Misguided by the 405

This gallery project, and coming up with stories about myself and my work has got me thinking, where did this all begin. On a day when my Mom gets laid off from a company she has put in 30 plus years, I set out to write about my path and what I’m doing. In my short time working as a photographer the one thing I have learned is that there is not sense of loyalty. I don’t even know if that is the right word, but what I do know is you go out of your way for people, you work hard, you give a hundred percent of yourself to your work, and many time the payoff at the end is less than desirable. Seeing the stress my mother has gone through over her job is ridiculous. I cant imaging giving that much of myself to something to just be sent packing. I’m in a similar situation, but I have been at my job for almost a year and I’m a contractor… I will simply not be asked to come in. It’s a little scary, but that doesn’t change my work ethic, or the quality of work that I put out.

At lunch, driving on the 405 I was thinking of the edits I have been working on and some shots that I still want to make. Specifically this shot off the overpass of the 405 looking back to LA from the valley. I got the idea for this shot driving home from this girl’s I have been chasings place. Kind of buzzed, but not drunk, but probably not legal to be driving. I have the music on, it’s pouring outside, like torrential downpour, almost he type of rain that reminded me of driving through the desert from Arizona. The final outcome of moving home to be with someone didn’t really work out the way it was planned, but I ended up getting into photography which lead me to working this pretty sweet job. So chasing this girl, I’m not really worried with what happens… if it works for a little great, if not at all that’s okay too. The fun really is in the chase, all the beginning jitters and all that sort of stuff. Its much like making images. For me the part that I truly love is the act of setting it up, working the subject or coming up with ideas and making them come to fruition. Some work some don’t. The shot posted, involved me hanging off an overpass to use a magic arm to mount the camera to a sign and then using infinity focus. I guessed at the exposure, and came away with this photo… it works. I think you can’t look at things so cut and dry as just the final product, just your job, or getting a girl or not. Its about the process of making something… re-reading this its incredibly disjointed and all over the place… much like my A.D.D. maybe this could have been summed up in short by saying:

This is my picture, it was a bitch to take, and it’s inspired by a girl…

enjoy

Overdue

Long time, no update. I’d be lying if I said that I have been too busy but the truth is I haven’t made an image or done anything really worth updating in a while. Just within the last few weeks have things been picking up. At work, while incredibly bored I have been sketching robots and trying to incorporate photographs I have taken into the scene.

A few weeks back a friend said she was putting together this gallery at UCLA and that the theme was Los Angeles inspired images or work in a variety of mediums.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

1. 5-10 JPEG IMAGES, or a website link including the images you would like to exhibit.
2. ARTIST BIO: Summary of your experience, influences, interests, or life history.
3. ARTIST STATEMENT: Description of the ideas behind your artwork.
4. ARTWORK DOCUMENTATION: Document with description (please include measurements and weight) and price of each piece, for insurance purposes.


Her suggestion was to just take horse photos I have made, print em, hang em and be done. Instead of taking the easy route I decided to go out, gas up the car and drive around LA for a day. Ill be posting some of the images over the next few days with some sort of story about it, or what was the inspiration

...

So I have been trying to write this blog for over a week now, and each time I only make it a few lines, get incredibly bummed out, and hit the delete key. A good friend of mine passed away 2 weeks ago at the young age of 19 in a sailing accident. The adage “It’s not tragic to die doing something that you love,” doesn’t seem like a sufficient consolation.

This got me thinking of how I live my life, and do I make the most of everything. Sure there is a chance that it could be all taken away from you like that. I buy into this lyric from a song “I rather live my life in regret than not take part in it.”

There is the finality that comes with death, which I cannot really grasp. The death of P.J. showed me what a tremendous effect he had on the lives of so many people at such a young age. What kind of effect do I have on people? When I am long gone there will be gigabytes of images and boxes of prints and tear sheets left over, and maybe someone will see them and say, “Hey this kid wasn’t that bad of a photographer and a heck of a guy too.”

Take for instance this photo I shot over a year and a half ago of P.J. and my sister before prom. I had another paying gig that day that I turned down to photograph them and my sister’s friends before prom. At this time, shooting only freelance with limited clients, I didn’t really have the money to turn down a paying job, but I understand this whole American idea of the dream high school prom, and the importance of being their for your family. After a few hours of dealing with my sister, who can be temperamental to say the least, I was pretty fed up with her and her endless bitching. So we head out to this park, and at first I’m looking at the sun and the angles and seeing that the light it’s going to be nearly perfect. Then I see that the park we are going to is covered with trees not really allowing any light in except for a few concentrated areas. So after about 10 minutes of scouting and thinking about how I am going to shoot this with a limited selection of glass (yes I only took out a 300 2.8 and 16 -35 2.8) I settle on this one area that you can fit 3 people comfortably into the frame, and start shooting exposing for the skin tones planning on having the background fall of dramatically. This was the final result.

I went from being extremely pissed off to intrigued by the challenge of making a beauty of an image. There were many frames from this shoot that were really nice, including a huge print of my sister and her roommate that hangs in their house, but this one frame says so much. It shows two best friends, neither of them were really the “prom” type sharing a laugh. A frame like this cannot be staged, but is a moment that is captured, that my sister will have forever.

At the funeral reception last Tuesday, there was a slide show playing, and people got up and shared stories. There were so many great ones to share, many of them too inappropriate to tell in front of 1500 people. My sister doesn’t like speaking to large crowds, my dad far too choked up to say anything, so I took the mic. And said a few words, but none as lasting as that image.

