all things mau

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The bus ride home is typically the time I fall deep into a music trance. This is my time to listen to music rather than hear it. Being that it’s Martin Luther King Jr Day, and tomorrow being Obama’s inauguration, Jose Jame’s velvet lyrics in “The Dreamer” hit pretty damn hard.

I saw the dreamer raise his hand
Into a world of possibilities

I saw the dreamer raise his hand
Into a sky of light and love

I saw the dreamer raise his hand
Into a day of tomorrow

I saw the dreamer raise his hand…

I have a dream of, a dream of tomorrow,

Yesterdays nightmare, and tomorrow’s promise

tomorrow’s promise….

Wow.  Give it a listen.  But please, listen, don’t hear.

I’m not exactly posting this in a timely fashion, being that Macworld was all of two weeks ago at this point. Nonetheless Here a little video produced by Eileen Rivera. I’d like an HV30 like hers too please.

MacWorld Walkthrough in 2mins and 39 seconds from Eileen on Vimeo.

мебели

Eileen and I took a little trip to the last Macworld Expo ever.  Here’s a few photos:

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This mix is based losely on the set I did at the Laughingsquid Unholiday party.  Enjoy.  Or don’t.

photo by flickr user tantek

Our first in a series of “Adventure Days”, Alison and I took a little excursion through North Bay’s Stinson Beach, Bolinas, and Petaluma.  Our sweet tooth took us to Powell’s Candy Shop which is basically every child’s dream come true.

Screw the children.   It is MY dream come true. Here are some photos

This kid doesn’t have potential. Potential implies that you’ll be good some day. He’s already there.

It was snowing here in San Francisco’s Dogpatch district, so Mark and I ran to the roof of the Revision3 building to catch some of the snow fall on video!

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Happy Holidays to you all.  The biggest inspiration for this photo was “Dali Atomicus” by Philippe Halsman shown below. The dynamic nature of the photo is amazing, and as Alison pointed out, the “madness” theme of the photo is perfect for Dali. And I suppose, by default, for us as well.

According to http://galadarling.com/article/dali-atomicus:

“This photograph was shot live. It took 26 attempts, & over five hours to get it to look like this.”

First of all, amazing.  Second, there’s no way in hell I’m going to toss my cat in the air multiple times.  Instead I gently held her in position, then photoshopped any suspicious fingers out of the way, added her motion blur, and drop shadow to the wall, all in post production.  In retrospect, there was a bit too much post production in our photo.  But with no assistant and low lighting (diffused lampshades, china balls, and tracked ceiling spotlights, all of different color temperatures), we had to composite everything to get everything and everybody in focus.  I also took the liberty to perfect our skin using some of the many tricks available online. Not… that anyone need skin clearing… I swear.  My scarf was held up by Ali with a coat hanger, which was also shopped out and motion blurred added after the fact.  The sepia/vignetted nature to the photo was whipped up using a modified template in Adobe Lightroom, my photo processing software of choice.

Next year, less compositing (which led to some of my least favorite aspects of the photo) and more of the Philippe Halsman’s live approach.  Maybe even a strobe kit if Santa is good to me.  We shall not “fix it in post”.

PBR Lean, originally uploaded by maubrowncow.

Good times at the uptown last night. The Canon SD600 has less than ideal picture quality, but sometimes some heavy grain is perfect. As is Mark Rebec’s sense of symmetry.