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6
Sep
Remember how I mentioned in my last post that the Magic Window dev team typically goes to Burning Man every year?
And that instead of going, we holed up in Tahoe to get work done?
Well, we wound up going to Black Rock City anyway.
Sort of.
Josh and Moshen have this awesome friend Mike, who owns a 6-seater single-engine airplane:
Josh and Moshen had planned doing a fly-over of Black Rock City, and at the 11th hour, the invitation was extended to me. Moshen drove us to Minden, a tiny town in Nevada near Tahoe, and there we met up with Mike and Leslie.
Here’s Josh and I looking horribly scruffy. I also look somewhat nonplussed, but the A/C hadn’t kicked in yet, and Nevada is an uncomfortably warm place in the winter, and extra-uncomfortable at the tail end of summer.
After fueling up and going through customary pre-flight safety rituals, we took off on a 40 minute flight to Black Rock Desert.
Here’s Pyramid Lake from the air. Our camping spot from my previous post is just beyond the furthest-visible outcropping on the left edge of the lake:
More photos after the jump…
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1
Sep
For the last week, I’ve been holed up in a cabin in Tahoe with Josh Michaels, Michael Ang, and Moshen Chan. They’ve dubbed it “Coding Man”, as the three of them typically go to Burning Man every year but decided to skip it this year to hole up in the Sierra Nevadas and crank out code.
We’ve done a little bit of hiking, and I’ve shot a few timelapses up here, but for me, it’s been a break from traveling so that I can sit down and focus on work I need to get done at the computer. It’s work I can do anywhere, but this is a beautiful place, and it’ll do just fine.
Josh and Mang have been working on getting the new versions of Magic Window for the Mac and iPad/iPhone out, while Moshen works on his app (and Magic Window’s sister app), Living Earth. Let me tell you, it’s going to be a killer update. I’ve been going through all the content I’ve shot in the last five months (I’ve shot almost 100 timelapses) and preparing 20 new scenes for the new updates. Once this is done, I can start over again gathering even more content for the next updates.
The only irony in the situation is watching three programmers who make their living writing relaxation apps get frustrated and swear at their computers and iPads every half hour or so, while completely surrounded by the type of “relaxing” aspirational lifestyle we sell to our customers.
C’est la vie.
26
Aug
Of all my friends I get to see on my travels, I’ve seen my friend Roxy in more cities than anyone else — of course, not counting various people I’ve been traveling with. She isn’t living the nomad life the way I have, but she recently moved from New York City to San Francisco to go to law school, with a stop in Los Angeles over the summer. Somehow, our travel schedules have randomly synced, and I’ve met up with her in all three cities.
A couple of weeks ago, she asked me if I wouldn’t mind taking photos of her for her body-positive/alternative-style fashion blog. Since I’ve been almost entirely shooting timelapses lately, I was excited about getting back into the habit of shooting portraits. All of my studio lighting gear is temporarily living with another photographer in Los Angeles while I travel, so the added challenge of being forced to shoot with only available light (and an underpowered hot-shoe flash) made it that much more interesting.
Armed with only a Canon 580EX and a 4′ by 4′ sheet of white foam core for a bounce, we set off to walk around the Mission and Potrero Hill.
She’s posted her favorites here. My favorites continue below:
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20
Aug
Last week Josh and I drove from Portland, Oregon down to San Francisco, back along the coast route. The plan was to put together a whole Magic Window pack in two days, beating our record of shooting the whole Las Vegas pack in four. (And before that, the New York City pack in five).
We got some great content. I’d have loved to spend more time shooting more sunset and sunrise scenes, but I’m really thrilled with what we got.
Here’s frames from the rest of the take:
16
Aug
Lots of people have been forwarding me lots of links to blogs and news articles over the last few days.
Police Chief Jim McDonnell, of the Long Beach Police Department has recently admitted to having a policy of detaining photographers taking pictures that have “no apparent esthetic value”. The definition seems to include most “industrial areas” and excludes “things tourists often take photos of”.
I’m no stranger to this policy — although this is the first time it’s been publicly acknowledged — as I’ve been stopped over a dozen times while shooting in that area. I’ve also been detained, questioned, interrogated, yelled at, checked for warrants, searched, frisked for weapons, and been visited at my home by FBI agents.
All for going off of the beaten path. If I took photos of the same things everyone ELSE was taking photos of, and in the same way from the same places, I wouldn’t have anything worth looking at, much less selling.
So far I’ve never been arrested in my life.
But then again, I’m not doing anything illegal.
My friends will tell you that I even drive the speed limit (although I’ve been known to jaywalk).
Anywho, as a law-abiding citizen and full-time professional photographer, I have a tendency to shoot gritty industrial locations. Places that are made by man and are designed to be functional and efficient, and without any architectural sense. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I tend to think that oil refineries, logistics hubs, rail yards, and other typically-unseen utilitarian infrastructure has a neat esthetic.
I thought I’d include some photos I’ve shot in the Long Beach + Port of Los Angeles area over the last few years.
After all, this one made the cover of Science Magazine two years ago:
And this one was the photo of the day on Bing’s homepage back in May:
Many of the photos I shoot in the port are available on Getty Images and iStockPhoto. I’m still not sure if they have esthetic value or not, but they certainly get a lot of sales.
I might actually be overdue for a visit to Long Beach. Hey LBPD: cut that crap out.
A few more photographers who have fantastic industrial photos from the area are David Sommars, Shane Quentin, and Thomas Hawk.
After the jump, a few more photos from the industrial part of the Long Beach area I’ve shot in the last couple of years.
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4
Aug
I’ve been spending some time on the train going through old photos I haven’t touched since I shot them, getting caught up. The oldest unedited sets are almost 8 months old at this point, so while I complain that I spend the majority of my 5D shutter actuations shooting timelapses and not individual stills, realistically I should go through old stuff more often and edit THAT.
No, I still need to shoot more stuff, but here are some photos I’d initially looked over, from the tarmac at Charlotte Airport:
 