I guess the bottom line of this incoherent post, is that as a photographer it is your job to put everything you have into every picture you make. Whether it is a tedious industrial shoot of some products, or the sun setting over the Pacific, you owe it to yourself and those who will see your work. Be proud of the photos you make, and don’t just settle on setting your camera to program and clicking the shutter hoping that you might get lucky and capture something. Make something compelling, thought provoking and beautiful, you never know when you are going to make your last photograph.

<3

Time Lapse

Since I haven't posted in a few weeks due to massive amounts of work and fun, ill post two in one hour...






Last week I spent two days in Long Beach photographing the set up and trial of a video production event. It was something like 20 hours of shooting over 2 days, and anther 5 of editing. The room was poorly lit and the color temperature was all over the map so it was a challenge to make the images look interesting and not so yellow and flat due to the tungsten bulbs. I found myself shooting with the fisheye to make a stagnate room a little lively.





By far this is my favorite shot, relative to the time lapse. It shows a final product and i kinda like the dark red table cloths.

Photoshopped

Since the shopping season is quickly approaching... (what thanks giving is in a few weeks right?) I have decided to update on a shopping spree of my own... Photoshop is a massive program, and combined with Lightroom there is almost too many tools to use. I think the statistic is, a photographer uses 5% of Photoshop's capabilities. At any rate, when there is down time at work, I play around in Photoshop, and these are two recent things that I have worked on.

The first originated as a poster of an astronaut who was part of a guest speaker program... I always wanted to go to space as a kid so I figured what better way to fake it than a photo of myself in the official 400 pound suit.

To accomplish this i went into the studio and duplicated the lighting condition of the original astronaut photo. Then carefully cut out my head and transferred it over to the original. Then used the free transform tool to scale my head down to the appropriate size, while holding the shift key to constrain the proportions. After some clone stamping around the head to make it softer and some burning to add the effect of shadows, I came to the final product. The white undershirt is completely made up from pixels and burning and dodging.

The second example is a photo of me playing at the Staples Center. Every time the Red Wings come to town we get the ice before the game and play a pick up game the LA Guys vs. the Michigan Guys. I'm a Wing nut at heart so I played with them, and a few guys wore all wings gear... It was super fun.

This piece started as an example to demonstrate a color scheme for a pair of Easton hockey gloves, and turned into changing the color of the whole uniform to match our Gong Show team.

The right is the original. To do this you have to select the area you want to change. Once selected with the marque tool, go to hue saturation and select pull the hue to modify the color. For the light blues, I had to go into levels after the hue modification and lighten the color to achieve the same color as another jersey. I'm also a big fan of larger tongues on skates, so in the image on the right I used the liquefy tool to make the tongue "flop"more.

In other news... Please grow your moustache, in support of Movember, the month previously known as November. The cause is to raise awareness for prostate cancer, as well as other men's health issues.

Visit www.movember.com

writers

Sin City

There were two choices for todays post... On being about working ridiculous hours and making deadlines for two sometimes three different clients, the other about photoshopping photos to look like they are from the movie Sin City. I will go with the later, seeing that I have been working since 6 am and its nearly 4 oclock in the afternoon.

The goal here is to add a comic book text bubble, adjust the levels and saturation to make the image really high contrast. Then to add grain to the image in a way that it creates a rain effect. Then i did a quick wikipedia search for Sin City quotes that fit the image. For this particular image I settled on the quote "There's wrong and then there's wrong, and then there is this." I felt it fitting with my buddy holding a wad of cash...

First step is convert is to desaturate the image, and then go into levels. Pull the left side to about 57 , the grey level at 1.00 and then the black level somewhere around 73- 140 depending upon the photo you start with. (i did this to three photos, with mixed results. This was the best final product, and the final level number was like 110)

The next part is adding in the rain. Create a new layer and then go to Edit> Fill and use 50% grey(this will make the layer appear grey). Then add noise and set it to 400 % Gaussian (this will make the layer appear like snow on a television) Then add a motion blur to the layer set the angle to 90 and the distance to 999 pixels. You will see the layer change from a snowed in television to a bar code. If you are using a file that is really large from a higher end dslr you are going to have to hit control F a bunch of times to make this effect come in. I scaled this image down to 3 by 2 at 180 dpi. Then go to transform and use the skew to pull the layer past the image border creating two triangle adjacent to one another outside the image frame. You are trying to make the bar code looking lines slant as though it is raining at an angle. After this the next step is to convert this layer to vivid light, and your original desaturated image appears with heavy rain. Use image adjustment, levels to tweak the histogram to achieve a desired effect. You can also change the opacity of the rain layer to lessen its effects.

Repeat this step again, changing the angle of the rain to make it look my scattered in the final product.

Lastly select the circular marquee tool and draw a circle where you want the text box. Select the Polo lasso and make a triangle coming out of the circle to create the carrot form the circle, remember to use the control key when drawing it so that it adds on to the existing circle, not making a new triangle. Use the fill tool to make it white and you are set. Just add whatever text you want.

In the end I burned around the subject and it fortunately turned the kitchen background into what looks like a cityscape behind the subject. Play around with your image and see what you get.

I'm sure it would be easier to show with screen grabs of the different steps but if you have questions just email em to me...

Have fun and Good luck