Okay, this has nothing to do with fashion photography, but it’s really cool!  As some of you may know, when I was younger I raced bicycles professionally and am still an enthusiast of all things on two wheels.  That is why I love these Derringer Cycles.

They are retro styled motorcycle / bicycle hybrids, basically mopeds that don’t require a motorcyle license to operate and get 105 miles to the gallon!

I first noticed them in front of a small shop while driving down 3rd Street in Los Angeles.  So I was excited to see them mentioned in the Trend Land Blog yesterday.  It’s a perfect moment to make something like this popular now that even downtown hipsters are obsessed with riding their fixed gear bicycles everywhere.

By the way, my birthday is coming up on March 31st…. hint, hint!

My friend, Christian Stoehr, is in the film and TV biz. Yesterday they were testing a small remote controlled helicopter designed specifically for aerial shots with a RED camera. Cool!

Here are a few iPhone pics from a swimwear and lingerie campaign I shot today.  

This is what makes a great shoot location, someplace with a specific point of view….. for some shoots it would just look silly, but for others it would be perfect and enhance the entire vibe. Anyway, I don’t think I would want to live here, but I sure would want to shoot here!

From Image Locations in Los Angeles

I’ve got a moment to write a post while we are printing up a new portfolio, so I thought I would give you a sneak peek of my recent swimsuit editorial shoot.  I haven’t actually finished the retouching yet, but unfortunately I had to give it to the magazine as is since they were at their deadline.  Check back on my website in a few weeks to see how the final product looks.

The shoot was for a very nice, but small magazine that has no budget for photoshoots.  It’s always a challenge to do something nice with no money, but ultimately it’s worth it to get good tear sheets and support a publication that is supportive of me.  My first choice was to shoot in Death Valley, but the National Park Service requires a lot of lead time to get permits, and the costs are pretty high.  In certain parts of the Salton Sea area, no permits are required, especially for very small productions like ours, so it was an easy choice.

On low budget shoots I always try to keep things relaxed and casual, and take care of the crew as best as possible.  No sense in stressing people out over a shoot that no one is getting paid for.  On this shoot we stayed overnight at a casino resort outside of Palm Springs.  Since we were only about 40 minutes from the shoot location, I didn’t have to make the crew wake up too early for a long drive from L.A., and we could have a little fun hanging out at the pool and playing in the casino the day before.  I’m not much of a gambler, as I demonstrated by losing $100….. but my assistant won about the same so I guess it all worked out!

We met at 8AM for hair and make-up in the hotel, then moved to the location at about 11.  Shot all day until sunset, about 5:30PM and got in 12 good shots, which is a pretty good day for editorial.  

Anyway, hope you enjoy the pics!

If you follow my Twitter feed, you saw that I was shooting a swimsuit story at the Salton Sea this past weekend.  I’ll have a sneak peek of the images up in a few days, but in the meantime I wanted to show you some images my assistant, Marco Sanchez, shot with a Holga camera while we were there.

The Salton Sea is a really unique location and attracts a lot of professional photo shoot productions, as well as thousands of photo enthusiasts.  We were there on a sunday in one single spot, and saw probably in the neighborhood of 30 or so photographers come out to snap around with everything from 4×5 field cameras to little point and shoots.

It’s a bit of a drive from Los Angeles, but definitely worth checking out.

Last week I shot a campaign for a major retailer in Los Angeles, thought I would give you a little sneak peek and some background.  

We were going for a back lit, natural flared light look with a bit of a dreamy feel.  We shot at a horse ranch in the mountains above Malibu that gave us a nice woodsy look.  We had a LOT of shots to do, and a short day to work with…. so we had to be quick and effecient.  We went for a 7 AM call time and sunset was at 4PM since we were in a bit of a valley.  Also, for the first half of the day it was overcast, so I had to create that backlit, flared sunlight look from scratch.  

