Sunnydale Revisited

Posted on December 17, 2020 by djnpub

Buffy DVDsI’m a child of the TV generation, and in the 50+ years since I started I’ve watched more than my share. I can say without hesitation that my favorite TV show of all time was 1990s era Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Though I didn’t fit the target demographic, when it was in production I was a die-hard viewer, and even held commercial-break telephone calls with a friend who at the time was similarly enthusiastic. When the series ended and went into syndication (twice a day in my area) I watched it over and over, being able to go through the entire seven year series in a little over a month. Then came the era of DVDs and I got them all and have watched the series through many more times.

Somewhere along the way I took a break. It may be more than 10 years since I’ve watched it though. I guess it was inevitable that in this unending lockdown and associated vegification I would turn once again to rewatching this wonderful series. I quickly went through the short Season 1, which was never my favorite, but ended up enjoying it more than I remember. I then plowed through Seasons 2 and 3 in the course of a few days. Season 2 was always my favorite. They didn’t quite grab me as hard as they did in the past, but it is still a great show. I’m about to start on Season 4 and may end up finishing the entire series by the new year. It’s great to have DVDs so you can watch old favorites at any time.

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Meghan Claire Photo Shoot

Posted on September 16, 2020 by djnpub

Meghan Claire, Livermore, 2020Fulfilling the old adage ‘when it rains it pours’ or perhaps the notion of ‘feast or famine’ I had my third photographic adventure in less than a week. I finally got a chance to shoot with Meghan Claire, who I’d met on the UTadventure tour earlier in the summer. After the tour we had planned to shoot together when she visited the Bay Area, but the temperatures and air quality had caused us to reschedule. Finally we got a nice temperate day with air that was finally clearing up.

We had a good four hour shoot starting mid-afternoon going until sunset. As usual I got a bit stressed out preparing for the shoot, particularly since I’d been away for the weekend. And as usual things went well once we got rolling. We got a chance to shoot a variety of things around the place, and Meghan was great trying things and making good suggestions. I think I got a number of pictures I really liked. I think I also sorted out the issue I thought I was having with getting soft focus on my 24-70 lens, and now the shots with that lens now look sharp. After a great week of varied photography I have a lot of images to go through and edit. I hope it’s not too long till I have a chance to take more pictures too.
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Joshua Tree With Sienna Hayes

Posted on September 12, 2020 by djnpub

Joshua Tree National Park, 2020The day after the Weese’s Pieces shoot I drove further out into the desert to Joshua Tree National Park to do some more photography with Sienna Hayes. We had planned a sunset shoot, and it was a little over 2 1/2 hours from my Airbnb. I left before noon and got down to the park to do some sightseeing and scoping out before we got together. I was also able to buy my lifetime parks pass, one of the little benefits of getting older. The park is covers a large desert area with lots of different types of cactus and of course Joshua trees. The views again suffered from the hazy sky; it would have been nice to have a blue sky with clouds, but you can’t have everything.

Sienna Hayes, Joshua Tree, 2020I picked up Sienna in the late afternoon and we drove to a location she had in mind. Luckily she had some experience here. On my scouting trip through the valley parts of the park with all the Joshua trees I didn’t see much secluded space for shooting away from people. We ended up shooting in some rock formations in the northern part of the park, but we ran out of time to travel around to the part with the trees near sunset (even though there wasn’t much of a sunset to take advantage of on this day). We ended up driving back through the valley in the dark on the way home. Nonetheless, I got some nice shots with Sienna in the rocks, and I had a nice adventure seeing the park for the first time. I’d never been out in the desert regions of southern California before, and this was a nice new experience.
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Weese’s Pieces

Posted on September 11, 2020 by djnpub

Weese's Pieces, Littlerock, CA 2020After a long gap in fun photographic projects, I got invited to join a photo shoot being organized by Bay Area photographer Craig Colvin at a unique studio location in southern California, the Desert Oasis Water Studio and CYC, also known as Weese’s Pieces. It is located in the eastern region of southern California out towards the desert. I drove down to Palmdale the day before and stayed in an Airbnb. The only downside was that the skies in all of California are affected by the smoke from all the fires. The I-5 corridor was just hazy, and even out where we were shooting the skies were still colorless. We could even see smoke rising from some of the surrounding hills from a local fire.

