Location Portfolio

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Location Portfolio

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Back to Reality

I'm just back from a grueling stock shooting trip to the Caribbean. This time I took my family along to mix a pleasure with business. After 10 days of 80 degree temps and tropical trade winds and days spent in shorts, Hawaiian shirt and flip flops it's hard to come back to reality in California. But hey, at least we got some much needed rain while I was gone!.

Here's an out-take from a stunningly beautiful beach in the Dominican Republic.

Here we are in Nassau, Bahamas.

Storm clouds at sunset in St. Thomas U.S. Virgin Islands.

A perfect sunset off Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos Islands.

The Forest Re-Opens!!

After a year of being closed due to the devastating Santiago Fire in October 2007, the Trabuco District of the Cleveland National Forest is finally open. The official opening day was November 9th. Local mountain bikers celebrated and reclaimed the route with a morning and an afternoon ride.

My wife Kristine lead the morning ride with alot of Trail Angels present. They paused for a group photo at Cooks Corner before heading off on the ride.

The morning group posted a new trail register for trail users to write in at the Luge flagpole. I put a couple pictures in the front from just days after the fire was put out showing the charred destruction of the forest.


Kristine wrote down a fitting inspirational saying from John Muir.


Here is Kristine coming down the Luge, a tight, twisty gem of a singletrack. Can you tell she's having fun?


Then later that afternoon the big boys rode and placed a new American flag at the top of the Luge.


Here is a Warriors Society member enjoying the new and improved trail.


Re-opening the forest has made many hiker, bikers and equestrians very happy! Now if we could just get some rain!

New Work For Acura TL

New work I shot of the 2009 Acura TL is now live at Acura.com. Most of the photography fills out the award-winning Interactive Showroom. It's a very interactive environment where the user can learn quite alot about the car without setting foot in the dealership. If one went through the entire showroom, it's quite possible they'd know more about the TL than alot of the people selling it.

My Aquarium of the Pacific Panoramas Go Live

I was informed today that the new virtual tour of the exhibit, "Ocean on the Edge" at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific went live today. It features one still shot and two panoramas I shot for the Aquarium.

The client loved it and I think the site looks really good showing the big panos. Maybe next time I can convince them to go full screen!

Please have a look at the exhibit virtual tour.

Recently I did some work for the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. They have installed a new exhibit called "Oceans on the Edge" and wanted to have a virtual walk-through for the web. The exhibit displays man's effects on the world's oceans as the population of humans exponentially grows. I shot shot two cyclindrical panos that will probably be linked together once they are posted on the aquarium's website.

I have to say it was a refreshing change of pace to be working on something other than a car shoot. Hopefully the aquarium will like the work and follow my suggestion of doing a full linked tour for the entire facility, which I think would be very cool.

Just a few short weeks after my new website launched it has been selected as one the Livebooks Site of The Week. Traffic on the site has been brisk since the launch, with big spikes in traffic corresponding to an email campaign my rep launched last week.

New Website johnearly.com Launched!

Last week I finally launched the new version of my professional website,  johnearly.com. After looking at several options I decided to go with Livebooks as the site designer/host for their dependability and easy-to-use Edit Suite where I can upload, update and tweak my site on my own without having to wait for a designer to get around to it.

Working with Livebooks designer Corrie Tse, and Flash designer Adam Royer,  we came up with a nice clean design that I think reflects my style and approach to photography. The site showcases my traditional photographic automotive and product work as well as my "new media" work consisting of animations, CGI, video, and virtual reality. There's also a new section called "Placement" that shows where some of my work has been seen on the internet. In addition I have a behind-the-scenes area and links to my blog and my stock site.

I'm thrilled with how it turned out so please feel free to take a look!

Life is Like Riding a Sand Pit

Those who know me know I spend lots of time riding my mountain bike. Most of my riding time is spent with groups of riders or at least one or two others. Not only is this safer in case you crash or break down, but it's more social. But I have always enjoyed solo rides for the peace and quiet and for being able to just ride at my own pace, whether it's fast, slow or medium that day. Those who also mountain bike may also know that one of the best qualities of mountain biking (on anything but pavement) is that it tends to free your mind of worries and extraneous thoughts and allows you to only focus on the here and now that is the trail in front of you (especially on downhills). Lose that focus and you will likely crash. Simple as that. 

So suffice it to say when I am riding solo on anything remotely technical I'm not doing much deep-thinking...just concentrating on the flow of the trail and problem-solving my way up or down the hill. With all  that being said, the other day I had a pretty deep thought while out on a solo ride. 

