The new newness.

So the new newness is comming. Yep. I can't really explain it, but it will start with a major overhaul of the website. The blog (this thing) will be out of service for maybe a week or two during the transitions, but you'll have the brand new spanking 'pro' website for awhile. I'm really interested in your comments on the new design, so as soon as it's out, you'll know.

ALONE

So, I officially live alone. I officially mark that official adult-like thing, that is, well, living alone. Yep, free to walk naked from the shower to kitchen. Or kitchen to shower. Or shower to living room. Or outside.

Well okay, I guess not outside. This country isn't all that progressive. (Not that I know of one that is).

Anyway, I'll have a real living room and real dining room. And I'll have a small studio built in which is way cool. Oddly enough, I don't plan on spending too much of this upcomming month in Czech.

Tommorows mission: Redecorate!

BOINGBOING

Oh my god! There's a link to one of my old projects on BOINGBOING.net!!!!!!!!! You probably don't know how cool that is, but I read boing boing a trillion times each day. And someone ELSE submitted my link as a cool project. I'm like, overwhelmed with pride! Here's the project link: Tilt-Shift Lens.

london

Hey!

I'm going to london in about a week to visit friends and see if I can start making connections for a possible 'move'. I really need to go and do the rounds for the agencies, and if I can, shoot something neat. At the moment I'm looking for places to stay, I've done the hostel and hotel thing before and for right now I'm really placing my bets on craigslist.com. Anyway, If you know of anything, please drop a line!

School, moma and other stuff.

I've been in fashion for about five years now, on and off. I started as a model and then it sort of progressed from there. Mostly it was a bunch of fortunate/unfortunate twists that led me to where I am now. It's a surprise really. I would have never really suspected it, but here I am. When you are young older will people always tell you that you can't really imagine what life has in store for you. You believe them of course, but you can never really imagine the vastness of which they really speak. We think they mean we never know who we will marry or where we will live. It never really occurs to us that we can't even plan who we will be. The very way our brains will organize themselves to see the world through our eyes is unpredictable. So we might very well just become anything. The trouble is that accepting this fact is a very scary prospect. It's hard to let go. Even now my mother gives me the 'eye' when the subject of going back to school comes up. You know, years ago I would have never imagined that I wouldn't get a PhD. I was so good at school it never crossed my mind that once I finished college I might never go back. My advisor warned me about it, my mother lost sleep over it, and I didn't even see it comming, right up to the day when the degree came in the mail. I remeber that moment, getting that degree. That little paper represented my entire life up to that point. I had gone through advanced programs, excellency awards, scholarships, endowments, high grades, everything. Just for that peice of paper. School was the entire way I saw the world. And then one day, it was over. Everything I had ever done was sealed off, encapuslated, summed up, vindicated and validated, by this one little piece of paper.

I skipped my graduation. I didn't know anyone who would have been there. When I looked at that paper I think I might have dropped one little tear. Maybe. But then I just shrugged.

The albatross that we hang around our necks are conceptual models of how we are supposed to interpret and percieve our own lives. When we realize that the rope that binds us to them is nothing more than our own fear of the unknown, the skulls drop away from our necks and plung into the sea.

I should have never been defined by school or by academia. But I don't regret having been. We come to peace with who we are, despite the pain such a metamorphasis might bring. So, no more PhD. Truthfully, if I went back to school, I can't imagine what it would be for. The things I hunger for now can't be taught, they must be lived. School might always be an option, but living my life is not. Truthfully, the path that passes through libraries, doctorates, and masters, is far too certain for me. When I sleep, I dream. But I've never had nightmares of failure. Success is a luck you build from the inside. You might be right, you might be wrong, but regardless you've got to believe in yourself. Even if no one else believes in you, you've got to believe in yourself. It might sound silly, but the light you create on the inside, will always be there to see you through.

work

Street Magazine. DJ, BigJ.

Room-mate

I often will rope people I know into my stock photography projects. For most people it's pretty fun and easy to do. So for this project I hauled in my roommate who has been curious about what exactly I photograph for awhile now. So, as an introduction, this is my roommate. Monika. Unfortunatly though, she won't be my roommate for all that much longer as she's planning on moving with her boyfriend to her own place.

Pluto

It's nice to know that there are stories like this out there. It's a BBC profile on the woman who named the planet Pluto when she was 11 years old. Notably, she is the only living person on earth to have the honor of having named a planet. She's now in her 80's.

