It has been way too long

some people have asked me about this blog and if it will ever seen an update, and for those few people here it is.

There are many notable things that have happened since the last update, but the best one by far is film.

the typical California picture, I can almost hear katy perry in my head

When I say film I don't mean movies, I mean pictures. I mean the old fashion way of taking pictures, where you would have to actually know what you're doing for a photo to come out properly.

I wish my carseat was this comfortable

The best thing about film cameras is that they are cheap. I bought my 5dm3 for 3500 when it first came out (you can get it for less than 3k now). And the camera I used to take the 2 pictures above I bought for 20 bucks!

It's hard for me to put my finger on it. Film is in focus, yet it's soft. The colors are vibrant and well blended. The pictures I take with my professional digital cameras need work done to them, but with film (as long as you know what you're doing) it comes out of the camera looking amazing.

If you're interested in shooting film, a great book I would recommend is "Film is not Dead" by Jon Canlas. I wish I had read this book 3 years ago. Or if you have any questions just ask.

Film is not expensive and I encourage anyone who's interested to try it, it definitely keeps things interesting.

All these Photos were taken with Canon Eos Elan cameras. Colored photos with Fuji400h and black and white photos with Ilford 400 hp5

Therapeutic Curiosity

I always enjoy watching other people take pictures because I like seeing what they take picture of. Thanks Annie!

Solitude Project

some more new photographers

Some new photographers that I think are interesting

First is Jeff Wall. He does an interesting narrative where he sets up a picture with clues as to what happened.

Each picture then becomes a puzzle or a riddle that is solved based on the interpretation of the viewer.

He's almost like the Riddler of photography.

Another interesting photographer is Wendy Mcmurdo. She uses digital manipulation to create a playful scene of a theatre girl who sees her double for the first time.

"[this] is an example of tableau photographer in which the constructed nature of the image is foregrounded"

Deadpan aesthetic: cool , detached, keenly sharp type of photography.

One deadpan photographer that I particularly like is Richard Misrach.

There's something alluring about giant natural formations that are just static in an image. 

They're so oddly peaceful....

One more photographer, who's actually not in my book and I'm not completely sure is considered deadpan, is Michael Levin. 

I discovered Michael Levin last year and this images were so captivating that I spent weeks just looking at his photography.

If any of you has ever bought an ikea frame his picture might have been in it.

who knew deadpan could be so exciting

Another update on project impossible

Here are some pictures updated pictures from a project I'm currently working on called Simple.Life.

My back is starting to hurt from carrying all my camera stuff around all day...

So I woke up extra early this morning (or didn't sleep) and got to school at 6:20 so I could get the sunrise. To my surprise there was a surprising amount of traffic and I felt like I was literally racing the sun to get to school. I ended up hating the pictures I got and deleting all of them and then going to panera bread to sadly eat my bagels. But after I wiped my tired tears and got back to school I got a unique view of teams practicing their sports.

Some epic volleyball (I'm not sure if this is a team or a class)

Our award winning track team.

I did end up catching something like a sunrise that I liked.

I'm going to go out right now to get more pictures. I think I need about 200,000 more and then I'll be done.

Contemporary Photographers

Contemporary photographer has always been a weakness of mine, it's a subject I never studied or looked into (except this one time I looked up David Lachapelle on my phone). I actually don't know that many famous photographers. Whenever someone asks me who my favorite photographers are my answer is Eddie Adams, Vincent Laforet and my boss Ezra, because those are the only photographers I know...

I'm reading a book called "the photograph as contemporary art" and I'm finally being exposed to a world of photography that is more than just flickr and instagram posts.

For most people, photography as contemporary art is mostly just anything offensive or homeless. This book has a lot of both... BUT there are some really interesting photographers out there.

For instance. Georges Rousse. George Rousse sticks out to me because I love perspective shifts. Long before the days of photoshop, artists used to (and still) build things in order to tickle our brains by deceiving and entertaining our eyes.

His use of line and color, getting the light logic accurate and correct, everything he does looks so tedious and time consuming.

And then he takes the reality and distorts it. I really like this picture. It's like having an extreme fisheye inside a rectilinear lens.

This one is a great play on plane shifts.



And then there's Philip-Lorca diCorcia.

His "Head Series" is really interesting. What he did was he put some lights on a construction scaffolding near a busy New York street and stood really far away with a telephoto lens. When people walked under he would capture a portrait of them, without them knowing.

People act weird in front of a camera. They never either stand awkwardly or they have a specific pose that makes them look good. Although I do feel like this is an invasion of privacy, I feel like this approach captures what a person really looks like.

I wonder if he ever got in trouble for these...

project crazy

I'm working on a project for a class and basically I have to take 100-1000 pictures a day for 10 days and then at the end I can either use 1 picture or all the pictures and basically do whatever I want. Some people made a childrens book, some people make a video, someone  I think put all their pictures on a roll of tape and hogtied the entire class with it.

