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.