Burning Man & The Great Ticket Shortage of 2012

Today, the Burning Man Organization will announce its new policies regarding tickets to this year’s event. Growth, permit concerns and an aging ticket system has taken its toll and has caused, what many burners see as a huge disaster. Many of the amazing and mind-blowing art and projects that makes Burning Man what it is each year are threatened, because theme camps and project teams have received only about 25% of the tickets they need to complete their projects.

There’s a lot of debate out there right now and a lot of people who are devastated. I get it. I’ve only been once and there hasn’t been a day since I got back that I haven’t thought about its effect on me on how I can re-arrange my life to fit Black Rock City into it. Should Burning Man move to a private location? Should we use non-transferable tickets? Many questions remain unanswered. I’m not sure what will or should happen, but I do know that we can all find ourselves back there again. I have hope that this will create a better Black Rock City and that we can all be together again.

It is speculated that later today, they will announce a plan to place the tickets in the hands of those who have the know-how, resources and experience to make Burning Man amazing. I don’t consider myself on of those people, but I still hold hope that I’ll make it back. There’s still Burning Man’s STEP program, which is supposed to help facilitate a secure exchange of tickets at face value amongst burners. I’ve got my fingers crossed. Hopefully, today will be another step towards a better event and you can bet your ass there’s thousands of people holding their breath right now.

Last year, the planets finally aligned and I was privileged enough to make it to the playa. For years, I made excuses or had my head in other places, so I never made the trip. When I finally did, it was everything I hoped. It changed me forever.

Thank you citizens of Black Rock City, from DPW all the way to the Sparkle Ponies. Whatever happens today,  I hope to see you at home and good luck with tickets!

 

I will never forget the time I spent in the desert with 50,000 of my closest friends sharing ideas, living with wild abandon and being astounded by each other. It shook me up and poured me over some ice.

Every day since, I’ve been trying to hold on to what I learned there. I left some of my prejudice and judgement out there on the playa, gasping for air and I thought I didn’t bring any. I don’t know how long its going to last, but I see things differently. It’s easier to be in the moment and its easier to open up to people. Those were two things I thought I was good at. I know now that I do not know how to give.

I can hardly describe the feelings I had over the course of that week and I won’t even try to. I will say that my heart and my brain are different now and I want to stay this way. I want to hold on to that Its-A-Wonderful-Life feeling that I have right now and I want to carve in stone the truce I’ve made with everyone in the world, good or bad. Its easy to write it all off as some giant desert art party, but it is a very special place on the border between personal freedom and the law where people treat each other with more respect and empathy than I’ve ever seen. People are more real, less diluted.

They say it’s the 4th largest city in Nevada (for a week). They say its the most educated city in the world. I’ve been to a thousand cities and it is impossible to compare Black Rock City to any of them. It’s more a feeling than a place.

Black Rock City is now my favorite city. I had too much fun to take the time and really take careful photos, a mistake I won’t repeat next year. I was perfectly content at the time to just be in such a wonderful place with such amazingly talented and creative people. I was told not to shoot at all, but thats just crazy talk.

I normally shoot digital, but I decided just before we left to shoot film and I wasn’t even really prepared, I just grabbed the stuff I had lying around. I did however acquire an instant camera that I fell in love with.

Now, I’m find myself shopping for toyhaulers, golf carts and scissor-lifts, planning my future around how I’m going to make it back and how I can apply what I learned there to my everyday life. I miss the playa more and more everyday, but one of the lessons of Burning Man is live in the moment, so I’m off to be with my lovely wife. Hopefully, I’ll see you there next year.

San Francisco on Valentine’s Day

For a slide show of these images, click here.

Every time I go to San Francisco, I leave feeling like I have unfinished business. It’s the kind of place you couldn’t truly experience in one lifetime. Like many other cities, it hustles and bustles and has its pitfalls, but there is a charm to this city that I couldn’t find in London, Rome or Madrid. I absolutely love these cities as well, but the fog city stands alone on the planet a singular individual. I watched the fog will the Golden Gate Bridge into being just by dreaming about it and sea lions stealing bait from angry fisherman. I stood in one place while people stopped their cars to simply look at light shining through the trees. One woman with a childlike sense of wonder in her voice exclaimed, ” isn’t the world we live in just beautiful!?” Yes. To quote TV, the world is just awesome.

