January 16, 2011 at 8:00 am, filed under Leica Project, Street and tagged Downtown, Leica M9, San Francisco. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

Back in November I got a call from my friend Milan asking if I’d be interested in talking to her boss, the CEO of Inkling, Matt MacInnis about doing some portraits for their company. Inkling is a start-up company that creates interactive textbooks for the iPad, which may or may not sound that interesting to you. But, let me say, it’s pretty amazing. The thing that really got me excited about their product was a photography textbook they showed me called “Lights, Camera, Capture.” In one of the diagrams, with just a slide of the finger, you can change the aperture of a photograph to illustrate to beginners the concept of depth of field. Boom, what took probably an hour for me to understand after buying my first photo textbook will now only take beginners about 15 seconds to understand.

The goal of our shoot was to capture portraits for the jobs section of the website that show potential applicants what the business and staff are actually like. To show that people are allowed to just be themselves, no forced smiles or neck-ties were necessary. I thought that was a really awesome and bold attitude to have for a new company and from the beginning I could tell the staff would be fun and easy to work with. The workplace environment wasn’t a field of cubicles and stiffness, it was one of creativity, transparency and fun. I tried to bring that out in the portraits by allowing people to react as they please to the camera. It was a great experience and I learned a lot in the course of one day. I think the end result shows a company that not only cares about its employees but is able to sustain a positive workplace that can stay focused on making an important product.

January 15, 2011 at 12:29 pm, filed under Commissioned, Portrait and tagged Corporate Portraits, Inkling, iPad start-up. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

Spent New Year’s Day exploring Muir woods and on the way home stopped to look at the Golden Gate.

January 3, 2011 at 7:38 pm, filed under Landscape, Leica Project, Personal and tagged Golden Gate, Muir Woods. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

I’ve been doing small watercolors the past year as a form of meditation. I’ve found it to be a very beneficial practice. This year I’m hoping to do the same with painting. This is the first acrylic painting I’ve done, and I enjoyed the process very much. Photography has its unique feelings but there is a satisfaction I feel from putting paint on canvas that photography will never be able to offer. I hope to find a way to combine my photography with painting and I think with enough experimentation I’ll find what feels right.

January 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm, filed under Personal and tagged Painting. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

Earlier this month I came across a music video contest being hosted by Genero.TV. The contest is for two new tracks released by David Lynch, a very significant creative inspiration and spiritual guide for me. So when I heard of this contest, I got that flashing, heavy feeling in my stomach where I knew it was time to stop talking and start making. The underlying and personal challenge was in making myself vulnerable by actually applying myself as much as possible, or in other words, facing the fear of failure. And as Julie Elman, a design professor from Ohio University, would always say to her students, you must “dare to suck.”

Last weekend I rented a Canon 7D for a weekend and in 48 hours, using Miki as an actress and our apartment as a backdrop, we gave it our best. It was a difficult and frustrating experience, a true DIY project. Lights from the hardware store, trying not to melt gels taped to tripods, doing take after take to get a fluid shot because I don’t own a video tripod, etc.. I spent about 4 days editing through 40gb of footage with the contest deadline hanging above my head and, in the end, as imperfect as the video is, I’m happy with it. I embrace the flaws because they’re a true reflection of where I’m at. And most importantly, just by completing this project I’ve taken a significant internal step towards becoming a cinematographer, which is my true passion.

Take a peek at the link to the video below, and if you like what you see, take a minute to vote for it or share it with a friend. Thanks to Miki for being so patient and supportive and to Scott Brauer for that trip to a decrepit indie theater in Detroit where I was first introduced to David Lynch.

Good Day Today: A David Lynch music video by Peter Earl McCollough

Here are some scenes from the video:

December 22, 2010 at 7:25 pm, filed under Cinema and tagged David Lynch, Miki Johnson, Music Video. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

I was given the opportunity to photograph Peter Acworth, CEO of the BDSM porn company Kink.com last week for The Wall Street Journal. You can read the story here. He was one of the most polite and patient subjects I’ve ever worked with. I was surprised at how large the drill squad really is, you could easily fit a soccer field inside of it. Walking around the Armory, a replica of a Moorish castle, which contains the studios and offices of Kink.com was a fascinating experience. Definitely my favorite assignment from the year.

December 21, 2010 at 2:17 pm, filed under Commissioned, Portrait and tagged Kink.com, Peter Acworth, Porn, The Wall Street Journal. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

My Evangelism images are on the Russian Esquire Magazine’s photo blog, take a look.

