What’s Your A-Team?

Warning: Extreme randomness ahead.

So today we were randomly having a conversation about which actors we would want to save the world from invading alien zombies. Deep stuff I know. My A-Team would be as follows:

Daniel Craig:
Think about the two new Bond movies. He kills people even when he’s not supposed to. Those alien/zombies don’t stand a chance.

Gerald Butler:
300, Gamer, RocknRolla, Reign of Fire. This man is all that is man. Burly, bad ass, and a good singer to boot. Bonus points for being born in Scotland.

Will Smith:
Recommended by Taylor and Craig, I was pretty set against him at first. Fresh Prince and Hitch do nothing to boast about his apocalypse survival skills, but I think he’s finally out of his juvenile stages. Hancock, I Am Legend, and Men In Black (1 & 2) all attest to his butt-kicking skills.

Runner-ups:

Sylvester Stallone:
Freaking buffest 60 year-old I’ve ever seen. I’d take him, even at his grandpa age. You can’t beat Apollo Creed and take out an entire army of Burmese bad guys and not be considered for zombie-killer status.

Hugh Jackman:
Despite his extreme manliness exhibited in the latest X-Men, I don’t know if Hugh would be able to pull it off without his claws. As Taylor put it, “He’s a bit too much of a musical type person to save the world.”

Bruce Willis:
I don’t doubt Bruce’s world saving skills, the Die Hards and Armageddon proof they’re there. But I think they’re buried under a few too many years in the field. His age was showing in Live Free or Die Hard; he was way too slow getting up from jumping out of the police car.

Angelina Jolie:
That’s right. I listed a chick. She’ll kick your butt if you think otherwise. The Tomb Raider series, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Wanted are proof.

Also mentioned in the conversation:
Sean Connery, Michelle Rodriguez, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Samuel L. Jackson, and Jackie Chan.

So. The question of the day is, who is your A-Team that you’d trust to save the world? Leave a comment with your answer.

Life at 24mm

Today was a good day.

Kelsey, Lee, Taylor, and I all roadtripped, err… traintripped (?) it out to Salisbury and Stonehenge. It’s awesome being 20 minutes away from Central London, which is a very cool place in its own right, but man the English countryside here is like a set out of a movie. You just expect a horde of kilted Bravehearts to come barreling down the grassy hills any second. It’s just about exactly how you would imagine it.

I’m also still waiting for some “terrible” UK weather that I keeping hearing about. It’s sprinkled on and off in the mornings and evenings, but other than that there’s been nothing but deep blue skies, huge puffy clouds, and brisk 60’s temperatures. Tough life.

Due to my broken 35L, I busted out my old and not-so-trusty Sigma 24-70 to drag along the countryside with me. I definitely need to send this puppy in to be re-calibrated, but I rediscovered my love for 24mm. So it looks like the 24L will be going on my to buy list. Along with the 45 ts-e. And 7D. And 70-200 2.8L IS. Oy. I hate that list. Anyways… On with the show:

And Salisbury Cathedral:

Rollout.

Fording the Ox

Class field trip. Yay.

Two things you should note about this pictures above:

Oxford looks (and feels) like it came out of a Harry Potter movie. They did draw a lot of inspiration in the movies from it, and even recreated Oxford University’s Great Hall for the dining hall in the movies. But even the people, country, other buildings, it all feels like a fantasy land. The whole trip (for our class) was about C.S. Lewis, and it’s easy to see how much inspiration that he, as well as J.R.R. Tolkien, were able to draw from this crazy little college city.

The other thing you should note about my photos is that anything that is in focus past 10 ft was shot with my 135L telephoto lens. Why? Because I dropped my 35L (wide) lens. Now it refuses to focus past 10 ft. Grand. We’ll have to see what Canon UK has to say about that. It made for an interesting shooting day, that’s for sure.

Peace.

Camden

These photos have been chillin’ on my hard drive for about a week now. I couldn’t let them be neglected any longer.

Oxford visuals = up and coming.

Rollout.

Will the Real London Please Stand Up?

Oh. There it is.

Peace.

Go Time

London has brought out the beast in us.

