I’m bringing a borrowed Nikon D300s to a photo trip I’m leading in Mexico next week, and I wanted to play around with the video feature, so I decided to do a little local shoot in SF over the weekend. It was a lot of fun; when you are shooting video with an SLR most people don’t pay much attention to you, so it is relatively easy to get candid footage. And though I didn’t originally intend to shoot anything cohesive, I brought home enough footage to want to do something with it. After picking music, a short film kind of fell together. This was shot at Ocean Beach and Golden Gate Park, with a soundtrack by Sea Wolf (You’re a Wolf, Album:Leaves In The River).
Last week I did another shoot at Ubuntu’s wonderful biodynamic garden. I shot close to sunset, and I was feeling a bit frustrated with the images until the lack of light forced me to bring out my studio strobes (lugging those around along with the hundred foot extension cords was a lot of fun). With better control of the lighting situation I was able to create a few really nice images that felt much more painterly than the sunlit ones.
I’m very excited to announce that Out of the Deep Blue is now a member of 1% For the Planet! Started in 2002 by Yvon Chouinard, founder and CEO of Patagonia, and Craig Mathews, owner of Blue Ribbon Flies, 1% for the Planet (1%) is a growing global movement of over 1,200 member companies in 38 countries that donate 1% of their sales to environmental organizations worldwide.
The cool thing about this organization is that we get to chose where the money goes, as long as it is approved by 1% (or you can have the non-profit petition for acceptance). I already have a few organizations in mind for our contribution, but if you have any good ideas let me know!
My friend and frequent collaborator at Taksu Media, Rylan Peery, has been working to help a project to give shelter to those still very much in need in Haiti.
Last week I did a shoot with the executive chef of Ubuntu, Aaron London; we were shooting a bean soup recipe for the September 2010 issue of Food & Wine magazine, and managed to sneak in a few other shots destined for an update of the Ubuntu site, including a lovely salad and a vegetable “dragon” with poached-egg head.
When brainstorming ideas for Ubuntu Restaurant’s new website, I had the idea of using x-raying vegetables from Ubuntu’s biodynamic garden for icons. These shots, styled by Chef Jeremy Fox, were originally intended just to serve as style guides for the x-rays which I would take at the Palo Alto Imaging center with the help of my friend, radiologist Dr. Larry Chan.
Above, beets and radishes with Chef Fox’s “edible dirt;” below, squash and squash blossoms.
In the end, some of the above shots made it into the site, while the x-rays will be used in a future project.
In early August 2010, we finished work on the first phase of the Stone & Leather website. Led by biodynamic farming consultant Jeff Dawson, Stone & Leather is a unique company that makes fashionable belts and cuffs with the finest Brazilian quartz crystals and American made leather.
Using a template developed in conjunction with Taksu Media, the site also uses our product photography to highlight the unique range of belts and cuffs.
This past March we did a fun staff photo shoot up in Ubuntu Restaurant’s biodynamic & organic garden; though I was there to shoot the staff, the real star of the shoot was their Scottish highland hairy cow Coco, who just had a baby, named Guinness. Click here or on the image above to see a slideshow video of the shoot.
The Ubuntu staff, including executive chef Aaron London (on left)
Ubuntu Staff; top row (from left): Louis Vargas, Aaron London, John-Paul Kuhn. Bottom Row (from left):Stagiare, Stephen Thorlton, Carl Swanson, Justin Yu
We are in the final stages of building a new website for Rammed Earth Works, a sustainable building consultant based in the Napa Valley. We won a competive bid for the project with the design proposal excerpted below; as you can see, the final design is a bit different but carries the same feeling over from the original mockup. The site isn’t up yet, but we will post it here as soon as it is.
I’m not an adrenalin junkie. Really. I love being in the ocean for the experience of being surrounded by organisms that are perfectly adapted to their surroundings, some unchanged for millions of years. For the strangely calming feeling of stepping into a wilderness that might be located 50 yards away from an IMAX theater (in Monterey) or hundreds of miles from the nearest civilization (Fiji or Costa Rica). That said, there is nothing like potentially being on the menu to bring you into the moment, almost as efficiently as being an expert Zen practitioner.
I often attained this state of mind in the Bahamas in February of 2009, diving with large (i.e. head the size of a coffee table) tiger sharks. The smaller sharks (most lemon and Caribbean reef sharks) became mere distractions as we kept our eyes peeled for the big boys (and girls…mostly girls), tiger sharks measuring up to 16 feet in length or more. After a while though, I came back to that familiar feeling of wonder and excitement, when tiger sharks passed by within inches and looked at us with unmistakable intelligence. That lizard portion of my brain never completely let go however, and I’ve never got back on a boat as quickly as when exiting the water in the presence of these ancient giants.
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