Intimidated – captivated – the feeling of being small – in ah – I’ll never be a great designer – I can’t wait to be a great designer – modern – wonderful – inspiring.
Like many in the design community here in Seattle, I have my own personal relationship with Peter Miller bookstore. When I first moved to Seattle in 1994 these were some of my early reactions to all of the gods of the design world presented so beautifully before me. Beyond the amazing books he has many wonderful design objects everywhere, drawing instruments, these are not mere pens or pencils these are elevated design tools. Then there are the bags and the clocks and the objects that you never knew you needed and now must have. It can be a dangerous place for the new and uninitiated. You must be careful on pay-days stumbling the streets of Seattle with blurry eyes from the latest all nighter, because you will have nothing left when you leave, I talk from experience. It’s a real place a place that has character and richness unlike many of our shallow packaged marketing stores we have today.
The store has been on my list of spaces I wanted to photograph for many years. When I heard recently that Peter was moving the store after 25 years in the same location it was a sign to get off my ass. He is going to relocate the store next to George Suyama’s 3×10 showroom and Suyama Gallery, another one of Seattle’s great storefronts.
It’s seems like there is always equipment that is on the “to get” list. Sometimes there is the gear that you need for a job that just doesn’t make economical sense to buy. For me a good example is the beautiful beast the Canon 600mm F4 IS II. I needed it to photograph birds here in the Skagit Valley in Washington State. I will never use this lens enough to justify the $12,700 price tag. Here in Seattle we have Glazers which is a great camera shop with an extensive rental department. I also recommend renting equipment that you are thinking about purchasing. It gives you the opportunity to get the piece of gear into your hands and put it through its’ paces. FInd your local camera shop and ask if they have a rental department. BTW the 600mm was $100 for the weekend. Below is a link to images captured with the 600mm.
http://sozinhoimagery.com/clients/skagit/
What camera should I buy? This is the most common question I get from friends, clients and relatives. The quick answer for me has always been Canon G series point-and-shoot cameras. There’s been a lot of advancements in cameras over the years and Canon has kept the G series in front of that design. One reason for me is it’s a “rangefinder” which means that you can look through the view finder, many people forget that putting the eye up to the camera creates a third point of contact. This greatly increases stability while shooting. I have owned three versions of this camera and have never been disappointed. The new version has 12 megapixel capture and incredibly low noise compared to previous versions and it’s really a no-brainer. You can buy a waterproof case for a couple hundred bucks and you have a great waterproof camera. Not to mention the G series always fits within everyone’s budget of just under $500. The auto focus is quick for a point-and-shoot camera, and you can capture 1080p video. The real advantage is being able to shoot raw image files. Here is a link to the product page on B&H. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/889961-REG/Canon_PowerShot_G15_Digital_Camera.html
CLICK ON IMAGE TO SEE VIDEO
We see them every day in big cities across America, tower cranes. They seem to magically appear in our skyline, one day they are not there and the next they are lifting materials into the sky. They symbolize the building industries ability to build efficiently; more importantly today they are a symbol of the economic recovering going on across the US. In this one piece of footage there are two cranes being used in the background, beside the one being erected in the foreground. This time-lapse video is of a Liebherr 420 ECH tower crane being erected in Ballard Washington.
Diana Rudolph’s article about fishing for Coastal Cutthroat here in the Pacific Northwest just hit the stands. The article is in the May/June 2012 issue of Fly Fishing in Salt Waters. ”Now why would I want to put a fish in a box?”, is the way the article starts off. It’s a really great read and highlights what a great fishery we have here in our backyard. The article examines both fishing from a boat and fishing the beaches. Capt. Keith Robbins is featured on his technique for throwing flies from his 23′ Grady. Leland Miyawaki shares his information for walking the beaches and finding fish.
We had an amazing day back in October when we shot most of this article. We had well over 20 fish in the boat including this beauty that surprised Diana with a little shower. The box that Diana is referring too is the Photarium which was supplied by the Wild Fish Conservancy. Here is a link to purchase the photarium http://wildfishconservancy.org/store. These boxes are an awesome way to safely examine and photograph your catch before releasing them back into the water.
I had the first day of shooting yesterday on a new book that I’m working on with The Tauton Press. Unfortunately, I can not share any of the images until the book is released. The projects are pretty amazing spaces. The first two projects are with a local firm Cast Architecture.
