The very first leg of my three-week trip back to the West Coast was to visit L.A. and see a good friend of mine get married to a stellar gal. Eric and I go back a few years, and having bonded in part over the fact that we were both single guys dealing with those crazy dames, it was especially heartening to see him find a dame crazy enough to take him in.

Home again, home again, after a good three weeks or so back in California.  As much as I love traveling it pretty much hobbles much of my updating.  Since my laptop has a glossy screen, photos I edit on it usually wind up a lot darker than they seem at the time.  As such, I tend to shy away from photo work on the road.

This past Saturday I accompanied my buddy Tas to the 2010 New York ComicCon / New York Anime Festival. Geek mecca, basically, drawing in geeks, nerds, otaku, cosplayers, and dorks alike for hundreds of miles.

Apparently there’s a Wordpress app for Android. This I’d especially fortuitous because just today I resolved to do a lot more shooting. Lately it seems like the only shooting I do anymore is for jobs or friends. I hardly ever shoot for me anymore.

Has it really been a month already? This may be the longest I’ve gone between updates. In fairness, though, it’s been a helluva month. I finally moved into Manhattan at the end of August, no small feat in and of itself, and then had a wedding to shoot not four days later (see above). Then came the post-production, not to mention all the work on the apartment itself, and time just did what it always does and slipped through my fingers. But I’m back, more or less, so at least there’s that.

Yesterday was the 4th of July, my first since moving to New York. Naturally, we decided to do it up right—by going to Jersey.

So Fourth of July weekend is upon us, and for some reason that made me feel extra-compelled to go out and do something than any other Saturday. Go figure. In any case, I promptly hopped on my trusty steed (the Manhattan-bound N Train) and galloped (commuted) my way into town,

Shot an engagement party for a lovely couple on Friday night. It was held on the rooftop of a building in the Lower Midtown/Koreatown area. The shot above is the view from the south side of the rooftop. You can actually see the Brooklyn Bridge, a good three miles away. I can’t begin to imagine what it’d be like to have that view waiting for you every morning.

Just before the weekend, Scott Kelby—photo guru, Photoshop whiz extraordinaire, and all-around swell fella—posed a photo challenge: spend the weekend shooting like it was 1999. In a nutshell, go out and shoot with your digital camera like it was a film camera: no reviewing shots on the LCD, no more than 24 or 36 shots for the whole weekend, no looking at any of the shots until the day after you “finish the roll.”

In the eight years I lived in the Bay Area—three of which spent living in the heart of downtown San Francisco—I never once attended Bay to Breakers. Friends and coworkers often participated, to the point of thinking up fun and crazy costumes (usually group-themed), but I never did. I wish I could provide some valid excuse but really it just boiled down to laziness. Weekends were my sleep-in days, Sunday the holiest of holy Days of Sloth, and I’d be damned if anyone was gonna get me out of bed before ten or eleven in the morning, let alone at seven o’clock.