The Monkey Shack

Red Bull does an awesome promotional event each year in various cities in the US and Europe. Under the tagline "Red Bull Gives you Wings," competitors try to push the limits in distance, creativity and showmanship by flying (or crashing) ridiculously insane homemade flying machines off a pier and try to see who can fly the farthest. What constitutes a craft is purely up to the imagination of the participating teams, and past Flugtag entries have included a pregnant cow, a diaper-delivering stork, a pimped-out Cadillac, a giant Oompa Loompa, and yes - a lobster named Larry.

I have got to get in one of these someday!

I got the Adobe CS3 Design package the other day and have bee busy trying to learn how to use all the new software. I'm really excited to begin using Flash. In between, I took this recent photo of Dylan and started messing around in Photoshop and it took on this sort of grunge look.

Obviously the Sonics belong in Seattle and not in Oklahoma City. I thought a fun way to communicate that would be to take other Seattle landmarks and place them in photos of Oklahoma City so that people could get a sense of just how awkward it really would be to have part of the cultural fabric of Seattle transplanted halfway across the country.

How can the NBA say there isn't support for the team in Seattle? Are you kidding me? The crowd was so fired up and loud in there you couldn't even hear the PA announcer. Even the players couldn't hear their names being announced and just started running out onto the floor.

**UPDATE**
In recent article in Forbes magazine, Seattle was ranked behind Atlanta as the second most miserable sports city in America. The Emerald City has only one championship out of a collective 105 seasons from its professional sports teams, including recent postseason disappointments from the Seahawks and Mariners. To make the ranking even more depressing, Forbes gave extra "heartbreak points" to pro teams that left for other cities and if the Sonics do indeed depart for Oklahoma City, Seattle will overtake Atlanta and inherit the top spot.

As it begins to look more and more like the Sonics are leaving town to become the second professional franchise in Oklahoma (behind the University of Oklahoma football team), I messed around with the Sonics logo one night to make the following creation.

One of the effects I've been trying to learn lately is how to change a daytime photograph into a nighttime image. It's a cool way to completely change the look and feel of a photo. Here's one of my early attempts.

Day
















Night
















Then I started messing around with another day/night image and turned the alley image into some sort of erupting magical dumpster. Weird concept, but I thought the effect looked cool!

There is a company in Germany called Lichtfaktor that does this really cool effect called "light graffiti," using long camera exposures to make some wild design using flashlights, LED lights, even fire. You've probably seen them on some of the recent Sprint commercials. I'm trying to do some of my own, but in the meantime, check out some of this awesome work from other artists!

On Easter I took a picture of Dylan on the front porch, and he immediately turned into a two and a half year old GQ model; hand in his pocket, legs crossed, other hand propping himself up against the porch post. It was a hilarious shot, only because he looked so grown up. I wanted to do something with the picture, but the only thing that came to mind right away was to prop him up against the Chrysler Building in New York. Not my best work, but its a start!

Having two kids, one under two months old, will drastically reduce the amount of sleep you get each night. Yet something keeps me glued to my mouse and computer screen late at night and no, its not me checking how awesome my NCAA bracket is performing on ESPN.com. I've become clinically obsessed with Photoshop. It is an addiction in every sense of the word, a chronic illness that seems as if its only cure is to feed it more.

My enthusiasm to share some of my work, though novice it may be at this point, has
crept into our family blog, dilluting it from its intended purpose as a place where our friends and family all over the country can see pictures of the kids. So, in an effort to keep the family bog as pure as possible, I've set up this blog fo that I can have a forum for my own personal musings, sort of an online journal since the old-fashioned
hand-written version hasn't been touched in over four years. Plus it gives me a gallery for some of the photography and photoshopography I've been messing around with so much
lately.

Should you stumble across the site I hope it can bring break up your day with a smile and a laugh or two. Enjoy!