I had a really good idea for this project, and then I ended up scrapping that idea and doing something else, and then scrapping that idea and now doing something completely different. Because this project is so open ended It's hard for me to solidify an idea when I feel like I could be doing something better. Fortunately what I have no, I think, is pretty good.

This is just a quick sample of what I'm doing. In the end it's going to be an actual video with music and fonts! I made this into a GIF because I wanted to see what a sample of what I'm doing would look like in motion without having to open up premiere, inportm resize, rendor, export, etc...

Special thanks to Ivan for letting me borrow his tilt shift. The low res gif doesn't look that good so I'll upload an actual still.

this is my toy house and those are my toy dogs. Hopefully the rest of this will turn out much better. I want to try to get a sunrise using this technique but I'm not sure if I'm for waking up that early...

This is going to be an interesting class

So I had an assignment this week where I had to either as a girl to jump on a bed and eat a sandwich or throw some fast food around. Since I didn't feel comfortable asking any of my friends to do such an awkward favor I decided to do the latter (I did ask one friend... but the timing didn't work out)

After thinking about what food to throw around I decided that the most interesting part about throwing food is the impact. If you just take a fast shutter speed of food in air it just looks like it's levitating, but smashing it on the ground makes it much more exciting.

I decided to throw an ice cream cone because (how I imagined it in my mind) it would break apart on impact. The results weren't as impressive as they were depressive. 

I had to drop it twice because my 5dm2 shoots at only 3.9 fps and I completely missed it the first time. 

I wasn't really happy with the first or second attempt, and I had enough money to buy another cone, but I decided to eat that one instead.

I had to go to 4 mcdonalds to get this shot because 3 of them had broken ice cream machines...

New Project

I recently did a project that allowed me to flex my creative muscles. It took a lot of time, planning and patience but I'm pretty pleased with the end result.

So it all started when my good friend Josh, who's also a very talented musician, asked me to do an album cover for him. He had a very specific vision in mind, and I was unsure of my ability to deliver on what he wanted.

As I got started, I hit a couple roadblocks, but eventually got by them through some clear communication with Josh. 9 hours and 10 mock ups later we had our final product and I'm going to show you steps that I took to make it possible.

This is the picture that I took. I didn't want to have to deal with stock photography so I just took the picture myself. This was taken handheld at like 1/25 of a second at 70mm so it's not the sharpest of pictures, it's also not that straight... But it gave me a starting point.

After that I isolated the part of the skyline I wanted to use. You can see I took out the bridge, some buildings on the left, and burned out a large portion of the front so I can get a good usable skyline.

After the 2nd picture I hit a brick wall. I emailed Josh what I had and asked him what he wanted. Josh wanted the city to be underwater. I had a couple ideas on how I wanted to accomplish this but I ended up going with the simplest way. It took a while to get the colors and lighting to match but eventually I got it. I sent this to Josh feeling proud of my work and feeling that I've gotten something close to a finished project. Then Josh shot back an email asking me to make it look "older" or something ridiculous...

This part of the process took the longest because I had no idea how to make a city look "aged" or "damaged" or "grungy". Figuring out what to do took a while and then what I ended up having to do was working within the picture I had and putting in all the individual details painstakingly by hand.

I can't remember how long this took, but when I started the sun was up, and when I finished the sun was down.

It's pretty crazy for me to see the original and the finished project. I look forward to starting my new company for creative visuals/independent film studio. I consider this project to be a step for the new company. I have a lot of ideas I want to see become reality.

Check out Josh's new EP available now for FREE!

www.cityrapture.bandcamp.com

Inspirational

After seeing so many different kinds of pictures and styles of photography I've come to a point where it's hard for me to see something and say "wow, I've never seen that before".

Every morning I get up, and then I read gizmodo, and I came across this guy who took beautiful black and white photographs and made them look like ink drawings.

http://gizmodo.com/5873682/these-beautiful-chinese-ink-drawings-are-really-amazing-photographs

With all the fog that always comes new years eve, I should have gotten some pictures like this...

I drew some of my friends facebook status'

Today I downloaded this thing for my ipad 2 called sketchbook pro. I was hesitant at first because I didn't think it would be that good, but gizmodo recommended it and so i downloaded it anyways.

I love drawing in an actual physical sketchbook with a variety of graphites and I don't think there can ever be a real digital alternative to pencil and paper, but this sketchbook app is actually really good.

I spent the entire day trying to get used to the app and trying to find things to sketch. After a while I got bored of sketching lamps and trashcans, so taking a page from Matthew Inman's playbook (theoatmeal) I decided to sketch some of my friends facebook status' using the new app.


