Woo hoo! Two weeks off :-) Hollywood almost completely shuts down for the holidays, so I'm done with work until January. The parental units are coming out to visit tomorrow, so coming from Georgia, I'm interested to see what a culture shock it's going to be for them. Now I get to go play tourist with them for a week. Should be fun :-)

Tuesday morning at about 10AM, I was sent on a photo call at Runyon Canyon Park for Famke Janssen and her dog Licorice. Normally, I'd never get up that early just to shoot one celeb and their pooch, but I like Famke, and I'm an X-Men fan, so I went. I'm glad I did! Her little dog is a great big bundle of energy. After I got the shots of Famke that I needed, I found I was more interested in playing with Licorice :-)

At one point, Famke was giving an interview about her pooch and she got a little teary eyed talking about him. Man, some women really love their pets don't they? I love the little boogers too, but I'll be damned if I'm going to get teared up about a mutt on camera for all the world to see. Anyway, she obviously cares about the cause, "Be An Angel for Animals", which is sponsored by PETA. Most of the time I think PETA goes a little overboard when it comes to animal activism (ie. throwing paint on fur coats), but in this case, it's all about being good to the pets that depend on you!

So be good to your pooches, kitties, and hampsters, etc.! Show them the love they deserve, but if someone sticks a camera in your face, you might want to tone it down a bit ;-)

On the carpet the other night I met a commerical actor that I recognized, and we talked for a few minutes. Apparently I was the first photographer to ever recognize him and take his picture. I mentioned that, in addition to being a photographer, I was also an actor. So, he's setting me up to meet with his commercial agent. Commercials can be really sweet gigs! If you can nail a national commercial, you can pretty much take the year off and live on residuals. I've already had a couple of friends of mine that landed jobs like that. Now it's my turn, damnit!

I have mixed feelings about it though. I really want to do film and television, and once you've done a bunch of commercials, I worry about the difficulty in transitioning over. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what comes up!

Last night I shot the premiere of "Pursuit of Happyness" (no that's not a typo) starring Will Smith and his son Jayden. This looks like a great film, and I was excited about covering the event, but once it started, all hell broke loose! There were two positions for photographers. First position was at the beginning where celebs get dropped off (normally the preferred spot), and a second position (after video crews) along the main entrance to the Mann Village Theatre in Westwood (normally, not the best spot).

Well, as soon as people started to arrive, they clustered themselves at the beginning of the carpet in a massive herd of bodies, and it was extremely annoying, not to mention making it extremely difficult to get any decent photos of the talent. But whatever, I struggled through it. Toward the end of the event, I overheard a fellow shooter that the end of the carpet just got a group shot of Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, Will & Jada Smith, and Jennifer Lopez with Marc Anthony!!! Wha??? "Don't even joke about that", we said. No joke, it was for real, and all of us at the beginning of the carpet got screwed!

It's times like those that make me wonder why I continue to do this job. *sigh*