A Draft in the Attic

Finally got internet set up this morning. I'm pretty excited. These pictures are of my friend Greta. We did a spontaneous mime shoot on the roof of my studio and this is what we came up with. Random news; a spaceship was flown around in circles over Los Angeles today prior to being dropped off at LAX and I shot a bunch of photos of it. They're still on the memory card, and I haven't gotten a chance to copy them to the computer and see how they came out, but I'll probably post a few here tomorrow.

Gramercy CLUE

My friend is making a customized version of the board game CLUE to be the apartment building we live in with a few different residents as game characters. Here are the photos we put together:

Trying to Keep Up

I'm about to leave to visit my friends Jen and Johannes in San Francisco and will probably be taking some pictures, so I figured I'd post a few older ones before I get there.

This is yesterday's sunset from my backyard
Lo at the bottom of an animal cage stairwell at an old zoo
Greta wearing an awesome dress we found at Fishy Finds
Greta again sitting on some creepy stairs in an abandoned 3 story house we found
Justine wearing a dress made by my friend Jordan

Sometimes You Need

I was thinking about Artificial Intelligence last night and what would classify something as being a living entity. I used to do a lot of computer programming and have written programs that read and write data, but never anything that was able to rewrite it's own code. In order for something to be artificially intelligent, it would need to be able to do that. It would need to evolve itself in a successful way to function and survive the same way that animals have evolved themselves through trial and error and by passing on their successful genes for who knows how many generations. The thing my mind stuck on though is "trial and error". Making mistakes is part of our nature, as it helps us to grow and adapt. Also, maternity pictures:

La Belle Dame sans Merci

I've been having some trouble sleeping lately. I'm pretty sure it's because a pack of crazy dogs starts barking every morning at 6am. I'm hoping for good things this Monday, mon. Today. We'll see!

I saw Coraline on TV a few days ago and it mentioned the Beldam. I've heard that term used before in the distant past, but couldn't remember from where or when. It is an old synonym for "witch" or "hag", but it originates from an old poem by John Keats about a woman "borne of faeries" who enchants a knight with her beauty. He takes her to her hut on his horse, where she sets the knight asleep. In his dreams, there are ghosts who tell him that he has been enslaved by her just as they were. Then he awakes on a cold, lonely hillside. It turns out there are several paintings about this poem and I happened to have one hanging on my wall for the past 10 years.


This is my friend Sophie

Night After Night

Occasionally, I'll spend some hours listening to music and reflecting on friends and family members who have passed away. It usually ends up not being an enjoyable thing to think about, but it reminds me that I'm human and won't be around forever. It's important to keep that in mind.. be a productive, contributing member of society, get a job with people that make you happy doing something you're okay with, and remember to show those that you care about how important they are to you. Oh, and take awesome pictures of your friends:

Medusa Model-1

Here's a picture of the flame thrower from the movie Bellflower:



And my cousin's movie is coming out in France soon! Here's the trailer that the distribution company came up with. The car and background are from a photo I shot, but they added Evan and Milly in behind the car, along with the flames and all the text.

Imitate the Great

I did a shoot with an incredibly nice and talented actor from Australia named Josh. He had a lot of incredible ideas for us to try out, and one of them was to attempt something similar to the style of a great celebrity photographer named Nigel Parry. Here's one of the shots we came up with.

Picking the Forbidden Fruit

I'm not sure what the point of these pictures was. My friend Melissa is spending a few days at my place while she does a modeling gig in LA. She's from the San Francisco area (two hours north, actually). Her hair is purple and she had leftover makeup on from her modeling gig, so we shot a few pictures in my living room. I had a purple backdrop that I thought might be neat with her hair, and I thought red and green would contrast nicely in the picture (hence the apple and vines). I was originally going to use a flower, but I put it in the freezer and it destroyed it. Anywho, the apple worked fine I guess. I put blue gel on a strobe on the left side of the picture to make the shadows blue.




dog interrupting :)

Hollywood Starlets

Here are some old timey dames that I took pictures of yesterday. I haven't had a chance to edit them yet, but they'll be in black and white eventually


Audrey Hepburn


Marilyn Monroe


Lena Horne


Judy Garland


Rita Moreno

Lucky Montuckey

Two of my friends from Montana have been staying at my place for the past week. We spent the night in a ghost town out in the desert, ate ChiChi's pizza, Campos breakfast burritos, happy hour sushi at Love Sushi, wandered around China Town, spent an evening at Griffith Park observatory, spent a day at the beach and watched the sunset, saw a Milk Carton Kids concert at the Largo, went rock climbing, hiked out into the hills behind Moorpark to take pictures at a bathtub, filmed bits of a soon-to-be music video, and watched several movies. There are hundreds of pictures and videos, but that feels like too many to post. So here are two.

Lost Highway

This is Jennifer. She runs marathons.

