It was 80 degress in L.A. yesterday in the middle of January, so I decided to take advatage of it, and hike up Runyon Canyon. I must be out of shape because halfway up the hill the muscles in my shins were killing me! At any rate, I made it to the first plateau and then decided my late afternoon would be better served by taking a few photos of the sunset, rather than getting some much needed exercise. So here they are, the photos I took of the gorgeous sunset overlooking Los Angeles/Hollywood!

Snapped this while waiting for the train.

Since I rarely use this blog, I have decided I'm going to start posting a few photos here each week. In an effort to get back to some more creative photography, and take a step back from the "cookie cutter" red carpet style. I am going to try to get out a few times a week and force myself to shoot something interesting... well to me at least, and hopefully interesting to other people as well!

I haven't written in my blog here in quite a while, but since MySpace is down right now, I needed a place to vent my frustrations. Let me explain why I'm venting... in a former life before I was a full-time photographer, I was a full-time computer geek. I worked for a tele-communications company managing their web servers.

(geek speak alert! This is about to get confusing to those who are computer challenged)

At this company I worked for, we had a lot of redundancy, 2 main servers, 2 fail-over servers, and 2 test servers. The 2 main servers were load balanced by a Coyote Point system, and the code on all 4 production servers (main+failover) was only updated after thorough testing on the 2 test servers. Pretty redundant, and more than enough server capacity for our purposes.

Well, tonight I go to login to MySpace and get the following message...

"The function that you are currently trying to use is disabled and will be back shortly.
We are making some minor changes to this section, please bear with us until we can get this back online. Please do NOT email me about this. Just wait it out. 8/17/2007
-Tom"

The FUNCTION I was trying to use was LOGIN!!! What production level web site disables login on a whim? Tom, don't you TEST anything? Granted, if there's a huge security hole in your production code, one might want to disable logins until it's fixed, but this is not the first or even second time this has happened. I've seen this issue on a number of occasions. It seems like MySpace code is updated on-the-fly, and if the frequency of updates is any indication, it's updated without any forethought or testing!

They mention that they are making "minor" changes. Well how long does that really take? The site has been down for at least an hour now, maybe longer. Sounds like more than a "minor change" to me! I noticed recently that the mail links (inbox, sent, etc.) had changed designs that didn't really fit the overall look of the site. Are they doing un-notified public beta testing for new changes to the site?

Listen, I'll be the first to admit that I update the code on my own website on a whim, without thorough testing, because when I make a change I do have a fair idea of the outcome, and it's not frequently hit by that many people. For complicated changes, I also tend to test code on my Linux server at home before deploying to my production server. But if I were running a website tapped my millions of people every day, I think I might curtail the practice of "instant untested deployment" for a more stringent QA process. Make changes, but make sure it works, and then deploy the tested changes. That's all I'm saying folks!

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*

Oh joy, yet another person in the world writing about celebrities! Well, I'm not really planning to write about celebs per se. I'm mainly doing this to recount my experiences on the red carpet, not so much about the celebs themselves. Because honestly, I'm just not that interested in the daily goings-on of ordinary people that just so happen to have cool high-paying jobs. That said, I'd still love to be one of those same ordinary people with the same cool high-paying job :-) Wish me luck!