Attention Deficit David

Not surfing is hard work

To round off the massive—though not as massive as last year's—travel schedule, I decided to take a quick trip to Hawaii (thank you recession for the stupidly-cheap fare) to shoot some video as a prototype for a job we might be doing soon. I'm in Honolulu at a nice hotel right on the beach.

Today I hooked up with my friend jeff Flindt, surfing photographer extraordinaire who lives up on the North Shore. Next week is the big surfing competition up there, and I shot video of Jeff going out to paddle around in the water as he shoots surfers.

Jeff's been doing this for 11 years, so he's got quite the hookup. I don't know surfing from podiatry, but I do, having shot the mountain bike scene for a few years, appreciate just how awesome it is to be able to completely integrate oneself as a photographer into a sport. Jeff is part of the culture, and he took a lot of time out of his schedule today to bring me over to the Quiksilver team house and introduce me to everyone there from the surfers to the "staff," and they're all great, friendly guys. And since they were nice enough to allow me to take pictures from their porch (and generally get in the way) I shall now type their name a few times, and give you a link to their site. Quiksilver, Quiksilver, Quicksilver.

I don't know the surf scene enough to know how important the guys I was hanging out with actually are, but I can tell many of them are really important, and they were all friendly enough to let a stranger just hang out with them.

I had to get up at 5 in order to get up to the North Shore in time for "first light," which wasn't so hard for me because due to jet lag my soul is still somewhere over Wyoming en-route to me, so my body just felt like it was getting up at a normal time.

My GPS totally crapped out on me, the first time I haven't been able to find a place based on its directions (and if I had read the manual, I'd have been fine—I couldn't figure out how to enter an address with a dash, like 56-305 Something Street. As a result I ended up on a spur road about 5 miles away from my destination, in the dark, having to call Jeff.

The day's shoot was great. I don't usually shoot video but since we don't have a second shooter here, the gig was all mine. Jeff's got some cool gear, including custom-made waterproof housings and it's fun to watch him get geared up. He spent a good few hours in the water, during which time I lugged around his 600mm lens and shot surfers and local surfer-watchers alike. Picture for those who like to ogle boys is here, girls with tattoos is here.

Jeff took a break at about 1:00 p.m. and we headed over to a great plate lunch, something I hadn't heard about until our President-Elect talked about it on T.V. The joint we hit today was a bit more upscale than most, very good food, very plentiful, very cheap. Lots and lots of surfers around, including many clearly baked dudes with incredible-looking women in tow.

Jeff pointed out the entrance to where the Lost beach is filmed, pointed out the Foodland grocery store where he saw the guy who plays Locke, and pointed out all the team houses, of which there are plenty. We went to the Oakley house and I talked an Australian photographer through some OS X issues for a while. The house is modern and well appointed, not really what you'd expect from a surf promo house, but definitely in the aesthetic of the Oakley brand.

Because its such a great promotion, each of the team houses is stocked with free beverages from companies like Red Bull and RockStar. I had a free, gigantic RockStar at the QuikSilver house and about ten minutes later wanted to punch a pony in the kidney, the shit is so powerful.

After lunch I drove around the remaining circumference of the island around looking at the water, which was directly outside my window for more than twenty miles before I headed up into the mountains and directly into rush hour traffic, which my GPS then got points for helping me avoid.

Then I started to flag after the day's moving around, but I suffered through another sunset (completely different than yesterday—where the hell did all the boats come from) and another Japanese meal in a place where I was the only caucasian.

Tomorrow I think I'll shoot some video from a hike up Diamond Head, more B-Roll for the video we're doing, and then at night I'll go back up to Jeff and shoot some more talking head of him. This paradise thing can be really exhausting.

Just in case you've decided that you hate me now because of the travel, here's a diversion. I was talking on IM tonight to a friend of mine from the PDN days who is now, with her husband, doing a project where they travel Asia shooting spas. Yes, I said that right, their job is to photograph spas. Then my friend Martin from Apple told me about an expedition a mutual friend from National Geographic is doing where they're taking some eighty people in a converted 757 around the world (in 24 days) to shoot some of the most incredible places on earth. It only costs a hair below $60,000. So there.

