Here is a site I made for Chemtrail Records, home of Brian Stuart Fox. Brian is an incredible multi-instrumentalist and songwriter with decades in the music business. He’s also a prolific videoblogger with a focus on government conspiracies and is outspoken about the changing roles of art and music in our culture.

While I don’t necessarily share all his beliefs, he’s a fascinating artist doing work he believes in and gets serious points across in entertaining ways.

Check out his new CD “Load the Jet Rocket” for sale as MP3’s on the site, as well as his new music video for the song “9/11 Was An Inside Job.”

So, here I am in SF a week sooner than anticipated. I’ve already met a handful of interesting people and I’m working on finding a July sublet (see my previous post for more info.) As soon as I catch my breath and have a place to unpack some boxes, I’ll be back in job hunting mode and exploring the city.
 
My current hosts have been extremely kind to me. While business in LA was unreliable enough to hold my interest, it’s my personal life that brought me here. It’s a long story that I don’t know will ever be told, but things are going well and I’m happy. There’s nothing like a cake with your name on it to make you feel wanted.

Working on a site for an independent musician with what I hope to be a great solution for selling digital downloads. I’ll post a how-to once it’s all up and working as advertised.

I’m hoping to land one more freelance editing gig that would keep me in LA an extra week. Either way, I’ll be looking for a July sublet in San Francisco. July - August works too. Looking in the city anywhere North of SFSU, near Lower Haight is ideal, cheap as possible, tiny rooms ok.

Me: don’t smoke, don’t drink, no drugs, clean and quiet, don’t care if you’re none of those things, pet-friendly, gay-friendly, good credit, good landlord and personal references, deposit ok. Will be in SF to meet up after the 23rd, maybe earlier. No shared rooms or “plywood divider in the living room” kind of deals, please. Email pat@patodea.com with any leads. Thanks!

Rose Rossi, The Viper Room, Hollywood, CA 5/28/08. Check out Rose’s Myspace to hear songs from her new album.

The most exciting thing about this post for me is how easy it was to make and repost thanks to some new plug-ins and apps I’m using. A post on streamlining your blogging coming up.

One of my favorite all-time movies was 2000’s severely underrated The Cell directed by Tarsem Singh and starring Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, and Vincent D’Onofrio. The story follows Lopez as a therapist using cutting edge technology to enter the mind of a serial killer who has become catatonic in order to try to find out where he has locked up his last victim before she dies. Lopez navigates a surreal and beautifully disturbing world where the killer is both demon god and injured child in a stream of vast, elaborate, circus-like interludes. Think “Nightmare on Elm Street” as high-art.

Director Tarsem kept a low-profile for years following The Cell working on his self-funded labor of love “The Fall.” The film has appeared at festivals since 2006 to much critical acclaim. Thanks to the combined efforts of director’s David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en) and Spike Jonez (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich,) “The Fall” has finally secured some distribution and sees a limited release this month. If you’re in Los Angeles, you can find it playing here.

Here are some shots I took of Los Angeles guitarist and bassist Alex Rentumis. Alex is involved in a wide range of projects including writing and recording solo material, Bill and Al’s Acoustic Adventure, Crematorium, The Brian Fox Band, and Trinity Test. Check out Alex Rentumis on Myspace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I came across a great DIY seamless background tutorial on the blog of Atlanta photographer Zack Arias that can help you get a great studio look for a couple hundred dollars and a few strobes. Seeing as I currently don’t have either of those things, I had to go the old route of improvising to get close enough and faking it the rest of the way.

Set up here was two $10 clip lights w/ 1oow Reveal bulbs. Diffusser was a tupperware container with a layer of one-ply toilet paper taped over. The main light was clipped to a microphone stand and kept close to the face, mostly in a safe “Rembrandt” angle with a few side-light shots just to spice it up. Second light was left hard and moved back.

 

 

 

I’d be able to get away with low-light portraits with my 50mm f/1.8, but having to squeeze in guitar necks meant having to shoot most of these with my kit lens and having to stay at 18-24mm to stay at f/3.5 wide open. I was still shooting around iso800 at 1/80.

The white backgrounds are a sheet taped to the wall. The second light was low and behind Alex, hitting as much of the sheet as I could while also keeping him as close to the wall as I could. I had to open the shades to get a little ambient to play with, but mixing in cool daylight was a compromise I knew I’d have to deal with and work around later. I shot these in aperture priority mode to make sure I got a good exposure without going over. To blast out backgrounds, I used a curves adjustment layer to blow out highlights, a soft brush to mask Alex back to normal leaving a little extra on his edges, merged down, then went around him dodging out highlights with a medium sized soft brush at exposure of 8-12%. This is faster than it sounds and you can be fairly imprecise. Here’s a before and after:

 

 

 

The black backgrounds are an air mattress leaned against the wall with a black comforter draped over. Since ambient was the enemy, I could kill the shades and not have color problems, but that also meant having to squeeze out more light by shooting close and wide and keeping the main light close and contrasty. So be it. The second light was taped to the top of the air mattress angled down to hit his head and shoulders to pop him off the background. To help keep the main light off the background, I put black tape on the left side of the tupperware as a gobo.

Here, I wanted to get Alex a few feet away from the wall to help drop the background into darkness, but that meant catching the glare from the rim light. When I hit a bad angle, I just held out one hand to block the direct light from the lens and it worked fine. Already knowing what I was working with and having the backlight confusing things, I switched to manual mode and tried to watch my histograms. In Photoshop, I used a similar approach only adjusting the blackpoint, masking, and then burning shadows. Here’s a before and after:

Following that weekend adventure last month, I quickly fell ill and spent several weeks in bed sleeping straight through everything from days of work to a rock record being recorded in the next room over to police breaking doors down in my house.

Here are some Converge and Red Chord shots you might have caught on the Flickr.

The loveliness of Paris Foxboro seems somehow sadly gay
The glory that was Rome Boston is of another day
I’ve been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan Los Angeles
I’m going home to my city by the Bay

I left my heart in San Francisco
High on a hill, it calls to me
To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars
The morning fog may chill the air, I don’t care

My love waits there in San Francisco
Above the blue and windy sea
When I come home to you, San Francisco
Your golden sun will shine for me

Excellent video for the song “Again and Again” by The Bird and the Bee. Director / creator: Dennis Liu. Wow.

I recently whipped up a website for my long time friend, roommate, and former bandmate Bill Scott. Bill is a Los Angeles based performing and session guitarist, as well as recording producer and engineer.

Check out his site to hear samples of his work, including several tracks from his new project Van Nuys Music Corporation. You can also check out Bill’s Myspace and the Van Nuys Music Corp. Myspace.