Lychee

So if there are two of them is it pronounced Lychi or Lychees? Ok... sorry I haven't added any new entries to this blog in a month. Summer was definitely in full swing. It's been a weird day. My coworker and I were having a debate whether or not this fruit was pronounced 'lee chee" or his usage "lie chee" I proved that it was the first. Dictionary.com is a beautiful thing. What started all of this was a Korean Aloe drink I purchased which was Lychee flavored. I know... weird in of itself. So not more than two minutes later our IT guy comes by and is giving out Lychee fruit to everyone... He didn't hear the conversation at all. A serious co-winki dink. I'm mean come on... who the hell brings Lychee fruit to work outside of Asia? The photo is the 'fruit' of my labor after receiving two of them. They were delicious!

Yuma, AZ Dusk

I dug this one out of my archives. I took this with my first digital camera, a Canon G1. back in the day it was a great camera. I took several shots of these mountains over the course of an hour as the sun was setting. A half hour prior to this shot the sky was electric blue with a full moon rising. The array of colors in the desert is simply stunning as the light changes.

Within Eye Shot

I was outside Barcelona Bar in New York with a friend of mine when I noticed the large blue neon shot glass in the window of the bar was reflecting perfectly in her eyes. I thought it was an interesting shot... so I made her pose and look in different directions until I had the one that worked best. This was tough as the camera was hand held and the shot was very dark, but the Canon IS helped quite a bit. The colors in this shot are true and there was very little manipulation other than croping and contrast.

New York Fireworks

Happy Independence Day! This is a photo I took on last year's 4th. Today is cloudy so this year may suck for photo ops.

More New York Lightning

I love to photograph lightning. I took this about an hour ago. It's such a chance game... and a little stupid on my part for taking the picture in my bare feet holding on to a metal tripod. The only thing missing was a lightning rod in my hand to attract the lightning with. "Heeeerrrrre flashy flashy flashy!" Boom! I hope you enjoy my stupidity.

Kansas Barn

Tunnel Vision

Earth Rod

I guess even Mother Nature needs some now and again.

Event Horizon

These are two photos I took of an outdoor sculpture installation by British artist Antony Gormley. The outdoor exhibit was called "Event Horizon" My UK friend Fiona was kind enough to take me to see his works at the Hayward Gallery in Central London when I was there just a few weeks ago. There are a total of 31 of these life-sized figures circling the city, all facing toward the gallery. All were at the skyline level so if you stood on the balcony of the gallery, you could see them near and far ( from 20' to 3/4 a mile away) along the horizon... hence the name. It was a lot of fun just trying to discover all of them. Sometimes they were so far away you could barely make them out. It reminded me of seeing police snipers on roof tops of some of the buildings here in NY when Pres. Bush was in town shortly after 9/11.

The rest of the exhibit was absolutely wonderful. If you find yourself in London before August 19, plan on going to see this. Especially check out his cloud installation called "Blind Light".

To find out more go to: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/gormley

Little Pink Shoes

Swansea Bay, Wales

I don't know why, but the English give the Welsh a really bad rap. Especially Swansea, Wales. The Welsh were extremely generous and welcoming. We figured that the two largest cities in Wales, Cardiff and Swansea were very industrial and shipping oriented at one time, but today these towns are in transition and are very lively and beautiful. There are a ton of new buildings going up. They seem to be in a bit of a renaissance.

I guess it's the same as the New York vs. New Jersey battle. If you've ever been to the Jersey Shore, you would probably have something different to say as it is beautiful.

Stonehenge

London, UK

Here are some images from the UK. The first one is a sculpture outside the British National Gallery. The second is a lamp post by the Tower Bridge in London. More to come in a few days.

I came across this sign while having lunch with some friends in a Los Angeles Chinatown Market. This is one of those times when words say more than the picture. I don't think I would want to go to this "Dr."