December 14, 2010 at 1:23 pm, filed under Industry and tagged Russian Esquire. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

December 7, 2010 at 8:08 pm, filed under Cinema and tagged storyboard. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

at 7:40 pm, filed under Leica Project, Street. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

December 4, 2010 at 1:51 pm, filed under Personal, Portrait. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

at 12:24 am, filed under Leica Project and tagged Day of the Dead, skeleton. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

One of my favorite things to do when I’m alone is watercolor in the dark while listening to Stars of the Lid.

December 1, 2010 at 2:16 pm, filed under Personal and tagged home. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

Read article

November 30, 2010 at 6:46 pm, filed under Commissioned, Portrait and tagged Councilman, Councilman Pete Constant, San Jose City Hall, SJ City Services, Smarphone, The Wall Street Journal. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

This summer I was invited to participate (thanks to Luceo) in LOOKbetween, an event created by Andrew Owen and Jenna Pirog, directors of the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph. The idea behind the gathering was to bring emerging photographers together and let them share their ideas and show their work while the elders and the masters of the industry listened. Several awards were open to the photographers invited, one being The Leica Project Award. I submitted a collection of my street work rather confident it would be passed over and to my surprise, I was chosen. Leica has given me an M9, their new digital rangefinder, to complete a project of my choosing over the course of the next year. They understand the creative process quite well, and are giving me all the freedom in the world, which I’m very grateful for. It’s not everyday that someone hands you a beautiful camera and says, “go make pictures of whatever you want, we trust you.”

I received the camera a few weeks ago when I was in LA and I’m still familiarizing myself with it. I expect it’ll take a month or two for me to have seamless and spontaneous control of the camera. In the meantime, I’m rising to the challenge of taking a digital rangefinder to the streets and working on my manual focusing skills. As far as what I’ll be photographing the next year with this camera, I don’t know. I’ve written myself a long list of things to explore and I’m just going to see where it takes me. Here are a few frames from my first outings and the beginning of a new project. (Thanks to Justin Stailey at Leica USA for making this award a reality)

at 2:13 pm, filed under Leica Project, Street and tagged Leica M9, San Francisco, Twin Peaks. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

If you pick up a December issue of SF Magazine, you’ll find the above double-truck inside. A photograph of several Marine helicopter pilot’s that sailed into the bay from Miramar for the annual Fleet Week celebration. Thanks to Sara Lafleur-Vetter, hard-working shooter and SF Magazine intern, for sharing my work.

November 22, 2010 at 6:09 pm, filed under Commissioned, Street and tagged Fleet Week, Military, SF Magazine, Street. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

November 16, 2010 at 11:15 am, filed under Street, Travels and tagged Los Angeles, Venice Beach. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

at 11:00 am, filed under Street, Travels and tagged Los Angeles, Venice Beach. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

November 15, 2010 at 6:10 pm, filed under Street, Travels and tagged Hollywood, Los Angeles, Stars. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

at 6:06 pm, filed under Street, Travels and tagged Hollywood, Los Angeles. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

at 5:56 pm, filed under Street, Travels and tagged J. Paul Getty, Los Angeles, Museum. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

at 5:39 pm, filed under Street and tagged Fashion District, Los Angeles. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

at 5:24 pm, filed under Americans, Street and tagged cafeteria, Los Angeles. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

November 14, 2010 at 12:15 pm, filed under Americans, Street and tagged Mission, SF Giants, World Series. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

Walked through Castro on Halloween night but quickly lost interest. I keep thinking I should revel in Halloween photographically, but there’s something about it these days that’s missing. After living in Athens, Ohio, where the infamous Halloween block party is more about dressing sexy and getting blacked-out-drunk, I’m slightly distanced from the celebrations. I miss the creepy soul the holiday once had. Castro unfortunately felt like an un-ironic contest to see who can be the most ironic. What ever happened to actually getting scared on Halloween? I must be looking in the wrong places. On my way home I came across a street show outside of Amnesia by a band called The Ferocious Few. Their shitty amp, foot stomping, western, dive-bar-style gave my Halloween something it was lacking.

November 1, 2010 at 6:23 pm, filed under Street and tagged Amnesia, Castro, Halloween, The Ferocious Few. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

October 31, 2010 at 1:49 pm, filed under Personal, Portrait. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.