T’was a perfect day in Topanga Canyon, and to stay inside would have been a crime, so I grabbed one of my cameras, the Samsung NX300, threw on the ‘summer’ outfit, and headed out into the hills. As I was hiking through this, live bluegrass echoing through the canyon in the distant background served as my soundtrack. Don’t know where it was coming from or what it was, but it was perfect.
Perfect.
Click past the break for a few images from that Topanga Canyon hike.
So I don’t have too much to say about this one, really just wanted to share. This was one of the properties I was assigned to shoot yesterday for Airbnb.com. It was a chunk of land on a bluff off Pacific Coast Highway that housed an old vintage Airstream trailer that rested on a ledge in what seemed to be the most idyllic, picture-perfect mini-canyon on the California coast.
Anyhow, the lead picture to the left here was processed to look the way I felt when I was wandering around in there…simple…relaxed…peaceful…grateful…unapologetically lazy…perhaps what the glory days of Southern California felt like, a feeling of romantic nostalgia who’s remnants only seems to exist in isolated, hidden, carefully-guarded pockets these days.
This place was definitely one of those pockets.
Click on “Continue Reading” and then click on the pics.
View them large.
Enjoy…
I know it’s been a while, and have quite a few things lined up for real soon, but until then hopefully a few iPhone5 parallax wallpapers can tide you over if you want ’em…
If you’re on your iPhone, just click the one you like and when the full resolution one comes up, press down, and save to camera roll. If you’re in your browser, you can do the same by right-clicking and saving the image to your hard drive.
These were all shot on the Samsung NX300 for their Imagelogger program. And as always when I throw these suckers out there, if I get enough interest for other devices, I’ll gladly begin to format for those as well. Feel free to drop me a line…
So I know you’ve probably already seen enough of this set of images, but, well, too bad! Ha! An image from this series keeps getting around one way or another – this time absolutely humbling me by showing up on the homepage for Photofocus.com as this week’s ‘Featured Image.’ This is Scott Bourne, Richard Harrington, Melissa Niu and company! It’s madness! Check it out:
The crazy thing is, I thought I was having a bad day that day when I just needed to get out and away so jumped in my car for that ride up the coast where I ran into these buggers on that hill. If it wasn’t for that ‘bad day,’ I would have never been able to make these images, rendering that day not a bad day after all – it actually turned out to be one of the best days of the year. Just another one of life’s funny reminders that you never ever ever ever ever know what’s going to happen and why things happen the way they do. Whether a frown or a smile, just roll with it…after all, neither lasts, but one of them is always sure to return…
Can’t wait for my next bad day!!
Yes, it’s a been a fun start to the New Year. So just after getting the opportunity to shoot Cindy Taylor last week, I got asked to help a friend Produce and DIT (Digital Technician – an overly fancy term for downloading video footage onto hard drives) a short film. Though I spent close to a decade working on and editing videos and commercials and whatnots, it’s been a while since I’ve been on a film set and I must say, it wasn’t too bad, one because I was working with friends, and two, well, my title wasn’t Production Assistant! No offense to my PA brothers and sisters, but, well, those weren’t exactly the most savory years of my working life…
Anyhow, the production was called Rabbit Season, a film by Director Jimmie Rhee from Defy Agency in Culver City. It was a bit of a dark story, which I’ll share here once they’re done editing and ready to release, but we had some fun on set. It’s not everyday that you’re getting paid to find a 65 Cadillac, a way to make a fake rabbit look like a real dead rabbit, deflect a police officer who got a call from a pedestrian who witnessed a scene in which a girl was being thrown into the trunk of a car but didn’t see the camera filming it on the mountain top above, and collect chicken bones from lunchtime catering to try to pass as rabbit bones on film.
In any case, Lacy Street Production Center was one of the locations (some of the films that shot there included “Catch Me If You Can” and “Saw”), which is that crazy dilapidated looking brick building in the pictures below. The other location was Singing Springs in the Angeles National Forest, which was particularly nice as, well, we got to be outside, in the mountains, all day long without any reception. And you all know how I like to be outside all day long! The picture at the right was my office for the day…
Anyhow, no special lesson learned here or any particular words of any significance or importance, just figured I’d share a few production stills from a few scenes and locations from that shoot, all of which were shot on the Samsung NX300 mirrorless camera.
And don’t worry, no animals were harmed in the making of this film. As a matter of fact, we ended up saving the life of a rabbit that was marked to be butchered for meat and pelt. We gone done a good thing!! What you see in some of those seemingly gruesome pictures are just a rabbit pelt being stapled to a fake rabbit cadaver from our friends at Dapper Cadaver (yes, there’s a shop that specializes in this madness…only in Hollywood…)
Ok then…
Hope everyone has had a wonderful 2014 so far. So I sort of disappeared for a bit, but hot damn, the new year began and everything took off!!! Hasn’t been much sleep but certainly has been quite a bit of action. There are some cool things in the works that will be revealed in due time, but for now, just wanted to drop a quick few lines. Last week I got to do another shoot for WhoHasItApp, the same client I shot Kyle Williams, Rod Streater, Stacey Dash, Gretchen Rossi, and the others for late last year. This time we got to shoot the beautiful model and TV host Cindy Taylor. Hit the ‘Continue Reading’ to see some of the images from that shoot (all shot with that Samsung NX300 and a 60mm/f2.8 macro lens). Just wanted to share. Hope you enjoy. (more…)
Topanga State Park, January 1, 2014. Shot with the Samsung NX300.
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I cannot think of a better way to start off a new year! Woke up this morning to hear the great Rick Sammon and Juan Pons saying “he uploads some incredible work on the DPE community website” (at the 1:08:18 mark) on the latest episode of The Digital Photo Experience podcast. They were introducing the image above, “Family Time,” one you’re already familiar with if you follow this blog or me on Google Plus, that I uploaded to the show’s Google Plus community with hopes of being chosen as one of their critiques.
So as so many of us begin to comfortably tuck away into some corner of the world to celebrate holidays and time with our loved ones and bid farewell to one year and salutations to another, just wanted to send out a warm and happy holiday greeting to all you beautiful peoples! Thank you SO much for being a major part of one of the most encouraging years of my photographic journey. I made some of the best images I feel I’ve made to date, from the epic winter journey to Yosemite to the summer adventure to Yosemite to the 3 Utah and Colorado National Parks road trip to the San Francisco madness, the podcast photo critiques to the (more…)
