While heading to a downtown San Francisco location for a Betabrand shoot, we came across major traffic on Folsom Street. It was from a massive blaze, with fire trucks coming in from everywhere. I’ve never actually seen a serious fire before— it was intense stuff.
Just found SFGate coverage on it here: SFGate. Since I had my camera on me, (as I almost always do these days) I documented it. While I saw at least three injuries, hopefully they all recover.
Coverage from Kron 4
Article on SFist
We recently jumped back into the world of gaming with the purchase of a new Xbox 360 Kinect bundle. As a Mac user, I am a big fan of all things Mac- the stuff just works. Maybe they didn’t coin it, but they have certainly defined plug and play in my eyes. However, when it came to setting up the new Xbox Slim with its built in Wi-Fi to our network created with our Apple Airport Express, we were stumped. The Xbox wouldn’t even detect our wireless network. As far as it was concerned, it didn’t exist. While attempting to trouble shoot the issue, we tried everything we could think, searching online through countless Xbox and Mac forums using “Xbox not working with Apple Airport Express Wifi” as our search terms. Sadly, I was unable to find a solution to my issues. After a day or two with much effort and zero results, I contacted Xbox support online. After waiting a day for a response, I tried calling the support line, and waited through the long hold to speak to a support agent, only to find that they had no clue on how to resolve our issues either. In fact, they referred us to Apple’s customer support.
Fortunately, I purchased Apple Care with my MacBook Pro, as customer support won’t even bother to speak to you unless you’ve done so. However, our call proved fruitless, as they were unable to help us either. Among suggestions I was given was to upgrade to an Airport Extreme base station with a second ethernet port option and set up the Xbox with a wired connection. That would be acceptable, except I just spent over $400 on the Xbox and accessories. Having to spend more was unappealing, especially since it seemed like something simple could resolve the issue- it was a bit ridiculous that they couldn’t help with the problem.
Vexxed, I threw my problems out to the Twitterverse. I was stoked when I received some sugguestions right away- not only was it possible to run Airport Express with the Xbox, but in my case, it was an easy fix.
The first thing we tried was changing the wireless security settings using the AirPort Utility. Our main issue was that the Xbox couldnt’ detect our network. I was already running the lowest level of security WPA, as my girlfriend uses a PC to log into the network. That didn’t do it. (Apple support suggested this as well.)
The next thing Twitter friend @thephotoduck suggested was to change the network settings from “802.11n only” running at 5ghz, to 2.4ghz. And it turns out it was as simple as that. My wireless network reset itself, and after rescanning for networks on the Xbox, my network showed up, and the Airport was now broadcasting it’s SSID in a way the Xbox could understand.
The irony? Apple care couldn’t help. Combing through forum postings didn’t help. Microsoft help? Fail. I love me some Twitter. Thanks again @thephotoduck.
When I redesigned my personal site, I didn’t add a portfolio of the personal work I’ve done on canvas since most of it is over two years old. Although I can’t track down a lot of my files, I figure the work at least deserves a blog post.
Most of these are more color studies or sketches, with a few polished to a finished state. Some are watercolor on paper, but most are oil on canvas or panel. The following gallery is a mish-mash of a few bodies of work, which should explain the inconsistency in style.
A short video edit I filmed and put together of the pump track I built in Astoria, Oregon. We had some good times on that little piece of soil.
The music track is “Six Million Doesn’t Buy Much Anymore” by Scomber, sourced from ccMixter.
For this quick sketch I had fun with the pencil tool in Illustrator and my Wacom tablet, emulating the drawing style from the film A Scanner Darkly.
Last week I did a few drawings of bike tools in the sketchbook and painted them in photoshop for a project. This week I decided to draw them as vector drawings (using Adobe Illustrator) for more of an infographic approach.
Only a huge bike geek would have this much fun drawing bike tools, I know.
I haven’t been drawing in my sketchbook nearly as often as I promised myself this year, so I’ve added a sketchbook category in my blog. (Lets’s see how that works.) Here’s the first installment, a drawing of Park bicycle cable cutters, “painted” in Photoshop.
First, a warning. This post gets pretty geeky. If you aren’t into cameras, or how images are made, you might just scroll to the bottom. You could also check out this link, to some cool images in my portfolio.
I’ve been looking for way to wirelessly fire my SLR remotely for some time now. In this quest, I’ve tried a few different products intended for firing the shutter on my Canon SLR, with mixed results. None of them really worked that well. I found the first one in a camera store in Kelowna, BC.
At $120, the shutter release seems a bit pricey, but when a single cord for a for a Pocket Wizard Wireless Transmitter is $80 or so, it appeared to be a less expensive solution to the problem. It seemed to fit the bill- I was able to fire my camera using a remote in my hand. The plan was to tape it to the handlebars on my bicycle in order to do self portraits while riding trails in the woods, for my site ihatebikes.net.
