Here we have a series of attempts at an epic ‘My Friend Lisa‘ photobooth photoshoot.

The Idea: Simply we wanted to have Darren & I jumping up as high as we possibly could at the exact same time with Shannon standing in front with an epic rockstar pose.  Seems like it should be simple enough, right? WRONG!

Above: This was the absolute best photo out of all our many futile attempts to jump at the same time.
Below: Me cursing out Darren for being a bad keeper of time, while Shannon laughs :)

Above: We try it again

Below: We simply give up and move on to the obligatory Rock Star band pose.

All in all fun!

Oh and yes Darren isn’t wearing any pants. Why because he is the drummer, and drummers don’t wear pants. :)

Now because I always assume that everyone that reads my blog, is also religiously following my every move/whim on twitter, as well as reading all about My musical escapades with My Friend Lisa, I often forget to mention the other things that I am doing with my time outside of blogging random photos with little to no explanations.

I am in a band. It is fun, I love it & in getting the new camera I find myself flexing my old filmmaker muscles. As such we did a super quick off the floor video cut of us playing one of our original songs.

All shot with the Canon 5D Mark II and the 85mm lens. Super fun!!

Yup there was a time that I called my self a filmmaker. Around the time that I started blogging was when I was on my way out of film making and into photography.

This is a video that I made in 2000 using an analog 8mm camera and captured analog into a 300 mHz computer with 128mgs of ram and edited in Adobe Premiere. It would take days to render out the effects that I was rocken and when I wasn’t happy with something I would change it and then re-render it for days again. I won an award from the local film society and everything.  But this is what I wanted to do with my life. make silly art films about nothing in particular. Long story short I became a photog instead. :)

What amazed me was things I was searching for 10 years ago are here now! Things like super shallow DOF, super easy editing, & among other things, simply super good looking video footage.

I talked to My guy down at Vistek yesterday (yup when you drop fat cash you get a guy) and he said that the mark iv is set to arrive some time next week. So I should have it in my grubby fingers very soon! :)

But I need to pack for snowbaording awesome now! See ya on the mountains :)

You get a short point form list of some of the things that have been happening in the last month! Some but certainly not all. :)
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We got a new kitten!
Every one meat Grizabella (or Bella for short)

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We played our first show on new years eve

Yup you heard right! We have gotten that first show under our belt. It was a small show & 99% of the audience was close personal friends but It was a show nonetheless. We have assembled a live off the floor recording for all those that may have missed out because you were all to cool for school or my beer.

Live @ New Years 2010
	Track Listing 1.Every End 2.Summer Song 3.The Ride 4.Days & Days (Tegan & Sarah Cover) 5.London 6.Where Is My Mind
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Oh Ya We successfully moved & we also some how managed to host 5 uber large/awesome parties in a row.

I have been snowboarding only twice thus far this year! (for shame i know) It seems that there is a stupid combination of crappy snow & us being silly busy with time sensitive things

I have also been having fun rocking the cheesy selfies lately as well.

I figure that if you are going to go for the cheese you should have a guitar in hand :)

I have been playing only the little bit of guitar. But I have almost gotten my music room together! Room tour soonish.

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Been shooting a full shit tonne of film the last bit but I haven’t developed any of it yet. I did however get keys to the uber Edge Darkroom of utter awesome! so I was down there today pulling out my Darkroom stuff like paper/chemistry/tanks to prepare for all this film that I have taken. I am going to only develop one or two rolls of stuff at a time so I don’t get over whelmed with 700,000,000 exposures all at once.  Tomorrow i need to do some running about so I will drop a roll off and maybe get this film party started. I garnered fresh black & white chemistry today at lens and shutter while i was getting them to send a large box of broken camera gear in to canon. I have 2 body’s/three flashes/ & My 70-200 God lens down for the count. Some of this gear is getting stupid old (my one 1D Mark II has been used non-stop since May of 2004. In my world that means an average of 4 to 8,000 + shutter actuations a month and all in the worst conditions. This is the camera that I taking into the oceans or out in the pouring rain. This is the camera that I use in dust that cold choke a camel, this is the camera that I could/would use to beat down an oncoming invasion of brain thirsty zombies. It owes me nothing :)

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Because my gear is getting a little long in the tooth I felt it was best to go ahead & buy some new camera gear! More specifically I managed to get a New Canon EOS 1D mark IV (should be here near the end of the month hopefully in time for the Big White Snowboard Trek!) so the film maker in me is super intrigued and the available light photographer in me is nearly ready to pee himself with the idea of usable iso’s in the 12800 range and Enhanced Iso’s (meaning most likely not usable at all) up to 102400 That is a full 5 stops over and above the utterly useless 3200 that I have on the MarkII’s!  5 stops!  I can’t even do that with film!!  I am also getting a new 5d mark II to round out the second shooter bag. That should be here tomorrow.

