New Year Updates

I meant to get this post out sooner, but with the start of the new year and some new projects I've already been grabbed by the snowball of momentum that is 2017!

First, let's recap... 

2016 was a big year for me in photography, beginning with the launch of this website and my first ever gallery exhibit at RAW:Hollywood Presents FUTURES. This gallery appearance marked what would turn out to be the first of many, and I was soon introduced to UCLA's Exchange Room Gallery with the "I AM" Group Art Show later that year. The year also brought a few meaningful collaborations with models I had worked with in the past, including the beautiful and talented Brianna and the soon to be muse for my Basquiat series, Renae.  

It was that very collaboration with Renae that lead to my first ever solo photography exhibit, Obnoxious Liberals: A Bodypaint Tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat which opened at the Exchange Room Gallery in LA to a packed audience.  And as if the year couldn't get any better, during the development of this Basquiat series I was contacted by TXTURE Magazine and invited to showcase selections from the series at their annual Miami Art Basel exhibit!  This was my first time ever even going to Art Basel, let alone exhibiting there, so to think all of this could happen within a year of printing my work for the first time was just incredible, and it left me very excited for what the future may hold.

In front of my Art Basel showcase with TXTURE Magazine founder Monifa Coffee

Things to look forward to...

My solo exhibit at the Exchange Room Gallery will be closing soon, so if you haven't seen it yet now is the time! (Click Here for instructions on how to get there, and how to find it on UCLA's campus).  So what next?  Things continue to get better, as the next stop for a few of these pieces will be at the headquarters of Arsenic Magazine and at the Los Angeles Chocolate and Art Show! More details about those will be coming in the near future.

I'll have some more announcements coming very soon, including a new long-delayed music project that I'll be releasing within the next few weeks.  For those that don't know, though I don't highlight it on this site much I do from time to time produce music as well, for no reason other than "why not?"  You can check out some of my past instrumental albums on Bandcamp or stream the more recent stuff on Soundcloud. I've had a new project in development since early 2014 that I'll finally be pushing out, so be on the lookout for that.

I should also have some big film-related announcements in the near future as well. This is definitely looking like a good year, so keep your heads up and don't let any bright orange man-children ruin it for you!

So I've Decided To Take Scanning Into My Own Hands

Luckily for me I routinely shop for things I can't afford in my fleeting spare time, as a way of keeping an ear to the ground for the general trend of fluctuating prices.  So like with the printer rebate, when I see a good deal, I know a good deal.  

A few weeks back I happened to come across a Plustek OpticFilm 7200i film scanner for $8. Yes, $8.  Eight dollars.  Gotta love Goodwill.  Now, this scanner is by no means the latest and greatest technology, in fact it's pretty outdated as far as film scanners go.  I think it may have actually been the first scanner in the Plustek OpticFilm line, and the first to be able to scan at 7200dpi, hence the name.  That would put it over ten years old.  But for that matter, that would make it about 30 years newer than the $65 worth of 1970s camera equipment I shoot 90% of my work on, so who gives a shit. Works don't it? 

When the 7200i was new, it only ran for about $250, which is still the very bottom of the food chain as far as film scanners go.  But when it comes to film scanning, considering how costly it gets to scan in print-worthy resolution, this was yet another no-brainer.  Photographers these days seem to have a habit of thinking more expensive = better.  The ability to self scan every 35mm negative I want to print cost me less than scanning one negative at a lab.  Yeah, I'll take it.  With this new (read: old) scanner at my side, I'll be able to offer a much wider range of prints in the store now, so look out for future updates there.

On a final note about the film scanners, I should point out that nothing in the roughly affordable price range for the average starving artist will be capable of scanning anything beyond 35mm.  A lot of people do have varying results with flatbed scanners however, and some even recommend them, but the size and workflow of those didn't exactly fit my (ridiculously busy and ridiculously cramped) lifestyle.  And even cheaper dedicated film scanners like the Plusteks are able to scan better quality high resolution negatives that the most expensive of flatbed scanners.  I knew a dedicated film scanner would be the right choice for me, and I'd just need to continue getting lab scans of my medium format work for the time being.  Any dedicated film scanners capable of medium format seem to run in the $1,200+ range.  And uh... That's rent.

Blog Redesign

Introducing My New Blog Homepage

When I first launched this site in January, the one thing I still felt significantly lacking was the design of the blog page.  The blog template used here doesn't provide any form of sidebar navigation, meaning there was no good way to quickly navigate posts, it wasn't very intuitive to differentiate one post from another, and it was almost impossible to notice that there was even more than one page of posts at any given time.  And if one thing was for certain, I didn't spend three days uploading my entire history-in-pictures as a film photographer in the form of two years worth of back-dated blog posts for nothing.  (What?  I gotta post em somewhere.)  So eventually something had to give.

Fortunately I was able to find a way to build a new (read: actual) blog homepage within the current template, as changing templates just for better blog features would've proved to be too counterproductive (read: pain in the ass) and hosting a blog elsewhere would essentially defeat the purpose of this site.  Luckily, spending four years working for a webhost was good for something, in that it's allotted me the technical wherewithal to make the most of customization in template-based site design, while having forgotten virtually everything else.  Go figure.  So today I'm proud to launch my new and improved Blog Homepage!

Now With Actual Working Search-Bar & Navigation Options!

Give it a try!

The new homepage includes a marquee of recent posts, a wall of featured content from over the years, and several choices for navigating through all of the posts.  Use the monthly archives, post calendar, tag/category cloud, or fully functional search bar to find what you're looking for.

I hope this makes it easier to get some use out of this blog, as I intend to keep filling it with interesting content about my various photographic exploits, progress made as a writer/director in the LA film industry, gear reviews, event updates, and much more. Plus, I promised myself I'd write everyday, and blogging is a lot easier than screenwriting.  Enjoy!