Portland Vs Hawaii

 

 

The beaches in Portland are way nicer then Hawaii's. I submit the following photo evidence.

Discussion over.

I see no reason to ever go back now.

 

Two new Images

 

Here is a fun Pano I did while in Hawaii on top of Haleakala. I broke it up and added some screen printing effects that adds a nice feel to it when printed out. It's 60 inches long.

And L.A. based Barrio Tiger just swung though puddle town and I took this portrait of them at the studio.  The new Einstein lights are working out pretty well and I have not had any issues working with my Profoto lights or my Pocket Wizards.  Small studio though so that might be what is saving me.

New Fun for the house

 

Just picked up a new to me but used drum set.  Here is the amazing snare.  Love all the nicks and dents but I am strange like that.

13 sn, 12 t, 14 ft and a 20 bd.  Sounds amazing.  Can't wait to get new heads on everything.

Shot with a tilt shift 90 mm with 2 Einsteins in strip boxes with diapers and a crazy diffusion set up.

 

Get off my digitally textured lawn!

Meet the sexy hot SyQuest Disk, the height of storage when I first started using Photoshop. We had the 80 meg platters and not this exact one pictured but you get the idea. We honestly had no idea what we would do with so much storage space. 80 megs! WOW! We also had a 4x5 film writer that would work with B&W film and looked horrible.  If I ran a unsharp mask on a 15 meg file I could literally take the elevator down 8 flights, get a cup of coffee from the lobby, take the elevator back up and sit with some time still to go.

Ahh, good times.

HOW TO STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST (AND 9 OTHER THINGS NOBODY TOLD ME)

Soon after, you learn that most of the world doesn’t necessarily care about what you think. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. As Steven Pressfield said, “It’s not that people are mean or cruel, they’re just busy.” If there was a secret formula for getting an audience, or gaining a following, I would give it to you. But there’s only one not-so-secret formula that I know: “Do good work and put it where people can see it.”

 

Good read.

Number 10 is really good as well, "Creativity is subtraction."

Tax Time!

Just in case you forgot it's tax time here. Also, if you are GE or Google you don't really pay shit. But you know, if you are a teacher in Wisconsin you a clearly rich and need a pay cut. Let me just link a few lovely things.

The top corporate income tax level in the United States is 35 percent. In the United Kingdom, it's 28 percent. But in Ireland, it's only 12.5 percent, and in Bermuda there's no corporate income tax at all. That means multinational companies that shift their earnings through Ireland or Bermuda can save billions of dollars in taxes each year.

On today's Fresh Air, Bloomberg News reporter Jesse Drucker, who has written extensively about corporate tax-dodging, explains how companies like Google, Pfizer, Lilly, Oracle, Facebook and Microsoft have managed to reduce their tax rates by hundreds of millions — and in some cases, billions — of dollars by taking advantage of offshore tax havens.

And from The Daily Show, I Give Up. It's funny in a sad panda make me wanna chew on a gun kinda way.

A Conversation with Nadav Kander - Conscientious

 

NK: I think it’s a universal Western truth that we have a real problem thinking any lower than our head into how we feel about things. I think when we are always trying to make our brain do the work and separate a picture into why I like it or why I don’t and what are the reasons for it, it’s often as simple as that it touches me in an emotional place, in a place inside me that responds to this for whatever reason. Maybe the way I was brought up, maybe the way my parents were brought up. Who knows how far these things go? We all have a problem in knowing that.

Good art works on that level very, very well. Think of Rothko as an excellent example. There’s almost no information on the canvas, and people can sit in front of them for hours, with very, very strong feelings. So composition in itself and weight of composition and colour can give you very strong connections to you and your past. I think that probably explains it.

 

Solitude, sweet solitude.

"But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone.

One ongoing Harvard study indicates that people form more lasting and accurate memories if they believe they’re experiencing something alone. Another indicates that a certain amount of solitude can make a person more capable of empathy towards others. And while no one would dispute that too much isolation early in life can be unhealthy, a certain amount of solitude has been shown to help teenagers improve their moods and earn good grades in school."

-I personally need a large amount of alone time.

Sunrise

Here is a shot of our lovely garden shed filled with all sorts of wood and dirt.  The morning light hitting it with the green and reds and whites and blacks.... had to get a shot.  This could be a lot of fun to blur the crap out of and make a color field print of.

Wysteria is wild and crazy stuff.  I am training this bunch to run down the length of our fence.  It follows those "T" bars I make out of cedar. I was messing around and made this sepia toned image and really enjoyed it as this graphic piece.

In Memorium

 

Just a reminder that even death brings about life and there is a beauty in that.  Need some people to remember that right now.

To use a finite lifetime to worry and grieve over the chaos of the world is like weeping into a river to increase its water in fear of it drying up.

-Lao_tzu

translated by Thomas Cleary

Hawaii Ridge Hike

 

Just another iPhone snap from our recent trip to Hawaii.  Drinking my coffee in the gray Portland rain this morning made me review a few of these.

Another day in the studio

 

Why yes, I am shooting a disembodied leg in front of  green screen.  What, you don't see all the practical uses of this?  Huh... well... I dunno what to tell you then.

High speed tests with sound triggers

 

Wanted to try out some high speed tests using a sound trigger to pop the strobes and these are the test files.  Last one is a screen grab from 100% which shows that there is no blur at all going on in those drops.  I was really wailing on the cymbal as well.  Fun stuff.

P.S.A.

Wanted to get some practice in today since it's slow.  Used a Beauty dish and one back strobe on the white table.  The full shot of the knife looks better, but does not work as well conceptually. So I get to show off my lighting less, oh well.  The text is just a general rule of thumb.