I have been trying to work with meditation, visualization and setting intention lately. Visualization I came to early in life, both through a wildly fruitful and well encouraged imagination, and through a couple of dance teachers who used visualization to manifest proper posture and movement. It really is amazing how much our mental images, or lack there of can effect you anatomy. Some of the images are so strong, I use them to this day: need to relax or getting a massage—images that you are made of soft, warm dough; want to walk like a ballet dancer—imagine two huge meat hooks hoisting you up under your ribcage, lifting you, but you shoulders are free and loose (avoid the should to ear look, which is never a good idea). I hurt my hip several weeks ago, and it will hurt to walk when I over do it, but if I image myself lifted from my center, not “sitting” in my hips, almost all the pain is gone.

The the beginning of this year, I decided that I was going to move from being a photo dabbler to photographer. I was going to be able to be someone who really knew how to use their camera, used the manual mode most —if not all the time, and got the shot on purpose, not by accident. During the month of February, I took two in person classes, two online classes, and set up 3 shooting days. I even got a set of two “proper” strobe lights off craig’s list. I feel 100% more confident, and know I have a ways to go.

I have also set an intention to fill out the Dangerous Curves rooster, and now have two new wonderful woman working with us—one of the a great trained dancer, which opens great creative doors for me!

Now it’s all about keeping the ball rolling as I enter into another heavier work period, so I don’t let all this progress be lost.

19 years ago today Dan and I transformed from good friends to a couple. It means that we have been together longer that we haven’t. We actually planned our wedding to be on the other side of the year on 9/9. But 3 is a magic number, for us in particular.

After shooting Bryn, I did a short session with my friend and fellow DC dancers, Jean. Her new bangs gave here a very 1930s look, very vampish. I was playing with some dramatic lighting, I love the shadows that highlight her cheek bone on this one.

Jean

When I originally set up this blog, the idea was to force myself to create and post art.  To challenge myself not to spend too much editing my work, being too critical. Now that I am getting seriously into photography, I want to get back to that.  I am going to start trying to take my camera with me more often and take more pictures.  I would like to try and post once a week—more if possible. The first one I want to post, is this photo of Bryn that I took on Wednesday.  I really love the intensity in her eye, while there is a still a softness.  In this photo she strikes me as challenging and wise. I may play around with this photo a bit later—making it black and white, except for the eye—maybe.

Bryn looking

Over the last few years, I have found a true desire to delve into photography.  I have always found photography to be magical, but it was always too complicated, and playing in the darkroom wasn’t that exciting for me—I hated the smell of the chemicals. Now that that part of the equation has been eliminated, I am more and more interested.  I made a big investment in a top end camera at the end of last year, and it came a couple weeks ago.  The Nikon D700 is a wonderful camera with a ton of bells and whistles, and most important to me, the ability to shoot tethered to a computer. Having spent many hours in the Future photo studios watching them shoot tethered, and the ability it gives to truly examine the image in full screen, I fell in love.  I tried several set ups to get my pentax to work tethered, and they didn’t really do it for me.  The Nikon is a dream set up.  Last night I finally got the whole setup working smoothly.  Just in time for a photo shoot for PlayStation: The Official Magazine.

My home studio, shooting tethered, working on a class project

It was really nice to be able to have everything set up within 15 minutes.  Now that I am using my laptop as part of the process, Dan helped me find this great rack stand—which has locking wheels—so I can keep the laptop near me, but it swivels easy to show images to the clients or the talent. It worked great for the PTOM shoot, that will appear in the May issue.  I am really feeling more confident about what I am doing, and it helps more with each shoot.

Fun with Ps3

One of the things that you may not know about me is that my first Art Director credit was on a car magazine. When I was a fresh thing out of college, working at Harris Publications in NYC, I was responsible for the Consumer Digest car magazines. It was just me and an editor (striking similar to the work I do now) and we would put out 10 special guides a year. It was black and white mando with a glossy color cover—and was nothing but stats, stats, stats. I learned my way around a style sheet on those books, and actually I think much of my current speed was developed working on those titles. I was drowning in car info and photos, and aside from a few special proto-types, I could never tell one from another. I just don’t have the DNA that can look at a car and tell the make and model—Dan does, but we think it’s mainly a guys thing. I am thankful for the job for the experience and the editor helped us find our very trustworthy 1996 Geo Prizm (which is still running great over 10 years later). But I never developed a love for cars.

So why do I love the BBC’s Top Gear? It’s just brilliant—the hosts, the camera work, the challenges—all just brilliant. We just watched an episode tonight where one of the hosts raced a car across Japan, while the other two took a bullet train. So wonderful silly.

They are launching a US version of Top Gear soon, and it makes me want to cry.  Sure the American version of The Office didn’t suck the way I feared, but with Adam Carolla, Tanner Foust and Eric Stromer I don’t think there is any hope for it.

So I recommend checking out Top Gear on BBC America, or at least Youtube, and avoiding all other versions. It turns out that cars might actually be cool.

