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Things You Should Know

I was down at California Street the other night to capture a few images of Malibu Surfer Brooke Carlson, the newest member of “Team Betty” for my wife’s company Bettybelts, when I saw someone headed into the water with what looked like a dive housing and a surfboard. It cracked me up. We call that sort of work where you ride and shoot or film another surfer: “board to board” work. It is tricky at best and amazingly difficult at worst. This image is the guy shooting. Again, hard to do. The lead image in this article is a shot

Samsung NX1: Modus Augmentation

Long time friend, and sage photo editor Jeff Divine, once put this question to me after pouring over a seasonal submission of imagery. Pages of 35 MM slides encased in Vis a File plastic sleeves, were stacked on his light table. “Don’t you ever shoot anything besides golden hour?” “Not if I can help it, Jeff.” (He looked at me quizicaly) The edit session gave me a reason and motivation to examine my method of operation in creation of my work. (Good editors are like that) Eventually this led to a higher (and narrower) degree of focus. That modus, which

Running and Gunning

Whew, just off a series of e mails with Lorenzo De Stefano, who is Director of the film Hearing is Believing which I am the Director of Cinematography on. The crew will be down at the Blue Whale in LA filming a performance by Rachel and the remarkable Taylor Eigsti for the project Thursday night. I on the other hand, will be on Bali working on some development projects for my wife’s company, and meeting up with a couple film makers there to possibly create something rather exotic. Life is hectic in a good way. This week saw a fantastic

Relevance

Sean Tully dropped me a note the other day, which had me scrambling to find an image file we created awhile back. I could not locate the high res finals, only some low res jpegs. So I referred to the original shot file where the camera raws reside, and had a little look. What I found was a slew of work we had not really put out into editorial at that time. I think maybe two or three from this series had become magazine covers, but the rest, had just not been relevant as far as I could tell. But

The Value of Story: Mavericks

I am just back from witnessing the spectacle which is the Mavericks Invitational big wave event at Pillar Point, Half Moon Bay, Ca. There are a huge number of stories surrounding this event, and I must select a few, and share those in Editorial. I worked this event with Deniece Watkins Smith who is a budding Photographer, sage Silicon Valley Real Estate Agent and wife to Cary Smith of the Pillar Point Harbor Patrol. We shot the event together. It was a lot of fun, challenge, and rich with story! Here is a great piece on the value of Story.

Risk Perception

The image above was shot during the 2010 Maverick’s Challenge where I worked as support and Photographer for K38 Rescue, who ran Event Ocean Safety and in process was in charge of training a cadre of local watermen to be a Rescue team. That local team was headed up by Vince Broglio. It was a big and perfect day. Possibly the biggest, best surf, ever paddled into for a competitive event. The quote is something Shawn said in one of our project groups this week. And I immediately turned it into an Oceanlovers Blue Note. Blue Notes are wisdom gleaned

Awards and Praise

The above image was shot a short while ago. For me it is sort of the peak of what is possible with modern DSLR imaging. The detail and various aspects which make an incredibly complex subject rendered to perfection are all there. This is why I am not posting the two images which are being discussed below, in a pasted in conversation with one of my editors at Corbis. My work evolves. It is far better than ever before. If that process was not building in such a way, I would stop. But many who die, who have reached bottom

Surf Photography and the Super Telephoto

A few of us have been discussing the declining economic validity of Surf Photography and ensuing demise in editorial based content for awhile now. Recently, changes to baggage rates by air carriers have added yet another challenge to those Photographers and Cinematographers whose content topics require super telephotos in the attainment of the rather high bar required in action sports imaging. The image above was shot with the Canon 5DM2 and the 600F4 IS lens with 1.4x v2 teleconverter on a monopod. Add up the original equipment cost of these items (all recently serviced by CPS BTW) and you come

Mothering

It is Mother’s Day. Yesterday I wandered out to create an image that would be illustrative, which I could use as a thank you note through our Ocean Lovers venture site. That image is above. I thought about it prior to building it, and all through the process from design, to copy writing, finalizing, and publishing. Sunset colors. White sage buds. The blossoms unified by the setting sun. An eternal message embedded within the symbology of the compositional elements. Earth, sky, eternity. I had spoken to my friend and colleague West Cook earlier. He was at his post running the

The High Value in Story

All of us as creatives, are storytellers. That is worth something. So the integrity, skill and life experience of a creator, matters very much. We function within a socio-economic system that is quite leery of the increasingly open source access to “their market”. In a conversation with two sage colleagues in Photography today, I had to point out something. Basically it was this. Just because surf publishing has deigned to not let you play, does not mean your voice is not valid. In fact, it is the opposite. Established fiscal entities do not necessarily WANT the broad market to know

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