Alright, thanks Blogger for changing your menus. It only took me a few minutes to fumble through and re-discover how to post a blog.

Enough of that eh? Ok, I just got to New York! Tomorrow will be my first time in the city. For now I am staying in a suburb on Long Island. I am hoping to have an apartment by the 1st of June. Until then, I am posting everything from my really slow and under powered lap top. Editing truly is a task on this thing. We will see what I can make happen.

Drove cross country, took the scenic route for as much of it as I could afford. My route was San Diego to Tuscon, to Alamogorod NM, to Roswell NM, to Fort Worth TX to Austin TX to Lafyette LA to New Orleans LA to Baton Rouge LA to Memphis TN to Nashville TN and then it was a pretty crooked shot to NYC. I tried to avoid the interstates as much as possible except at the end when time finally really mattered. I will post more on this later.

A bit of minor news. I am moving to NYC in a month and a half! OK, I won't actually be there until mid May, but I am leaving California on May 1st. Exciting stuff. I am going to be driving cross country, through the southern states and then up the East Coast. Expect a lot of photos from that! In the mean time, I am incredibly busy with getting stuff in order.

In other minor news. I finished putting Santa Ana into a portfolio. http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/3057018 You can purchase a copy for yourself through Blurb. A little pricey, but it looks pretty awesome. I will potentially update it at some point with an essay of some kind, but for now its mostly photos with a tiny bit of writing. It looks pretty amazing in person.

These are a few shots from the Hickey Underworld. A small part but extremely important part of my project "Unknown". The Hickey was a punk house in Long Beach. It was off Magnolia and Anaheim, and once a month they would host a mixture of local and touring bands. Some of the shows got pretty ridiculous. These four shots came from the show where Andrew Jackson Jihad headlined. The place had to have a couple hundred kids there. The police broke the show up at 10, but a lucky few dozen got ushered into the house. After the police left, Andrew Jackson played and it was ridiculous. These shots were before all that, during the opening acts.

The house itself was an unassuming home. On a regular night you would have no idea what kinda shit was going down. On party nights, there would be kids spilling out of the house all over the patio. Bicycles chained to the fences. 40ozs on the lawn.

After a few shows they started charging a few bucks at the door. All of the money went to the touring bands, and to fix the occasional broken window.

I believe this band was Merry Christmas. Local band, and all of their friends knew the words.

The Hickey Underworld attracted one of the best crowds of any show that I have been to. Nearly everyone was there to have fun. I don't remember anyone starting fights. I only remember everyone having way too much fun.

Thanks for reading!

Vegas

This blog is going to be a little bit different, the pictures within are not part of any project that I have been working on for months or anything like that. They are simply some pictures I took over the weekend. I went to Vegas to visit my family, and of course I did a few things outside of that. Not to worry, I am not sharing any photos of my family.

These first few pics you may already be familiar with. The neon museum of Vegas, also known as the Bone Yard. Its the place all good Las Vegas signs go to rest. The museum is pretty amazing. Right now it is halfway between being a museum and a yard filled with old signs. It is a work in progress. I highly recommend taking the tour. They are fifteen bucks a person and you need to book it a couple of weeks ahead of time. They may be able to squeeze in a couple of people on the day of, but it's not very good odds. The tour takes about an hour and you can wander a bit as long as you are within eye site of the tour guide. You will learn a lot of Vegas history and of course the history of the Bone Yard and the signs themselves.

click the link for more pics and rambling.

Boozy Floozy

Tonight I am going to share, or possibly re-share (depending on how far back in my blog you have gone) a few images from my series "Boozy Floozy". As you may or may not know, Boozy Floozy is a series I shot documenting the Boozy Floozy Burlesque Troupe of Orange County. I followed them around for a year, shooting just about every show they did, backstage and on. Shooting these girls was an incredible privilege. They are amazing, and I hope that you can appreciate them from just the photographs!

I suppose this falls into the realm of cliche girls pictures but I can't help myself with it. I completely expect this type of image from this series, and this one completely fulfills my wishes for it to exist within the series.

Simone Danalustrous's fan dance. When I think of iconic images of a Vegas showgirl, this is one of the images that comes up. The light was perfect on her, and you can barely tell the file is an underexposed 3200 ISO shot (honestly, all of these are). I am a huge sucker for large amounts of negative space. Throughout the series, I use shots like this as the "candy". The images that you really just can't help but want to look at.

