Little Roadtrip to Joshua Tree

There is nothing quite like cruising down an open desert road, windows down, with some good folk playing such as Ray LaMontagne. Great fun. I've been craving that feeling for quite a while now... So Bethany and I jumped at the opportunity to take a little one-night road trip yesterday. We decided on Joshua Tree National Park, because I have never been there and it's not too far of a driving distance from San Diego.

I had fun shooting some night light painting stuff for a bit. My two favorite images are above, and here are some others that are worth posting...









One last thing for the photo nerds... Click on the images below and you'll see a 100% crop of the two top images. The detail my Canon 5D captures is amazing! Even with long exposures like these two!

Wind storm!

North County San Diego was hit by an awesome windstorm on Tuesday. Bethany and I went out on our bikes and petaled along the beach, first against the wind and flying sand, then going back with the wind was a lot easier. A ton of sand from the beach blew up on the road and formed little sand dunes. I even spotted a few cars get stuck in it!

I went out for a quick little photo session in Oceanside around sunset, only got to shoot for about 20 minutes because some parking guy was shooing me off everywhere I stopped. And for you photo nerds, I got the "dreamy water" look by using my 10 stop neutral density filter, so I could use long shutter speeds.

Tsukuru

San Diego Sailing

Went on another fun sailing adventure with Capitan Taylor and his crew yesterday... good times. Took a few photos too.




These next ones were fun because I used my 85mm f/1.2 lens to shoot hand held at night. I tried shooting with a f/2.8 at first and it just wasn't going to happen...


Gotham City!

old stuff...

I was just browsing through some old photos from 2004 because my awesome instructor Chris Orwig (from the Brooks days) asked if he could use a couple of my photos for examples in a Lynda.com tutorial. Looking though some of my old pics inspired me to start posting some older stuff with stories in addition to the new stuff I always post. So here is the first of hopefully many older photos with stories.

Bethany and I were cruising along on a warm summer evening in Michigan when I started seeing all these little glowing things everywhere and I had no idea what they were! Turns out they were fireflies... definitely a first for me! Growing up on the west coast I had never seen anything like it! I made Bethany pull over just so I could catch the little dudes to check them out up close. They are so cool looking! So anyway I wanted to take a photo of the field next to the freeway because it was glowing everywhere, but it didn't really work too well, so this is all I got. It's not even a good photo at all, but it's just a great memory of the first time I ever saw real fireflies!



PS- Chris is an amazing creative dude, check out his stuff and you'll be so inspired!
Photography site one - Photography site two - And his daily photo blog!

playing around with my underwater housing

I recently got to go out and play a couple different times with my new underwater housing from Erik at Del Mar Housings.

So far it's been a huge learning experience because it's way harder to get good images than I expected. Everything has to come together perfectly right in front of your lens to get something nice. Even when everything comes together, it happens so fast that my 5d isn't capable of getting the action at 3 frames per second. 8-10 frames per second would be nice!

Anyway here are a few of the better shots from the past couple days... for these 8 photos I tossed about 200 other ones!

Time Lapse "Making of" Future of Forestry Music Video

A couple weeks ago I got to work on a music video shoot that my friend Peter is doing for the band Future of Forestry. Peter has such a crazy way of going about creating something like a music video. He has an amazing vision for the video, and I know the end product is going to be incredible.

So anyway I wanted to document us building the set on one of the production days, and also one day of the shoot. There was really like 5 days of production and 3 days of shooting, but I couldn't document all that so I just did what I could.

So I had the idea to set up my camera on a ledge close to the roof and set my cool cable release to take a photo every 15 seconds or so. Sometimes I sped it up to once a second, and sometimes when there wasn't much going on I'd set it for once every 30 seconds.

It ended up taking almost 7,000 photos! So I put it into Quicktime Pro and played it back at about 15 frames per second. To see it just click on the photo below!



Also you can check out a similar time lapse I did at Lake Powell last year HERE

Coronado Islands Fishing

Tuesday I had an awesome day deep sea fishing with my Uncle Andy and a couple of his buddies. We went out to the Coronado Islands and came back with our limits (10 per person) of Red Rock Cod. I cooked my fish up tonight for dinner, it was so good!

It was an unbelievable day to be out on the water because there was barely any wind, it was in the 70's, and the water was sooo calm. That happens about twice a year in the Pacific ocean, so we lucked out!

I brought along my new underwater housing because I thought I might want to try it out with some fishing shots.. I'm glad I brought it because I got some cool photos!











I wanted to get a shot of the boat cruising by, so I hopped in the water and told Uncle Andy to go a ways away and then cruise by me at full speed. It was a pretty eerie feeling floating in the middle of the ocean 600 feet deep with the boat being a ways away... haha.

Franger Family in the old days

Last week after visiting Grandma and looking through a bunch of old Franger Family photos Bethany decided to spend a bunch of time scanning loads of slides and prints so she could put together a DVD slideshow to share with everyone after the funeral. It was a huge hit and it had everyone crying and sharing stories about the photos. Good times.

I'll figure out a way to put the slideshow online, but until then I just wanted to share some of my favorites...

Grandpa in Germany serving in WW2

Grandpa when he graduated from college at Cal Poly

Grandma and Grandpa on their honeymoon... aren't they so cute!



The happy Franger Family!


Grandpa lookin' so happy to hold his first grandchild... me! :)