Something has changed. Something is definitely different about us than before. It’s like someone stuck some steroids in us when we weren’t looking. Beth, Kelsey, and I have all been suddenly hit with a huge desire to improve. I’m not talking about making little baby steps by taking a few pictures every week. I mean we all have this sudden, extreme craving to take our photography, our journalism, our entire lives to the next level. Kelsey hasn’t said anything about it (at least to me), and Beth has started to touch on it on her blog, but it doesn’t need to be put into words to see what’s going through everybody’s heads.

I’ve traveled around Biola, California, the US, and Europe with these two, taking thousands of pictures along the way. But when we ventured on our photo assault in Central London today, something was noticeably different. We weren’t just documenting our lives anymore; we were challenging ourselves with every photo we took. We were pouring every ounce of talent into our cameras, trying to make Every. Frame. Count.

I mean it wasn’t all a photo commando op. We had a blast. Goofed around. Made fun of Kelsey when she was awarded her stars of honor for coloring paper on the South Bank. But at the same time, we were pushing our own limits of what we could see and what we could capture in the camera.

When I get back to my room after a day, the first thing I do is check up on everything photographers that I admire are doing. I’ve always paid attention to their photos and figured out what I liked and what I didn’t, but now it’s different. I’m dissecting the lighting they use for every photo. I’m looking at the way they design their logos, layout their blogs, export their photos. I’m reading about their business practices and how they deal with contracts. I now have a Twitter (I was anti-Twitter for quite awhile). It’s not so much a tool for informing others of what you’re doing as much as it is a tool to see what others are doing. Other photographers, students, newsgroups. I’ve found that I’m not using it to connect with people that I know, but more so to connect with people that I want to know. People who I admire and people who I want to see the way they’re living.

Roehampton is probably gonna flip when they see how much bandwidth I take up on a daily basis.

I was talking with Kelsey today about the reasons why we won’t be able to start taking pictures professionally (aka actually making money off of photography) and she shot every one of them down. But she’s right. We’re good at what we do. We are all decently equipped in terms of gear. We know what we’re doing. So it’s go time. When I get back, I’m doing it to it. I’m guessing that Kels and Beth will be right behind me. Or in front of me.

So there you have it. London is getting intense. And not because of the classes or culture shock, but because we’re making it intense.

Rollout.

Dear God,

You are currently flipsiding my world and blowing my mind one tiny little revelation at a time. My sanity would like to thank you for keeping the revelations bite-size, and I would like to thank you for being patient.

-Mike

ReHosed

Yeah. Welcome to Roehampton laundry. Now to the dryer’s credit, the clothes weren’t completely soaked this time. In fact, most of them were pretty dry. But the lovelies shown above decided that they like things a little on the damp side apparently. These dryers have me completely dumbfounded. I’m not overloading them, they are clearly running, and I’m pretty sure I have them on the highest/hottest setting. Bah. Such is life.

Also, if my words startrunningtogetherlikethis, I’m sorry. I think my spacebar is getting a little jiggly though. It doesn’t feel like working too well at the moment.

This week was our second week of classes, and I’m beginning to think that we’re in for some long days in our photo class. It encompasses just about everything we learned about photography when we were 5. Pretty thrilling. Beginner lessons aside, I don’t think that our prof is a great photo teacher. She’s a nice person no doubt, and she is probably a decent photographer in her own right, but she had some pretty mangled ways of explaining stuff [like I’m one to talk…]. Although really I’ve never seen anyone teach photography really well. Funniest part of the class: our final exam includes testing on everything except how to use a camera. Go figure.

So despite the extreme amount of concentration needed to remain informed in the lecture, Beth, Angela, and I just pretty much sat around taking pictures of each other:

Lots ‘o shoes:

Told you I’ve been feeling the black and white lately…

And I finally have a phone here. Party.

Also, relatively deep thoughts rolling around in the head: Projected self vs. actuality, influences and influencees, conscious intake. Coming to a Mikerophone near you? Probably. But not tonight.

Rollfest.

Tweet.

I have officially tweeted. For the past year I’ve been firmly against Twitter, but in reality I’ve always known it was just a matter of time before it caught up with me. I’ve just been way too stubborn to admit it. For whatever reason, living in a different place gets you doing different things.

I’ve slowly been realizing that I’m not going to come back to Arizona as the same person who left it. And I’m slowly realizing that this is a good thing.

Tweet me.

Peace.

Score

That’s more like it.

Rollout.