Nonetheless, the shoot was a lot of fun. The property looked like a bit of a collectors junk yard with lots of assorted stuff like cars. The site was a large outside area, colored a bit like a swimming pool with white walls and blue bottom, allowing for water to a few inches deep. The shoot itself was a lot of fun. We were there for 5 hours with 3 models, Sienna Hayes (who I’d shot with a number of times before), and two other models Fae and Kitty who I met for the first time. Fae is an aerialist from southern California, and Kitty and her escort Aaron run Little Boxes Theater in San Francisco. The shoot space had a variety of geometric props to move into the water area including spheres, columns, disks, and cubes. This provides a lot of variety, and I ended up taking a lot of shots. The models were great, providing many artistic and athletic poses in the space. Aaron even jumped in for a bit to provide some variety. It will be fun going trough and picking out my favorites.
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King Lear — Live @Home

Posted on July 26, 2020 by djnpub

One of my big disappointments in this year of pandemic lockdown was the cancellation of all of the Shakespeare festivals I normally would have attended during the summer and into the fall. But this afternoon, I got to experience a live production of King Lear by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, performed in a distanced manner over the internet. This is the festival that normally does the Free Shakespeare in the Park performances during the summer. Apparently some theaters have produced plays using Zoom, where each actor appears in their own box in a matrix. This production was unique in that all of the actors were performing physically separated and used green screens, then they were composited together against different backgrounds appropriate for each scene. Apparently the actors couldn’t see each other, only hear each other. The resulting video quality wasn’t great, and the green screen artifacts were quite noticeable, but overall it worked as a play. Visually it was a little sketchy, but considering what they were doing it was quite impressive.

In this production they had the lead be a female, but still referred to her as King. It gave a few scenes a little different flavor, but no major difference. There was also periodic inter-scene sound effects of news reports on BLM unrest to try and make it timely. The setting was supposed to be America, but this was only superficially noticeable. They were clever in the way they had to appear to pass items between actors, or do stage fights. It was good to be able to see at least one “live” production this summer. Hopefully things won’t be shutdown forever.

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Photo Shoot With Sienna Hayes

Posted on July 17, 2020 by djnpub

Sienna Hayes, Livermore, 2020While California remains in a virus driven lock-down that seems to be never ending, I managed to work in a photo shoot at my house with the traveling art model Sienna Hayes. I’ve worked with her previously on three different UTadventure tours, in both Utah and Mexico. After this year’s tour in Yucatán we had planned to get together to shoot when she visited the Bay Area. However, all of the shutdowns altered both of our schedules, and we finally managed to do it several months after originally planned. It was good to have something productive to do.

Like previous shoots at my house, I kind of stressed myself getting ready and straightening up the house, but once we got rolling everything went smoothly. Our shoot was in the afternoon, and luckily while it was warm, it wasn’t too hot shooting outside or in the garage. We got to try out a variety of looks and we used most of the locations I’ve identified in my house for shooting. I’m looking forward to the day when I’ll be more flexible in scheduling these kinds of activities.
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Utah Photo Adventure 2020 — 6

Posted on June 22, 2020 by djnpub

Melia Josefina, Meghan Claire, Anoush Anou, Great Salt Lake, UTA, 2020The last day of the tour started with a morning shoot at the Great Salt Lake. My first Utah tour ended with a shoot at the Great Saltair, and this was in the same basic area, but a mile or so away, and we had a good hike out to the water’s edge. There were some relics of pylons from piers from when the lake was fuller which provided for some interesting photographic opportunities along the way. The models were great sports to get out in the mud and out in the water, which is fairly brackish and doesn’t necessarily smell great. I got some nice shots, but it’s always a little sad to realize it’s the end of the tour. After our shoot, we headed back to the hotel to get cleaned up for our going away luncheon. It was bittersweet, but I think we all realized we were grateful to have had this escape from some of the heavy stuff going on in the country. After lunch I headed back to the hotel as I wasn’t flying out until the next morning, and took a much needed nap.
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UTadv, 2020, Utah

UTA, map, 2020

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Utah Photo Adventure 2020 — 5