My friend Rachelle and I both love So You Think You Can Dance, and this last season we watched as much as we could together.  Even though Dan would sometimes watch it, and appreciate the difficulty, there is something special about watching with another dancer.  We gasp, bitch, and fast forward Mary Murphy’s screaming. We tried to enjoy Step Up and Dance, but was physically impossible—which surpised me, since Bravo usually rocks the reality shows.  So when we saw that there was a new show by the creators of SYTYCD, we were pysched.  We got together last night to watch Sunday and Monday’s shows—4 hours of dance!

Superstars of Dance was being hosted by some generic Miss America and Michael Flatley.  I think Flatney is a fablous dancer, and a bit an asshole, which seems to be the trend in great male dancers (yes, Mikhail Baryshnikov, I am looking at you).  He usually has a lot of passion and spirit when he is talking, so he should have been great as a host—but make him read from a telepromter and he might as well be made of cardboard.  Rachelle said it best “What is he, Michael Flatline?”  And dude, you were raise in Chicago, why are you forcing that Irish accent?

The show started by letting us know it was a competition, but we didn’t know how it would be structured (1 group, 1 duet, and 2 soloists from each of the 8 countries).  And the judges weren’t really introduced, so how do I know they are qualified.  ALL of the Irish numbers are from “Lord of the Dance” Flatley’s vanity project—which they don’t aknowledge.  Yes, Michael, they did dance that very well—big pat of the back to you for creating it and touring it for 11 years.  If they don’t have it down yet, they never will.  The male dancer doing Flatley’s part was good, but after seeing Flatley do it, it was a yawn.

There was no explaination for how the “Supstars” were chosen.  My guess is that they called people and groups that were ethnic that had auditioned for SYTYCD. Also there was a bunch of performers that weren’t really dancers.  I mean Kung Fu is great and difficult movement, but isn’t really dance.  And Monday night the judges agreed with me—but Sunday night they all ADORED the group number from China, which was the same thing, except with much more supporting a performer on the tip of 12 spears. This caused me to cover my eyes and yell “not dance, not dance” much to Rachelle’s glee.

Not dance! Not dance!

The standouts for me were the two soloist for India—both wonderfully talented, the american duet—we watched it twice, and the Russian ballerina.

The biggest disappointment: the awful camera work and the director work either has never done a dance show or was staggering drunk both nights.  Some of the dnaces where impossible to see becuse of the way the camers moved and the shots that were picked. It’s like they paid a lot of money to rent 4 crane lifts for the camera and they were gonna get every red cent of of them.  My thought is that dance is ment to be seen from the audience—one angle. the full body.  I will grant that you might want the occationally close up, but dance is a full body art—show me the full body, and I would like to see all of the dancers please.  I know American’s have short attention spans, but if a dance isn’t interesting when you are just sitting in the theater in front of it, then it shouln’t be on TV anyways.

Some of the countries were just not well represented—there are great dancers in all of these countries—just not appearing in this show. And BTW, aren’t we missing several important dance countries? Hello, France? We know that you set the standard in ballet and in fact created the vocabulary that dancers use to communicate steps—but we don’t think that we will be needing you. Thanks anyway.

Shell and I both agreed that the competion part is lame, since the judges are so predicable “What’s that South Africa? You’re a pompous cock who thinks everyone could do better?” “Oh, the Chinese judge voted 8 again? I am so surprised.”  It really would have been better as a showcase, but if it was a showcase, it would have been on PBS—and no one would watch it.

The last week of last year, I lost 1.5 TB of storage and backup when two drives kicked the bucket in a perment way.  Everything on the 500gb MyBook was backed up, since the drive had never been all that stable.  I kept work files from a handful of clients that are always asking for old files, since I hate having to dig through my DVD backups.  The 1TB Maxtor drive had all my video work files, all my photos and my entire iTunes library.  To say that Ihaven’t been all that diligent in backing up this data would be putting it mildly.  All of it is gone, gone, gone.  Dan tried, far longer than he should have, to revive the drives. But short of very expensive data recovery, it wasn’t worth it.

I am rebuilding my iTunes by copying files from my ipods, and redownloading from iTunes, which they should offer at anytime, but are making it seem like it’s a big favor.  I think more than half of the pictures that I lost are backed up.  The photos that I took for Dan’s christmas gift, a calendar of all his guitars, are gone.  But we still have the guitars, so they can be taken again. I lost countless pictures of Devon, and his adorable-ness will have to re-cataloged for historical import. But client photographs are back-up.  The video work files are gone, with no backup.  This includes a lot of Fast Times footage that was shot for a video that never came to be. All the DC videos are up loaded to Youtube, but the quality is shit. I am counting it as a lesson and moving on.

So now I start 2009 with new drives, and a healthly respect for the massive backup DVD collection that I have, and will continue to grow.  It seems right that I am getting this fresh start at the beginning of the year. I wish you all better back-up karma!

How can you resist? Too cute to stand.