Lan and I hung out in the RVIP Lounge at the LA Film Festival this past Saturday with Hayden Black, Kestrin Pantera, Jonathan Grubb, Batgirl (the dog) and a few other cool people.

We didn’t really spend much time at the festival, and it was the day before it ended… but we did walk past the big Hellboy II premiere party as they were still setting up.  Very fancy…

Here are a few shots from the day, I actually didn’t shoot that much.

I just called 911 for the first time in my life about a half hour ago.  I need to wake up in 3 hours to go shoot some crazy crane move at CHLA… but I thought I’d jot this down really quickly first.

I was coming down the 22 East… passing the 5… when I noticed a newer silver BMW 7-series swerving back and forth between the carpool and fast lanes.  I thought it might be someone just taking the turns a little tightly… or being a jackass… but after we passed Main St. I figured that he/she (after this I’m gonna just refer to this loser as a “he) was drunk.  The driver started to slow down… and I wasn’t going to pass him for fear of being rear-ended… he’d gone from 75 to about 45 in a short amount of time… and I wasn’t going to risk him ramping back up behind me.

As we approached Tustin, it seemed like he was moving towards the exit… but a little too slowly… the nice new BMW smashed right through a large road sign - the kind held up by a wooden 4×4 - and then swerved back on the freeway and kept driving.  It was at this point - maybe 2 minutes after I first noticed the car - that I called 911.  I gave the officer the info on what I had witnessed, told him that there was probably a large sign sitting as a hazard in the road on the Tustin exit, and gave him the color make and model of the car as well as the license plate, lastly mentioning that the car looked pretty beat up by the sign and had the front bumper hanging off the side.  By the end of the call we were on the 55 South passing the 5, I had my flashers on behind him because he was driving about 30 mph.

As we approached MdFadden, it looked like he was finally going to exit… but as we started to get off he must have suddenly realized it wasn’t his exit (SOME of his brain cells were still functioning) and he swerved back towards the freeway, over the curb, and back into the traffic lanes… and since I wasn’t about to pull any death-defying (or death-inviting) moves of my own… he lost me and I drove home.

I do wonder if CHP responded and went after him… or if he made it home.  Neither would surprise me.  There is also the chance that he got into a larger accident… he was totally out of it and nearly crashed multiple times during the 5 minutes I was tailing him.

I hope that’s not the case.  I’d like to think he’s in the back of a cruiser right now… and once he gets out he’ll pay some hefty fees to get his smashed car out of impound.  I doubt he’ll learn his lesson, but it’s the best I can hope for (unless I want to hope that he just wrecked his finely tuned German automobile on the side of the road… but that wouldn’t be nice to wish on his friends and family).

When Mark and Candice Brooke contacted Lan and I about shooting a promo video for their photography website we were totally stoked. Their photography is top notch and they are definitely a force to be reckoned with amongst the wedding photographers we know.

Part of our video called for some unique shots of them that we were going to incorporate into the intro… a way to quickly and without words show their personality and fun demeanor. Luckily we all chose an awesome spot to shoot the video… so we decided to do the photos right there as well.

Here are a few of my favorites from the shoot… you can see the rest when you watch their video (which Lan did an amazing editing job on) here!

Well, the concert went off without MUCH of a hitch. We ended up starting almost a half hour late due to audio issues, but once we got started the show was awesome… and both the live and the internet viewers had a blast. After the show we went out to the back balcony (Keats’ place is awesome!) and had snacks, pizza and conversation. All in all… awesome night.

I shot a few photos outside… love the metal siding background thing. Unfortunately it was only about 5′ tall so I had to sit people down… but it worked out. I’ll post more shots to Flickr tomorrow or so.

I am not a designer.

The being said, I’m actually pretty proud of myself for putting together the page for the new Shootsac promotion. Lan and I did the video (Lan’s post work on this one was AWESOME) and I put together the page with a good deal of input and advice from Keats. It’s done in a very old way (tables and crappy html code), but I did everything on the page except design the logo (made the poster, buttons, etc…) I’ve checked it in multiple browsers and everything seems ok with it, so the fact that it looks decent is all that matters.

This may seem like a pretty inconsequential thing… but I have a long history (8 years or so) of making really crappy looking websites and pages. This is the first time EVER that I have put together something that doesn’t look like it was done by a five year old, or maybe a monkey.

To top it all off it’s also a GREAT promotion. Spend $75 at the Shootsac store during the month of May and be entered to win the lens of your choice up to $1800 on Adorama. The odds of winning are actually quite high compared to most contests or promotions you will find out there, so it’s pretty exciting. Check it out.

I received my new Alien Bees ABR800 ringflash last Wednesday… and have anxiously waited to have time to try it out. Finally yesterday I came over to Lan and Bonny’s garage… set up some lights… and did a quick shoot. So far I really like it. I do need to make sure to not overuse it… but when you have something new that’s inevitable. All the shots below are with the ringflash and 2 strobes behind and to the left and right of Bonny… at about a 45 degree angle or so. It took some time to get it right, and I was adjusting throughout… but I’m pretty happy with the way they are turning out.

One thing I didn’t realize that I’m going to have to rectify is that I definitely need an ND filter… many of the shots were done with the ringflash set to minimum power (1/32). Some were still too bright, at ISO 100 f/16. It definitely reminded me that I need to clean my sensor, though. Damn that thing’s dirty… shooting wide open all the time I tend to forget that.

After seeing everyone else do it… I thought I’d go ahead and try Tweetcloud, which makes a word cloud of your most used words through your Twitter posts. I have no idea how accurate this is… “going”, “know”, “think” and “vegan” are supposedly my most used words (minus the stop list, which removes the most common English words like “the” and “and”, etc.

Try it!

Eddie Grey is an awesome personal trainer out of Studio 1 on 1 in Venice. Keats, Lan and I shot promotional photos of him on Thursday, and here are some of my favorites.

As it turns out, the body builder types we see gracing the covers of insecurity-inducing magazines at the checkout stand typically go through quite a bit for a couple weeks before a photo shoot… Eddie educated me a little bit on this. No amount of carb dropping or forced dehydration, however, can fake what’s not there… Eddie is the MAN and he is in SHAPE.

You can also see Lan’s images here.

We went to San Luis Obispo yesterday to help a friend and aspiring wedding photographer, Bonnie Tsang, who was shooting her second wedding. We went mostly as support and to do a little second shooting… but we also took the opportunity to shoot a little video that we’ll be putting out in the next few weeks.

I’ll probably post a few shots from the wedding one of these days, but here are a few shots that Lan and I did in another room during the reception when everyone was pretty much stuffing their faces… typically not the best time for photographs.

This one is good for all my non-photographer friends who just like to take photos and maybe do some simple edits to them. I assume most of the photographers I know actually own a copy of Photoshop…Adobe has just released a beta of Photoshop Express… which is basically a scaled down FREE version of Photoshop that you can actually use on the web. There are no layers or filters or complex brushes… but the truth is that for 99% of the photos that are posted on the web you really don’t need any of that. It’s more than enough to take your decent photos and make them look great.

That being said there’s still a pretty impressive list of adjustments and tools for an online application.

The Touchup feature works really simply… you choose the size of the spot you want, click the area in the image you want to touch up, then a red circle comes up which you can move to find the spot you want to use to blend into.

There are also liquify-type effects that you can use… for entertainment purposes only, of course.

I’m not going to do an in-depth feature review… but this is definitely a great tool for amateurs or those who just want to perform basic edits before posting their photos online or having them printed. Check it out.