I shot a wedding today and went to check out Josh & Shannon’s new home! It’s is awesome you guys so happy for ya! :) Being that I have been busy all day you all get old photos. This is me playing with new radio poppers that I got back in October. Selfies seem like a great real world testing ground for photo stuff.

Tomorrow we are moving J&S into their new digs :)

So today was about packing and jamming!I managed to pack a whole crap load of stuff and clean out most of my desk and such.

We had a quick bite at the newly replaced Incendios in g-town where Darren & I ended up with ridiculously large & free beers.

Then there was Jam time where Darren & I had more foolishly large beer.

We rocked out so hard that the Zoom H4n Actually froze 30min into the session. That is how much we rocked out! tomorrow more packing and treks to Richmond :) Fun!

Is there musical instruments in the vicinity? - Check!
Is he drinking beer? – Check!
Is he in some grubby poorly lit room? – Check!
Is there some sort of surly gesture going on? – Check!
Is the photo grainy and poorly exposed? – Check!

Yup Rockstar!

Unfortunately we didn’t hit cypress today for snowboarding glory due to the only chair lift (besides the bunny hill lift but it is the bunny hill so the run and lift don’t count) being closed. So maybe Wednesday when the mountain is open again? we will see.

So Darren & I went to see Art Brut Rock out at the Biltmore! It was fun. These photos are not nearly as awesome as the ones that I took at Richards On Richards a few years back but they are OK. The Show on the other hand Royally kicked ass. It helped that I was 2 feet away from the band. Despite the group of drunken, barely of age, hipsters girls wearing large framed 80’s spectacles with the lens pop’ed out that were bound and determined to bounce me out of their way.

It was here that he started telling us that we should form a band. I wanted to yell back that after the Richards On Richards Show in March 2006 we did.  this was the Show that made Darren & I start our musical exploits that resulted in My Friend Lisa

I heart these Cuff links. I want Cuff links that say my band name :)

I was so bloody close to the guy! I sorta wished at the time that i Had brought a 24mm lens. I am glad looking at these that i stuck with the 50-1.2

This week has been all about the moving for this jerk.  For those not in the know (which I know is most of you because it is summer and I am to busy to blog anymore) we are shrinking our space in a effort to not spend preposterous amounts of money.  We are hoping that by January sometime we can be on the hunt to buy a home somewhere. If all goes according to plan we should be able to keep our water street office and have a separate home somewhere else that is completely devoid of all work related things and contains nothing but life type stuff! That is the plan and step one is to give up the second suite that we have here and suck it up and live in the single space again for a while!

So I have been moving us slowly back into the left side, and when I say ‘I’ I really mean Reka the Intern and Darren the Tiger because I managed to pull a reasonably important muscle in my back lifting the very first thing. So props to Reka for making 70,000 hand cart trips to the recycling room and Darren for hauling all my wife’s lead. (when I say lead I really mean lead! She has like 700 lbs of lead type for a printing press) you both rock!!

I have large boxes of Computer parts (most of it/them work even) for free/sale so if you wanna come rummage you are more then welcome to! Come quick though because goodwill is about to receive a multitude of computer craziness!

In other news saw the Weakerthans and Iron & Wine last Friday! Wicked show for them both! I bootlegged it with the Zoom but I haven’t gotten around to listening to it.

Tonight is jam #2 for My Friend Lisa at the new jam space. The Tiger & I have been making noise on a fairly regular basis but this is the second time that the band we be together here. I am going to attempt an off the floor recording of a line in mix of the evenings adventures so we will see how that all goes. The Lrbaggs will rock out for the first time in a loud capacity as well!

