I shot a 90-mile road race outside of Ely, NV not long ago. My AC and I had to hike up a mountain at 4am to get our camera in position. We were up there for about 12 hours, shooting cars racing at 180mph past us with a RED.

Whip-pans at 180mph with a fully-loaded RED and an AC pulling focus is a tricky thing. We nailed nearly every one of the 100+ cars that passed us.

We shot the movie with a Panasonic AF101 (PAL version of 100) and a couple 7Ds. We had a bunch of lenses and peripheral stuff and we divided it between the crew to get into NZ because they can be strict about productions coming into the country. They did sweat us in customs but eventually let us and all of our gear through.

A stop in Jo’burg on the way…

And another stop in Sydney…

Finally, Auckland!

In the studio…

Sir Cedric! (It’s a long story)…

Rental van off the road…

My birthday cake on our last night in NZ…

Beniamino and one of our other producers, Josef…

Cape Town is one of my favorite places in the world. There still exist a lot of social problems from past apartheid but it’s a beautiful place with a ton of energy. As one of our local musicians said, “This is where life is.”

One of our producers, Peter…

Self…

The star of the movie…

Collaborating with “The Ladies”…

Cape Town at dusk…

Peter and some kids in one of the townships…

Dungeons…

DP Beniamino attacking some lunch…

This is the project I’ve been working on most recently. I won’t say much about it for now except that it’s a feature documentary I am directing (and editing) about a musician traveling around the world, recording an album and collaborating with local artists. We went to Kingston, London, Stockholm, Cape Town, Auckland, and a few other places. I have a ton of photos, here are a few.

Flying to Jamaica…

Outside a local recording studio we stumbled across in Tivoli Gardens…

The rules of the studio…

Trench Town…

Never thought I would shoot something inside Tuff Gong, amazing…

Bob Marley’s 1977 International 3/4 Ton truck that is still parked in the Tuff Gong parking lot…

Ras Fraser Jr, incredible musician and singer…

Production lights are hard to find in Kingston, but our guide Big6 came through for us…

Behind the board at Tuff Gong…

Ras Fraser Jr and I…

London…

Stockholm…

Stockholm at 1am…

At the headquarters of a motorcycle gang called The Immortals in Ludvika, Sweden…

Flying somewhere…

Maybe I should break this post up a bit…

I mentioned a couple posts back that some friends and I directed and shot a short film in Healdsburg: It is a story about two writer friends surviving after the apocalypse. My friend Cory Loykasek and his writing partner Robb Boardman and I wrote the general story over a series of lunch meetings in 2009 and then they created the screenplay together. Robb and I directed the short together. It’s a personal project for all of us and, in-between all of our professional and other personal obligations, we hope to have it edited before the end of the year.

Cory played one of the leads (Big Spoon)… 

Donny Davanian (R) played the other lead, Short Straw, and Greg Edwards (L) played the main supporting role of Walton…

Robert Weiss played a supporting role as Cult Member. It was constantly a challenge while shooting to crop out the beautiful vineyards around us and to make the paradise-like Healdsburg look “apocalyptic”…

It’s been a while since my last update and I’ve been busy with a lot of stuff. I just got back from Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin and I have a couple down days until I leave for a shoot in Mexico, so I figured this might be a good time to throw some photos up on the ol blog.

This is a pilot I DP’d in June (?). Of course, I can’t really say anything about it but it involved helicopters and crashing cars and this gentleman…

…and lots of guns…

A Latin drum troupe is practicing down the street from me as I type this.

There is a lot to update but I don’t have time to post photos right now, so I’ll jot down the quick and dirty.

The show I was DP’ing last fall has premiered and is currently airing on VH1. It’s called Beverly Hills Fabulous and you can get more info and watch a couple episodes online at http://www.vh1.com/shows/beverly_hills_fabulous/series.jhtml.

I worked with Bryan Barber who is best known for directing the film Idlewild and a bunch of music videos, including a lot of stuff for Outkast.

The music show I DP’d last year with Cee-Lo is also airing currently on Fuse. It is called Lay It Down and you can check it out here: http://fusemusic.com/lay-it-down/

Early this year, I spent about a month traveling through the south with an interesting group of people for a new show. As expected, I can’t say much now but I will say that when we rolled into town, it really felt like the circus had arrived. Here are a couple photos, and I’ll be able to add more photos and info as the show is announced.

Most recently, I directed and shot a narrative short film in the Bay Area. I’m super excited about this project and will definitely post info and photos asap.

More soon!

My fellow filmmaker and friend Brennan Maxwell is doing a project: taking a photo-a-day for 365 consecutive days. This is the one he took of me last night. Check out his flickr feed to see the technical info, see the rest of his photos (he just started), and keep track of him.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxfilm/

I just got back from a hitch hiking adventure with my friend Adam Leech who owns the Leechpit in Colorado Springs (www.leechpit.com).