It was mid-week, early morning in the newly re-opened Whiting Regional Park. Many know that name because it is where Mark Reynolds, a mountain biker, was killed by a mountain lion a few years ago. Last year it burned in a forest fire and was closed to the public until just a few weeks ago. The park was particularly empty and I had only seen one hiker on the way up Borrego Trail. Borrego meanders it's way along a mostly dry creek, slowly gaining elevation as the trail climbs the canyon. Before the fires this trail used to be a cakewalk to ride. Smooth, buff hard-packed trail, worn smooth by countless mountain bikers. After the fires and the rainy season Borrego Trail became a sand pit wherever the trail crossed the dry creek bed. What used to be smooth, easy trails were now in many places a 75-foot stretch of 6-10" deep sand. In case you've never ridden in sand like this, it is difficult to say the least to negotiate. Many bikers tossed out a slew of negative opinions about the sand and why couldn't it be removed. Apparently they were not able to negotiate it. I found it wasn't easy like it used to be, but hey look on the bright side..it's rideable and at least the park is open.

As I was crossing one of the sand pits on my morning ride, this deep metaphorical thought crossed my mind. These sandpits were like one's life journey in a several ways. 

• Life can be hard at times, but not impossible: Just like the sand pit. Riding in sand is difficult, sometimes seemingly impossible to traverse. But with enough steady effort and the right balance, the sand is easily travelled.
• Have a plan: Allow your front tire to wander from the straight line in the sand and you will either crash or be delayed and you will exert extra effort to exit the sand pit. Just as in life, without a plan to steer straight on, one might wander through life,get sidetracked and either never achieve one's potential or a least will require or expend additional unnecessary effort to achieve one's goals.
  
• Everything in moderation: Enter the sandpit too fast and even the slightest steering mistake will send you flying. Enter too slow and you will bog down not able to ride through the sand and having to walk. Same goes for life...live it too fast and hard and a mistake could send you crashing to rock bottom. Live life too slowly and carefully and you might miss out on many of the best things in life.

And then just about the time I completed that deep thought, I realized I wasn't concentrating on the trail enough and I should stop thinking and just ride!

Pirate Ride

This past weekend Kristine and I participated in a cool ride called The Pirate Ride. This is a semi-underground ride where a large group of mountain bikers get together, dress up like pirates (and wenches of course) and ride. Well there's a little drinking thrown in also to spice things up. After all it wouldn't be a pirate ride without some rum! Arrghhh!

This year the event was so popular it was covered by the Orange County Register. The ride, and the party was alot of fun. But the fun was marred by two crashes when we headed down the hills back to the cars. Our friend Brenda dislocated her elbow and we had to take her to the hospital. Another friend, Vickie, crashed and ended up getting a black eye. 

Check out the thread on SoCalTrailRiders.org for lots of awesome pictures and words.

Gnarls Barkley at the Hollywood Bowl

My wife and I had a nice date on Sunday. We ventured up to LA-LA land to see Gnarls Barkley at the Hollywood Bowl. We had great box seats 14 rows back in the center. Here's some Youtube content someone else shot of the concert. We were lucky to be much closer than this. If I get a chance I'll upload some of the video and stills I shot.

The opening bands were Deerhoof and then Fallou Dieng. Deerhoof can best be described as a four-piece super-electic San Franciso band experimenting in wildly varying rock timelines and beats with high-pitched vocals from their asian female vocalist. I don't think the crowd liked them much but I kind of liked a couple songs because they reminded me of The Flaming Lips in their earlier, more raw formative years.

Fallou Dieng is a great Senegalese nine-piece band with a great rhythmic African sound. They were tapped at the last minute to replace Youssou N'Dour who could not make the gig for some reason.

Gnarls Barkley was awesome as expected and really rocked the bowl. They played alot of their best songs as well as a cover of "Reckoner" by Radiohead for their encore. Alot of people don't know Gnarls Barkley isn't some actual person, but it's just a name. The lead talent is Danger Mouse who played piano and Cee-lo Green who is the vocalist. Of course they "had" to play "Crazy" as they were "contractually obligated" as they put it.

Here's a great article that goes into more depth about the concert.

My Portfolio Makes Photoserve's Top 10 of the Month!

Got an email yesterday telling me that I had been selected for the Portfolio of the Month at Photoserve.com. Check it out!

Trail Work...Time to Give Back

I spent most of my Saturday doing some trail work on The Luge up the Santa Anas. The Warriors Society had a work event to repair a section of failing trail. This trail took alot of damage in the fires last fall. Even though this area of the forest is still closed, our group has permission to access the forest to patrol and perform trail work. Here's a link to  the write-up on Socal Trail Riders.

Acura MDX CGI Photo Shoot

Just wrapped up a CGI shoot with Acura last week for the 2009 MDX. We shot background plates and HDRI dome down at The PIke in Long Beach, CA. The shoot went really smooth since we had a really great crew for the shoot.


We used the Biax dolly from Move-n-Shoot which worked out really well. The dolly moves on two axes to simulate the motion that we would get if we had a camera rig on a car. I prefer this more organic method of blurring the background instead of trying to reproduce it in post.




Look for the shot on the model landing page of Acura.com in a couple months.

Time to Ride

The shoot wrapped early enough last night to get a ride in with some friends. Summer is a great time to ride in the evening around Rancho.

This is a view looking toward Saddleback Peak in the Santa Anas.

The Blog is born.

Been meaning to get this rolling for some time now...the blog is finally born.