May 26th, 2008
It’s Monday, May 26th and we just got back from a great concert. The show consisted of two amazing bands Death Cab for Cutie and Tegan & Sara. Both were very good live but were rushed by the Provo 10 P.M. curfew. One of the bands was not able to play due to technical difficulties that left us in waiting for a little over two hours. It was definitely worth the wait though.
Here are a snapshots from a friends camera of Death Cab from the concert. I also included a couple strobist photos from the same night.




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May 16th, 2008
Such a sunny bright morning so far, hopefully it stays this way. I have a few photos from these past two weeks. The first set is from Kerry Park. I was there last night to try to capture the sunset. I took a few of the pictures with the 70-200mm as well as the 17-40mm. The first panorama was taken with the 17-40, 3-stop GND Filter attached via a Cokin Holder. View Large for detail.

This photo will be available for prints on Imagekind tomorrow (5/17/08). If you would like prints of any other photo, please feel free to contact me.



Here is the second set of photos from last week.

Can you guess where these portraits were taken?




There were lots of people up there, mostly tourists and people shooting photos. One of which that I met was, Eric. His photostream is here: flickr.com/photos/seattleclick/. His photos of the sunset came out awesome as well.
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May 5th, 2008
This last week has been overly hectic—new projects and personal design adventures. It all has me wondering when the week begins and ends. One of the biggest problems with freelancing is that it takes up a lot of your time if you’re not careful and firm with your hours. Speaking of which, I read a short article tonight on freelance and noticed a quote in it that I liked. The article is at Digital Dreamer towards the bottom of the page.
Moving on…A few days ago a friend Josh and myself went down to the studio for some recording stuff and snagged a few portraits on the green screen. We went out again today up to the Space Needle. I have to say, even though I find myself scared of dangling over the edge of giant drops, I didn’t have a problem hanging over the fencing trying to snap a shot of downtown.

South of Puget Sound/Seattle was hazy. Mount Rainier was visible but not by much.






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April 23rd, 2008
There originally were going to be a few posts in a row with a couple different graphics, but I’ve narrowed it down into this one. Up first is a flyer done for a show in Philadelphia, PA. The show is for Marcus Eaton and his band. The show will be happening Wednesday, April, 23 (tomorrow). If you’re in the area check it out.

It looks as if more of this stuff will be coming soon as well as plenty more photos. I just purchased a new set of gadgets that I’ll blog about when I get them in the mail. For now I’ll leave it up in the air as to what it is.
Second on my list of things to blog about, are a few of the stock photos from the Sunday walk at the Olympic Sculpture park with Dave. Apparently both of us had stock photos in mind when we went out shooting. We both returned with very similar shots. Here are some of them. There are more on flickr that you can view:




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April 10th, 2008
This is a great week to do a photo blog. There has been nothing but camera talk all week between myself and friends. I believe it was Monday night and two of my friends decided to head out to try to get some portraits. They asked if I would come along to show them some flash work–so I did. After a few suggestions, I saw a shot that I wanted to do. Heres the shot below:

It only took a few minutes to get the shot. The trick to this photo was using long exposure and an external flash (Canon 430ex). I set the camera at four seconds with an f-stop of 8. This gave me enough time to run to the left of the camera and pop off some light. I only flashed once to give the model some definition but was careful to keep from ghosting. Simple enough? I think so.
The next series of photos that I’m posting are taken on slide film and have been in my film camera for a while now. By shooting with slide film and then cross processing, you get strangely over-saturated colors and color casts. You can vary the exposure + color by shooting 1 or 2 stops over exposed–raising your ISO/ASA also does a similar effect.













If you’d like to try cross processing, I’d recommend going to a Walmart or something very similar. They do a good job at processing it, and its cheap. I would not recommend going to RiteAid. They have a different setup there and sometimes their machines can’t read the film. I had a slight problem with them this time and had to take my film to another place to get prints from the negatives.
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April 5th, 2008
ColorSync is a great thing to have built into an OS. The first time that I ever tried to calibrate my monitors using this App, I failed miserably and had to borrow an Eye-One system from Dave. I definitely succeeded this time around and have a few charts to show the difference.

Take note that there is a large difference in brightness/contrast of objects on white backgrounds. The monitor had a tendency to over comphensate the brightness and would result in blow outs. I noticed this largely when opening Safari or Firefox.

Part of the reason that these monitors were largely off calibre was because of my recent reformat of the Mac Pro Quad workstation. Things had been running a little slow and the main drive was getting congested. There is bound to be a full network format here in the next week as well as the addition of a Time Capsule. It never hurts to make sure all machines are up-to-date and running full speed.
If you’re interested in using this method of Calibration, just remember these few things:
1. Make sure you sit back at least 2.5-3 feet from your monitor (depending on how large it is).
2. Set your Brightness control to 100%.
3. It won’t be a perfect calibration. I’d still recommend getting a Calibration device such as EyeOne.
EyeOne can be purchased online at X-Rite.
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April 1st, 2008
Today was the day of the huge Pillow Fight. All went well down there, minus the Seattle police patrolling the area. That certainly made heads turn and attracted people down into the area.
The whole purpose of this improv project was to get people to laugh and possibly spark interest to do more projects/events. I don’t have much else to say about this except that the police and the market maintenance workers were not pleased. If you’ve ever been in a pillow fight, you know that the feathers stick to everything–there were feathers everywhere in the street and on people.