Things seemed to be good- it fired the camera from an reasonable distance, and I was able to hang it on my grip easily with a hair bungee and some tape. That is, until halfway into a paid gig, when it abruptly stopped working. I ended up getting the shots I needed, but had to fiddle with it a bit until I got it working again. However, using old school Nintendo tactics (ie, blowing on it) is a bit ridiculous. For what I paid, I wasn’t willing to be stuck with a random piece of plastic from Taiwan that may or not work a week from now, so on my way back through Canada, we made a detour and I returned it.
I foolishly tried again with a similar product, the Cleon, from Phottix. I believe I found it on Ebay, and with a price of $30 or so shipped from China, it looked like the same product with different packaging.
Unfortunately I had similar results. The product worked- at times. The wireless remote didn’t fire the camera half the time, and that led to a bit more hair pulling, although I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. The push button release would fire the camera consistently, and that is about all I could recommend using the product for.
At this point, I was tired of messing around, and after reading the Chase Jarvis post on POV photography, and seeing some of the possiblities a reliable remote trigger system had besides just using myself as a MTB model in a pinch, I ordered up the rather expensive (it is all relative I guess) PW pre-trigger cable.
Now the question was, how am I going to attach and position this thing so I can reach the button and fire the damn camera? Back to Google, and after some searching, I found it on Reuben Krabbe’s blog. In his DIY tutorial, he modifies a miniphone jack, and connects it to a push button switch.
Heading off to Radio Shack, I purchase the necessary supplies, and shelved the project temporarily, as I don’t own a soldering iron. However, my brother is a full blown RC fanatic, and he just happens to be a master of the solder, so on my last visit, I pulled the bag of parts out and sat down with him to complete the mod.
Little bro did a great job, and even added some seriously nice finishing touches. I was expecting to wrap the soldered connection with electric tape; what he did turned out super pro.
Plugging it in to my Pocket Wizard, the project seemed to be successful. Pushing the button activates the PW on the camera via channel one. In order for everything to sync correctly, the Pocket Wizards on the speedlites need to be set on the next channel.
All that was left was to get out and test the new set up. Heading into the woods near our apartment, I set the camera up on my tripod. I bungied the Pocketwizard to my bars, and using gaffer’s tape, set the trigger up near my grip so I could actuate it while riding. The big test would be seeing if I could time the pushing of the button with aggressive moves while riding.
It turns out I was able to manage hitting the button at the right time- although I did end up shooting each position I was trying to shoot 10 or 20 times before I started getting results I was happy with. The downside to this system is that I am going to need at least one more Pocketwizard, as one is mounted on the camera, one on the bar, and one with my speedlite. I had issues slaving the flashes, so I’m going to get another (preferable at least two more) to get the effects I’m after.
Here is the final image from the day. It was creating using a composite of five separate images in post processing. I have one flash that is mounted to the camera right that is pointing to the rider. In this case, it’s me. I ripped through this s-turn section on the bike over two dozen times. Each time I would tap the push button on my left hand at the appropriate point, and capture an image. At one point in the day, the sun popped through the trees and lit the trail, which was perfect. The final product took a considerable amount of time to shoot and put together in post, but in the end, I came through with what I think is a pretty sweet image that I can add to my portfolio.
What do you think?
The Bridgetown Hustle took place on Friday February 5th at the Nemo Design Studios in Portland. A convergence of bikes and associated culture, the event kicked off with an opening of a bike art show that featured installations, photography, prints and a few paintings and drawings. Backyard Blam held a cross genre bunny hop contest which pitted BMX versus MTB versus Freestyle fixed,(BMX won) and had a number of launch ramps, picnic tables, and other features for the riders to play on. Inside, they also held a packed Goldsprints race for the prize of a bicycle donated by Giant Bicycles.
The crowd was a broad range of cycling enthusiasts, which was more than apparent from the variety the types of bikes stacked outside and cabled up in the parking lot, though the tight girl wearing jean crowd had strong attendance, with hipsters everywhere. At one point in the evening, it got pretty tight, especially after the events outside shifted indoors.
I got wind of the event just weeks before it happened, but had a few paintings that were ready to show that I was able to submit. I brought my camera with me, and was able to test my new low-key sneaky camera bag set up that utilizes Domke inserts in my Timbuk2 messenger bag.
The event continued on Saturday, with more mayhem planned, but we were unable to attend.
Please contact me if you are interested in the use of any of the images.
After dropping my girlfriend off at the airport the other day, I stopped by my buddy Bryce’s house for breakfast. He’s a random dude, and I’m a spontaneous guy, and somehow this combination ended up with the two of us paddling in kayaks down the Columbia Slough in the rain. To date, I’d never actually paddled a kayak, (always wanted to try) but as a former Boyscout with my Canoeing merit badge, it wasn’t totally unfamiliar to me. The Slough is a good spot to paddle around for a first timer, and I was able to dial my paddling technique in pretty quickly, which allowed me to really look around and appreciate the experience.
