dust to dust




This is my buddy dust. He stopped by and I volunteered him to stand under a new softbox I was testing. Dust is doing cool little videos with a d90. Well he was anyways. He just bought a canon 5dmkII which thanks to a recent software update now has full manual controls for video. No 24p yet though. You can see his work at dustbrandfilms. It's really amazing what he does with some decent ideas and a good aesthetic sense and very small budgets. Any man who rents a t-top firebird for a video gets my vote. Dust also is the musical genius behind mars ILL. I have probably $40k more gear than he does but his videos are just as entertaining as my videos. If not more. It's the mind behind the gear that counts. Dust built his own dolly. What he does with his tiny budgets is inspiring. Dust is charging into battle with a rusty butter knife and a lot of determination and he is winning. Don't buy his brand of butter knife, buy his brand of determination.

This picture looks a little different than my normal stuff cause well... I'm tired of my normal stuff. Ironically, it reminds me of my older stuff and my original style where I was cribbing off of yann-arthus bertrand. Right now I'm actually trying to rip off my friend Sarai who is getting gorgeous shots out of her hasselblad. I was hoping I could replicate the feel with my 5dmkII but so far, it's a pretty pale sad imitation of what she does. I've been tired of my photos for awhile so I've been reaching out to try other things, looking into medium format and black and white film e.t.c. You should have seen the look on my wife's face when I told her I was thinking about building a dark room... the house is already overflowing with gear stacked on top of other gear stacked on top of boxes that studio stuff came in. I need a man cave so I can get my crap out of the house. Which will then become a proper house/girl cave. (UPDATE: my wife informs me the term she prefers is "lady cabana"). If marriage is so great, why are most men banished to the garage?

What's funny, is that while I'm tired of my stuff, the people who are booking me don't want black and white or artsy TTV stuff... As an artist I tend to constantly innovate, I hate to repeat myself and while that's great for evolving, sometimes we lose perspective and we can walk away from our natural gifts. We undervalue anything we can do. I see it in bands all the time. I think that's partly why I don't take as many pictures anymore or blog them. Renay shared her blog with me last week and I'm not sure where she lives, but I found her photos fascinating because they are so different from my life. It was a good reminder that what may be old hat to me, might still be worthwhile to someone else. So I'm going to try to get back into the blogging thing, to include you guys a little more on what I'm working on, because even though I'm sick of it, maybe you guys aren't.

Posted: Fri - June 19, 2009 at 10:53 AM          

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