We spent the Sunday/Monday on Galiano Island for a wedding last weekend as well. What a genius place to hang in the wilderness. If I ever get rich/eccentric and feel the need to record a solo album with nothing but my mac book in a cabin in some secluded location I am going to do it on Galiano island! Man I Love that place!

I need to collect a case of free Rock Star now so ya!

I am off to a wedding later today so I will be brief!

Last week my friend lisa had the first loud jam in the new space!  Despite our apprehension about getting into a loud space it went swimmingly! However I basically had to play almost everything on Chester the Gretsch. I am not complaining cause I heart Chester, but some things just need to the acoustic tone. Now Jonathon Livingston does come equipped with a pizo bridge pickup but I have to say that it is about the worst sounding thing that I have ever played (not that i have played a lot) I am working on different ways to make that better (things like tossing it though a new preamp or possibly installing a LB6 but these are all topics for another day.) but in the mean time we basically didn’t have a real great acoustic solution other then getting quieter and that was sort of against the point :)  So after about a year and a half  of research I decided that getting an Lr-baggs M1 would be a decent idea, and while at L&M the other day the opportunity presented itself with a cheaper open box M1 Passive! Super great pickup, you can swap it in and out of any guitar you want, there is a tonne of info and reviews out there about this pickup so I am not going to get into a huge review about it or or anything. I like it and think it sounds great. Full stop.

After playing with the cable hanging out of the sound hole for a day or so I decided that I should probably install the end jack in something.  Jonathan Livingston’s sister Seagull had no pickup of any kind so she seemed to be the likely candidate! The problem was that being that she had no pickup installed of any kind she was missing the holes to install jacks and what not so surgery was going to have to be performed.

Basically I needed to drill a 1/2” hole in the bottom of the guitar and screw in an end pin jack. Doesn’t sound all that complicated but to be honest the fear of ruining a nice guitar was running a bit high! After double and triple checking every thing I fired up the drill with the biggest drill bit I have.

Next was weaseling my hand in through the sound hole to install the end pin. Not an easy task when you have big hands!

Next add the actually pick up itself.  You can get this in & out with the strings on with ease.

Then a fresh new set of strings!

Because I took all the strings off at the same time I will have to adjust the neck a little but all in all it was easy and I ruined nothing! Sound sample to come! :)

Yesterday I decided that I was going to take a day off! A real day off! Not a I idly work all fracking day not really working and not really not working and then wondering why I am getting so stressed about stupid little things in life kind of day off. Nope I took a full-fledged day off. To do that I shut off my computer and totally ignored my phone/facebook/twitter and did nothing work related.  What I did do was get creative and it all started with this thought!

My guitar case is stupid boring!

I found myself wondering is there a great stylish guitar case that represents me as an ‘artist’ and is not the Iron Maiden style airbrushed mural of skulls/dragon/snake or rose entwined knife stabbed though a bloody heart on a crest formed out of rotting top hat wearing skeletons! I searched the Internet for an answer and the closest I came to awesome cases is this company called Postal Monkey. While on the right track with neat graphically intense cases none of them reached out to me; that and they specialize in Electric Guitar cases.  The only acoustic cases they have are Leopard fun fur and faux Louis Vuitton print. While it was not an Iron Maiden epic odyssey mural, also not really for me. The next option was to cover my guitar case in stickers and though that somehow express my personality.  Stickers like ‘everything is better with bacon’, ‘Sub Pop’, and the ever favorite ‘I am a rocker I rock out!’ and this is exactly what I started doing last year with my brand new SKB case. However, it would seem that guitar case technology has not really improved in the 10-15 years that it has been since I bought my last case, because in less then a year the case was broken and a total mess.  While the case was covered under warranty, transferring stickers didn’t seem to be covered, so I was sitting back at square one with a boring bland guitar case, and my personality left fully unexpressed.

Those that have been to our studio have probably seen the awesome table that M refreshed from something that was bland and beat-up into something awesome and wicked perrrty, if you haven’t been to the studio go here and see what the hell I am talking about. So then I started thinking, I wonder if I could decoupage myself up an epic awesome case, so nearly a liter of glue and a pint of Polyacrylic later I came up with these.

The photos for this one are from a couple of Blurb books that I had sent in a while back as a test.

These are the maps that we used to navigate our way across Canada in 2004.