Got a new lens today. This is one of the first images from it. A very over photographed subject, but just wanted to get some test images. All in all, a pretty nice piece of glass. It's a Canon EF-S 17-55mm f2.8. I hemmed and hawed about which lens I wanted to get as Canon makes a few in this wide to mid zoom range, but when I read the specs of all of them, this one had the best resolution, contrast, and brightness (f-stop). If you have the means and a Canon DSLR with an APS sized sensor... I highly recommend. I'm sure there will be more images from this lens in the very near future. Here are a few great websites for lens reviews for Canon.

http://www.the-digital-picture.com/
http://www.photozone.de/

I think most of you have seen this image before on my MySpace page. I was reminded of this again this morning when I was woken up by thunder echoing off of the urban canyons of the city. I took this picture from my back porch in Queens last spring. I shot around 60 images. I put my camera on a tripod and left the shutter open for 10 seconds at a time with all the lights out. I did this for about 45 min trying to anticipate a strike. This was the only frame that had something.

Lightning use to scare the daylights out of me. When I was a kid, I couldn't stand it. It scared me to the point where I would be petrified and hide under my bed for hours until the storm had passed. It didn’t rain that often in my hometown as I grew up in a desert, so I was generally ok. It was like this until I was 15 however. Don't ask. When I was about 10 my family and I were visiting my grandparents at their house about a 5 min drive from us. It started out as a nice day, but then, towards evening, the clouds came and the lightning and thunder started in. Midway through, my parents wanted to leave as it was getting late. I wouldn't leave the house to get into the car because I thought for sure the lightning would get me. After much deliberation, basically me screaming hysterically, they decided to leave me there and pick me up the next day.

I was finally cured of this by pure fright. When I was 15 I went to a private school in Wisconsin. No I was a good kid and wanted to go. It was in a small town of about 2500 people along the Mississippi River. I stayed in a dorm with 100 or so other kids and had a roommate from Georgia who could sleep through anything, including his alarm clock most mornings. If you have never lived in the Midwest like I hadn't, I had no idea the thunder and lightning storms could be so intense there... really intense. After about the first week of living there, I was woken up late one night with flashes of light going off about every 1-2 seconds. I thought the Seniors were hazing us with flash bulbs or something, but to my horror, I quickly realized a serious storm was approaching. It moved in fast. I was absolutely in shock by the shear number of lightning strikes and the loudness of the thunder. It shook the whole building. My roommate never woke up… good thing, I guess because he would have seen me lying there fetal with the covers over my head.

After living there for 9 months and having to go through many, many more storms like this, I was eventually cured. There was no place to go and hide during those storms... and besides, I would have been totally humiliated by my peers if they ever found out. Much worse than being struck by lightning at age 15. Now I can even take pictures of it for everyone’s pleasure!

Sometime I'll tell you about why I don't have any mirrors in my apartment except for the bathroom.

I took this from the backseat of a car going 70 MPH on a trip to New Hampshire to see Ryan Adams. Good memories on that trip. I just pointed the camera and pressed the button. Life is random, sometimes you capture it.

This image also vividly reminds me of my childhood. When I was young my family and I would travel 2 hours West to go to Seattle for the weekend sometimes. There were these power lines that looked like this that came from one of the numerous dams far away on the Columbia River. They marked the halfway point for the trip. Even if I wasn't paying attention as to where we were from the back seat of the car, I always knew we crossed the halfway point when the high current from the power lines caused the AM radio to suddenly buzz like a swarm of bees for a few seconds, then return back to whatever country song was playing at the time. It amazed me how they came down one side of a mountain and went back up another, at times almost leaning 90 degrees off the side of the hill. Just a straight line… no matter how steep the terrain. It was as if someone drew a line with a ruler on a map and said, “That’s how we will get power from here to there” with no concept of geography. What is so simple on paper can be so complicated in reality.

That reminds me of this photographer/artist, can’t remember his name, that use to go out in the desert and flip stones in a straight path for miles, then photograph the line. Random.

***UPDATE: The name of the artist is Richard Long - www.richardlong.org.
btw... FIONA ROCKS! She told me who he was!

Ok so this is my first post... as I'm sure everyone probably says this for their first post. This is my friend Taras behind the magazine. We were at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. It was cold and we had just seen a series of shitty films... so we were feeling restless. If you want to see a good film, go to www.shoulderhill.com/theeyeshaveit Taras is the main actor in this film and does an amazing job! But he's not quite as hot as the girl on the magazine.