After a long summer of traveling that included my third solo cross-country drive and a wonderful trip to Paris (not Texas, though I did make friends with a gnarly cat in Marfa), I decided that instead of moving back to San Francisco I would explore life in the East Bay. I finished my last 3 months of 2011 living in downtown Berkeley and loved the area – but after a few nights on the town in Oakland it became clear to me, for reasons I don’t understand, that this was where I needed to be. So here I am, living in a beautiful place in downtown Oakland, and so far it’s fabulous.

May 2011, Bernal Heights, San Francisco

A few weeks ago I was sent out to photograph a piece of land between a proposed BART station and the old NUMMI car factory now used by Tesla. The city of Fremont wants to use the land to build tech oriented offices in hopes of boosting the local economy. But the Union Pacific railroad recently purchased the land, to the City’s surprise, and isn’t interested in building offices.

It sounded like a piece of cake assignment. I mean how hard is it to photograph a field? Well, after walking through the mud, running across train tracks and driving in circles trying to find a vantage point offering more than ugly grass and midday sun, I realized maybe it wasn’t so cake. After a few hours of giving it my best I made a last ditch effort and pulled into the parking lot of Sunstate Rental, a nearby construction equipment rental company.

“Hey, I don’t suppose there’s any way you could take me up in one of those cranes outside do ya’?” I asked.

“Ummm, I’ll have to ask the Manager about that one.” The guy said.

Luckily, the staff at Sunstate Rental are awesome. They busted out one of their biggest cranes, put me in a harness and took me up, way up. When we got to the top I could see the whole area and (after thinking I was going to die because I’m scared of heights) was able to take a shot that illustrated the story much better than anything else I had captured on the ground. So thanks to the guys at the Fremont Sunstate Rental yard. If you ever need to wash a window on your 10th story flat, paint a mural, base jump, or do whatever people do with 80-foot cranes, go see those guys.

Read Story in The Wall Street Journal

A few weeks ago I went to the the Sunnyvale Materials and Recovery Transfer (SMaRT) Station to photograph the issues they’re having with plastic bags. San Francisco took the lead with banning carry out plastic bags and now nearby cities, thankfully, are making the same push. Other than plastic bags being horrible for our environment they’re also, as I learned first hand, very inefficient in the recovered materials sorting process. They fly away from trucks and garbage piles then get caught on plants, wires and fences. They also clog the large machine they use to separate materials before they reach an assembly line of workers that does the final sorting. Everyday, a team of workers has to climb in this huge separator (that looks uncannily similar to a scene in Event Horizon) and pull the hundreds of plastics bags out by hand. In addition to this, the SMaRT station, which technically no longer accepts plastic bags for recycling, has been unable to find a viable market for recycled plastic bags.

After receiving a tour of the station and crawling into the separating machine, I was somewhat horrified by the amount of plastic disposed of on a daily basis. Plastic bags aren’t just unsustainable, they’re a considerable detriment to our environment. I encourage everyone reading this to make an effort to use reusable cloth bags, it really does make a difference.

Read article in The Wall Street Journal.

See also: a short film titled Plastic Bag, that tells the story of a plastic bag’s life. Narrated by Werner Herzog.

My friend Brianna on our way to swim during a trip to Lake Tahoe with friends in August, 2007. I remember swimming in Lake Tahoe for the first time and being frightened because the water was so clear that you could see every rock and shadow. Ignorance is Bliss.