pictures to prove it™

my norcal connection Ali Sajjadi sent me a link to this. im not even sure if this should be described as light painting, but im so stoked. i wish i could read it. regardless you can be sure to find me wandering around the WDC all night for the next few months trying to create my own versions of this. these guys are inspiring. get stoked, get out the tripod, and get out the glo sticks and flashlights. it’s on.

During a visit to see my friends at the Discovery Channel last week i got into a discussion with Jenny Lim about stop motion multimedia (which i love by the way). She and Andy Cutraro pulled together a cool piece for the show Dirty Jobs (which i’ll post a link to as soon as they post it).

Andy has been doing some of these lately. i started doing them in 2003 when i did an unfinished music video (with Stephen Guidry) for the song “Not These Homes” by Decahedron. since then ive been making time lapse and stop motion films about once a month. Jenny made me realize the potential of this sort of work. until now i had only done it for myself, because i loved it.

so with all of this on my mind, i wanted to share with you what i think is one of the greatest uses of stop motion.

FOOD FIGHT!!!

maybe both. but who cares?

im not sure how i even wound up stumbling on to it, but about a minute in, this video gets good.

SoCal wedding photographer Mike Larson talks about a tossing his gear around, having fun and really being involved in the weddings of his subjects. maybe it’s just a blatant marketing technique, but i like it and i don’t know him, but i like this guy. and when the photo works it is stellar.
im sure at some point im going to run into this dude and exchange hi fives.

that’s me on the left.
the short version is, i went to california to take a road trip with my good friends william chesser and travis rust. along the way we went to see my homie peter harper (who is one of the coolest cats you could ever hope to meet). i had been telling him i needed him to make a life-sized bronze sculpture of my head that i could wear as a necklace. when i arrived and was explaining it to peter he said “we can do it, but you can’t carry that much bronze around your neck.” i disagreed and picked up a head sized piece of bronze in his shop. it was at that moment that i realized my idea might not work. not one to be deterred peter said “lets do your face, like a mask.” i said “ok lets do that.” then i made william go first (that’s him on the right). he lost some hair, but survived, so then i i let him make a mold of my face.

i knew peter would come up with something good. i’ll be excited to see this in bronze (right now it is a resin mask). he has just gotten started, now the silly plan has become an incredible project. the collection will be inspiring when he is done. im stoked he has grown this into something so amazing. im really honored to be included in anything he does. besides being a visionary, he is a thoughtful, inspiring and genuine guy.
he created an Art Barter to give people who couldn’t necessarily afford his art a chance, once a month to trade one of his Mary series. brilliance and generosity.

drop him an email, send him a postcard, send him links to your art. you’ll be a better person if you get to know this guy.

also im buying dinner to the next person i see wearing this.

im sure it is only because of Photokina, but im swamped by the news of all of the new gear hitting the scene. this morning the NEW lens baby caught my eye. i’ve been a critic of theirs for awhile, but you can be sure i’ll be buying the Composer but you’ll probably only see the pics i make with it here on my blog.

the Lensbaby site says “With the Composer, Lensbaby introduces a completely new lens, based on a ball and socket configuration that delivers smooth selective focus photography with unparalleled ease. The new Composer retains its position after being bent and is easy to use even with one hand. Photographers no longer have to squeeze the lens to focus, but can simply tilt the lens to a desired angle and then focus with a traditional barrel focusing ring. The Composer stays in the desired bent position without requiring a locking mechanism and features the new Lensbaby Optic Swap System.

The Composer features a unique manual focus design which requires more rotation to move the optic as you approach infinity. This makes it easier to focus on objects at intermediate and distant depths than regular manual focus lenses”

they’ve got a ton of new accessories too including interchangeable optics and what they call a creative aperture kit. this “you can custom cut your aperture disks into any aperture shape you want. Out of focus specular highlights (bright points of light) in your photos take on the shape of the hole in your aperture disk”.
you wont find those in my bag, but i bet it isnt long before someone winds up cutting out the virgin mary in their aperture disk. im sure we will see the results in the Weekly World News and on flickr.

and today’s other notable was that Apple just made Adobe CS4 available for preorder. you can also go to the Adobe site and sign up to be notified when the beta version of the CS4s (like Photoshop for instance) will be available.

i just noticed that Vince Laforet posted the film he made with the 5d mkII and in my humble opinion it looks amazing. he has a lot of skills and he had help from champs Yoni Brook and Andre Costantini (plus a handful of others) so check it out and be so stoked.

they’ve got some behind the scenes footage too. now how long until i can buy this thing?

Photokina (as always)is the bearer of loads of good news. today Leica announced the S2.

Engadget reports — Leica’s making some pretty remarkably bold statements about its new S-      system. The first device to take advantage is the 37-frickin’-megapixel S2, which sits between Canon’s EOS 5D and EOS 1Ds MkIII in terms of body size. The company designed the camera to provide “the quality of medium format and the handling and flexibility of 35mm,” and the outfit also has nine S-system lenses on tap. As for expectations? Leica says it’ll perform “twice as fast as Hasselblad H-series cameras,” and if that wasn’t straight-up enough, the firm’s David Bell proclaimed that “[Leica] thinks it has the best professional camera system in the world with this.”

more about it here and here.

Ben Lowy has been talking about this camera being released for a little while and i continued to say “that’s dumb, they wont call it that” as well as “it isnt coming out anytime soon.” now on both of those counts, i stand corrected.

The Canon EOS 5d mkII has been announced.

probably the most interesting post about it has come from Vince Laforet. he not only got his hands on it, but he managed to make something with it. you can read his post here.

then i found this video that is a nice walk though of the camera.

film is not dead.

a flickr use that goes by Dark Orange has created a frankenstein machine to make and coat his own film. i dont if or how well this will work, but im anxious to find out.

i need a studio space so i can try my hand at building one of these.
i predict that in the not to distant future, digital camera companies will lobby to outlaw film, so everyone will have to go underground to shoot it. Dark Orange will be a moonshiner for the photo community

there are a lot of copycats to Dan Hanna’s project out there and some of them are good. this one is really good.

Living My Life Faster.

i’m not sure who is the first person out there to take this approach, but i’d love to see all of them. more on JK and his project here.