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Rear Window, Coast Starlight

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.

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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).

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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)

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Las Vegas

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.

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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.

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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.

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Pyramid Lake

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

DUMBO Sunrise

11 Jul

DUMBO is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, it’s an acronym for “Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass”.

I shot this timelapse there:

Chicago Cloud Gate

8 Jul

Saugerties Bridge

7 Jul

Another timelapse I shot during my brief stopover in upstate New York last week:

Audi Ride Manhattan

6 Jul

About six months ago, I had a rented mini cooper for a day. When I was done using it for it’s utilitarian purpose of personal transportation, I mounted a still camera and intervalometer to it and drove it around San Francisco for a couple of hours. The resulting time lapse scene (originally shot as a test) proved popular enough that Josh and I decided that I needed to gather more moving vehicle scenes for a potential Magic Window aftermarket scene pack.

On my last day in New York City, I rented an Audi A3 and drove it around Manhattan. I tried attaching the camera to different places on the car to see what would work best. The final scene won’t make it to Magic Window for at least a few months, but in the mean time I processed the time lapse scenes out and cut them to some music in Final Cut Pro. Here’s the result:


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Brooklyn Bridge Sunrise Timelapse

5 Jul

In following with my last post, here’s a timelapse I shot on the Brooklyn Bridge that same morning:

LAX Theme Building

1 Jul

Short little timelapse I shot in Los Angeles last month:

Whiskytown Lake

15 Apr

This will be my first “What I’m up to” post.

Currently, I’m sitting on the top of a rocky bluff next to Whiskytown Lake.  It’s about an hour West of the town of Redding in Northern California.

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Here’s my “mobile office”, where I’m writing from right now:

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I shot these photos with a cool app for my iPhone called Hipstamatic.

I have a Verizon USB EVDO card, so I can essentially connect to the internet anywhere there is cell service.  It’s a bit slow out here, but it works well enough to post to the blog.  Having a computer and internet access this far into what is essentially the remote wilderness seems to be defeating the purpose a bit, but the beauty of it is that I can do my job from here.  Nothing is an escape, nothing is a vacation, but yet everything can be an escape and a vacation.

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