Here is the link to the Seattle P.I.’s photographers shots–some great ones as well.
We actually got some coverage in The Stranger-a Seattle Newspaper-for an HD video that friend Arzhang took at the Pillow Fight. I had a few repetitive words and a mini interview with a police officer–very funny.
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March 28th, 2008
Early this week I took a trip to Portland, OR. I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed Portland until I came back today. Hopefully soon there will be another trip down there and I’ll take the camera with. I have been waiting a few days to blog a poster/flyer that I was asked to make for an Art Show at Autumn Garage in Salt Lake City. The show will feature work from Dave Kamp, Brett Allen and my good friend Ian Matteson. I will include the information below if you’re interested in attending the show.

As of recent, I’ve been asked how many layers go into making a piece like this. My answer is simple—as many as it takes! Of course, the more layers, the larger the file size. For example, this file has around 90 layers being used. In return the file size is about 618MB—giant. Some of which were very small, but still served a purpose. Here is a screen shot of the layers panel. Of course I’ve made the image smaller and moved it horizontal so you won’t have to scroll 6,000px down.

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March 26th, 2008
These past couple weeks have been fairly busy–from moving into a new building to trying to navigate Ikea’s crazy store. I spent a solid two hours in the store just looking at different things. I ended up getting quite a few things from the store in Renton, WA. For anyone who hasn’t assembled Ikea furniture, its a blast and very fun to do. Everything is pre-drilled and fits perfectly. The only problem I had was that I didn’t start out by reading the directions. It made things difficult so I’d suggest reading them first or at least as you go along.
After putting together two tables, I decided to make a time lapse video of a dresser being built. I used iMovie so of course the quality is low and only a few cuts were made but here it is.
Music by Ferry Corsten – Into the Dark.
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March 20th, 2008
Awesome! So psyched, my website has been down for a handful of days due to a horrible domain host–Joker.com. If you can avoid it, don’t register with these guys. They will gladly host your domain, but if you need to change your contacts, email or even have a small customer service problem they won’t respond back. I’d recommend going with Dreamhost; much more reliable and willing to help you out with problems.
A few weeks ago Universal was filming a few blocks down from where I live (Seattle, WA). I headed down there with the camera but nothing was happening. After a few minutes, the camera crew and whole set rolls up and sets up nearly on my lap. I took the opportunity to shoot a couple hundred photos just for good measure.
The film is titled ‘Traveling’ and is about a man whose book turns him into a best-selling self-help guru. On a business trip to Seattle, he meets a woman (Jennifer Aniston) who attends one of his seminars. The man (Eckhart) learns that he is not truly over his wife’s passing. It should be an interesting movie for sure. Here are a few of the shots.






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March 6th, 2008



On other news, my 50mm f/1.4 USM is being repaired at Canon in Irvine, CA. I lent the lens out and it ended up getting in an accident. Everything should be fine with it and I’ll have it back in about 2 weeks. Speaking of technology, I’m looking at getting a Time Capsule from Apple. I’m also trying to find out more information on the Time Capsule w/built in 802.11n Base Station.
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February 27th, 2008
Today was an alright day. Things have been slowly getting better around here–been feeling slightly more motivated to get out and do things around downtown. Today started off with a small walk down to Pioneer Square where Steve Arnston (Ai Professor)** played his concertina.

**Pictured is Steve Arnston**
After I was done shooting, a friend and myself headed back towards home to upload photos. I snagged another friend to head up towards Queen anne to a bicycle shop.
I had to return a BMX tube to a bike shop because they were the incorrect size. The bike mechanic at the strop proceeded to tell me that I was putting my tube in wrong at the shop–I’ve been riding bikes for almost 10 years! Even so, you can’t go wrong in putting a tube in a tire except pinch flats. The most annoying part of the whole thing is that it’s the only bike shop that carries any BMX accessories in all of downtown Seattle.
Anyways, now that the ranting is done, here are a few of tonight’s sunset images. Some of these will be available at my Imagekind.com account so if you want a print, you can order from there =).









**Pictured is Shandon Dyksterhouse**
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February 22nd, 2008
These last two weeks have been spent trying to recover from two wrecks on the bicycle and getting well from what might have been the flu. I spent some of that time going looking at apartments and reading articles. I was skimming through Digg yesterday and couldn’t help but notice a series of links about inspiring things. This particular one was about the worlds most inspiring and creative hotel rooms. I would love to stay in one of those and have dreams. I think I’d be having creative nightmares.


**Photos from Digg Article
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February 19th, 2008
This graphic was made as a piece just for display. I may decide to do posters on these if anyone if interested.
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