So for those that know me I’ve been in the skate/surf retail industry for a few years and love skate vids. I saw this on the Everyone tab of FriendFeed just randomly. Great soundtrack and cinematography. I thought it was totally unique.

skate - shot on red - 120 fps from opus magnum prod. on Vimeo.

I can’t hide it. It’s who I am. Since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated with the concept of the undead. When I saw my first George Romero flick - Dawn of the Dead, the original - my life was changed. I saw Night of the Living Dead, Day of The Dead, Land of the Dead, and recently Diary of The Dead. There were a couple other movies that I saw that approached the zombie concept but I didn’t think any of them were as creepy as Romero’s style. Anyway, a friend of mine recently turned me onto this claymation for zombie lovers….complete with pieces of the soundtrack from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Enjoy.

I just got back from taking my 3 sons on a camping trip in the bay area. We had a great time, ate a bunch of crappy snack food and s’mores, and didn’t sleep much. Lots of hiking and exploring the Pescadero area. It was a blast and we can’t wait to go again. Here’s some photos from the trip:

I got back from my trip a couple weekends ago and got some decent shots of the show. It was my first east coast experience and business trip outside of California. Some interesting moments for sure from ejecting drunks out of our corporate exhibit tent to a cab driver that was driving almost 100mph on the way to the airport while he was half asleep to the gallons of sweat and electrolytes that poured out of my body at any moment of the day. I’m not used to that kind of humidity. I ate an an awesome cuban restaurant called Cuba Libre. That place had amazing Mojitos and I don’t even really like those drinks. Below are just a few of my photos. 

It’s finally here..a trip to the east coast! I started a new job in early July that requires some travel. I’ll be working at the Download Festival 2008 in New Jersey and am super excited. My job is to create content for the social media/blogosphere so it’s right up my alley, plus it’s a music event, which is even more up my alley. The only bummer is that I didn’t have time to pad my stay there with an extra day so that I could take some pictures of the city. Maybe some other time. If I manage to get some shots out before the sun goes down tomorrow, I’ll make sure to post them!

Peace out beatches.

If you know me you know that I’m obsessed with drums and drumming. I found this old video from 2003 where Travis Barker (Blink 182, Box Car Racer, Transplants, etc.) was a guest on the Jimmy Kimmel show doing a sketch about how he uses his drumming to help people. He’s always seemed a little uptight to me so this was cool to see that he could chip away at his ego at least a little bit. Enjoy.

It’s weird. I’ve been a business man my whole life, confident in my endeavors, doing the sales and marketing thing. When it comes to my art/photography, I have no idea how to price anything or sell it. I don’t know how to place a monetary value on art, especially if it’s mine. I just create it cause I love it.

I got an email out of the blue from someone that wants to purchase my Skull Stone painting as seen to the right. I was super flattered and stoked that they would consider even putting it up in their house let alone pay me money for it.

It has definitely inspired me to paint more but not for money, more the fact that something I created did something for someone else. That’s why I’ve always loved art and playing a band. It’s an opportunity to connect with other human beings.

Anyway…I hope to do more stuff that people like. I know I’ve felt connected to other artists because of their art, without even meeting them. Good stuff.

So recently I took a drive to Point Lobos near Carmel, CA and snapped some shots. I don’t usually do the standard nature/landscape type photography as it usually bores the shit out of me (sorry to all you landscape photoggers out there). I’m just not intrigued with the artistic/photographic expression of most. I guess that makes me an art snob.

Here’s a few shots I took while I was there just so I had some record of my visit. Point Lobos is a gorgeous place with good walking and/or running trails, and such an excellent view of the sunset to the point of being ridiculous. I’d highly recommend it. There were a couple areas for my more abstract photography but I didn’t have time. Next time I’ll go more head down there and explore the place with my own shtick in mind.

These are some shots I took for a Mother’s Day present. I had each of my sons pick out a picture of their mom holding them while they were. I then took photos of them and framed them. I think they turned out really great and got some much appreciated compliments from other photographers who’re way more skilled than me about it being a really cool concept. Enjoy.

I still feel like it’s missing something but none the less….this is my first dealio using my projector. My next one will be more thought out. The premise of this is just how war takes in the young man, chews him up, and spits him out as an old veteran with not much left but his thoughts and what’s next in his life.

This weekend my wife is out of town for a break from being a mom and wife of a wacked out husband (me).

