Obama to give $50 Billion to Photographers

Ha!

Chauncey Billups: Busy Guy

Shot Chauncey Billups of the Denver Nuggets for Outside Magazine recently. The shoot was scheduled for 1pm, and we were supposed to get an hour with him. Chauncey showed up an hour late and gave us 15 minutes, which was pretty awesome!

The shoot worked out in spite of Mr. Billups' tardiness, his trainer, a total spaz who has so much energy he has to carry a small cooler of power food with him to keep the furnace stoked, and other randoms shooting pictures over my shoulder and triggering my strobes with their point and shoot cameras.

Freemasons continued

Things have been pretty slow, so I've had lots of time to work on the Freemasonry project. The buildings are beautiful with incredible light, and the people have been friendly and helpful. It's the most fun I've had shooting in a long time.

old photos are cool

Sometimes I wish that I could transport myself back to the 50's and shoot a bunch of color film, then have it all shift colors and end up like this:

Simon Norfolk: we're fucked

Saw a really disturbing quote from Simon Norfolk on Conscientous, and the full story on The WPP site (complete with a really creepy picture of him.) Simon believes that photography as we know it is going to go away, and that photography will basically be reduced to a hobby, or a second job at best.

"So my predictions for the future? More 'name' photographers will be cashing in their reputations to teach 'masterclasses' to wealthy orthodontists."

If this were coming from someone else I'd just blow it off as more fear driven doom and gloom. But Mr. Norfolk is an insanely talented shooter who has spent a lot of time around chaos, misfortune, and destruction.

Time to go back and train to be a ceramics researcher?

Pawn Shops + 99 cent stores

Spent yesterday driving around for Pawn Shops and 99 Cent stores to shoot. I thought it would be interesting to see what kinds of things people are selling right now. The first shop I went in was pretty cool looking, but the owner was totally perplexed and kind of freaked out by what I was doing. Why would anyone want to take pictures of crap in a pawn shop? His answer was a flat no. When I asked him why not, he just looked at me until I left. Another shop was corporate, and I met with the regional manager who was super cool, but also said no way.

Then I went to another shop and didn't really like the way it looked, so I didn't even talk to the owner. But on the way back to my car I saw this:

...so I stopped to take a shot of it. It was kind of a dicey hood, and I was standing in the street. I heard a car behind me so I turned around to see a red Escalade with huge rims stop about 30 feet away. The guy in the drivers seat pointed a little red digital camera at me and took my picture. I felt like I was in an episode of The Wire. After my little photo shoot with Stringer Bell, I decided to take off.

Where did everybody go?

So I know that it's always best to look on the positive side of things, but what's going on? I was busy through December, and then things just stopped. I keep trying to pretend that everything is fine, but it's difficult when I'm still sitting here at my desk, after spending 3 weeks making phone calls and sending out promos with no results.

Everything is going to be ok.

Right?

checking in with craig cutler

I've always liked Craig Cutler's work. I remember seeing his still lifes and landscapes in the award books when I was still assisting, and wanting to shoot like him. I checked out his site today to see some new work, and found some cool portraits from Texas that incorporate three views: front, left, and right. Kind of cool to think about scouting for these kind of shots.

I also saw some of his travel shots from Tokyo and Paris, which seemed like they were missing something. I had a similar experience in both those cities too -- I spent many days walking around with my camera, but couldn't really find anything that worked when I looked through the viewfinder. To this day I have no idea why, especially because I found both cities to be incredibly interesting and beautiful in their own ways.