Burbank Water and Power
I’ve been on an HDR spree lately, doing tons of landscape pictures that would be really difficult to expose properly without HDR. Normally shooting directly into the sun is utter madness, but HDR lets you grab the details at each exposure bracket. (more…)
The wost thing for a me as a photographer is seeing awesome things when I don’t have a camera or I can’t shoot pictures. It’s usually worst when I’m driving.
I’ve been playing around with Photomatix. While it’s very easy to make a good picture look worse using HDR tonemapping, it’s also possible to make three bad pictures look amazing. The tone mapping makes it possible to do smash the rules and do ridiculous things like shooting directly into the sun. The software also does a great job with realigning photos when you shoot sans tripod, which is the only way I shoot.
So I’ve been hitting a bunch of Los Angeles landmarks to take pictures. I’m very happy with how they turned out.
Santa Monica Pier
Santa Monica Pier
Portal of the Folded Wings, Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery
Downtown Los Angeles
Sepulveda Dam
L.A. Bike Scene from studiodrome on Vimeo.
This awesome video does a much better job of capturing the scene than my clumsy thrown-together home movies.
I’ve made an interesting discovery. Apparently MTV, the crappy reality show channel, dabbled with music videos in the past. Now they’ve gone and made themselves a Hulu-like web site of their own, on the internets, to get back to their less-awful roots. Kudos and golf claps for you, MTV! You’re almost relevant now.
This weekend I once again went on the monthly “Best Ride of Your Life,” aka c.r.a.n.k. mob. It was their first birthday. I made another home movie which will be studied by film students for decades to come. I took a few terrible photos. Once again it was chaotic, hounded by the long arm of the law, and the most fun ever. The only thing missing was bacon, and I hope to lobby the crank mob gods to install a bacon grill in the box for future fiestas.
Once you’re done being blown away by my masterful photography and cinematography, check out this video made by someone who actually knows what they’re doing. It mixes processing with Trentemoller with great results.
World is not round. from Simon on Vimeo.
Burning Man was pretty tough this year. There were a few serious dust storms at bad times, one on Monday which shut down the gates for several hours and another on Saturday that ended up killing the pre-burn fire conclave. There were also a lot of missing persons from this year’s camp, which was sad. A lot of the art projects I liked most in previous years didn’t show up this time. The third biggest playa project after the man and the temple, Babylon, was sorta lame. The playa was a nightmare to cross, thanks to giant piles of dust which ate your tires. At night they would randomly slow you down enough to occasionally crash your bike. However, this was only a problem until halfway through the week, when my bike was stolen.
All that being said, it wasn’t a total loss. It wasn’t a loss at all, we had a great camp this year. There were new people who were great additions and grizzled veterans who were more entertaining than ever. We partied our asses off, ate our fill of delicious, life-giving bacon every morning, and wore ridiculously awesome costumes. Fire was played with, delivering spectacular results, and safety was third. I took a lot of great pictures, which is hard not to do there. Check them out.
There is actually stuff to do there! When Downtown Los Angeles isn’t occupied with its primary task as a massive homeless shelter, there’s an art walk every second Thursday of the month. More art than you can shake a stick at, and this month Calarts is playing free sci-fi movies at the top of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel: Powers of Ten (check out a similar online exploration of the micro and macro universe) and Solaris.
Via midnight ridazz. Join us!
