Red Bull Music Academy: Decibel Festival

I know this didn't just happen yesterday, but I still wanted to make a post about it... even if it is a couple weeks late. I just got done shooting the Seattle Decibel Festival at Neumos for Red Bull Seattle and thought I'd post a few of my favorite shots from the night.

Yeah, I know music isn't my "normal thing", but who cares?!?! Photography is photography after all. And on top of that, when we step outside of our comfort zone, we sometimes can experience the greatest growth.

That said, not being used to lighting a nightclub for a photoshoot, I was running around Neumos for the first half of the evening like a chicken with my head cut off. Mis-firing poketwizards and an ever changing assortment of strobes and LED lights screwing with my exposure made this a huge challenge. But the challenge made this fun for me. If you walked into every shoot and knew exactly how EVERYTHING was going to go, it'd get boring really quick.

A huge thanks to the folks at Red Bull for giving me the chance to shoot this event. And also, a big shout out to the artists: Schlomo, Teebs, Headhunter, Mount Kimbie, and Modeselektor... what an awesome show... my ears are still ringing.

While I Was Away

I'm usually the biggest advocate for maintaining a blog with constant updates. However, I just looked at my blog the other day and realized that I've been doing a MISERABLE job of maintaining mine. But, in my defense, hopefully you'll all agree that I had a good reason.

That's right, for those of you who didn't get your invite, I just got married to my beautiful bride Karlee at the beginning of the month in Kauai. With all of the logistics of planning a wedding, unfortunately the timely exercise of blogging had to fall by the wayside. But fear not, I'm back in the saddle again. New blog posts are already slated out as I try and catch up with about a months worth of back-logged ideas. Thanks for sticking in there with me. More to come soon.

Thanks!

Behind the Scenes: Matchstick Productions shoot

Quick blog post for ya. This coming Friday marks the world premiere of Matchstick Production's new ski movie, The Way I See It. I was fortunate enough to work with the MSP crew on a couple of their shoots this past winter during the filming of the movie.

With the premiere right around the corner, I've been busy working to help them promote the release. Along those lines, we've put up two "behind the scenes" looks at the production of Mark Abma and Eric Hjorleifson's Meadow Lodge trip.

The first behind the scenes look comes from an article I worked on with ESPN. To check out the full article and photo gallery, click on the link HERE.

The second behind the scenes look comes straight from the Matchstick Productions crew. This first episode of "The Making of: The Way I See It" shows some of what goes into filming and shooting skiing movies.

Enjoy!

Red Bull Kayaking Shoot: In 3D

To see the image in 3D, click HERE.

I just recently finished up a really fun shoot for Red Bull Energy Drink with professional kayaker Tao Berman. What made this shoot so incredible, wasn't just the sheer athleticism in front of the camera, but was the amount of creativity I was afforded. In organizing the shoot, Red Bull had essentially given me free reign to shoot this however I wanted.

For the last few months, I've been dying to try shooting something in 3D. Since I saw the James Cameron movie Avatar, I've wanted to test the 3D technology and see how it translated from video to still. When this shoot with Tao came before me, I knew this was the shoot to make it happen.

In doing my research for this shoot, I'd come across plenty of other 3D photos, but none of them were action or motion based. Everything I was coming across was static... whether a landscape, portrait or still life. Not finding any 3D (also called anaglyph) photos of sports left me really excited. This was going to be something relatively new, and it's always fun to be the guinea pig on new things as you never now what you're going to encounter or how it's going to turn out.

(A brief note: with new versions of Photoshop, it's now possible to create 3D images in post production with a single camera and manipulating the single resulting image. But that's not what I wanted to do here. With this shoot, I wanted to achieve a true 3D image, by shooting two cameras offset from one another. The advantage in using two cameras, is that the resulting 3D image has more depth and texture that it can draw out as it does not require photoshop to extrapolate and create new information.)

Given the inherent danger in running waterfalls, and not wanting to subject Tao to any more danger than necessary, we only had a few cracks at shooing this. With that in mind, we were running 3 cameras at all times, in order to ensure maximum coverage and guarantee differing angles and vantage points.

In the end, the shoot went off great. The resulting 3D image turned out better that I could have hoped. I'm excited to put this technology to use again on some more shoots in the near future... stay tuned.

If you'd like to see some of the other images from the shoot, you can see a small gallery HERE.

Final note: if you're interested in learning more of the details about how to shoot a true anaglyph/3D image, post a comment below. If enough people are interested, I'll follow up with a tutorial post later.

International Photography Awards- Honorable Mention

I just got notified that one of my photos received an honorable mention in the 2010 International Photography Awards. The above shot of parkour athlete, Daetan Huck was honored in the Professional, Advertising, "Other" division.

The International Photography Awards is an annual competition for professional, non-professional and student photographers on a global scale, which has created one of the most ambitious and comprehensive competitions in the photo world today. www.photoawards.com

I'm honored to have received this mention and it's got me charged with new vigor and ambition to keep pushing my work in new directions.

To see my photo and some of the other honorable mentions, check out the gallery HERE.

On the Road

I usually try to post at least once a week on this blog. As I look back at the month of June, I realize that my goal was far from reached last month. The result of being on the road and not getting to spend a lot of time behind the camera has left me with the more difficult task of finding things to write about. Not wanting to be "that guy" that just throws up a bunch of random garbage on the blog, I've remained silent for the last 2 weeks.

Well, two weeks of silence is enough for me... actually, I think that's the longest I've ever been quiet for. And while I might not have the most interesting "behind the scenes of a bad-ass photo shoot" blog post for this week, I thought I'd at least post something. Below are a handful of shots from my iPhone from the last couple of weeks of traveling. Hopefully something fun and unique.

Cheers!

Amazing Work... Thanks Red Bull

I just got an email from Red Bull announcing the finalists for their second Illume Photo Contest. The work that was submitted is absolutely stunning. I spent a good hour flipping through some of the photos featured on their website. I could have spent the rest of my day captivated by these images, but instead, I thought I'd share some of my favorites here. (A quick note: These are NOT my photos, just some of the photos that I feel are truly inspiring! Nice work to the photogs that created them.)

If you'd like to see the entire sampling, scroll down to the bottom of this post for the slideshow in its entirety. Enjoy!