Problems with Blogger + GZA

Hey, so I've had a few computer problems the last couple days. Ha! Do I ever get AWAY from computer problems? Good question. Anyway, the other night I hung out with GZA from Wu-Tang clan for STREET magazine. It was a pretty good time. Normally I don't do stuff like that which borders on journalism, but I always make exceptions. Good time.

Assisting for Elle.

So I assisted on a editorial shoot for Elle today. It was really cool to do and I'm crossing my fingers I get a printed assistant credit (also very cool). There's lot to say about it, nice location, nice models, etc... But mostly it really impresses upon me the importance of shooting with interesting styling and top-notch models. But that sort of stuff is hard to do if your not working for magazines. I'm shooting mostly commercial and a few things on the side on my own. Very cool stuff for sure, but it really never comes together like a fashion story. Mostly because I don't have any reason to shoot a fashion story. Sure, I could shoot stuff on spec (shoot if first, ask them to publish later) but I don't feel like spending that sort of money (fashion stories are EXPENSIVE) and I also really don't much have the time. So for now, not much fashion. But I'll find a way around that.

big day

whew, I am tired as heck. But todays a big day, I'm assisting my photographer friend David who is in from new york on the editorial shoot for Elle. Cool huh? I'm excited. But totally worn out!

another nail in the coffin.

Well, Nikon has announced they are ending the production of all but two of their film cameras. Read the release here. What an end of an age. Film has reigned for more than a hundred years.

forward

Sometimes, while rushing forward towards the everything in your life, it occurs to you what a huge freaking mistake you've made along the way. The world is such an incredibly huge, enourmous, crazy, giant, limitless, never-ending horizon, that for every moment after you lose sight of the shore in your little boat that is your soul, you fear. Once the shores have receded, all there is horizon and when all there is, is horizon, the only direction you can go is forward. Because it's all the same. You've simply lost sight of your land and if you didn't go forward, you would end up just drifting. And that's not any sort of solution.

No, onwards, onwards, onwards. You're screwed if you miss anything from home, and screwed if you forgot to take anything with you.

Once I met a guy while I was in the desert somewhere outside of Suez City who took got drunk at the docks with some sailors in New York and awoke on a ship bound for Nigeria in the middle of the atlantic. What did he do? Well, the trip takes a couple weeks, and the boat certianlly wasn't going to turn back, and there's not like any place to get off along the way. So at first he became resigned to his fate, and then empowered by it. By the time he reached africa he came to peace with the fact that he wasn't returning to his job, to his apartment or girlfriend. No, the horizon had opened for him, and although regret might dogg him out of the shadows in the corner of his mind, there was only forward.

I met him in the desert somewhere outside of Suez City. Supposidly there is a spot in the desert, as you approach the suez canal, where the angle hits just right, so that you can see ships sailing in the distance, but before only sand. These massive ocean going ships seem to just sail through the desert. Mirages. This man anyway, he reached nigeria, and then just decided to keep going and crossed africa on what started as an accident, then proceeded as a whim and finally became and obsessive, consuming passion to know and to go forward. Behind us, the world recedes. It recedes and recedes and recedes. And we go. Forward, and forward and forward. And the past dissapears and in our dreams the tommorow becomes a race into forever.

ahead and before, after and behind.

oh gosh. What to say, what to report? I'm sleeping better, which is good. My roommate is moving out soon, which leaves me in a curious position. Do i get a new roommate? Or do I live alone? It sorta can afford to be alone, and I'm tempted to do so. But additionally my friend who lives in my building (above) is moving out. Which will leave me, for all intensive purposes, alone. I don't live with anyone else, and I don't have much of a social life. But I've got a half serious idea that I'll use the extra room as an art/experiment/mini-studio type thing. I'm also tempted to move, to someplace reconstructed and modern looking (to shoot stock in) but I'm not yet totally convinced it's worth it. At least not before the summer when everything is wonderful and great.

So perhaps I'll be alone.

I'm producing a new website, and a new portfolio. Self promotion baby. I hope it helps!

I don't know. Not much to say really. I wish I could be in like a more spiritually satisfying relationship with myself, but I feel distant from even myself these days. (Hence my hesitation at living alone) I'll probably buy a TV and get cable TV. I know, that's BIG for me. But otherwise I'll get just, well, disconnected. And I don't want that. Probably some more IKEA furniture. Maybe even a real bed. (whoo-hoo!) I'm even thinking about incorporating in the Czech Republic, start a small photo-production company. Ideas ideas!

The picture is two days ago.

You know what? I wish I could find other photographers like me. Young. Struggling. Work-a-holic. I'd love to join some sort of young fashion photographer support group. Just a place we could all sit around and be friends and talk gear and light and all these other things that normal people just do the 'eyeball glaze over' when you start talking.