Just as there will never be another Tony Bennett, San Francisco will always live and breathe and be unique.  If your not convinced yet, hopefully the images will win you over. I’m not sure whether the earthquake gave everyone a chance to rebuild and recreate a city better than it was before or whether the topography itself mandated such a cosmopolitan and lovely place to occupy its boundaries, but whatever it is, it has me and I will return.

What you won’t see here is photos of the Great San Francisco Pillow Fight. Russ and Heather and I decided that just the event title alone was good enough to get us there with great expectations. I brought 10+ gigabytes of photos home and it takes a little while to get through all o’ that. I’ll post the pillow fight as its own post in days or weeks to come. In other news, I’ll be shooting one of the most fun projects of the year over the next few weeks for an old friend: a series of romance novel covers. Who hasn’t seen a zillion six-packs on rippling dudes staring at you while waiting in line at the supermarket? I had to jump at the chance to help this author turn on women across America. Sounds like good karma to me.

Also, we had a chance to photograph Marcela Carmona at one of the coolest recording studios I’ve ever seen , the Bomb Shelter in L.A. (founded/owned by Eric Kretz, drummer of Stone Temple Pilots) while she tracked vocals for her new album, shots coming soon. Stay tuned….

Streets of Lancaster Grand Prix and my new Canon EOS 7D

I’m in a kind of photographic ecstasy at the moment. As some of you may already know, I’ve just upgraded to the new Canon EOS 7D DSLR. I love my old Sony DSC V-3, but I won’t be looking back. I’m in a whole new ball game. I’ve traded in a fine 7 megapixel Honda for a 18 megapixel, 8FPS, 12,800ISO Acura. I chose this camera for its claimed low-light capabilities, its image quality and customizability (is that a word?) and I am very pleased so far. This camera responds very quickly to adverse focus situations and is pretty hard to stump. I have no doubt that this thing will give me years of images and I look forward to putting it to the test. Heather and I are now equipped better than ever to record this awesome experiment called Earth and we are beaming with anticipation of future gigs. Let us know if we can help you capture your special event.

In local news, the City of Lancaster is stepping up their game lately; if you read my post about the Arbor Lofts, then you may already know that the city is trying to renovate downtown into a 21st century foot-traffic people friendly district. Part of that process included shutting down Lancaster Boulevard and holding a go cart race called the Streets of Lancaster Grand Prix, and I don’t mean the ones you used to ride when you were a kid. These machines go 100 mph and corner like a tron light cycle and are very loud. Heather and I remarked that this was the first time we were happy that we got denied for the Arbor Lofts, if only because we wouldn’t want to wake up to the sound of 100 carts a top speed (apparently we make too much for the  low subsidized rent, which we could not afford).  An event like this in America wouldn’t be complete with a ton of fried food and beer sold from trailers and stands and we were not disappointed to find bacon-wrapped hot dogs right next to the beer garden.  The crew headed out to see what we could find.

The first day, we missed the qualifying races and showed up right before the car show. We would later return Sunday for the main event which was likely a good idea. Saturday’s car show made for a much better setting to get acquainted with the 7D, which did not disappoint. The light was diminishing quickly, but I wanted to test the camera’s higher ISO’s. The auto exposure bracket function worked beautifully for handheld HDR’s because the 8 frames per second helped eliminate whatever movement occurred. I’ve been wanting to shoot a car show for quite sometime and the setting was rewarding. Everyone likes cars. There were thousands of man-hours represented in the work that the crowd inspected from an amazing maroon Ford panel van to a jet black gloss perfect ’51 Chevrolet.

The feel and build quality of the 7D make you take it seriously. It’s nice to own a camera with a learning curve. It has a bottom and didn’t take me long to at least explore all of the possibilities and in some cases, employ them. You pay for settings when you buy a digital camera and this one has a setting for aaaaalmost  everything that you can think of. What’s impressive is how easy it is to get to those settings. That said, my one disappointment is that of all the customizable buttons on the camera, mappable to many functions, not one can be set to start auto-exposure bracketing. This seems like an oversight to me, especially when HDR (high dynamic range imaging) is rapidly becoming so popular. The autofocus is the best of any camera I’ve used and handled carts coming straight for the camera on the straight aways moving at what seemed like 70 or 80 mph. Most images were simply in focus when I used AI Servo mode with zone AF and AF point expansion.