Some of them like Saskatewan were hardly used while others like Ontario were all beat up and nearly destroyed. I think it is neat that parts of the case traveled around like a vagabond in a beat up old VW golf.

Decoupaging this music stand was really an after thought.

I used the books that come with a Diana+ camera that are filled with the history of the camera as well as some neat examples of the Diana+ work.

Wanna know how to do this?  M has a step by step instructional on the art of decoupage

I wandered about UBC the other day while waiting for stuff. That is a freaking gold mine of awesome waiting to be explored i tell ya :)

Yuppers it is. I am super tired being that i got up at 5ish so you get no explanation other then I was bored and multi-tracked this with Johnathan Livingston the Seagull, Bobby da’ Bad-ass Bass, & Chester the Gretsch.  Super excited for jam tomorrow! Aaron will be rocking out with us!

So this morning Miranda and I went down to our truck with dreams of a Slickity Jim’s Eggs Benedict dancing around our heads, and possibly looking driving about to look at random craigslist banjo’s. Yuppers I wanna take up many new instruments in the upcoming months, one of which being a banjo. (others things on my list include The accordion, the cello, and perhaps the glockenspiel) We stumble down to the parkade to find that some crack head mother fucker has broken one of the Xterra windows and has robbed us of our ring flash and one of our light kits, as well as a large assortment of things that I shouldn’t have had in the truck over night to begin with. Fuckers!! First thing through my mind was “wow all this deductible money would certainly have bought a really nice banjo, the second thing that went though my mind was Wow all this deductible money means I probably cant really afford to buy a banjo! Fuckers!!!

After making a list of missing items and reporting it all to the police we begrudgingly went off for breakfast. We ran a bunch of errands and I took M to the north shore for some girl time with peeps and drove home really bummed about the amount of money that I would now have to fork over to deal with deductibles and replacing things that are to small to claim (like CB radios and snowboard helmets)
Then I remembered that Long & McQuade rents things like banjos for a very reasonable monthly fee. so off I went to Terminal! I arrived and did my obligatory wander about the store to look at things, and then found the banjo renter man. While Long & McQuade does rent banjos every single one they rent was out. :( ah well I figured that I would check back later. I then wandered up stairs to look at other stuff like Violins and Cello’s when I discovered much to my delight that they rent violins for a mere 15 dollars a month so how could i say know to trying out a violin for a month.

It is not a banjo but it was on my list of things that I want to learn! Wow it is loud. I have a full drum kit in our kitchen but I was never really concerned about annoying the neighbors till now :) It is so much fun though! I have always been intrigued but random fretless stringed instruments, so this is a whole new learning experience for me. Tomorrow Shan and I are going to “practice in public” and that should be awesome for busting out of our fear of performance! Next week I will get our busking license (as well as my damn commercial parking permit) and then we will be set to launch into full scale outdoor performances.

While I had a super sneaky weekend hobnobbing with movie stars, but I am waiting to hear from the powers that be if i can blog about it. So you instead get more photos of random kitchen music gear. My Friend Lisa should have a fully functional website soon which will mean this sorta thing can happen there and not every fraking day here :)

Here we have the guitar triptych! Chester the Gretsch, The Yamaha Electric, followed by Johnathan Livingston the seagull.

I looked down and saw a rats nest of stands and cables.

Guitar cases to firefaces!

The drums in their complete form!

The main ass recording unit! !

I figure with D buying a place with jamspace, the random kitchen jamspace we have now will come to a close so I must take as many photos as possible while its all here!!

So I bought a new guitar & not just any old guitar! I bought a Gretch 6120 Chet Atkins Special which is pretty much my childhood dream guitar. I always wanted a hollow body like a Gibson or a Gretsch but the 6120 was my favorite out of everything that I can remember. Originally because it was orange, but as I did research in to the guitar (which was quite an ordeal in 1992 it involved guitar magazines and listening to my moms old 8tracks of Mr. Atkins himself.) I discovered the sound was just so perfect in so many ways.  I remember this one time we made a road trip into e-town which happened once or twice a year. Being that we were from the north we headed straight to West Edmonton Mall. In that mall was a Mr. Entertainment near the ice rink.  This was my first real music store adventure (prior t0 that I would buy my strings and picks at the local Radio Shack) I bought a chord book, a book of “alternative rock” song tab (which i still have today) and a set of guitar strings for my Harmony. They had an original Gretsch 6120 in the case and stood and stared at it for 10min before my mom insisted that we leave. I remember looking at that vintage price tag of $10,000+ and as a kid growing up in the middle of nowhere Alberta that pretty much was the same as saying it was $100,000,000, the difficulty was they weren’t made new anymore because Gretsch was basically run into the ground and the original blueprints and prototypes were lost in a fire the year I was born, so there was only vintage to be had.

