the photography:
keeping with the tradition of posting in spurts, here goes nothing. diptychs are awesome. and quite fun to spell. nuances can be determined only when you have a second ‘something’ to prop your first ‘thing’ up against. hence the photographer’s long standing love of diptychs. i think i’ve talked about them before so i’ll just skip over how awesome they are and just show some off.

these photos were taken within a two day period while i was wandering along chicago avenue, daytripping with the mrs. up sheridan road along the north shore in glencoe, walking from my garage to my house in my backyard (Monte!), and after i had used a rather interesting bathroom housed in a grocery store which is then housed in a tall apartment complex in the west loop (notice the changing table in the mens room, gonna use that thing soon enough!).

my need to take two photos every time i click the shutter stems from my work with autos. i photograph cars at such a pace that sometimes i get ahead of myself. when you already know what angle you are going to be working from and when you’re working on memory repetition, sometimes your hands and feet move faster than your shutter. thus, if i take two photos, hopefully one of them won’t be blurry. as i shoot fine art and portraits for myself and this blog, i find that each shutter click becomes a little more refined, a little less hurried, and a lot more thought gets put into what i’m aimed at. so these diptychs, as you look at them, they really do pop with subtle differences. btw… did you know that subtle nuances is redundant? nuances are subtle by definition. huh… cool.

shot with the 28mm again. also, you might notice that i added a fantastic little plugin feature to my WordPress driven blog. it’s the jQuery lazy load plugin and it totally rules. as you scroll down my blog you will notice that the images will load when you need them as opposed to trying to load all at once. did someone say, user experience? shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. thanks to srobbin for the heads up. he’s got his ear to the ground and i appreciate his help!

the music:
oh ted, how you make my life better. i once saw ted leo play a concert in a defunct bar at my college with nothing more than a microphone, his gibson es335, his twinreverb fender amp, a chair, and a reel-to-reel 2″ tape deck with a built-in speaker sitting on the chair. after he introduced himself into the microphone, he pressed play and began to sing and play along with recorded bass and drums. and to the bewilderment of the crowd of less than 50 people, he rocked his ass off. it was truly amazing. i have seen ted leo live more than 25 times and he keeps getting better. when i hear that his music is being listened to by kids of all ages it makes me smile and it reinstates the fact that he is one of the reasons why i love music. ted leo = passionate singer-songwriter guitar hero who loves what he does and he does it for the kids. truly punk (even though he may sound like Thin Lizzy sometimes).

the photography:

Portrait #31 is Joe

joe and i have been running social circles around each other for probably a good 5 years (who knows, it might even be for longer, i’ll have to do a more thorough background check). he is a well known online photographer (the chicagoist, gapers block, being totally sweet in chicago have (re)published his pics), a super duper bike enthusiast around chicago, and thousands of people have (repeatedly) checked out his flickr page and his hilarious take on the world via twitter. yesterday was the first time i actually got to meet joe in person. i have seen him from a distance 3 times before but under very crowded circumstances. he’s almost instantly recognizable. people like that fascinate me. joe fascinates me.

joe and i share the same love of lots of things but most notably, we love kicks. and by kicks i mean what most people would refer to as their “everyday” shoes. and by shoes i mean really sweet footwear. and by really sweet footwear and i mean the types of sneakers that make guys like joe and i go “oh hell yes please” and drop to our knees with envy.

joe also is the type of guy who is never too far away from his camera or his camera phone. the man takes images constantly. and i love every single one. if you spent enough time, you could actually mark out joe’s path on his bike tours around chicago just by putting the pictures together. it’s a fascinating way to tell a story. and i get completely absorbed in joe’s stories. he’s the kind of photographer who takes pictures of what he likes, not what he’s told to like. it’s pretty awesome.

i hope to see a lot more of joe in the future. i will keep my eyes peeled for the biggest wheeled bike in all of chicago. maybe next time i’ll meet him at publican and ya’ll can witness some fantastic gorilla food photography. that would make my year. photos were taken again with the 28mm f1.8 as the 50mm f1.8 has yet to move off of my desk. i might just have to threaten myself to get it to the lens doctor. one of these days… also, you might notice that with a couple of the outdoor photos i kept the ISO set to 1600. that would be an accident. i set the camera at 1600 when we were shooting in joe’s poorly lit concrete bike locker and i failed to return it to the proper ISO setting (for bright sunny days at least) of 100. i hate it when i don’t recognize stuff like that. i absolutely hate it. good thing it was super duper awesome sunny out and none of you would have noticed if i hadn’t told you.

