Tuesday, July 29, 2008

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.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

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!



Wednesday, July 23, 2008

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.

Monday, July 21, 2008

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.

Friday, July 18, 2008

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.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

The Blog is born.

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