Lament.

But alas after cat-scanning, x-raying, and doing other fancy stuff to a bunch of the old 6120s lent to Gretsch from people like Randy Bachman they managed to remake the long lost blueprints of some all time legendary guitars. From that we get this glorious reissue!! it is so pretty, and it is a complete dream to play! Open chords sound genius, and I have to say this guitar matched up with the crate (thank you again Tracey you rock) is a marriage made in heaven. I love it. Shan & I ad-hoc jammed it up a bit on Saturday after breakfast and well pure genius!!

Thanks M for taking photos of me :)

Tomorrow we have the next awesome jam of jams in my kitchen so we should get some great cuts I think from that.

The Weekend started early on Friday with the arrival of our friend John Edgar from Toronto. For those not in the know about Edgar read this and check out his blog. Having never been to Vancouver before we drove him about to give him the nickel car tour. We hit up Booster Juice on the North Shore, toured Gastown and came home to finish up some of the pressing work we needed to get done before the weekend. We hit NetChick’s Friday night rock band party for a while but for the most part we played it fairly low key. I have been nearly getting this sick that people are dishing around to each other like a hot potato, so a reasonably relaxed evening hanging out in the jam space was precisely what I was looking for.

On Saturday morning we hooked up with the Tiger and hit up Locus restaurant for breakfast. For those not in the know about Locus it is the sweetest little restaurant on Main Street. They have a wicked breakfast and hardly ever a crazy line up at 9:30am. Edgar hit on the waitress and twitter was aglow with all sorts of thinly veiled references to Darren’s penis. Sounds like a perfect morning right!! Well the only way that it could get even more perfect was if we went and spent an hour at Tom Lee poking at music stuff, and not wanting to mess with perfection that was exactly what we did. We spent over an hour wandering about the different sections of the place. Darren was there to look at some new drumheads and such, while I wanted a new guitar strap.

We inadvertently made fun of/joked with a staff member, while Darren checked out microphones and studio monitors. All in all it was a really good time!
We dropped the tiger off and took John on a small tour of the Deep Cove area. While tooling about on random roads it became apparent the John had never really been 4×4ing so we messaged Josh to meet us under the bridge for redneck style mud’n shenanigans. We cruised around in the ocean for a while and I am sure we basically blew John’s mind. Having to deliver my wife to the opera at a particular time we didn’t really get into anything too serious but we did manage to set a new milestone for deepest water forded, which incidentally is well over waist deep, and I am also happy to report that the doors don’t seem to leak even when submerged. :)

photos by Me Edgar and Josh

While Miranda was at the opera I thought I would try some new strings on my guitar. On the advice of a guy at Long & McQuade I am currently giving a set of Martin light 80/20 Bronze a whirl and I am sort of not really all that impressed, I will play em a bit but I am reasonably sure that I will be changing them back to the D’Addario lights that I normally use before our recording session on Thursday.

Speaking about recording sessions Darren came over with his Macbook and the fireface to set it all up for Thursday. We hooked it all up just in time to test it out when Shan and Josh popped over! :) I would toss up our mp3 from the testing we did before we went to the frog, but I have absolutely zero clue how to work Cubase and I haven’t had time to sit down and take a look at it all. I am sure that it is uber rough sounding as I was half drunk on this cheap American beer

I will dig into it all that later tonight I think, but it looks like with the exception of a couple of cables we should be all set for the first serious My Friend Lisa recording session. We all next hit the Frog for some food