The light was fading and the band was setting up so, I turned my focus to putting the new camera through its concert-capturing capabilities. I promoted concerts for a few years and have played bass in more bands than I care to admit, so concerts hold a special place in my heart; I’ve seen over 300. Unfortunately, the photography bug hit me late in relation to the concert part of my life so, I feel like I have a lot of making up to do. Bullfrog Blues gave me a chance to do just that.

A friend from the music scene and colleague just happened to be performing that night making it even more synchronous and enjoyable. The light was better than some of the clubs around here but still bad enough to put the Canon to the test. Small concert lighting is always terrible. The wings of the stage were hardly lit and essentially turned a five piece band into a trio. Luckily, this band knew how to find their light and did so for their various solos. It was a pleasure to shoot this band and they were good, too. Soon thereafter, we slipped away to recharge our physical and actual batteries for our return for the main event the next morning.

Our buddy Jonathon was able to join us to bring the video the next day and as always, it was good to have him along. We managed to find great places to shoot, slipping past a few fences. I think that the cameras actually get us places we aren’t technically supposed to be. I really believe that a uniform and an attitude can get you just about anywhere. We definitely wear some amount of false confidence to go with the subterfuge and that can go along way. In reality, we should have contacted the event coordinator 6 weeks ahead of time to obtain a press pass. Lesson learned.

There was a quality of the light that I’m trying harder to understand. There are definitely times of the day where images just turn out to be too harsh. So far, based on my own observations, you’re better of getting the sun closer to perpendicular to your subject. Obviously low angles of incidence are going to get you more shadows, which is bad, but I think there is more to it. I definitely like the hour before and after sunset, I believe the “golden hour” is the hour following sunset, but I like the minutes just before. People turn out  a little orange, but there’s a romantic feel to the light I cant seem to replicate anywhere else. The second day had the harsh light that’s difficult to overcome.

We seemed to arrive amidst all of the action. Carts were buzzing by like some hypersonic lawnmower caravan, cutting the grass before it could grow another micron. There were about 5 races, progressing from young teenagers to middle aged. During the first few races, it was surprising to see how young some of the drivers were; their fireproof gear made them look more experienced and bad-ass that we expected them to be older. A resounding thud signaled the first visible crash where a kid went flying into the barrier with enough force to immediately create a rescue scene out of the bystanders nearby. Turns out just the guy’s standing was the only thing harmed.

I was very surprised about how non “carty” it was; these guys are wearing fireproof clothing, carbon fiber rib protectors and a million sponsor patches. At speeds of 100 mph, they speed down straight aways with the gas tank between their legs, relying on rubber stick to save them from the awfully stationary barrier at the turn. There were all the elements of a NASCAR race or a day at the drag strip: testosterone flowing, hours of blood sweat and tears, the smell of melted rubber and gas and the technicolor break-up of the crowd with a million wants and dreams of every kind, nursing children with greasy food and soda. Cotton candy, bacon wrapped hotdogs and carbon monoxide. America. People are beautiful, I love the things they do to entertain themselves and destroy the monotone drone of work and sleep. I take pictures.

At the end of the day, I was much more familiar with my new language, Canonese. If there’s any one out there looking for technical information on the Canon EOS 7D, I suggest DPReview or Imaging Resource, my opinion is one of an amateur and I’m easily amused. That said, this machine really performs. Aside from a few small omissions, like a button mapped for AEB, this camera has exceeded my expectations. I haven’t even scratched the surface of the 7d’s video mojo, but I’m giddy just thinking about it. This also means that there are a million new expensive devices I need to flesh out my new system like the TC80 remote control with intervalometer for timelapses. I can’t wait to stop timelapsing manually.  The shots below represent some of my best frames with the new beast so let me know what you think. There are a few HDR’s in the gallery, but other than that, the shots are jpegs straight out of the camera with no processing. I’m taking a little bit of a gamble spending all sorts of money on gear, but I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t matter. Great work has been done with modest gear and I respect that, but I’m sick of that crap, for once, I have a tank to drive a nail.