The Balloon Pop. She starts out with lots of balloons, ends up with none. What is under the balloons? Please. You know what's under the balloons. Bella would fill the balloons with glitter so that with every pop she would shimmer. With this photograph I got the main light perfectly back lighting the glitter as one of her balloons bursts. This was a shot that I overlooked at first, but I found myself coming back to recently. Every night that I shot this dance, I would try to get the moment the balloon popped. This was a far better image than I was hoping for.

Hands are amazing, they tell can tell us everything.I love her chipped fake nails and bandaged finger. Her hands don't look like the delicate female hands that we would like to imagine.

Just in case you are wondering. I am in the process of self publishing this series as a book. I am going to take a huge risk and go out and say that I am aiming for May for it to be finished. Crap. Now I really have to finish it by then!

What do talk about today?! I don't know. Hmmm.

I know! Lets post a picture or two!

It amazes me how discreet you can be with a professional body and lens mounted onto an equally massive tripod. Ok, so I was not discreet, just ignored. Fine with me. Photographing this project, I would walk up and down each side the street moving from one building to the next. I do not photograph every building, but I photograph most of them. This kid knew I was coming, and still just pretended I didn't exist.

The civic center in downtown Santa Ana is a Mecca to Orange County homeless. Any day that you are down there you will find the landscape dotted with trash bags, sleeping bags, a tent or two, and the homeless that they belong to. I didn't want to directly photograph the clusters of homeless people, but I still wanted them to be a part of this project. As a society we try to ignore them, but they are always around, and there is always signs.

The children in the background is jut the icing on the cake. Their mother was trying to take a picture of them with the fighter jet on a cell phone. I offered to take a picture of them with my camera and I would send it to her. I switched to a longer lens for the kids, and I went back to my wide angle for my shot. This project is thick with symbolism, and this image is no different.

I was walking back to my truck late in the afternoon after spending the last few hours photographing the Henniger Park neighborhood. I passed a school bus that was parking along the street, the bus was filled with what looked like the Santa Ana High school baseball team. I set up just passed the bus facing a fence with their home field in the background. I was hoping to get a few shots of the team passing by. One at a time, they slipped through this hole in the fence to get back to their school. One of the kids asked what I was photographing for. I answered that I was photographing a documentary about Santa Ana. The kid yelled back as he was walking "Ahh so you can see how ghetto it is here!". A second kid chimed in "Yeah don't come here!". Half truths and sarcasm.

Continuting with my Santa Ana project, I have a few more pictures to show you. All of these were shot with a Canon 5D mk1 with a 24mm lens mounted to a tripod. Just thought I'd get that out of the way.

One Broadway Plaza. The goal is to build the tallest building in Orange County, the drawing of it is nice and all, but when you climb the fence to see what is on the other side, it is just an empty lot. A lot of dirt, a tractor, and a temporary building set up as what I am guessing, an office. The plan is for it to be almost 40 floors of office space, and if I am not mistaken, apartments too. It is too bad its been a vacant lot since about 2005.

This is a great example of what Cartier-Bresson would dub "the Decisive Moment", or in my case, the accidental decisive moment. The woman peering through the windows open hours sign as I snapped the picture made it that much better for me. The size is a little too small to read, but the sign that hangs in the window reads "please use other door" and points to the left. Two "open" signs a faded American flag and a ratty welcome mat round it out. The woman came out and talked to me a moment later. She invited me to come back and take more pictures once she had cleaned up a bit.

This is the Lacy Neighborhood. Just a few blocks East of the civic center. When I was there, it seemed like at least half of the houses within the neighborhood were boarded up and abandoned. The houses are all small, one and two bedroom things. Probably dating to the 30s and 40s for many of them. I asked around as to why so many buildings were boarded up and I received a variety of answers. It was the city buying them out, they lost their jobs and the banks bought them, but many simply couldn't answer as to why this was happening in their neighborhood. As it turns out, the city is buying them. The city is attempting to re-make the neighborhood into what is being called the Station District. Gentrification marches on. Or at least it tries to. I love the little girl in this photo. Children in general do not display the same fears and paranoia that adults display. She is more curious about it, and looks directly into my lens, her head held high as she is lead past by her father, who displays completely opposite body language. He is simply walking past and ignores me, his head hangs low as he watches the street.

Chris and Brittany's Wedding

I received the opportunity to photograph one of my good friends weddings last month, here are some of the photographs. :-) I won't bore you with any more writing and will let the photographs do the talking.