Posted on June 21, 2020 by djnpub

Anoush Anou, Melia Josefina, Meghan Claire, White Wash Sand Dunes, UTA, 2020The fifth day of the tour started early again, and we headed to the White Wash Sand Dunes. After heading out into the wide open spaces, we got to some dunes before the sun got too high and it got too hot. We got in some good shooting, and then even though the air temperature wasn’t too hot, working on the sand got plenty warm, we headed into a shady area against a beautiful wall that provided a great backdrop for a lot of additional shooting. This was another diverse landscape, different from all the others we had experienced on the tour. After wrapping up our morning shoot we headed back to the hotel to check out.
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Meghan Claire, Crack Canyon, UTA, 2020We had a relaxed lunch, again at Tamarisk, then headed to the second slot canyon of the tour, the beautiful Crack Canyon. A number of the photographers got hung up near the front of the canyon, but as I’d been there before I migrated down further and managed to get some very interesting shots. Nate, our driver, made some cool fast-motion GoPro videos hiking from the back part of the canyon out to the front. Even though I’ve been there three times, there were still many beautiful things to see and shoot. After wrapping the shoot in the late afternoon we began our trek back north towards Salt Lake City. It was another day with a great sunset that lasted late into the evening to give us some beautiful views on the way back.
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Utah Photo Adventure 2020 — 4

Posted on June 20, 2020 by djnpub

Melia Josefina, Onion Creek, UTA, 2020The fourth day of the tour was a rest day. It was nice to sleep in and get some needed extra sleep. There was an optional shoot scheduled for the late afternoon that everyone elected to attend. After getting some lunch at Tamarisk (where we ate virtually all of our meals in Green River on this tour), we headed for the Onion Creek area near Moab. It took some serious offroading past the lower campground to get to our starting point. It was enough of an impediment that we had the area all to ourselves. The view of the surrounding landscape is amazing, and you can see the Professor Valley area to one side, the Fisher Towers, and the Locomotive Rock on the Hauer Ranch. Climbing up on the rocks from our parking area provided many nice shooting spots. Most of the other photographers seemed to get hung up at the bottom, but as I’d been there before I went up a ways to get some variety. I wasn’t feeling great so I wasn’t loving climbing up and back down to try and get people, but I still managed to get some nice images. I had forgotten that this was the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, so when sunset came I was lucky enough to get Melia to shoot in the golden hour light that seemed to last forever. I got some beautiful images there. As I was still feeling a little queasy, I did most of my shooting sitting down, but it still worked. It was another amazing sunset shoot. When we finally wrapped (as everyone else had already called it a day), we had a nice picnic looking out over the beautiful landscape with an amazing post-sunset sky. Driving home the sky stayed striking till nearly 10 pm.
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Utah Photo Adventure 2020 — 3

Posted on June 19, 2020 by djnpub

Anoush Anou, UTA, 2020, Professor ValleyThe second full day of the tour we were up early for two locations characterized by wide open spaces of the American West. Our first location was Professor Valley following the Sylvester Trail. I’d been here before. It is the area used by the TV series Westworld, and it has amazing monoliths in the surrounding landscape. In particular many of my shots featured the Castleton Tower (Castle Rock) and the Priest & Nuns Rock in the background. There was lots of brush and trees and creek beds in the surrounding landscape to provide good shooting locations, and I managed to get some nice shots with all the models. As we had started early, we finished up before the sun got too high and before it got too hot.
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After the morning shoot, we headed into Moab to get some lunch at a favorite food truck Quesadilla Mobillia. It’s become a go-to place on the tour, and it’s a nice place for lunch. They had some nice mist sprayers going which helped as the day was starting to heat up.

Melia Josefina, UTA, 2020, Wedge OverlookAfter lunch we took off towards the San Rafael Swell for a scenic drive along the Buckhorn Draw Road. We passed along prairie land, and then stopped at the Buckhorn Wash Pictograph Panel, which features some ancient drawings on the beautiful stone walls dating to 2000 years ago. Finally, we made our way to the Wedge Overlook, which features what is referred to as the Little Grand Canyon formed by the San Rafael River. I had been here on my first Utah tour, and it has some beautiful views. We were here as the sun set and I was able to get some gorgeous golden hour images. After we lost the light and wrapped shooting, we had a picnic dinner before heading home.
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