My friend and apparently neighbor Elisha just cut her hair. I'm pretty sure she cut more than 1 but her status wasn't very clear..

My good friend Josh just watched girl with the dragon tattoo, apparently he fell in love, I hope someone can get him out..

My friend rachel has a poor phone, in light of the holidays I hope we can dig deep and help out.

Emily has a sweet little sister... or had  I mean...

Sindy is a friend I met at sfc last year and a talented photographer. I hope the smog leaves her alone..

This was surprisingly fun, I hope I can get better at this app soon and give you guys comics that look like they've been drawn by an adult and not a baby seal.

studio IX

I haven't told many people about this, because I planned on doing it later rather than sooner but this video changed my mind.

PROTEIGON from BURAYAN on Vimeo.

Studio IX is an independent movie studio that focuses on creative visuals. I plan on using it to make cool projects like these during the off months from Light and Love.

full circle

My friend grace came back from korea and brought me back a small journal and some fun pen and pencils to use with it.

to regular people that looks like a seal, but to the trained eye it's actually an otter.

I planned on using this new conveniently sized journal (i usually have a sketchbook with me but it's like 8.5x11) to write down everything, and to draw of course.

This journal has been a huge outlet of creativity for me. I've been using it to make huge progress on all the movie scripts  (there's now 6 in progress), i'm using it to plan my friends photoshoot (Josh Kim, very talented musical artist, I got a special sneak peak at what's coming and it sounds really good), and I even wrote down steps to a secret handshake, that i eventually want to share with someone who's cool enough.

Something unexpected happened yesterday though. I've been working on an art final project that's due next week and while writing some ideas in the journal it reminded me of my initial calling to art.

Not many people know this about me, but before I started making movies, before I ever picked up a camera, before I even started learning guitar, my first interest in anything creative came from poetry.

Back in the 3rd grade after watching the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I was so intrigued by the oompa loompa's songs that I wrote continuing lyrics to all the music. My teacher (formally Ms. Moy, now Mrs. Wong) eventually saw what I had written and was so impressed she showed all the other teachers.

My elementary school days was full of interests in poems and finding different ways to rhyme words, and even poetry contests here and there. Even up to high school I remember doing all of my friends poem packets for them, not because it was easy for me, but because I enjoyed doing it.

And then I took different creative turns, I eventually learned guitar, fashion, photography, film and now more hands on painting and drawing and poetry just took a backseat in a bus of full of other things I want to do.

So back to now. Thinking of my final art project I wanted to incorporate a story, and I ended up writing it in a poem form. I normally wouldn't share something like this online, but I figure if it's going to be shown in a class in front of my peers I might as well show it online to people who actually like me.

The Otter and the Wolf

The Wolf and the Otter
the deep friendship that's offered
of two unlikely characters
that put aside their matters
because one can't live without the other
this is the story of the Wolf and the Otter

The Wolf, cold and mean
Never low on self-esteem
He is smart and critical
considers everyone else pitiful
His observations are acute and keen
The Wolf; smart, cold, and mean

But the Otter is fun and genuine
Everyone that knows him, loves him
funny, sincere, polite,
friendly, gracious, and nice
If you needed a home he would let you in
The Otter is hospitable, and genuine.

Now you see, the Otter and Wolf are polar opposites
It's difficult to understand their relationship
But as one coin has two different sides
The Otter and Wolf are the same guy
If you still haven't figured out this mystery
The Otter and the Wolf are me.


I realize that this might cause some confusion, I didn't write this poem to show how great or smart or nice I am. I wrote this to show a struggle of clashing personality traits inside of me. Some days I wake up and I feel like being nice to everyone and other days I'll wake up being completely critical of everything, and mean. I think my closest friends probably know this about, they've probably seen me and my nicest and meanest.

being creative for creative sake

It's been a while since I've taken pictures just for the sake of taking pictures. I don't remember the last time I intentionally went out just to take a picture without it being obligatory (I think maybe when I took my camera out into the water in Cuba was the last time).

Anyways my very good friend and talented photographer friend Tuan let me borrow his macro lens and so I went out today to my backyard to see what I could do with the lens.

My dad enjoys gardening and I didn't realize how many different flowers we have in my backyard until today.

I don't really like this particularly as a photo, but I like the design elements inside it. I think the out of focus and in focus lines make for interesting negative shapes.

This picture gives me a headache if I look at it too long, which is why I like it.

Either the ground was muddy, or my dog needs to lose some weight...

I initially went out with the lens hood on, but I had to get so close to some of the flowers that the hood kept hitting them. I feel like we have a surprisingly amount of flowers out in my backyard for december.

This looks alien to me

alien flower...

I love the detail in the color and on the head and back of the wasp. It took a while to get this picture right because they kept moving and the depth of field is so shallow when you're shooting this close.

My babies.