I’m looking forward to getting some quality dad time in with my boys. Lately I’ve been working so much that I don’t know where Friday ends and Monday begins. My schedule is a whirlwind.

Hopefully I can get some good photos in. All the kids have point and shoot cameras and love to go on little excursions where we take trips together along the coast and snap some shots.

I’m hoping that we can figure out some other good activities outside of the standard (yet relaxing) time at the pool and the beach and late movie nights with popcorn. It’s all testosterone this weekend baby!

-R

Ok…so maybe I wasn’t completely drunk, but taking some time for myself, having a shot of whiskey and a couple Guinness pints before hitting the streets of Santa Cruz for some photography and hang out time, was a much needed ordeal. Lately, I’ve been working so much and on such fast-paced projects that I think parts of my brain are shutting down. I have like 3 unfinished paintings that I just can’t bring myself to even take off the wall and set up on my easel. I pretty much had to force myself to take some photos this particular day.

I’m definitely in some weird life-changing phase right now, some good, some weird, some negative. Thank God for my band, forcing me to play drums twice a week. It’s helping to keep me going, jogging my right brain as much as possible.

Anyway..enough of my hoo ha. Below are a couple pics from this weekend

-Rich

I’ve always been a fan of B-movie viewing. There are shitty B-movies, and then “quality” B-movies. This one was definitely quality in my opinion. An interesting premise actually but the effects and the lead role played by none other than the WWF wrestler, Rowdy Roddy Piper, was a key component.

I think the quality of the premise/idea exists here because John Carpenter was the director and he’s a bad ass.

Basically Roddy Piper’s character is a “down on his luck” transient construction worker guy, looking for work in a new town/city. With eerie hints that something is going on like random abstract transmissions on Televisions, weird sonic noises sprinkled throughout the city/movie, it’s obvious something subversive is going on.

Roddy stumbles into box of Sunglasses he found from a suspicious looking church. When he puts the glasses on, all of a sudden every other human’s face walking around the city is actually alien and billboards, magazine covers, etc. are all short messages like “OBEY”, “DON’T QUESTION ANYTHING”, “SLEEP”, and more.

During the whole movie he finds other humans that know what’s going on and they’re the underground humans plotting to identify/overthrow the aliens. The humans invent conact lenses that behave the same as the sunglasses so that the aliens don’t know they can be seen.

The ending actually sucks. They manage to break into this underground base the aliens have set up, they shoot some dudes, blow up a control center and some other shit. At the end Roddy Piper makes it to the top of some apartment building, where sits some giant glowing glass tube responsible for running the whole alien operation of the city. He’s able to destroy it with one gun shot. You’d think aliens smart enough to pull off the deception they pulled off would be smart enough to hide the most crucial technological part of their whole effort in a more protected private place with guards all around it…..but hey..then it wouldn’t be a B-movie right?

Onward…

This is my test blog post using the Flock “Social Browser”. Basically it’s goal is to effectively pull together all your standard social communities into a browser experience, automatically pulling in your feeds/accounts/etc. from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. The main issue I see with it so far is that there’s no MySpace add for it. That seems silly to me.

Anyway. I’m blogging this post right from within the Flock blog post client and I was able to have it detect my blog type (WordPress) by just giving it the domain, it figured it out, probably looking to see if standard Wordpress URL existed, etc.

I was also able to add my gmail and yahoo mail accounts to it and easily use them through the browser alongside my social sites.

I’m really liking this so far and will grill it a lot harder of the next few weeks.

Peace and Grease.

-Rich

There it is…on the left side of http://www.47project.com.

A bunch of my geeky photoblogger friends kept pushing me to installed this app. I resisted only out of laziness and my forced overdose of widgets and web 2.0. I have to say though that as a blogger, a photoblogger, and most importantly, a photographer. This app is truly awesome.

Created by Alex Rabe, this app is spot on and the cool thing is that it’s one of the first apps created by an engineer that I’ve seen in a while that actually looks nice, and presents my photos gracefully…as opposed to half the apps out there that are cool functionally but look like holy hell shit from the web design school of 1992.

I would highly recommend this app for anyone who Wordpresses their lives online for everyone to see because now you can accomodate your blogs nicely with photos. It has everything you’d want in a Wordpress app on the administrative side as well. Tons of configurable options and amazing tools for managing your galleries, uploading images, customizing the alt/title tags for SEO.

I can tell, being a web developer/SEO/Analytics person that great care was taken in covering those bases as well.

Peace Out!