Radio Frequency Tags

So one of my christmas presents was an orange sweater. Turns out, this sweater (very comfortable and good looking) has a radio frequency identification tag sewn into the seam. Crazy huh? I found it because it was scratching me and it doesn't explaing what it is, just says, "remove before washing or wearing, cut here". So I cut it off. when I held it up to the light it's obvious what it is, one of those radio tags. Creep huh?

Besides that, here is an example of my commerical work. Typical stuff.

Insomnia

I'm not sleeping well these days. *(Yes mom, I'm alright)* And to counter my insomnia I've decided to start going back to the gym so that I can start trying to at least physically wear myself out and hope that helps. In the mean time though, I'm getting a lot of work done, in the night. This is from a gothic lingerie story that I put together the moment I stepped off the plane. I've been retouching it since then and I hope to get it published soon. The model is really perfect for it because her body is so androgenous that although she's naked, it's not really sexual leaving more of the clothes and her expression. This model has a hard time finding work in Prague, but personally I think she's a perfect for modern fashion. She lives in Britian where I think she will do beter than in czech as in britian they could really appreciate her build. Czech is great, but the model market is quite traditional. As a note, while most girls this size tend to be quite young in the model world, this model is in her early twenties and thus already at final size. I think being a fotographer you can really come to appreciate the variety people come in. Never ceases to amaze me.

Finished.

Here is the finished version. (I'm prepping to get a whole new website, so I'm going through old work to bring it up to snuff).

Several Things

First of all, Photoshop TV (which you can subscribe to via Apple iTunes PodCast Directory) is freaking awesome. I've just resolved to get a Video Ipod because of it. I mean, wow. Podcasting is freaking awesome. You wake up in the morning and all your subscriptions have already been downloaded for you. Ready to watch or listen to automatically!

In other things, here's a "work in progress". I still have to fix the teeth. Like it?

More

Well the microsoft thing ended up getting resolved quite amicably and professionally. So, burning sense of mistreatment has passed. In other computer news I've made the plunge (literally) into the world of Liquid Cooling. For the longest time now I simply haven't been able to keep my computer processor chip cold enough for it to operate at it's optimal performance level. Now however I've gotten a large external cooland pump system with fan and radiator assembly connected directly up to the CPU itself. Oh man is it COOL. It literally doesn't even warm up anymore. I'm so satisfied.

Windows

Microsoft Windows sucks. Recently I bought a brand new copy of windows because I wanted to finnaly own my own windows XP CD rather than using school CDs that the Tech department used to give out when I was in college. All is well and good, except turns out your only allowed to use it on one computer. So, having installed it on a laptop AND my desktop, turns out it won't work at all on the desktop because I have to buy it TWICE to use it on a seperate computer in my one bedroom. This makes me furious. It's not cheap software, infact most software isn't cheap. But the idea that a person has to purchase TWICE something that they will never own, and never use more than ONE at a time, within the same room, really makes me mad. The definition "per computer" is stupid anyway. Exactly how many computers are in my computer? I think it's reasonable to assume that in this modern world most working professionals will have two computational devices. One stationary, one portable. Legally, the computer companies might be on solid ground, but legally so is the music industry and you can see what people think of stealing music. They think its fine. And why? Because the music industry treats it's loyal paying customers like crap when they are buying something that has no value with out them purchasing it. People don't care if it's against the law. Laws change. And if they don't? Well, sue a few thousand and another hundred million will still tell you to f*ck off. All power starts with the people and ends with the people.

We will abide by the laws as long as they abide by us.

Eugh. I'm so disgusted. How stupid a situation is it when the only people who have suffer for stealing software are the ones purchasing it? No foul for stealing- but if you have absolutly any legitimate fair-use your forced to pay through the nose.

Travel

So, I'm back in Europe. I flew to London over new years and then hop-skipped-jumped to prague by the morning of the 1st. Ah airtravel. Pretty freaking fast.

Anyway, despite the Sominex induced attempts on the plane to 'force' adjust me to my new time zone, here I am, at four in the morning. Wide awake.

Surprisingly enough, I worked today in studio. A 8 hour shoot with one model who flys out to London tommorow, (well, already today). It was a good shoot by the end, but I was rusty at the start with my lighting all over the place. I felt fine, but the truth is, I was probably no where near 'on the ball'. I'll put stuff up over the next few days. It was done both digital and film, and although I like the digital, I really look forward to the film.