It was a surprise and an honor for me to receive the first AIA Seattle Presidential Citation for Outstanding Volunteer. I have been volunteering at the AIA for over a decade now. I starting working on the Open House Committee, then the Honor Awards and then I helped co-create Future Shack. I absolutely love the programs and the staff at the AIA. It’s been a great way to give back and also try in a small way help the architectural community here in Seattle. Being the first to receive an award is always a great honor. I want to thank the staff and the board of directors for this citation. I look forward to this years committees and the great people that volunteer to help make the programs possible.
I had the wonderful opportunity recently to photograph the beautiful Weyerhaeuser HQ in Federal Way. Classic is the word that comes to mind like a 1956 Chevrolet Corvette. The lines are unmistakable and can not be improved. Here are some great statics for this amazing piece of architecture.
The Weyerhaeuser Headquarters building was completed in 1971 by the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) and the landscape architect Peter Walker.
Site Area: 130 acres
Project Area: 358,000 ft2
Building Height: 70 ft
Number of Stories: 5
Project Awards
2001 • AIA National 25 Year Award
1973 • Owens-Corning Fiberglass • Energy Conservation Award
1972 • AIA • Bartlett Award for Handicapped Access
1972 • AIA • National Honor Award
If you think you are color blind, I have good news for you. You are color deficient not color blind. It sounds much less dramatic doesn’t it. Research shows that 8% of men and only .5% of women are color blind. So it might make sense to let your wives pick the color of the house next time men. Red Green blindness is the most common. If you want to learn more about color deficiency here is a good website, http://colorvisiontesting.com/. With that said how does this effect the world of photography?
Well understanding how color effects the human eye and the it’s reaction to color is important. Also color temperature is incredibly important to the proper rendering of an image. Unlike a color deficient person, today’s digital camera picks up every color in the viewfinder. This includes rendering the images color temperature with the use of auto white balance “WB” . Be careful of the auto WB feature on your camera, its trying to guess the color temperature of the image. Understanding what the color temperature of a given space is important so you can render the image correctly. Here is a great link to better understanding color temperature, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature. Once you have captured an image you can adjust this color temperature or white balance within your photo program. I use a iT8 target in the field to get accurate color rending later on the computer. Here is an example of an iT8 target.
This procedure leaves little error in the color rendering and gives the most accurate result. The human brain is an amazing computer, it can see the difference in color temperature assuming the viewer is not color deficient. For example the old standard incandescent light bulb gives off a color temperature of 2700-3200 K which is very yellow. Our eyes adjust to this and render everything to us color balanced. In the old days of shooting daylight balanced film it would render our images of many interiors as yellow orange, unless we used the proper filter to balance the image. So are we color deficient to the color cast from this incandescent light bulb? The answer is no but we must be aware of it and how it will effect our images.
As you can see being color blind is not about being diagnosed by a doctor. Our brains are constantly judging color and rendering it to our eyes, understanding that it is doing this is what’s important. By the way did you see the boat in the image at top?
Well that was an intense day. For someone like myself that can be type A, I do not like things that go wrong particularly if I have worked hard to make things right. After two months of work rebranding and creating the new website and all the other things that modern businesses must do. I sent out the official announcement today to clients and friends. I took an old Pro Image email and copied the format and erased the old links and put in the new sozinho imagery links. Then I sent it out to over 700 individuals. Within minutes a good friend emails me informing me that the link is sending people to the old website. Crap, actually “Are you F?$!!$&! kidding me “was the first thing I said. And get this the link said http://sozinhoimagery.com/ it was correct but the old link stayed active somehow, thank you Microsoft. So at this point do I send out an email to correct the issue, yes. If my client and friends are going to take time out of their busy lives to look at the new website then I need to get out a second email with the correct information. Well this is were earthlink decided that I’m a spammer and shut down my email account. Are you F?$!!$&! kidding me, so I had to get them on the phone and figure out what went wrong. They fixed the problem but to my knowledge the correction email got blocked. So I send out a third email short and sweet, and did not get a response from anyone. I thought that was weird, so I called a few friends and guess what now none of my emails are going out, are you F?$!!$&! kidding me. As of now I do not know if the emails will ever get to there designations and I probably sent out two correction emails. At some point you just have to laugh and let it be.