The Redbull Soap Box Derby ’09

My wife Heather dragged me along to Red bull’s Flugtag a few years back for lots of wacky fun, so when we heard about the Soap Box Derby, we were an easy sell. Accordingly, last Saturday, Heather and I dragged another few cohorts down the hill to Los Angeles to take it all in. Fellow photogs Jackie Jordan and Jonathon Redman were navigator and bombardier to our pilot and co-pilot. None of us are Red bull drinkers, in spite of it being handed out like water to many a thirsty hipster.

The event was at 5th and Grand, a diabolical choice of venue, where gravity and one nasty turn served to foil contestants and entertain the masses. One might have chosen a more gentle grade or a lesser turn, but what fun is there in creating a course where the majority of contestants actually complete it unharmed? Skyscrapers of the jewelry district stood watching over the silly festivities laughing quietly to themselves. Inside were many curious executive types welcoming the distraction. They reminded me of Caesar but gave no thumbs up or down. Residents of the local Hilton looked down from what seemed like a hundred stories, leaning on glass balconies, clutching drinks.

They even brought in a few celebrities to “spice” things up. On hand were : Paul Rodriguez, Jillian Barberie and even Erik Estrada was there signing CHPs shirts and casting judgement on the bruised and beaten teams of soap-boxers with cards reading 1 – 10. There were cameramen on scaffoldings and emcees choking on the mic. Almost as if planted at every crowded event, there were teenagers and twenty-somethings and even drunk thirty-somethings climbing into the sky on whatever they could find. Perched in trees and traffic signals and street signs, they kept the cops busy and gave them something to do. There were jumbo-tron type screens displaying the games for the short or poorly placed and not too far from the free Red Bull, they were selling Red Bull and water for $3. Yeah…theres a certain ugliness to an event like this. It sort of turns us all into stock animals, sharing fluids and bacteria. I looked to the pro photogs and thought, “how do I get press credentials?” They were in there own little zone that had the best views, a crowd-free space in which to work and of course free Red Bull.

Among the wheeled death machines were every manner of rolling nightmare: a fire truck from the FD, a giant PacMan, Lonestar’s RV from Spaceballs, a piano and even a giant brain from my current schoolmates at C.S.U.N., which did very well I might add. Nothing quite measured up to the almost flawless replica of the Mach 5, complete with Speed Racer. The seasoned driver took the Red Bull branded berm like it was 2nd nature. I mean it WAS Speed Racer after all. Actually I hated the cartoon. How strange is it that the greatest incarnation of this awful Japanese cartoon was in a soap box derby years after the fact and not in a multi-million dollar feature film?

The event was so crowded that it wasn’t too easy to find a decent view of the course. This was frustrating me for a little bit and we all sort of split up and found what vantage points we could. We all ended up pretty close to each other struggling for line of sight as best we could. Heather is far better with crowds than I and her set of photos shows it. Jonathon got some great video. All in all, we had quite a good time. We are seriously considering building a soap box derby car for the next event. Anyone want to lend a hand?

The crowd dispersed faster than you can say tear gas. We were out of there in a hurry and due to a few wrong turns, we found ourselves chasing food and architecture in Chinatown. Every time I visit L.A., I am forced to concede that my outdated, all negative,  Jack-Kerohuac-On-the-Road view of Los Angeles is more than likely unfair. I find something fine and something sad every time I come to the City of Angels. We happened upon a Chinese temple of some kind just before sunset and closing time, just soon enough to snap a few shots of the amazing structure. Art and creativity were everywhere on the property and it made me wonder why we so seldom build for beauty’s sake here in the West. Our Churches pale in comparison to the temples of the Middle East or even South America. We have so much ability and so many resources, why don’t we put it to better use? Our pyramids land on Mars and create nuclear energy which is great, but I want a real pyramid-type monument for my age. Any thoughts?

In other news, a few people are starting to get their hands on the much-coveted Canon EOS 7D. The results look good so far and it looks like I’m on track to have one in the next couple of weeks. In the mean time, I’ve found a few nice links with some info on this machine. Visit Rob Galbraith’s site for a great write and up and preview. I’ve been finding quite a bit of results from new owners at DPReview, which is one of my go-to sites for all things digital photography. Also, I found the video below from Digital Rev which outlines some of the great new features I hope to be enjoying in the near future.