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I recently photographed the bar mitzvah of a delighful young man named Jordan. His big “simcha” was a wonderful day, surrounded by lots of fun family and friends. Dan Ohrman of Denon and Doyle rocked the house as usual and we all went home exhausted, but very happy.
Sometimes working out of town is a complete drag. The hassles of modern air travel, missing my family, the long hours, and the uncertain surroundings. But then sometimes I just hit a home run. I’m shooting a corporate event in Orange County, CA, and my client generously put me in one of the same rooms they’re giving their clients. And let me tell you, this does not suck.
This is the view from my private patio. 
My dog, Walter, on my back porch. Poor thing…he’s a little nervous when I point the camera at him.
We photographers must periodically do what we call “personal work” in order to keep our creative juices flowing. I am in Portland, Oregon with my son Max for a college visit today. I went out for a walk along the river this morning with my camera, one lens, and no agenda. I enjoyed the quiet time.
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So I am working this week as the official photographer for TechCrunch50, a very cool gathering of high-tech entrepreneurs and the real glitterati of the online world. But what made for some excellent photographic opportunities was when the real Hollywood types made some appearances.
Ashton Kutcher launched a new venture called “The Blah Girls”, and as if that didn’t create enough of a stir, he brought along his gorgeous (and I mean gorgeous) wife, Demi Moore. And later in the evening, Myspace.com hosted a big soiree in San Francisco and they hired Samantha Ronson to be their DJ. If you don’t know who she is, search on Google for “Sam Ronson” and “Lindsay Lohan”.
Update (August 19, 2008): Intel have announced that they’re jumping into the Solid State Disk business: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10018837-64.html
I am amazed at Moore’s Law. For those who may not be familiar with this great piece of computer history, it goes something like this…
Way back in 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore wrote in a research paper that he believed that the number of transistors able to be placed on a circuit board would roughly double every two years. He could not envision this continuing beyond even ten years, when that would place over 65,000 transistors on a single board. Imagine his delight all these years later when he sees things like this.
Digital cameras record their images on “compact flash” or “SD” memory cards. The SD cards are considerably smaller, and are becoming more favorable because of their size advantage. Their capacity has now caught up with their larger siblings, as evidenced by Kingston’s announcement of a 16 GB SD card.
I won’t bore you with yet another accounting of how much of the Library of Congress would fit on that one card. But consider this:
Currently the largest available conventional hard drives are one terabyte (that’s roughly one thousand gigabytes, or 1 million megabytes) in size. They’re available from all the major hard drive manufacturers. So I did some math and imagined if you were to build a storage device made up of not a high-speed magnetic platter, but a whole bunch of these little SD cards.
The SD card spec says that the cards must be 24mm X 32mm X 2.1mm in size.
A standard 3.5” one terabyte hard drive is roughly 26mm X 101.4mm X 147mm in size.
So, based on my redimentary calculations, that means if you were to attach a whole lot of SD cards together (I figure 200 would work) so that they could fit in the same space, you’d end up with a solid state storage device which requires very little power, weighs 40% less than a hard drive, and stores over three terabytes. And it would work a lot faster than a hard drive, too.
Unfortunately, at a retail price of around $230 each, this whiffy storage device would cost you $46,000. But remember Moore’s Law, and just wait a few years!
[Update as of Feb 1, 2008] As if to prove how quickly things change, today I saw that Sandisk has announced a 32GB SD card. So take the calculations above and double them. Except for the price, which is $350, so the cost of your 6.5 terabyte solid state disk would be a nice round $70,000.
(Images courtesy of Kingston, Inc. and Sandisk, Inc.)
My dear friend Ken Wornick invited me along with him to document some of his work today. Ken is a devoted and talented winemaker, and his La Honda Winery in Redwood City is totally a diamond in the rough. He’s also the proprietor of Post & Trellis residential vineyards, and has built some beautiful vineyards all over the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ken’s objective is to decorate the walls of La Honda with some beautiful, large prints of some of their vineyards. So we headed of very early this morning with just enough gear to be able to shoot out in the fields. It was a terrific day, capped off by an amazing lunch at the awesome Village Pub in Woodside.
Ken promised he’d write wrote about our day in his blog, so check him out when you have a chance!
Here are a few photographic highlights of our day:
In April of 2007, I had a remarkable opportunity. I was asked to film an brief interview with His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama in San Francisco. I wrote a story about this extraordinary day (and the days and days of preparation which led up to it) here. Please give it a read if you’re curious.
On the eve of the opening of the Olympics in the Peoples’ Republic of China, I thought it might be time to share this work with you here. I’m really not trying to make a political statement, but rather I just want to share the words of a man who touched my life in a real way that day last year.
It is copyrighted material, so please understand that I am exercising my rights as a citizen journalist to share this material with you. So without further ado, here is the piece.
We had a lovely morning adventure today. We loaded up the kids and went out to Año Nuevo state beach in search of their resident Elephant Seals. Although it’s neither the mating season or the breeding season (the most popular times to see them) we wanted to have a day. So off we went. We parked in the main parking lot and walked the 2.5 miles or so down to the beaches where the seals congregate. At this moment in their year, the seals are molting. It’s primarily the large males who are on the beaches alongside the juveniles. The mature females are somewhere out in the Pacific between Pescadero and the Hawaiian Islands loading up on squid.
Anyway, we ran across a couple of pups who were actually up and (sort of) about. Both were kind enough to offer me the opportunity to photograph them and photograph them I did.
I had the opportunity to bring in some wonderful kids to do another baby fashion shoot. It was a tremendous success. I even had one baby fall asleep and we photographed her sleeping in a “nest” that we created for the shoot. How cool is that? Here’s a cute little compilation of all the photos I took that day. Enjoy!
