard art galleries with fashionista Marta Pozzan, inhaling tacos and mescal with globetrottin' foodie Krista Simmons, and joyriding up Pacific Coast Highway with the gorgeous DJ Duo POSSO. 

I forgot how much fun editorial shoots can be.

If someone were to ask me to dream up the perfect piece of property and location to call home, I've found it. 

I was there. 

And it was all mine for 5 glorious days...

Several years back, when I first began my immersion into digital photography world, I found myself religiously listening to every photography related podcast I could find. As the years went on and podcasts became more and more popular, more and more of them began to find their way onto my playlist. As time went on, however, I've been able to narrow it down to the handful that truly resonated with me, and there was always one that stood high on that list...

To A Beautiful 2016...