While in the throes of bookbinding delirium, I decided to bind a book of images from a series I shot about 10 years ago. Experiencing the backwash of one of the unfortunate hazards of the digital age, I came to realize that I had lost the original files and was left with only a few small web images.

My solution was simple – I would re-shoot the entire series and bind the images as a new project. So-far so good. I’ve produced 20 rough images in 3 days.

War on Graffiti was my first digital photography project.

My client, Open Air Bikes approved two of my jersey designs and I uploaded them to Voler today. Production should start this week.

This is one of those jobs I’m actually pretty excited about. Heck, I love bikes and I ride bikes and I wear jerseys, so it is a total blast to design something I’ll actually use!

Seven years after it’s first printing, I decided that it was time to print and bind the second edition of my first book, Freekmagnet. The first edition was printed in a run of 40 in 2005 by my friend Elli at Paperlily and was spiral bound. She did a great job and I managed to sell almost all of them – I gave one or two away.

I wanted the second edition to have a different look and have a more finished binding, so I did a search and found a great tutorial on paperback bookbinding at PersistenceUnlimited.com. I was shocked by how easy bookbinding could be – in fact the hardest part was finding a cool paper stock for the cover! I set up the type and the layout in InDesign and spent an evening or two parked in front of my Epson printer printing the pages for the book. I built a little clamping jig with some scrap wood and glued the spine together. Overall, the results are fantastic!

I’m pretty lousy at creating on-line tutorials, but I have posted a few images of the process below.

This copy is a prototype for a run of Freekmagnet books I will be doing soon. I will be selling them, but be warned – they will not be cheap! These are really beautiful books and take a lot of time and expensive materials to produce. I haven’t figured out my actual costs yet, but I will be asking at least $75. Hopefully, I will be shooting some better product photos later today (I’m sick and I should be in bed ), so stay tuned if you want to see some nicer pictures of the finished first copy of the second edition of Freekmagnet.

Here’s a little WordPress site I set up for acupuncturist in Arizona. It’s based on the Minima Theme on the Genesis Framework. This is the first time I have ever used a commercial WordPress theme, and this one was definitely worth it. There are some really cool features built it and it was easy to make cosmetic changes in the style sheet. I like the way this site shaped up.

I shot this little gem on Christmas Eve, 2011. I was riding my bike home from an afternoon of shooting when I spotted the sun tickling the trees above the Sespe River. With just minutes to act, I had to run down from the overpass to get close enough the the spot pictured here.

I shot this with my Panasonic GH2 using a Leica 25mm f1.4 lens.

The new Freekmagnet site is here. The interface has be completely designed and all of the Flash heinousness has been removed. There’s a couple of new images in the series that I shot at about the same period of time.

Freekmagnet is a collection of images I put together in 2002-2005. At the time, I was obsessed with the works of such photographers as Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron and I spent most of my time reading Victorian adventure novels for inspiration. Most of the images were shot in my warehouse in Emeryville, CA. I lit the place with a pair of 750w fresnel lights and a couple of halogen work lights. I used a Kiev 88CM and an old Speed Graphic for cameras. The models were friends and acquaintances from around my neighborhood. I made the props myself.

In 2005, I collected the works and published a book using rubber stamps and an inkjet printer. The collection was exhibited at a small art gallery in Oakland, CA.

I must confess that this announcement comes a little late as it has been a while since I finished the new site. This blog appeared mere days after the freekmagnet.com site was finished and I’d completely forgotten about the update.

One of my graphic design gigs is working for this guy named Steve Southerland. He owns Not Just Printing in Ventura, CA. Steve is a philatelist and as a hobby, he perpetrates a few hoaxes via these phony stamps. He has a few different series’ of stamps including collections from mythical islands that have since sunk into the ocean. Some of his stamps, including the ones pictured here, are based on the concept of misguided and privately funded postage. The idea behind these is that at some point in time the Postal Service was considering selling stamps as advertising space to generate extra income. These are from the Wonder Brand Goggle Co.

Steve comes up with the concept and the text while I create the actual stamps using scans of actual stamps and pictures from old catalogs. We mount them on a colored background that includes the description. The mounted stamps are then framed as a set.

You can see some of Steve’s completed sets at his Buckaroo Arts web site and they can be purchased directly from there.

After having this image sitting idle in Lightroom for about a week, I decided that I couldn’t add any more to it and that it was complete. I shot this on the Sespe River in Fillmore, CA with my Canon S90. I guess you could say it is another one of those “magic hour” shots. Most of the post-processing I’ve been doing with these photos involves creating an HDR or panoramic image and then layering a bunch of textures over them until they become the painting-like pictures you see here.

I have to confess that this series is inspired in part by a trip to Santa Fe NM that I took with Amelia this year. Without getting too far into my own personal critique of what I saw while visiting the world’s 2nd largest (?) art market, let’s just say that months later, I am still processing the experience. Part of it is my way of trying to find inspiration in the town I live in. If I can draw from what is arguably Fillmore’s assets, i.e. it’s landscape and surroundings, than perhaps I can find some sort of salvation.

Here’s a new one for my Lotería series. I whipped this one out this morning while the woman and her child were in LA. The green on green is a bit intense, but I think it will work with the rest of the series.

Two more down for the Lotería set. I whipped these out yesterday with the new camera.

This project has been taking way too long – almost 5 years into it and I’m still nowhere near done. I think that the biggest problem that I had with it is that it has been a struggle for me to stay within the bounds of illustration as opposed to making art. I printed out a sheet of 9 fruit images and came to conclusion that some of the earlier pieces that I made for this project are a too far into the so-called realm of “art”. For this project, I should be thinking more along the lines of “commerce”. The redo of the Los Platanos image you see posted here is sort of the result of this realization. I’ve decided that all of the fruit images will stay within this general scheme of plain fruit against a solid background, the people images will stick to their particular scheme, the inanimate objects will have their own scheme and so forth. Who knows – maybe I’ll finish someday.

Lastly, the Panasonic GH2 worked like a champ – however, I discovered that it doesn’t support tethered shooting. D’oh!