photography by wasim.

Tag: Wasim Of Nazareth

We Saved Rabbits And Got Away With Kidnapping…All In A Day’s Work!

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.

Rabbit Season_Defy Agency_Wasim Muklashy Photography

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…

January 21, 2014
Shooting The Gorgeous Cindy Taylor For WhoHasItApp.com

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…)

January 14, 2014
Not A Bad First Sunset Of 2014. Happy New Year From Topanga State Park. 01.01.14

Topanga State Park, January 1, 2014. Shot with the Samsung NX300.
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January 1, 2014
Thanks To Rick Sammon & Juan Pons, The Resolution Becomes The Focus. Hello 2014!

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.

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January 1, 2014
Happy Holly Daze And All That Good Stuff!

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…)

December 23, 2013
Photography Lesson Learned – Don’t Fight It, Just Succumb To It (It’s More Rewarding)!

When you feel something, your mind and body are trying to tell you something. Listen. Don’t ignore. Today was just another reminder of that basic instinct that we so often and easily seem to lose touch with in our hyper-‘connected’ day and age. There were a few things going on that were weighing heavy a bit on my mind, and something just kept tugging at me saying, forget everything you’re doing right now and just go. Doesn’t matter where or what, just go. Get out of here.

Go!

But I had work to do, and I was on the clock, and so I kept pushing back…”No, no, you can’t just go. What are you thinking?” (more…)

December 13, 2013
Ken Block Gets Crazy With VectorMount for GoPro In Gymkhana 6

Ken_Block_Vectormount_GoPro

So I don’t know if you guys remember the company I was doing video and photo work for until early this year, VectorMount for GoPro (there’s one of my pics above that you might recognize), but all that time and effort has begun to finally pay off in immeasurable dividends, especially throughout the racing community, most evident in the Hoonigan production of Ken Block’s latest iteration of the Gymkhana series…number 6, the Ultimate Gymkhana Grid Course. If you haven’t seen this followup to the now legendary Gymkhana Five, in which he drifted through the streets of San Francisco, DO IT! In this one, Block basically drifts his souped-up Ford Fiesta through a video game obstacle course, replete with wrecking ball cranes, police-laden Segways, Lamborghinis, and shipping containers. Yeah, he’s a bit off his rocker, but that’s precisely why it’s already got 15 MILLION views in less than a month.

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The flagship VectorMount product, if haven’t checked it out, uses a wind-vane and centrifugal force to automatically turn the camera in the direction the car turns in, so you’re effectively seeing the angle of the view that the driver is seeing, versus a static mount, which, well, gives you a static shot, so you’ll just see whatever is off to the side, rather than the angle the car is heading into. Anyhow, Steve Greenthal, the owner and inventor of the VectorMount has been tweaking and adjusting and modifying and perfecting the bugger in his usual mad-scientist ways over the past 8 months and has managed to make the VectorMount into a prominent part of this Hoonigan production! I suppose I’m just a bit proud that I got to be a part of this thing from it’s infancy and was there at Formula Drift in 2012 where Ken Block and the Hoonigans crew got their first look at it. Seeing it plastered all over his latest madding production just reinforces the long way it’s come since we used them on Go-Karts with Tony Hawk and Kev Jumba less than a year ago.

Anywho, that’s it for now. Just got off the phone with Steve and saw the videos and figured I’d throw this around! Any of the shots from the roof exterior that remain focused on the course while the roof underneath it swivels left and right…that’s the VectorMount in action!

Above is Ken Block and Hoonigan’s official Gymkhana release, and below is GoPro’s cut of the same course as well as a few of Steve Greenthal’s pics of Ken Block pimpin’ one of the VectorMounts used during the Gymkhana 6 taping.

Check out more about VectorMount at www.VectorMount.com (they make holiday gift recipients love you more…).

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December 11, 2013
Ok Mirrorless, Here I Come! I’m Officially A Samsung Imagelogger!

So I’ve been curious about them for at least a year, and have been hearing more and more about them especially in the last several months, and now I finally get to experiment with the new mirrorless camera systems myself…in a very unexpected way. Samsung reached out to me to see if I was interested in joining their Samsung Imagelogger program. Basically I’d get to be one of 50 lucky buggers who are getting cameras and gear from Samsung over the next half year or so to experiment and play with and report back on and post images from.
Uhhh…YEAH!!

Needless to say, I’m pretty hyped on the opportunity to get intimate with the latest mirrorless systems and see what these things can do.

So as of Wednesday afternoon, I’ve got the first camera they’ve sent out to us in my hands, the NX300, and we just had our training session, so I preemptively apologize if my posts hit a slight overdrive. Since this is the first new camera system I’ll be using in about 2 years, as well as my first foray away from Nikon DSLRs, and, of course, my first adventure into the mirrorless space, it should be interesting to see where and what brain circuits this experience might fry or invigorate.

Anyhow, the header image above is one of the first images taken with this mini-beast, and the camera itself? Well, I must say, the brown leather color scheme is pretty shnazzy! It took me a few minutes to get acquainted with this thing (the biggest adjustment being not using a viewfinder), but once I got the hang of it, I had a blast. Anyway, only got to use it for a few hours between gigs today, but there will be much more to come soon.

If you want to follow along to all the images taken by myself and the other Imageloggers (trust me, you’ll want to follow along…The Candid Frames‘ Ibarionex Perello, The Giving Lens‘ Colby Brown, renown pro photographer Valerie Jardin, and the most unique father blogger you might ever run across, 8BitDad‘s Zach Rosenberg, are amongst the shutterbugs that’ll be contributing), check out www.DitchTheDSLR.com, where they’ve set up a crazy interactive map of the country as a home for the photos taken by the Imageloggers. It’s fresh now, but it’s gonna start filling up with eye-candy in a hurry!

Below are a selection from the first batch of images that came out of the NX300 in my hands.

Ok…let’s do this thing!

December 6, 2013
Nelson Mandela. A Eulogy.

At first it was just news – a ticker under some inconsequential sporting event on the TV above the bar as I sat with a friend, dipping pita bread in hummus and scraping at the final bits of a mound of shawarma sitting between us.
Then it was just another part of the never ending social media stream…Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter – another one of those mindless swipe up…swipe up…swipe up…

oh…stop…pretty picture.

ok…swipe up…swipe up.

Then, when I got home, when I sat down on my couch, and when I found myself suddenly and uncontrollably weeping, that’s when it became real.

He was gone.

Nelson Mandela was gone. (more…)

December 5, 2013
New Photo App, OKDOTHIS, Feeds Creative Block To The Fishes!

It happens more often than I like to admit – I want to make images, but either I’m not feeling inspired, or there’s always the lame default ‘I don’t have my camera’ excuse. But more and more lately, that hasn’t been the case as I, along with the rest of the world, always have a camera with me. In my case, it’s an iPhone, and I’ve found myself using it more and more, perhaps not for paid gigs and official shoots, but for, brace for it…FUN! So there goes that excuse. But I was still left with the ‘I’m not feeling inspired’ nonsense.
Enter OKDOTHIS.

It’s an app.

It’s barely been out for a week.

But I’ll tell you this right now – this thing is gonna be big. (more…)

November 30, 2013