About a year ago, he and I discovered we shared a similar interest in hobo nickels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobo_nickel). He carves ‘em and I collect ‘em and we hatched a plan: the idea was to hitch hike from Colorado to a huge coin show in Tampa, of which the Original Hobo Nickel Society (OHNS) was a very small part. We wanted to trade hobo nickels for rides and document the whole thing for a to-be-determined future project.

We ducked out of Colorado Springs on a Greyhound in the middle of a blizzard on New Year’s Day and spent the first night of our adventure in Sante Fe, NM.

We started hitch hiking from there and went:
- from Sante Fe to Cline’s Corner (where, Adam likes to say, Patsy Cline’s bus broke down back in the day)
- to Albuquerque (which was 60 miles in the wrong direction but Cline’s Corner was dead)
- to Amarillo
- to Oklahoma City
- to Houston (we originally wanted to take a more northern route through Nashville but the bitter cold and being stuck in OKC for 12 hours convinced us to take a ride south)
- to Beaumont
- to Baton Rouge
- to Biloxi
- to Mobile
- to Daytona
- to Orlando
- to Tampa

It took us a little over five days and we traded hobo nickels for rides the whole way.

We rode almost entirely with truck drivers except for one ride with a cargo van full of Mexican migrant workers who spoke no English but gave us beer and dropped us off at a Waffle House in the middle of nowhere (doh!).

We slept in ditches and trees in 15-degree weather, ran into some rain in the South, and walked from truck stop to truck stop as we got kicked out.

We shared so much time with one trucker who drove us a few hundred miles that he took us home to meet his family and have lunch with them. He had never picked up hitch hikers before and said that, when he picked us up, he kept waiting for “the dental floss to come around my neck.” He was a younger ex-marine who we nick-named “Supertrucker.”

We also rode with Ernie (who couldn’t stop texting and facebooking on his phone while he drove), Chris (a Tennessean with a thick accent and a taste for herb), Cornbread (a young Alabamian who gave us a crash course in new country music) and a host of others. 

When we arrived in Orlando, we were picked up by Rollie Taylor (the president of the Original Hobo Nickel Society) and his girlfriend Wanda and driven back to his house where we stayed for the next four days along with Dave Boulay, an ex-steel worker and current nickel carver from upstate New York. They cooked food for us, bought beer for us, made sure we had everything we wanted, and we now regard them as family.

The coin show was insane, with MILLION$$$ of rare coins and currency, gold and silver bars, and jewelry stuffed wall-to-wall in the Tampa convention center. The Original Hobo Nickel Society had a small booth in the corner of the convention and it was constantly packed with curious onlookers. All of the hundreds of other booths at the convention were occupied by dour-looking middle-aged men in suits who just sat there waiting for somebody to negotiate deals for coins and currency with.

But the hobo nickel carvers were a motley group of guys who were hacking into nickels with Dremels and chisels and vices and pneumatic air tools and gravers and hammers. They were making noise! It was, by far, the most interesting part of the convention, if you don’t include the heist that happened on the last day. During the hobo nickel auction, I saw a carved nickel sell for $7000.

Adam and I were embraced by the entire OHNS crew. The event organizers, however, eyed Adam and I suspiciously and eventually had security follow us because they thought we were “casing the joint.” Once they learned what we were doing, they interviewed us for their website with the hopes of “drawing younger people” to the convention.

While on the road, I documented our journey with a weird pile of recording devices, including my iPhone, a Ricoh GRD digital still camera, a second digital still camera that shot SD video, a Samson H4n audio recorder, Sennheiser wirless lavs, an Audio Technica 4073a shotgun mic, and an old VHS video camera that only worked when it was plugged into a wall (or an inverter in a vehicle). I shipped my Panasonic HMC150 HD camera out to Florida and used that to shoot everything once we got there.

It was a great adventure and I am now a member of the Florida United Numismatists (FUN).

I am DP’ing a new network TV show but I can’t say much more than that right now. Here are a few photos…

Flip camera rigging. Hilarious and sad at the same time.

This was one of my favorite days of shooting…at an after-school program in Compton.

A transformer blew up across the street from a location we were shooting at.

I am shooting with 4 Panasonic Varicams, a Canon 5D and a Canon 7D.

Me on top of a ladder.

PA Voltaire caught in a downpour.

Waiting to go to Miami.

South Beach Miami!

Varis all lined up.

Wow! Ever seen a broken Mafer clamp? Faulty construction.

Coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee.

Back in Beverly Hills. This is what a $2 million car looks like.