Every video of teh Evah!

Interested in watching all the videos of your youth? Great, cause MTV Music has them all. ALL.

Video kills the radio star, indeed. Free video does at least.

iPhone 2 speculation

Since WWDC is today, I thought I'd post my official speculation that the iPhone 2 will be announced today, and will be available June 27th.

Why June 27th? Because there's a Pixar movie coming out, and the first iPhone was released the same day as a Pixar flick.

I'm a trend setter

Abby and I were walking down the street in Nyack yesterday after a quick lunch in a new middle-eastern restaurant. (In a bit of a parallel to the actual universe, it's a Islamic-owned establishment across the street from a Jewish-owned middle-eastern restaurant. At some point we expect the double yellow lines on Broadway to be replaced with barbed wire and tanks...)

In any case, as we were strolling, two black teens (yes, this racial reference IS important to the story) wearing a level of cool looking clothes that I'm unable to get away with (low slung jeans, cool looking hoodies, new sneakers, etc.) stopped dead in their tracks looking at me.

"Oh man!" said the younger of the two "where did you get that?" At first I had utterly no idea what he was talking about. Get what? I looked down and realized I was wearing an Apple logo'd zip up track-style sweatshirt.

"I got it at the Apple store at the company's headquarters in California." I said.

"I'm totally crushing on that!" (yes, that's what he said) "I've got Apple everything." His friend chimed in at this point to confirm that he did in fact have a ton of Apple-branded clothes. (Although he did it in a bit of a Forrest Gump sort of way—"Apple hats, Apple shirts, Apple drawers...")

I thanked him for his comments, and got into my car, which is when the oddness of the situation hit me.

Flash back to my formative years, sitting alone in my room at my mom's house with my Apple ][+, then Apple //e, then Apple IIGS, poring over manuals, learning how to do graphics on a system with two-bit color, and admiring my "Beagle Brothers" peek-and-poke chart.

Years later I found myself working at the Apple retail store, having been hired the day that the iPod was announced, and spent my days surrounded by overweight white folks—the early days of the Mac retail experience were only occasionally punctuated by the visits of teens, usually males, always white. In fact it was usually a challenge to figure if the customers or the iBooks were whiter.

Wearing an Apple-branded anything was never really a sign of a hip cultural reference so much as a clear indication that my life has been spent among the ranks of the geeks.

Now I'm picked out by clearly trendy non-white teens who identify with the brand icon, and must, to some degree associate with the products the brand represents. (After all, the Nike swish isn't popular just because it's a clever icon.) This is truly odd.

The only thing I can come up with here is that I've been a trend setter all along, I'm just vastly ahead of the curve, and that the world is just catching up to me as a teenager.

And that can only mean that any day now watching scrambled-because-you-haven't-paid-for-it Cinemax on a weekend evening trying to see a bit of nudity will become a cultural phenomena and I'll be further vindicated.

So swamped

I am really, really swamped right now. It''s a good sort of swamped—not in an "Army Corps of Engineers built me a shitty levee system" way—with work projects.

I've been generating some content for upcoming seminar tours and so far I've written about 10,000 words this week. We're trying hard to launch some new programs around the PMA trade show, which I am thankfully not attending as I can't stand where it's being held.

"What happens in Vegas can go fuck itself," as the ads say. No, wait. Maybe that's "Vegas: What's that burning smell?"

Back to life. I like being busy, though I'm up against a bit of a deadline and that's why I'm so swamped. Naturally the way that I'm wired I'm unlikely to do any work until a deadline looms anyhow, so this is just business as usual.

I've also had someone else interested in helping us look for a bit of capital contact me, which is nice. It's a good feeling building something that people think has a lot of potential. Never can tell where these lead, but it's nice to go down these roads.

iPhone to the stars

This week I'm in Washington, on the Microsoft campus for the second annual Professional Photography Summit. (Marking air mile 56,000 for the year, for those of you playing the home version of Frequent Flyer Hell.) Microsoft brought a bunch of actors in to talk, part of a group that are lobbying for different rights for celebrities who are photographed. Don't ask. Really.

