Make it look easy.
New food photography work from your homie Justin Sullivan. Fresh macarons from the unstoppable Bottega Louie downtown Los Angeles.
Images from the Occupation – #occupyLA tonight
Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa announced that Occupy LA would be evicted from city hall at 12:01 AM today. I was on site from 11:50PM to 2:45AM and despite a huge police presence nobody was evicted from the park at city hall, and to my knowledge all of the protests remained peaceful. This is what I saw:
Shooting at the Fantasy Factory
Today I got hired to light a shoot with Rob Dyrdek (Rob & Big, Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory) at his warehouse skatepark/office/tree fort in downtown LA.
Markus Paulsen was the photographer, and we were working together creating some new images for the upcoming launch of a new eyewear line Rob’s doing.
It was such a blast to get to hang out and work at the Fantasy Factory all afternoon and make some bold, iconic images to help launch his latest venture.
There’s a foam pit for learning new tricks…or just throwing yourself off the balcony into. That’s a trick right? I stuck it.
They have this slogan blasted all over the place. Really inspirational to see a dude who came up from skateboarding with a fresh new Ferrari with that attitude. Make your own luck indeed.
Rob was a great guy to work with, and really worked hard with us to make sure everything looked great.
Here’s a 360 panorama I took from the middle of the joint: http://360.io/Mvh6gF
Pretty rad!
Be on the look out for the images when the brand launches soon!
Downtown LA via Yashica
I love my Yashica-A twin lens reflex medium format camera. I’m gonna be using this thing as much as I can this year.
Haunted
I promised I’d eventually share some more photos from Hard Haunted Mansion shows I shot over Halloween weekend. Despite my ongoing tradition of not following through with promised blog posts, I’m actually going to do it 😉
Without further ado…
Tumblr X Logitech Loft Party
I had the good fortune of being invited to attend an exclusive party last night thrown by Tumblr and Logitech at the new Logitech Loft. It’s a penthouse on the 30th floor of the new Watermarke Tower in the South Park area of Downtown LA. The space was gorgeous, and the view was completely insane. Tumblr and Logitech were nice enough to have excellent catering, an open bar, and new Logitech TVs to play with. If you get a chance to attend any events here while Logitech is sharing the wealth, so to speak, I recommend that you do.
Peanut Butter Wolf
Rolled by DanceRight at La Cita tonight to grab a quick couple snaps of Peanutbutter Wolf, one of my favorite DJs. It was a good time as always, but I’m pretty tired from being sick with a throat cold this week.
Here are a few pics. 
These DeeJays Don’t Take Requests. Haha PB Wolf and Excel have a little bit of experience. They don’t need any help picking what comes next.
Peanut Butter Wolf was playing all old hip hop 45’s tonight at La Cita for Dance Right MFG
Peanut Butter Wolf Going Hard at La Cita for Danceright MFG
All of the senoritas were dancing.
Skingraft Fashion Show S/S 2011 LA Fashion Week
I shot the Skingraft show last night for LA Fashion Week. It was a great time, featuring free cocktails from Hpnotiq and a bunch of solid
clothes.
Here’s a bunch of pictures
Bethanie Jean
I’m starting to do a little bit more model testing to broaden the scope of my work. Here are some selects from a session I did with Bethanie Jean Triplett last friday. Enjoy!
LA LIVE Christmas Tree Lighting
Popped by LA Live last night for the Christmas Tree Lighting. I heard LeAnn Rimes was supposed to perform, but she was nowhere to be found. No great loss, haha.
The tree is pretty cool, made up of thousands of programmable LED lights. They also have a cute little ice skating rink right in front of the Nokia Center. Skating is 8 bucks including rental, which is the same price as the Pershing Square rink. Pershing’s version is slightly bigger, yet not quite as glitzy.
Enjoy!
Maggy Barry’s “Wrapped in Beauty” Fashion Show
The Downtown Fashion Walk has been gaining a bit of momentum here in LA over the past few months. After launching in September, this fledgling event had a wobbly start with low attendance and a lack of direction. To be fair, it’s always tough to spearhead a new project, and I applaud the effort. I do everything I can to support my neighborhood from promoting to event coverage. It’s nice to see everyone’s hard work beginning to pay off a bit.
While Fashion Walk is far from brilliant, this month held a few more actual happenings than in months past. The usual map was passed around with the same boutiques doing nothing new, but The Alexandria Hotel kicked it up a notch by hosting a fashion show for Maggy Barry. Admission was open to the public and there were quite a few people on hand to check things out.
The format of the show was something they seem to have borrowed from Box Eight Studios. Instead of traditional runway style, there was a live photo shoot of the collection. So all of the pieces from the Spring/Summer 2010 collection were paraded in front of the camera, and an all-too cliche’ looking “fashion photographer” shot thousands of images. Normally I am very amiable with other photographers and I love to support others in my field. But when you’re a chubby middle aged man wearing a scarf and sunglasses inside WHILE you’re shooting, sagging your cargo pants with your big belly hanging out the front I feel comfortable shaking my head at your silliness. Guy was a bit too over the top for my taste with his Blow Up-esque methodology.
The atmosphere was fun, and I noticed quite a few people dressed in their finest fashion attire happy to be parading around at the show. Lots of fun styling, music and some hard to see visuals. Sushi was going around on trays carried by topless models provided by Naked Catering.
Here are some images from the evening.
(sub)urban home Brings Style to Downtown
Many people may have noticed the beautiful new space opened recently at 5th and Main. It’s called (sub)urban home and it’s the brainchild of LA designer Ronnie Gene. About half of the pieces in the shop are from other designers, and the rest are all designed and produced in-house. I stopped by to check out the situation yesterday and had a great chat with Ronnie. Seriously nice guy with a lot of passion for what he does and a vision for the future of downtown that’s really exciting.
They have some awesome stuff in there, from ceramic skulls to custom, one of a kind sleigh beds. 
This is such a cool addition to the gallery row area and downtown in general. There are a few other home furnishing stores around the area that really don’t do anything for me, so it’s refreshing to see such great contemporary work in a great space.
(sub)urban home will be hosting a surprise gallery tonight for downtown art walk that will be worth checking out.
Bottom line, the shop is beautiful, the owner is great and they stock some really gorgeous home decor. Go buy something! Go buy a lot of somethings!
Panamanian Independence Day Parade in Downtown LA
I just looked out my window about an hour ago because I thought I heard a marching band. Sure enough, there’s a parade going on. They must not have promoted it very well in the neighborhood, because I haven’t seen any posters or ads. But that didn’t seem to stop the thousands of people who were on scene to celebrate the Panama Parade down Broadway.
Today’s event celebrates Panama’s independence, so there were a gaggle of fun-loving central Americans prancing down a closed Broadway, with music and dancing.
I grabbed my canon and my trusty 70-200 f/4 and ran down. Here are some of my favorite images from the parade 🙂
I love my life
Wow, the last couple weeks have blown by! I’ve been photographing every day and it keeps getting better and better. I have the best job in the world.
Photographed a great group of people for the new Reno Nazarene Church ad campaign. My man Sterling Doak at Media Directions has crafted such a great package for these guys. We rented the new studio that just opened on East 4th here in Reno. They have a huge cyc wall and were very very accommodating with our shoot schedule. I highly recommend that anyone in need of shooting space for a job check it out. If you’re into church, they have a very informal, non-traditional Sunday meeting that you might enjoy.
Here are a few photos from that shoot. We are using motion graphics to combine these portraits with other visual elements for a TV spot. I can’t wait to see it finished!
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