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Container Shipping

16 Sep

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I spent some time in the Port of Los Angeles recently shooting shipping containers.

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These giant boxes are fascinating, they get loaded up at the manufacturer and can be carried by truck, boat, or train anywhere in the world, and only need to be unpacked at their final destination.

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The Port of Los Angeles is the largest container port in North America and handles tens of thousands of these containers daily.

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After coming off of a ship, they are put on trucks for local delivery, or put on trains and shipped by land anywhere in North America.

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California Timelapse Compilation

4 Sep

 California is the most populated state in the United States, and the third largest. It’s almost double the size of the United Kingdom and slightly larger than Japan. If it was it’s own independent country (as it was briefly for a few weeks in 1846), it would have the 8th largest economy in the world by GDP.

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It contains the highest summit and the lowest desert in the Continental United States (and the second-lowest point in the world), both of which are in the same county.

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It’s most known for movies, technology, wine, and national parks, but also grows more than a third of the vegetables consumed in the US, two-thirds of the fruits and nuts, and an unknown but presumably huge percentage of marijuana.

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It contains every major climatological biome except tundra. More important than those facts, to me, is that I was born and spent most of my life here.

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My goal was to cram all of the visually stunning things about the entire state, from coastline to mountains to deserts, from cities to wilderness and national parks, into four minutes. I intended to use as a pitch for work from the California Board of Tourism, but now I’m sharing it publicly.

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The average clip took 1-3 hours to film and another 3-10 hours to edit. Several cuts are from clips more than 24 hours long. I shot 423 clips over four years to make this, but the majority of the 67 clips ultimately used were shot in the last 12 months.

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The music is “Intense Rocks” by Sebastian Watzinger, licensed from Audiosocket.

Most of the individual clips are available for license via Getty Images, Dissolve, or directly. Many of them feature in the Magic Window timelapse screensaver for Mac.

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Paris When it Drizzles

1 Sep

At the end of 2013, I’d been living with my now-wife’s family in Yorkshire, England. With my 30th birthday quickly approaching in January, she asked me what I wanted to do for the occasion. “I want to have sushi for dinner”, I had decided. I’ve done this every year on my birthday since I was a kid. With there not being very many options for Japanese food in Northern England, our plans evolved to the point where we’d decided to spend a week in Paris. I took all the camera gear the Eurostar would allow me to cram on board (the timelapse dolly kept in a ski bag, as skis travel for free), and so spent the week filming time lapses in Paris’ rainy January weather.

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After a few days of carrying camera gear around in the rain, Lizzy asked me “Do you really want to spend your whole birthday trip filming stuff?” I paused, thought about this question for a second, and replied “Yes. Yes I do,” before clamping my 6D to a metal guard rail on the roof of Printemps.

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And yes, we did eat sushi on my birthday.

All but a few of these clips were shot in one week in January of 2014. A small handful were shot on a previous trip to Paris in October of 2012.

Music: “Wreck Beach” by Sean Bayntun
soundcloud.com/sean-bayntun

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Erin Gunn and Jo Celso for Wolfpack Hustle

21 Aug

I had the pleasure of photographing Jo Celso and Erin Gunn, the two fastest women on fixed-gear bicycles — possibly in the world — for Wolfpack Hustle last week. Shot with two 2400 watt Profoto heads in the middle of a Downtown street on Sunday morning. No retouching.

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Timelapse London

5 Nov

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I just spent the last week at iStockalypse London learning from fellow iStock and Getty Images staff and contributors. In between seminars, lectures, and drinking, I managed to squeeze in two days of lugging two cameras and a motion control dolly through the tube to capture the patterns and pulses of human and vehicular traffic in the city.

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After letting my body recover for a few days, I processed the scenes I shot, and edited together this little video. Have a look, and let me know what you think!

Golden Gate Bridge

8 Jul

This is a still frame of a vertical time-lapse I shot last week in San Francisco. The final product will be part of a physical digital installation in San Francisco’s SOMA district. I’ll share more when the project launches!

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Frankfurt Flughafen (Airport)

25 Apr

I recently had a short layover in Frankfurt, and wandered around and took a few photos while I was waiting for my flight back to the United States.

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At one point, I hung out and waited for other travelers to walk past this sign, which I thought was visually intriguing.

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I don’t have much to add to this post, but I just found the airport to be one of the more photogenic airports I’ve had the opportunity to travel through.

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Also, despite it being a new and modern airport, they still have the analog flippy departure boards, which are really cool to watch update:

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StoopidTall, the tallest bicycle in Los Angeles

22 Apr

This past Sunday, I joined a quarter of a million other Los Angeles residents for CicLAvia, and rode my bicycle with a handful of friends from where I live in Downtown out to Venice Beach. CicLAvia is pretty well covered around the internet, so I won’t elaborate too much, other than: it was awesome, if a little too popular for it’s own good, and definitely needs to happen more often and run later.

When I got to Venice, I met up with several other friends, including my good friend, colleague, and extremely taleted cinematographer Richie Trimble. Riche had, only the day before, completed building a new bicycle from scratch, albeit one that was 14.5 feet (4.5 meters) tall.

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Note that the other two bicycles behind Richie are other “tall bikes”, albeit ones of standard size made from two bicycle frames welded together.

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I can’t imagine it would be possible to build a bicycle any taller and still ride it. As we rode around Venice and Marina Del Rey, Richie was constantly ducking under bridges and power lines only a few inches over his head.

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At some points, other riders would ride ahead and clear pedestrians and vehicles out of the way to make a path, so Richie could ride under parts of obstacles that had more clearance.

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I’m sure you’re thinking “how does he get off?” “How does he stop?”. These are all very good and valid questions, so I will direct you to this very fine video, shot by Richie himself from the GoPro strapped to his chest. If you think it’s scary to see photos *of* the bicycle being ridden, you should see the view from the driver’s seat from the man himself:

Tahoe Blue

17 Apr

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A few weeks ago, Josh and I shipped Tahoe Blue, basically a Lake Tahoe version of Magic Window, which is a live desktop and screensaver for Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Android.

Our timelapse demo video has been making the rounds today (thanks LaughingSquid and San Francisco Chronicle!), and I realized I never posted it on my own blog. So here’s the video:

Editing was done by Josh, and the music is Justin Lassen.

For those who have been following this blog for awhile (basically four of you according to my web statistics. Hi mom!), you may remember this post from 2011, where I chronicled locking ourselves in a cabin to write code and get our shit together. We shot about 20% of that video on that trip, so I thought I’d include some behind-the-scenes photos of the project.

All the equipment used to shoot it:

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Josh working away on the software-side of things:

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The camera running all-the-while:

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“That’s a nice view”:

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Sunset at Sand Harbor:

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View from a highway turnout we found on the Southern Nevada side:

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Moonset from Sand Harbor:

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Ken Hill

11 Apr

I did a photoshoot with the amazingly talented Kenneth Hill several months ago at my studio in Los Angeles. I had some electricians in at the time doing some work that took a whole lot longer than I expected, so we didn’t wind up using the studio part at all.

This was shot on the building’s fire escape:

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And a few in my living room:

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And then a few on the balcony, in front of a typical, bright Los Angeles sunset:

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That final image was picked by one of my editors and appeared on iStockphoto’s homepage for a few months after that:

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Thanks Ken! Let’s do it again!