Anyhow, mind you I'm at the Microsoft Campus at a Microsoft event, and while I'm standing in the hallway putting away my iPhone, actor Joe Montagne's daughter comes up and takes a look at the phone. (She's, I think 16? Perfect market for a device like this, right?) "OH MY GOD" she says, "is that the iPhone?" which precedes the request for a demo, as always. So I'm showing off the iPhone to her mostly, but also to Ernie Hudson, Joe Montagne and Joey Pants. I show off a movie, scrubbing through it, changing the volume. I switch to photos and show her flicking through photos and then pinching to zoom in. Which is the point at which she squeals with surprise. (That demo on the Apple video was actually the same thing that convinced several people I know to get the iPhone.)

One of the Microsoft guys running the show comes over and says, jokingly, "what's with this Apple product at a Microsoft event? "Yeah," says Joe Montagne, "it's like looking at bar mitzvah pictures at Hitler's house."

That's one hell of a good line.

My Steve Collection Is Complete

Yesterday I was riding my bike in San Fran, when I rode by YAFGOAS (Yet Another Fucking Guy On A Segway) and as I did a double take I thought that dork looks like Steve Wozniak.

I sort of shrugged it off—while I'm here for Macworld, Steve Jobs and Woz aren't exactly the best of buddies.

Today I read a Gizmodo post with a shot of the same hefty dork on the same Segway at Macworld, and lo-and-behold, it's Woz.

You sort of need to be a geek to appreciate this.

A Very Obsessive Thanksgiving To You

I'm not often obsessive, thankfully the gene that turned the houses of my parents into dueling junkyards usually only appears in me as a desire to get things done right fucking now when they're bothering me.

On Thanksgiving though, that approach doesn't usually work, resulting instead in a big pile of food that's ready at the wrong time. So for the last few thanksgivings I've turned to computer assistance to help plan my meals. It's been excel the last few years, but this year it was iCal.

Behold! A day's worth of cooking in order, timeline based! Now you too can play along with our home cooking game, Schlanderson Thanksgiving®

Can't Seem To Focus

I've sort of lost my drive to photograph recently. Partially it's because I've been spending so much free time on my bike (4762 miles for the year as of today) but part is because I'm just sort of non-motivated. I've got two main camera selections, my super-honking Canon 1Ds Mark II, which is something like eight pounds with a lens is one one end of the spectrum. On the other is my smaller point-and-shoot but I've become so disillusioned with the image quality that it's not even worth shooting.

The perfect camera has yet to arrive, and every pro photographer I know wants it. It's small, high megapixel, with manual settings (including Aperture and Shutter Priority modes, and preferably full-manual) and in an ideal world it would come with a raw mode.

The Canon G7 seems tantalizingly close, and I'm still awaiting PDN's review unit, but it lacks a raw mode and that's a bummer. Panasonic/Leica have a new body out but it got terrible terrible reviews for high-ISO noise, and by that I mean "anything over 100 ISO" which makes it less attractive by a factor of around a billion.

Anyhow, fall just fell and I didn't get out to shoot at all. I think that's a felony in the photographic market. I need some motivation. A good project or something to get me going.

In related news, I've been on flickr for two years now. Time flies .

The New iTunes Store

So, Apple today announced a bunch of new features to their iTunes Store (dropping the word "music" as they've added movies to the available media) and I've been playing with it. While the interface elements are tres chic, I'm a bit more impressed with something that His Steve forgot to talk about, which is the new downloading architecture.

While the presentation did mention that one can now change the order of items to download, it did not mention that things now download in parallel instead of in serial. In other words, instead of downloading an album, one track at a time, at about 300k/sec a track, it now downloads as many tracks as it can, at a good clip faster, at the same time until your broadband pipe is filled.

In my case, that's a 30mb/second FIOS pipeline that gives me the equiv cap download speed of 3.2Mb/second.

I just purchased Grosse Point Blank and O Brother, and they both downloaded at 1.2Mb/sec, for a total of about 11 minutes to download two full-length movies.

Incidentally, if you try to play back any movies from the store, you'll need Quicktime 7.1.3, which the program says is available from Software Update. It's not, as of this writing, but it is available from apple.com/quicktime.