Making Iron Man

Actor Jeff Bridges who played the villain Obadiah Stane in the Iron Man movie, has a great photo essay up on his site of behind the scenes black and white images that he shot himself during production. 

I'd love to know what kind of camera and film he used. If i had to guess, i'd say good old fashioned Tri-X pushed a little bit (for the grain) shot on a Hassleblad Xpan??? 

Copy This Sketch...

Looking through some old magazines at work i saw some ads which has been pretty commonplace. Yes there was the artistic trade school ads but my favorites are the "if you can draw this you too can be an artist" types of ads that has been all over day time TV and in the backs of comic books for ever. 

But here's the kicker. The magazine i was looking through was a McClures magazine from 1908. This same batch of issues had a "where are they after the war" kind of article about once prominent members from the Confederate States of America. The war of course being the Civil War. Yeah thats an old magazine. And those little artist ads have been around for a really, really long time. 

I'm shocked that this amazed me...

But today i only paid $2.19 / gallon for gas. I don't remember when that happened last. Like maybe when my car was new...like 8 years ago. I don't remember when filling up my tank from empty cost me less than $30. 

The economy is still pretty scary, but at least the gas is kinda cheap. 

pardon the overused stock graphic...its just too funny to not use somewhere at least once...

I'm not much of a bike guy...

But these are pretty cool. Who would have thought i'd ever look at a fancy moped and secretly want one.

Based in LA Derringer Cycles is infusing some cool turn of the century retro design into a sweet new product. It gets 150 miles on a single tank and is technically a bicycle so no special license is required.  They're a bit expensive at around $3k but they're still cool to look at. Now if they could only find a solution to riding a bike in Los Angeles that wasn't completely terrifying....that would really be something. 

Btw....they have a pretty cool logo too...

Hollywood...

Gotta love the city. This morning as we're working, we hear a tapping on one of our windows. A man is shaving in our mirrored glass and knocking his disposable razor against the window frame to clean it off.

Then after lunch, as we're all busy working on layouts, my fellow intern noticed a couple of LAPD officers cautiously approaching our building with drawn handguns and shotguns looking through the bushes for a somebody of evil nature. Police sirens and helicopters followed. Who knows what they did or didn't find. Just another day in Hollywood.

They didn't sell out, they bought in...

Rolling Stone magazine decided to get rid of one of its biggest personality attributes. Its size. Starting with the October issue, they cut the magazine down to a more "normal" 8.5x11 size we are used to. Its a move designed to sell more magazines on the newsstand. The classic odd size just didn't fit in and wouldn't always fit in the magazine stands. The large size and saddle stitch binding made it difficult and more expensive for advertisers to put in special inserts and make ads.

Other changes include a move to glossy paper, and typical magazine style glue binding and it plans to add 16-20 pages per issue.

I had a chance to check the current ACDC issue out. Its horrible. It seems as if they just took the design from the larger format and squeezed it into the smaller frame. It just doesn't feel right. Perhaps with time they figure out how to make it work, but for now, It seems Its small, its forgetable, its generic. Everything is crammed onto the page. The pictures are all too small.

In my opinion Rolling Stone just murdered their magazine. I was thinking about subscribing again...y'know so i could stay current and all that, but now i most certainly will not. Part of the appeal for me was the large size, that wierd newsprint like paper, the big pictures....i even liked the staple binding. I liked it because it was unique and different. Apparently that wasn't enough and once again another magazine had to conform to stay alive.

The Big Picture Mr. President.

One of my favorite photo blogs is The Big Picture from the Boston Globe. It is an amazing display of photojournalism and should be a weekly stop for anyone who loves to see what current events looks like.

They of course had to do a story on the historic election of Barrack Obama. Its amazing to see some real behind the scenes images from this historic campaign.

p.s. To online media outlets...please take note from TBP...give us images that are larger than postage stamps. kthxbye.

I voted

And my sticker proves it.

Voting in Los Angeles is interesting. My polling place is only a few blocks from my apartment and i was able to count 3 other polling places within a half mile radius of where i live .(there are probabally more but i just counted on my way to and from) They all had incredible lines at 7:00 am. It was interesting because there was a huge line around the block at this church and then 2 blocks away, where i voted, there was a much much shorter line.

There was even a decent line at my local starbucks where they were giving out free small coffees to anyone who voted.

Its a historic day and i'm glad i participated. Lets just hope it turns out the way its supposed to.