Boardom

The reason I haven’t been blogging lately is completely due to my boardation. In the past two and a half weeks that I’ve been home, my board hasn’t spent more than 4 consecutive days locked away in the storage room. So at a minimum, I owe you guys a few shots of my winter break:

More to come.

Rollfest.

ReBlog/Reesers [Family Shoot]

Welcome back folks. It’s been awhile, but I’m finally up and rolling again. Thanks to the lovelies over at State Farm, this Mikerophonity is coming to you straight from my shiny new MacBook Pro’s keyboard. Insurance is by far the best investment I made this year… Err… Last year.

Yup, yup. As you may have noticed, it’s now 2010, which means I should probably look back to this post and give you an update on the resolutions made there [spoiler alert: the results are surprisingly similar to most other people’s]. A new year isn’t all bad news… I’ve got some exciting stuff for your lovely eyes to check out coming up soon. I have my good buddy/Javascript genius Josiah whipping up a spifferific website for me, and a full on rebranding on the way.

I also need to throw up some Scotland shots, the results of my final photo project, and some fun snowboarding action. Needless to say, I’ve been busy.

But for now, I’d like guys to meet the Reesers; a supremely photogenic and fun family that I shot on the day after Christmas. You’ve already seen Brandon and Breanna strut their stuff in their ridiculously cool 30’s shoot. This time, they brought along the rest of the family for the party.

Rollfest.

Hello, Beautiful

Something came in the mail… err… “post” today.

Things were going really well between us until I opened the battery compartment to put in a battery and found this:

Ah! Knife through the heart! I put the battery in anyway, hoping it would just ignore the ridiculous amount of corrosion that surrounded it, but no such luck. The camera simply doesn’t want anything to do with electricity at the moment.

Even if it had power, it would be a serious pain to focus. The rangefinder (focusing eyepiece) is way too fogged up to notice anything resembling an in-focus shot. Bah. Such is life. I’ll have to dig around and see if I can find anywhere that could give it a good cleaning and replace the crapped-out electronics, but I’m not entirely hopeful at the moment.

Besides those two issues, this thing is a beautiful little camera. It was made sometime between 1966 and 1968, so it’s a little on the old side. Everything about it is super smooth, even being 40 years old. It’s relatively small, but very solid. It feels just as good as it looks. I wouldn’t mind if Canon added a few pounds to its cameras to give them the same solidness that this little sucker has.

But of course, none of that changes the fact that right now, it doesn’t take pictures. Apparently film and I just weren’t meant to be…

Peace.

Remember, Remember the 5th of November

Today was Guy Fawkes Day. If you don’t know who he was, go watch the first five minutes of V for Vendetta. And then if you haven’t seen it, watch the rest. Because it’s a good movie. Or just be a lazy bum and click here.

But there were fireworks. And it was fun.

Danni said something about liking all the pretty colors in the sky, then Lee made some witty comment about liking grey fireworks, and then we went off on a tangent about watching fireworks in black and white. Thus the reason for the above photo being on the slightly desaturated side of life.

Anyways, it’s late. So I’m gonna go to bed. Or edit photos. Or watch a movie. One of those three…

Peace.

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.

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.

prague.

This post has been a long time coming, but I’ve just been so slow to finish the video for it. Likewise, the Bruges post will probably take awhile to put up here since I haven’t even started editing that video yet. Anyways, on with the show:

We spent a good amount of time (3 days) in this laid back, very fun city. I think this took the groups vote for “best part of the trip”. Kelsey didn’t wanna leave.

Peace yo.