Wouldn't it be funny if...

That's how most of these things start. Quick design and put it up on Printfection. Spread the humor (not the flu). What I like to call "The Offical Shirt of Swine '09." If you look closely there is a H1N1 on the but of the pig for the more politically correct.

http://www.printfection.com/theswineflew

A gem on PCH

I got assigned to shoot at Sophy's Cambodian today. Yes, there is a woman named Sophy and she runs the place. We rode our bikes up Orizaba (a good street to bike on btw that runs parallel to Redondo).



She made three dishes. Beef kabobs, salmon salad and a yellow curry. The food was pretty easy to shoot. They looked great so it was just a matter of figuring out the light and how to position the plates. Someone commented and asked if I have an assistant. I usually don't. In fact, it would have been nice to have one on this shoot.

I had my camera in my right hand and my left hand was holding my lucky white matt board that is crinkled and stained from 2 years of food guides just off to the left side of the frame. That's about as high tech as I get. No assistants. No beauty dish. No ring light. Just a small softbox a used Nikon SB-28 strobe and a piece of matt board (I should take a picture of it).

Shooting a pile o' food...

The Scenario:
Doing a quick food shoot I go to a seafood restaurant that is making their famous seafood menagerie. It is served....or rather, it is poured on to your table. Crab legs, mussels, potatoes, corn and brine. While it taste good, the pile o' food doesn't represent too well. It looks like carnage. Like a lawn mower was let loose through the set of The Little Mermaid and a potato garden. What to do.

Problem Solving
Photography is creative problem solving.

The first thing is find a good background. The checkered cloth looked promising but it was covered with butcher paper. The food is going to be too low and horizontal to get a good shot of the patio and window outside.



Luckily, I'm nosy.

Luckily, I ask questions.

I find out that in addition to the food being poured on the table you are given a mallet and a wooden board! Voila.



I arrange the mallet and wooden board. Sort of pre-light it. Get it close. When the food is about to be dumped, I ask them for tongs and try to arrange the food. Strong diagonals. I'm going to use the handles of the mallet to create a leading line into the photo. The crab legs are big, red and photogenic. I'm going to arrange the grab leg as the counterpoint to the mallet.



Finally I get to shoot. Head-on. Over-head. Trying to think of the food as a landscape and my strobe as the sun. Where do the shadows fall. Where is it interesting. If I saw this photo on the screen would it make me want to lick my dusty monitor.



All this in 10 minutes before the food gets too cold and the brine and the juices coagulate. Fun!

It's Food Guide Time!

My favorite time of the year (for eating that is)....Do you own a restaurant or catering service in Long Beach and need photos that will make people want to lick them off the screen or off the page? You know what to do.

Now on Twitter!

Yay....I've joined the Twitter-sphere....ok, a little late, I admit. It sorta feels like showing up to a birthday party after the cake is all gone.

So for those that are interested, follow me at:

http://twitter.com/russroca

If you're local tweet me everytime you see me ride by with a time/place and I'll set up a google map and do a sort of running Where's Russ?

A new post on PathLessPedaled.com

Check it out at www.pathlesspedaled.com.


This is the second episode of The Path Less Pedaled. We've counted all our stuff now it's time to start getting rid of it. Laura goes through our dishes and starts picking what can stay and what has to go!

www.pathlesspedaled.com

Baby Carter turns 2!

Some snaps from baby Carter's birthday today!

Behind the District Cover

Shot a portrait for the DW on campus today of writer and professor, Alan Rifkin. Everything is available light. Nikon D300. Simple light.


The first challenge with every portrait is looking for a good background. Interesting but not too interesting. Simple but not boring. Find the background first, THEN the subject. Seems backwards, but too many a potentially good photo is ruined by a crappy background. Lucky for me, the room had this blue/cloud-like pattern going on that was just interesting ENOUGH without being too distracting.

The next challenge is light. I turned off the overhead fluorescents so I could get some nice directional light (instead of flat overhead light). Worked well. Didn't have to set any strobes up.




Then, it was a matter of just getting Alan comfortable. Hey, I was a literature major in college, I can talk about anything, especially books!

Bilenky + Ortlieb

I've been really enjoying using the Ortlieb Shuttle Bike on my assignments this week. Here it is with my Bilenky. It doesn't use the mounting bracket, obviously, but judicious use of bungees fixes that problem. It looks (and might actually be) a little more aero than my wicker basket :)

PathLessPedaled.com

A short video from the new project Laura and I are doing. Check it out at PathLessPedaled.com.


The Path Less Pedaled - Stuff from Russ Roca on Vimeo.

The Mini Rig

After riding around the Santa Monica mountains with the cargo bike and a lot of loaded gear, I needed a change of pace today. Instead of the Bilenky, I took out the Dahon Speed TR and my Ortlieb Shuttle Bike case. I've written about this combination before and I still feel that it's the best set-up for multi-modal transportation.

Here are some shots of the great Ortlieb Shuttle Bike



On the deeper side of the clam shell design, I keep a LowePro backpack that adds extra padding for my gear. Inside, I'm carrying my Nikon D300, 17-55 2.8, 2 pocket wizards, 2 strobes, extra batteries and a synch cord.


