BASICForm

Went on a weird group photo walk of, I don't know where the group was from or who anyone in the group was - I just sorta crashed the party, Griffith park last Sunday. The group was cool though and it was nice environment to force a bit of creativity. Here are some of the pics. If you happen to know how to contact these girls let me cause I didn't get a chance to get there email and I want to send them these photos/ say thanks for posing in old monkey cages while a bunch of rapid photographers gawked and snapped pictures for hours. blah blah blah I a friggin over bloggin. I want to get a motorcycle and side car and travel thru Europe! Yah! However, that is not going to happen so I will settle for a Guinness at lunch.

He is a bear that wears sunglasses and smokes a pipe(not pictured) - how cool!

Yo, I used this little flash component called FlipBook to create a weird 'Mad Men' advertisement on the Variety site. The component was super simple to implement and has a bunch of easily customizable settings. Check out the final product here. I am eager to use this flipBook Component to make a couple Zines in the future so look out for those.

Just finished up this weird little doodle while listening to this playlist.

Here are a couple logo ruffs that hit the cutting room floor. Never used for nothing.

The cool thing about shooting The Black Lips live performances is they barely move. Shot with a 200mm from with the entire crowd between me and the stage.

Yep. I poached this shot. Don't even know who the surfer is.

Shot Nas live. Yep!

I have been pretty stoked off my new longboard. The extra glide and float has allowed me to have fun on even the most dismal of LA days. If you are finding yourself surfing less and less with the approaching summer flatness I highly recommend you pick up a longboard blank and start sanding. Even a crude and rudimentary shaped board such mine will provide hours of surf sliding fun.

Just another cheesy graphic I created at work today in 5 mins. Kinda crazy that Nielsen is fucking over all the T.V. networks by withholding their ratings.

Woke up early this morning and played around with my projector and camera. I ended up getting some funny photos.

I love taking pictures. I hate looking at my bad pictures. Fuck it, here is to making better mistakes tomorrow.

Yes I stole that quote.

Photo retouching is an art. In both a painting and a retouching you must master your brush and learn to use it as an extension of your creative vision.

I am NOT AN ARTIST! There has always been a disconnect between what I consider my creative vision and the sloppy work that my body creates. However, like any practical activity the more you work the better and more confortable you get with that activity.

So for fun I took a horrible photo that I snapped while trying to set the exposure on one of my strobes and started tweaking it all different ways.

The images started as a very dark image (I ended up bring the power on my strobe way up for later photos to make the correction in camera), but with this photo I was forced to pull much out of the exposure in Photoshop's camera raw than I would normally ever do. I was then left with a pretty harsh and unflattering picture of my subject. The first thing I figured I would do is smooth out the face. I concentrated on blending the patchy skin, shaping the direction of the light source and minimizing the harsh light, and gave my subject a bit of a shave. I then softened the skin a bit. However I went a bit far so I tried to add a little texture back to keep things looking real. Bored with the results so far I decided to give the photo a high contrast over sharpened look. Then I burnt and dodged some key areas hoping to make the light look more realistic, draw attention to and away from certain shapes in the face and make the outline of the face pop a little more.

The resulting image was not a great success but I do feel the time playing with my tools and thinking about the different effects of my tweaks was an invaluable lesson.

I was lucky enough to shoot a couple photos of this talented model who was beautifully styled and masterfully done up with make-up this weekend. Figured I would share some photos.

I have been updating the one-a-day-photo-a-day-every-new-day blog...well everyday! Check it out! Exclamation points for no reason!!!!!!