the music:

many of the people who have appeared in the 50 portraits project evoke certain feelings of some shape or form when i have met them or even when i think about them as artists, chef’s, friends, or just peeps. interviewing doug #27 made me hungry for obvious reasons while photographing jay #24 made me want to go out and learn to paint. with joe, all i wanted to do was relive my early years of college radio where i would play anything from the get-up kids, wilco, bad ska, worse hip-hop, and even (gasp from my friends…) steve earle (side note: steve earle rules. get over it!). i imagined myself, all alone in the radio station dj booth with the monitors at full blast, making sure the needle of the receiver wasn’t pinned in the red. so for the drive home, i proceeded to play drums on the steering wheel while i blasted champaign, IL’s hum, really loudly. when i grow up, i’m gonna play through two completely different amplifiers simultaneously while jumping on pedals and destroying my fender strat. uh huh. when i grow up. the best part? when i got back to my in-laws, the bears beat seattle. so, you know… i think it all worked out ok for a sunday that was perfect.

the photography:
it is called a few different things across the world. putt putt, miniature golf, mini golf… but no matter how you slice it; the smaller than real life golf course is one of the greatest places to relax on the planet. 1 father-in-law, 1 wifey, a dozen life-sized paper-maché animals, 1 waterfall, 1 not so close to scale replica of the great wall of china, and 1 gorgeously sunny afternoon in illinois = THE perfect labor day.

here’s a fun perspective/take of a miniature golf course in skokie, illinois. we snuggled our round in between a rather quick threesome of daughter, son, and dad who sat quietly behind us while we putted, and four twentysomethigns who were trying not to curse too loudly when they missed their 4th and 5th shots. it was awesome. did i mention the weather? gorgeous. i also love that mini golf courses have their own little alien-like ecosystems that may or may not survive on rain and sun (they might just grow on dreams and luck). these environments offer up some pretty radical angles. everything was shot using the 28mm 1.8 that was slung around my neck while i putt-putt putted to the head of the leader board after 17 holes (we never did play the first hole).

for a historical look back at golf de mini, check our this link.

the music:
sometimes i just want to hear melodic rock and roll so i can set myself afloat in my office chair. this song does just that. spinning and spinning and spinning i forget just how boring work can be sometimes. thank god for Panodora.com.

the photography:
in many ways, a car is a car is a car. if it gets you from point A to point B without fail, it’s doing it’s job correctly. now, getting from point A to point B is determined by the driver and how the driver would like to or can afford to get from A to B. some cars are made for those with money and some cars are made for those with no money and even more cars are made so that you can look like you’ve got money. exterior designs and drivetrains are copped every day from manufacturer to manufacturer and lawsuits and lawyers help to keep original ideas original. but no matter how you slice it, no matter how many models are on the road in one given model year (347 last year, much less this year) every individual entity known as “the automobile” can be viewed as a work of art. even the craptastic ones.

it’s funny that i ended up where i am today as a professional photographer. a couple of twists of fate, a coffee table book that went no where (which is a total bummer because i really look at the entire experience as some of my best editorial work as a whole and collected), a design career that was just asking for a break (although i still do the occasional album cover so keep those requests coming), this guy who i sorta met once who was looking for an auto photographer, and one fatefully awesome working interview later and, ta-da. so what has the two years brought me? well, for one thing, i know that i can make almost any car look good enough to pass off as awesome when viewed at 350px x 269px @72dpi. say that one five times fast.

other than that… say, the basics of first gear? eh, ummm… i know what torque does but could i describe it to you? probably not without using the word ‘torque’. and i know how a 600 hp engine feels when you stomp on the gas really hard. but do i know what shocks and struts do exactly? not so much. what i HAVE learned is how the light will react off the hood of a car in the shade and at what angle i should park a car at any given moment in the day to get as much soft light to bounce off the dash. it’s the little things, right?

photos are of a car without a single photo of a decipherable badge (i do leave one hint…) or a Monroney sticker (the thing on the window at the dealer, and yes, it has a proper name). i decided to take some shots without the normal car pieces extruding thus ruining the photo, with the exception of the headlights and the taillights which, after a while, feel less and less car like and more and more just plain mechanical. no wheels, no dashboards, no engine, no sounds, no fury, no burning rubber. just metal lines after gooey metal lines… (and some leather and more metal)

the music:
what happens when you mix two crazy multi instrumentalist dudes, one incredible drummer, numerous midi triggers, a couple of keyboards, a vocoder, one heavy bass, one heavy guitar, and then to top it off you pour lighter fluid all over the cymbals and light them on fire? after the drummer hits them repeatedly to put out the flames, you get Trans Am. this song is one of their best. and this band still sits in my top 10 live acts of all time. amazing. i will drive to cleveland to see this band. that’s how much i love their music.

with all the crap indie-metal-synth-pop-vocoder-idiots out there (that’s right, i’m looking directly at you dan deacon), you can point to trans am as a ground breaking band. on their 2004 record, liberation, they even remixed george w bush speeches into one of the best anti-war songs ever created. these guys are boundary pushers. and sometimes they come up sounding lame and trite (don’t buy the record TA). but for the most part, these guys kill it. and they kill it every time.