Jennifer the runner is different than Jennifer from the previous post. I've known Jennifer the runner for close to 10 years now. We used to have a movie night every Friday night which we nicknamed "Ukyu" after some weird anime thing we watched. She's been living just outside of Berkeley for the past few years and is teaching at one of the colleges in SF. She is also an ambassador for the San Francisco Marathon, which is pretty amazing. I've ran one marathon my entire life and it was 26.2 miles of sweat and tears. She has run... I'm not sure how many, but at least 4 of them! We have a mutual obsession for Lord of the Rings, though she might be even more into it than I am.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

This is Jennifer. She is a classy dame living on her own in the dangerous city of Los Angeles. We're planning on putting together a Mad Men themed photoshoot one of these days.

Here are some pictures from a test shoot we did

Find a Penny, Pick it up...

... And all the day you'll have good luck.

I'm all packed up and about to leave London. Lots of stories in store! For now though, a few pictures from the first couple days of the trip.

Going the Distance

"I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself." -Maya Angelou

Thanks to my younger brother, I've had a unique opportunity to travel to many places this year. Two months ago, a number of random variables added together in such a way that I found myself in New York visiting my friend Lauren. That led to planning a return trip to drop off some costume parts for Lauren, put a super-computer together for her roommate Kevin, and see an art exhibit done by her roommate Yuri. The greatest thing I've gotten from traveling is the friendship and insight of others, so I thought I'd write a bit about that...


(Samus Light Suit Canon - Brooklyn rooftop)

Lauren Baker

Lauren, Lo, Stripedwine, Pilot, Jukebox. She has many nicknames, but they are just different ways of addressing this multifaceted individual. Before going to New York, I didn't know Lauren that well. I just knew she was really good at drawing and had a fun personality. I've gotten to know her a bit better though! She listens to 60s and 70s rock music, which is the COOLEST music ever (I grew up listening to it so it makes me feel all sorts of happy when I hear it). Normally, people are good at memorizing lyrics or song melodies, or neither if they're unlucky. But Lauren remembers the song melodies and lyrics as a pair (hence the nickname Jukebox). She has cybernetic implants that allow her to create 3D rendered models in her brain and create them as drawings or perfectly fitting and correctly measured costumes. This is all really neat, but what really surprised me was how much of an outdoors person she is. Lauren has been camping as far south as beaches in Mexico and hiking as far north as Alaska. She can speak nearly fluent Canadian and is getting married soon! She's currently a comic book digital inker and a fantastic cook. Without a doubt, she's one of the most incredible people I've ever met!

Kevin Hsi

Kevin is a funny character and a fantastic friend! He is from Taiwan and speaks both Chinese and English. He went to art school with Lo, Yuri, and Liz, and he spends almost every waking moment drawing. Kevin has a particular knack for drawing tanks and doing suuuper awesome watercolor coloring. He wants to experience more of the outdoors because all the comic book work kind of traps him indoors. He has a nice SLR camera and a great eye for picture composition, so I showed him how to use everything on the camera in hopes that he'll use his talents to grace the world of photography. Kevin sort of led me and Lauren on an adventure through Flushing, NY on my last day visiting and ordered all sorts of crazy food things for us to eat at a "Hot Pot" Chinese restaurant. One of which was chicken hearts. Kevin and I built his super computer earlier last week. It has a 3ghz quad core CPU with 16GB of DDR3 RAM, a 2GB DRR5 256bit Radeon HD graphics card, and several other what nots.

Yuri Leonov

Yuri is one of those people that will look at something and see layers upon layers of interesting things buried beneath the surface that other people wouldn't realize are there. He's from St. Petersburg, Russia and went to art school in NY with Lauren, Kevin, and Liz, but he is the only full fledged painter living there. Last time I was visiting, he showed me the preliminary sketch on one of the canvases he was going to paint. It had a Golden Spiral drawn lightly on it, which is a spiral based on the Fibonacci Sequence that is made up of a series of quarter-circular arcs whose radii are consecutively increasing. Sort of like a nautilus shell. This shape was the basis for some of the compositions of his paintings, as you can see in this picture from Yuri's Exhibit (Art Exhibit picture). Aside from being extremely artistic and having a unique perspective on everything, Yuri is also a super genius! He has a wealth of interesting knowledge that is apparent whenever you talk to him. If you were ever interested in collecting incredible artwork before the artist becomes famous, I'd recommend getting a piece of Yuri's work while he's still starting out... because he is going to be crazy famous one day!

Liz Kim

Liz! She is so much fun! She came from Baltimore, MY to NYC to attend art school and has one more semester before she graduates. Everyone should have a Liz living under their roof; she will cook all sorts of sweets ALL the time just for the heck of it. Popcorn cake, upside-down pineapple cake, sushi, and ice-brewed coffee are the few things I had the great opportunity of experiencing on my visit. Liz and I went on a spur of the moment adventure one day across the east side of Manhattan which started at a nice little Cafe called OST Cafe. Next door to this cafe was a store called Vampire Freaks which we HAD to check out and we ended up staying there for a good hour talking to the people who worked there. Then we went to several music shops including one called Cobra Guitars where we met a really nice guy at the doorway to the shop who was spraying a guitar body with lacquer stuff. He brought us into the shop and showed us a whole bunch of custom built guitars and basses (all made by them) and works in progress. We made our way down into China Town to look for white umbrellas, and eventually around the southern Manhattan peninsula towards Wall St., then we headed back to Brooklyn. Liz aspires to write a comic about herself and all her roommates in pokemon form.