On the shallower side, I've got my reflector (folded piece of white mat board, XS Chimera softbox, speed ring for the box and there's room for a small pump and patch kit.



The whole thing folds up to a nice sleek package. When I arrive to my shoot, I just pop the case off and wheel it in using the retractable handle and casters. I can use this set-up for about 80% of what I shoot. If I'm taking a lot of trains and buses, this is really the only way to go.

I'd highly recommend this setup to anyone that needs to transport any kind of equipment by bike. The weight is centered so you're not riding lopsided. The lower overall center of gravity of the Dahon Speed TR also helps mitigate any handling issues.

The Bike'Stache

Laura added a fun new item to her etsy store, the Bike'Stache! For sale now (you know you need one :)!

Even more Bike Fest!

Even more snaps from Bike Fest. This was on Sunday when they had the Crit.

Some snaps from BikeFest

Still sifting through about 3000 images of BikeFest. I got through the first day! Whew.

Meet yer maker...

A historic moment! :) I finally meet the people responsible for building my cargo bike. A photo for the ages, the bike, myself with Bina Bilenky and Simon Firth.



Not related at all, but has some religious overtones. Spotted in the handicap bathroom stall at Ocean Beach, where I was changing into my bike clothes.

It's just so pretty....

What a beautiful day today! Gotta love spring. I took the Bilenky out to the QM and took some pics. I noticed some wild flowers on the ground and thought they'd make a great framing device in the foreground. Shot with my point and shoot (Canon G10), not known for a narrow depth of field, but if you stick something RIGHT in front of it you can get a little foreground blur.

Kindling for the fire...

The contest, for better or for worse, has really made it clear to Laura and I that we want to travel in a big way. Even if it doesn't pan out with this way, we're going to go. We had an official brainstorming session last night on how to make it happen. The decision has been made to go. In my head were the words of Lyn and Larry Pardee from Cruising in Serrafyn:

"The decision to go is the hardest part of the whole project. There always seem to be so many reasons not to go:children, aging parents, a business or job you've worked so hard to develop...But if you are determined to go, you'll analyze each of these factors and probably discover that each problem can be solved. If not, it may be just an excuse to hide your fear of heading into the unstructured existence that a cruising life seems to represent."

The spark has been lit, not here's some kindling...

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac

“He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” - Moorish proverb

“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” - D. H. Lawrence

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” - Freya Stark

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” - Martin Buber

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” - Bill Bryson

“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” - Lao Tzu

“Not all those who wander are lost.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

101! But more to go!

We broke 100 votes! Awesome! Thanks so much to everyone that has voted and left a word of encouragement. It means loads to Laura and I. Special thanks to EcoVelo, Team Potter Cycling, Cycleicious and Bilenky for putting something up on their sites!

We've still got a ways to go, so if you haven't voted yet, then click HERE!

And if you want to post about it on your respective site/blog/tweet, then that's just more awesomeness!

A video!

Haven't made one in a while. This starts with the only footage I took from my Flip camera in Joshua Tree (battery died), but it makes such a great intro :)

A minute on the soapbox...

My comment to a piece in the Press Telegram regarding a cycling friendly Long Beach.

I applaud the city's interest in making Long Beach bicycle friendly, but there are also lots of very simple, inexpensive ways in which this could be quickly accomplished that I think are being overlooked.

It is no mystery that a lot of conflict that occurs between cyclists and motorists stem from a misunderstanding of where it is bikes belong. Hence motorists incorrectly yelling at cyclists to "get on the sidewalk" and that "roads are for cars." In the California Vehicle Code, it is stated that bicycles have all the rights and responsibilities of other roadway users.

Simply put: Bicycles have the right to be on the road.

Truly bicycle friendly cities support this basic right from the TOP down and make it clear in unequivocal terms that bicycles are an accepted and valued roadway users.

What does this mean for Long Beach? I would like a statement from Chief Batts that he has his officers understand and will help protect this right of cyclists. I would like to see similar statements from other community leaders and this newspaper that bikes unequivocally have rights to the road that should be respected.

Why is this important?

While the occasional new bicycle lane or bicycle facility when well designed is welcomed, that improvement affects only that very specific area. It does nothing for the cyclists in other parts of the city who may never encounter the new improvements. However, a powerful blanket statement from our top brass and an aggressive bicycles belong campaign makes every mile of Long Beach more bicycle friendly, not just those select few blocks.

The challenge of making a city bicycle friendly is not just an infrastructure one, but also a cultural one. In this way, bicycle rights parallel civil rights. Though cyclists have all the rights of other roadway users, they are marginalized and treated as 2nd class citizens. They are verbally harassed and threatened everyday on the streets, yet there are no actions to stymie this sort of behavior.

My fear is that if the city promotes these separated facilities, WITHOUT simultaneously asserting the rights of cyclists on ALL streets, it will give the impression that cyclists must only use these facilities and are not legitimate roadway users. This happens now at Hartwell Park where there is a cycle path near a roadway. I have ridden there and have been harassed and told to use the path, even though it doesn't serve where I want to go.

I'd like to challenge the city to not only look in terms of infrastructure but roadway culture as well, when they take on the task of making Long Beach cyclist friendly.