3
Aug
At this very moment, I’m riding Amtrak’s Coast Starlight from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon. There isn’t much to do on a 30-hour train ride (except diligently catch up on work, of course), so armed with my trusty Superclamp, I mounted a 5D to the rear window of the last car on the train.
This is one of the more scenic passenger rail routes you can take in the United States, and the only one that literally both winds it’s way along the beaches of Southern California and winds it’s way up through the Cascade Mountains of Oregon and Washington. (Yes, it does do quite a lot of winding. I can drive the same distance in half the time, but honestly, this is a much more comfortable and far more productive way to travel).
You know what they say. The last car has the second-best view on the whole train. (The first, of course, being from the locomotive)
3
Aug
I left Las Vegas last week… I’ve actually been in Los Angeles catching up on work. I’ve been neglecting my blog and so I need to get caught back up.
   
All of these are frames from timelapses that will eventually be in a future Magic Window update. I haven’t been shooting many individual photos, just a few thousand at a time. I need to get back in the habit of shooting stills during my travels as well.
  
The trip culminated in a 17-hour stretch of shooting, starting with the view from the hills at the beginning of the post, moving to shooting on the strip all night (above), and ending in shooting the sunrise at the Hoover Dam.
The last shoot of the trip was shooting the timelapse below from a rooftop bar, while sipping $16 cocktails. Not a bad way to end a super-busy trip to Vegas.
23
Jul
Back in April, it had been pretty widely reported that the iPhone was tracking it’s own movements. A log was kept of the GPS coordinate of every cell tower that the phone had ever connected to, for some reason.
Apple fixed this “bug” in a new update of iOS that’s been around awhile, but I haven’t bothered to update until now. I’ve been on the road since April, and I haven’t wanted to use precious bandwidth downloading a 600MB+ iPhone update.
Also being that I’ve been traveling a lot, I figured that my tracking log would actually be pretty interesting. I ran the iPhoneTracker application, and came up with this map that shows my travels since I bought my iPhone 4 a little over a year ago:
It’s creepily accurate… most of my time was spent in LA, San Francisco, or New York, with frequent stops in Portland, Seattle, Austin, and Chicago. It also shows the routes of several long-distance Amtrak routes (Coast Starlight, Cascades, Southwest Chief, Acela/Northwest Corridor, Ethan Allen Express, and Capitol Limited for those curious), and a half-dozen or so various road trips.
Pretty cool.
20
Jul
Alma Desnuda left me in Reno yesterday morning and continued back to the San Francisco bay area. Here, I met up with Josh, the developer of Magic Window, who had come up this way from San Francisco after raiding my storage closet for me and grabbing my camping gear. From Reno, we set off to Pyramid Lake, about an hour North of town.
Josh had always imagined shooting a Magic Window timelapse scene of the same view as the default iPad wallpaper by Richard Misrach.
Armed with a GPS coordinate and Google Maps’ satellite view, we found the spot, set up camp, and waited until sunrise.
The result was epic.
I decided to go with a much wider angle and different framing than the original shot… besides the fact that I don’t like the idea of blatantly ripping off another artists’ work, the wider angle I feel shows the whole Northern end of the lake, which is a gorgeous scene in it’s own right. Still, if you compare the ridge lines, it’s the exact same mountain range, which I think is a very cool reinterpretation.
I’ll put a video together in the next few days and post it, but I’m super-backlogged with projects at the moment and I’m trying to bang out as much work from a casino bar in Reno while I have such modern amenities as electricity and quasi-reliable cell phone service, which have been sorely lacking over the last month.
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