Archive for June, 2009
Video from The Uptown Unveiled
I made a little video from footage I shot at the Uptown Unveiled last week. I’m looking forward to making more short videos like this, but it’s actually a lot harder than I thought it would be. I think the night shots look great, but it’s really difficult to keep people in focus when shooting video in low light. In fact, it’s really difficult to keep things in focus in general with this type of camera (manual focus/35mm sensor). The audio is also not great, obviously.
But it does have its moments. I love the people in the video who think that I’m taking a photo and start posing. Also the kid dancing with his mom (right around the 3:45 mark) is possibly the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen.
Best of the East Bay 2009 – Bands Photoshoot
Last Saturday I did a shoot for the East Bay Express with the bands that will be playing on the main stage at the Best of the East Bay 2009 Party. All 13 bands:
Souls of Mischief
Goapele
Fracas
Superfinos VTO
Mystic Rage
Maldroid
CU Next Weekend
7th Street Band
The Thrill of it All
Dizzy Balloon
The Heavenly States
Swann Danger
Social Unrest
The idea was to do a double-truck layout that would look sort of like one of those Rolling Stone Magazine covers where they take a bunch of separate photos of famous people against a white seamless background and then combine the images in Photoshop so it looks like they’re all part of the same photo, but with the twist that the band members would be all mixed up, so you’ve got hip-hop dudes posing with metal dudes, R&B singers next to punks, etc. It’s a very eclectic lineup, so there are some pretty amazing combinations of people that you wouldn’t expect to see together.
I was a little nervous about this job since there were so many people to shoot and I don’t normally do a lot of composite work, so I wasn’t sure how it was all going to come together. It actually went really smoothly. Once I got everything set up, the shoot was really fun, the bands were a blast to work with, and I’m totally happy with how it all came out. Other than spending a truly ridiculous amount of time working on this project in Photoshop, it could not have gone better.
The Uptown Unveiled
There was a big festival in Oakland last night called The Uptown Unveiled. There was a lot of stuff going on (skateboarding, BMX, bands, dancing, welding demos) and everyone seemed to be having a good time. Plus there were no riots or shootings. So that was nice.
I took a few pictures, but I shot a ton of video. It’s going to take a little while to get the video footage edited into something I can post online, but here are some photos:
