My special Living Social photography class sold out in 1 day. That’s 2 days earlier than projected. Looking forward to meeting all 476 of you! I’ve been getting emails and phone calls from lots of folks asking when my next set of classes will be. Keep an eye on my facebook page and I will make an announcement regarding that soon. Thanks for everybody’s interest, and phone calls, and emails!
If you happen to be looking through the middle-east edition of Rolling Stone, you will catch my photoshoot with the group RDB, a Punjabi DJ production team, that I shot in Canada a little while back. I photographed this particular image in an alleyway behind a restaurant with a lot of graffiti. Really cool location. Kind of wish I could shoot there all the time.
“Wastelander Panda Prologue - This prologue is based on a TV series we’re developing: the tale of the last remaining panda in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.” Essentially, an Australian filmmaking team put together this TV show pilot about a Panda-man walking the post-apocalyptic earth ready to kick butt and take names. I thought they did a great job with it. This is certainly a show I would watch. If you want to support their efforts to create this show, feel free to visit their facebook page here or their Pozible page here (Australian equivalent of Kickstarter).
You may recall the previous review I did of the ONA Union Street shoulder camera bag that I love so much. Here is one of ONA’s newest bags, the Camps Bay backpack. I’ve had it a month or two and really have had a good opportunity to test it out. Now here are the important stats to start with (according to the ONA Bags site):
My thoughts on the bag: At first glance, it’s just a beautiful travel bag. I get loads of compliments on it everywhere I go. It’s clear that it was designed and constructed with a great attention to detail. No loose threads or mis-matched parts here. It’s not the bag you want to bring to a huge commercial shoot due to space. It is more of a fantastic travel/overnight/camera bag. It has space on top for a couple of overnight personal items (see below), a laptop, DSLR with vertical grip, and realistically space for 4-5 lenses even though you could squeeze more in, but not if you want space for overnight clothes up top, you could fit 7 lenses without any of that, though (see diagram below). I thought I would add that the camera compartment is very well-padded, as is the laptop area.
When wearing the bag on your back, the straps are well-padded and feel very comfortable. There is padding for your back on the bag, but I wouldn’t mind having more, especially for longer walks with a bag full of heavy gear. They say you can fit up to a 17″ laptop, but the padding is best designed to fit a 15″ laptop (like my mac pro) in my honest opinion. I wish the pouch on the front was big enough for my iPad, but I can fit it in the main camera compartment over my lenses.
Sure, at $429, this consistently back-ordered high-demand bag is definitely not the cheapest camera/laptop bag on the market, but it is certainly the most luxurious in my opinion. Every ONA Bag owner I run into are extremely pleased with their bags. I even ran into a shooter at a celebrity event in Sundance this year and saw he had my same Camps Bay smoke-colored bag and I pulled him aside to ask his opinion. He mentioned that he was skeptical about the bag at first, but after travelling with it for the past month, he said he had grown to love it and that it fit in perfectly in the “first class lounge” at the airport. Haha. That is a direct quote. He specializes in celebrity event coverage across the country, so a bag that was stylish, could carry some overnight items and a few lenses and a flash was all he really needed.
Head over to the ONA Bags site today and check it out. If you have one of their bags, I would love to have you weigh in with your thoughts!
Video was filmed and edited by: Addison Wright
Photos provided by Ona
The $50 follow focus. A really cool product and another kickstarter success story raising over $100k, 10 times more than their goal and they still have 2 days left on their fundraising effort! I may have to order one or two of these for my production company, 8112 Studios. This is one of those things that is simple, yet so ingenious, you wonder why the bigger companies didn’t come up with this already! Nice work Wiley Davis for inventing this.
“All we wanted was an affordable way to adjust the focus on our DSLRs in a precise, repeatable manner. We wanted a device that performed solidly and intuitively and we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it since we’d rather spend our hard-earned dollars on more lenses or food and beer for the underpaid crews on our low-budget shoots. But such a follow focus didn’t exist, until we made one, that is.
It’s the small details that make a product a joy to use. That’s why we’ve spent the last year iterating the design way beyond our original notion. We added built-in marker lines. We added a repositionable handle that lets you quickly set a mark, or put the handle at your preferred position. We added user-adjustable friction. We also gave the handles a nice textured finish that feels exquisite on the fingertips.“
Check out their Kickstarter page to see the cool video on the product itself.
Focus handle
The beauty of “Time Wasting Machine” is that you can scroll down their page for hours and you’ll witness a seemingly endless barrage of incredible transportation (cars and planes and people mostly) photography / ads / history that I have never seen before. I often find inspiration from this tumblr page, being the car lover that I am. Check it out!
Random images I found on the site just today below. I mean just look at this stuff! Incredible:
In honor of the Super Bowl, here is one of my favorite ads… Ok Go’s new music video made with Chevy’s help. The band even took stunt driving courses to do this. This was incredibly well-done. Good for Ok Go for always keeping their music videos fresh and creative. I can only imagine how much this cost to do…
“The new music video from OK Go, made in partnership with Chevrolet. OK Go set up over 1000 instruments over two miles of desert outside Los Angeles. A Chevy Sonic was outfitted with retractable pneumatic arms designed to play the instruments, and the band recorded this version of Needing/Getting, singing as they played the instrument array with the car. The video took 4 months of preparation and 4 days of shooting and recording. There are no ringers or stand-ins; Damian took stunt driving lessons. Each piano had the lowest octaves tuned to the same note so that they’d play the right note no matter where they were struck. For more information and behind-the-scenes footage, see http://www.LetsDoThis.com andhttp://www.okgo.net. Many thanks to Chevy for believing in and supporting such an insane and ambitious project, and to Gretsch for providing the guitars.”
I know this isn’t a photography post, but being a car guy, something cool I wanted to share. I had a chance to see this beauty debuted months ago at the Acura dealership conference in Las Vegas behind closed doors. It popped out on stage for just a few minutes to allow us to take a gander at its beautiful new lines. It wasn’t until the Detroit Auto Show shooting for Acura and Tier 10 Marketing last month, that I was able to take a look at it up close (see below).
The new Acura NSX is apparently “a mid-engined V6 with the company’s new SH-AWD system, which uses the gasoline engine to power the rear wheels and provide juice for the two electric motors mounted up front.”
They were also playing this promo video (above) on the big screen behind the car. Check it out, it’s pretty cool. I think “Promises” by Nero was a good song choice. I believe it was created using Gran Turismo video game graphics technology.
I also saw Tony Stark’s / Iron Man’s apparently one-off version of the NSX Concept in convertible form to be used in the new Avengers Movie. Saw this car on display at Acura’s display at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah last month. I would drive that for sure.
iPhone photo of the NSX concept while at the Detroit Auto Show
Tony Stark / Iron Man drives an apparently one-off version of the NSX concept in convertible form in the new Avengers Movie. Saw this guy on display at the Sundance Film Festival last month.
Stark's ride from behind.
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