My hope was to use mostly daylight reflected with a 4×8 foamcore, 4×8 silver foam core, or a 6×6 scrim jim.  Just depended on the light conditions as to which reflector I would use.  For situations that required artificial light, I had a Hensel Porty battery strobe to use as a back light and rim light when we were far from power, and three Profoto strobes for when we could run an extension cord to the house.  I used a homemade diffusion filter on the lens of the camera to accentuate the back lighting.

We also shot tethered to a laptop, which can present unique challenges when on location. I developed a really cool set up that is completely self contained and can run without power for 16 hours, which I’ll go over in greater detail in a future blog post. But here are some pictures of it to whet your appetite.  Notice the tether cable coming off the laptop’s right side.

Interesting side note, the ranch is owned by Suze Randall, a famous erotic photographer who was staff photographer for Playboy and then Hustler in the 1970’s.  She also has a beautiful daylight studio built on her ranch, a perfect place for a shoot with a Malibu based celebrity. Fingers crossed I can use it sometime.

Anyway, hope you like the results of the shoot.  Once I have finished the retouching I’ll be adding a selection of the shots to my portfolio website as well.  Check back in at www.kilkus.com 

Not long ago I ran across a blog post from advertising photographer Chase Jarvis about his studio’s image back up and storage solution.  See it here.  (By the way, Chase has one of the best blogs out there about photography, so definitely add him to your RSS feeder.)

It was perfect timing because I was just in the process of figuring out how to safely store and back up my archive.  I’m one of those terribly unfortunate people who has actually lost some pictures because of hard drive failure.  Although, it wasn’t from lack of back up…. years ago I was storing my photos on separate 1TB LaCie drives, 4 in total, 2 main drives and 2 back up.  But at almost the exact same time two of the disks completely died….. first a loud clicking sound and then the faint whiff of electrical smoke.  One disk held my originals, and unfortunately the other held the back up for that particular drive!  What were the odds?!?  And as they were striped RAID disks (two 500GB disks connected to make a 1TB) it was impossible to recover any information from them.

Luckily, most of the images on that drive pair were drum scans from images I shot on print film, so at least I still have many of the originals in a box somewhere.  But I did lose a few images forever, like the one below that I now only have in low resolution, and as a tear sheet from the magazine.  

The system that Chase Jarvis describes is probably in the neighborhood of $15,000 or more.  Below is how I met my current needs for not much more than $1,100.

Backing up really is about ease of use….. the harder it is for the user to do, the less often it is done.  I needed to put together a simple and safe back-up and archiving system that was mostly automatic and didn’t require daily maintenance.  

SansDigital makes some inexpensive hard disk enclosures.  I bought two of the TowerRAID TR5M models, a 4 bay RAID array that connects to the computer via eSata into a RAID controller card.  I have it set up as JBOD, which means each of the four disks shows up as a separate disk on my desktop.  (I try not to use any sort of striping RAID now to simplify recovery in case of a failure).  I use one array  for daily (or more frequent) back up, and the second array is stored in an offsite secured location and is brought in every week to be updated. 

In my office  we have a MacPro with 4TBs of internal storage, which houses the bulk of my image archive. The main disk in Bay 1 of that computer is where we do most of our current editing and retouching.   I have a 2TB FW800 external disk attached and with Time Machine, this main internal hard disk is backed up incrementally throughout the day. When a project is finished, we will move that job to one of the other internal hard disks. The Intego software is set to automatically back up the four internal disks to the 4 disks in the RAID array every night.  So current work is backed up constantly throughout the day, and our other work is backed up at least once a night.

Then we have another MacPro for some more retouching and general office work, and finally a couple laptops which come with us on location shoots.  We never store original images on the two laptops or this other MacPro.  So those have a single external disk attached, and Intego Back Up Manager automatically writes a bootable back up of each internal disk every day, while Time Machine handles incremental back-ups throughout the day 

The TR5M cost about $150 each, plus another $100 each for 1TB sata drives, so the whole set up was about $1,100.