When Josh and Shan arrived they came with tales of preposterously large cardboard boxes in our lobby, we thought that we should do something with them. It was suggested that we take some sort of My Friend Lisa photos in said boxes. In fact josh even had a proof of concept photo from his iPhone. So we simply grabbed the better-looking box on our way up the elevator. It was quite the adventure as the box was the exact size of our elevator door so I went in first to operate the elevator while every one else was in the box in the elevator. We did this all trying to be sneaky but we failed to notice when we hopped in the elevator that it was going down so when the elevator doors open in the basement to allow one of my neighbors on they were affronted with a cardboard box filled with people and nothing more. My neighbor mentioned something to the effect that this was precisely what she was thinking of doing and happily hopped on in the dark cardboard box with everyone else.
We went through such care to take the box in one piece up the elevator and up to my door but what none of us thought about was the fact that my front door is nowhere near the size of an elevator, so we had to dismantle the box in the hallway to get it into the studio anyway :) having reassembled the box we got down to the task at hand.

Thanks to Edgar and Josh for shooting photos that I was in :)

I thought it was truly awesome that with two small exceptions I was able to produce everyone’s ridiculous demands when it came to things to place in the box.

Sunday was a day of Dim Sum and mini road trips to show off the see to sky highway to the guy from Toronto. We all met up at Sun Sui Wah for Dim Sum greatness which despite my irrational hatred of seafood was a delicious time. I am still dreaming about the Mango pancake thingy. Our server who’s name was Ronald wanted to know if any of us worked for / or knew some one that worked for a courier company like UPS or FedEx. None of us did so we asked him why? He replied that he was looking to get a job with a company like that because he was really trying to move up and out of the restaurant industry. I have to give him an A+ for initiative because he was, as Kimli put it, a walking resume. He is a fantastic driver (stick even) as well as being extremely hardworking he has stated that he is very trustworthy.

Look at him as if he isn’t trustworthy really? If I were in need of an employee I would hire him in a heartbeat simply based on his initiative. We all have his phone number and such so lets try and get this guy a courier job shall we.

Next we were off to Squamish for the heck of it. Shan Kimli and Josh piled into the delica and M, John & I fired into the Xterra. And off we went!

We made it home in time to quickly prepare for the little photographer party we were having. It was a blast and we want to thank everyone for braving the quarter inch of snow that fell and coming out. The Box made its second appearance in two days as a photo booth

All in all it was a crazy jam packed weekend!!

So I haven’t had a lot of face time outside of work on my computers this last week so blogging and the like seems to be what takes the hit. One of the main things that has been taking away a lot of my time away from work is My Friend Lisa! I suppose that it is a good thing that I have been cultivating a hobby that doesn’t involve me sitting in front of a computer for a billion hours and/or taking photos of stuff. Mostly because what I do all day at work is sit in front of my computer for billions of hours and/or take photos of stuff, which makes My Friend Lisa a nice change. We set up a nice little jam space in the disused dining room area. It is not disused because we don’t cook but instead because we haven’t gotten a table for the dining area.

Last week was the inaugural jam in this space with Darren rocking out on his new drums and Aaron on bass. We sounded really and truly awful but awful with promise :) Tonight we are headed to Rockspace to really make a bit of noise and the like. In the upcoming couple weeks our goal is to get the website up and running. It is all ready to go on the back end, we just need some important things like… oh i don’t know…. content, which between us all is slowly coming along. We also need to finish the looks part of the site design meaning what we want the website and our stuff to really look like. I was out taking photos this morning to be used for the graphic design part of things, mostly because the idea of using other peoples photos (even if they are creative commons or purchased stock) is sorta making me feel icky :) The other super big thing is to record some really good cuts of our tunes and get them up on our site as well as all the various music websites (Ie: Myspace/LastFM/etc.) We are going to pool together all our equipment and hopefully do this all ourselves, which is turning out to be a really big task but we like challenges :) Between the ZoomH4, Darren’s Fire wire interface, and the smattering of mics we already possess we figure that with a couple of mic rentals/purchases we should be able to do a decent job. The question is do we four track it up, meaning each of us record our individual parts one at a time, which wouldn’t really require a lot of equipment other than what we already have, but would loose some of that played together sound. Or do we instead try and record all of us into our own tracks but while we are all playing at the same time using a combo of firewire inputs and mixers. Which would save that played together sound and would be the ideal recording situation but would require a heck of a lot more equipment then we have going on right now :) We sorta thought that this recording part was going to be easy, but as we are finding it is far more complicated than we originally thought. I guess that is why people do this for a living eh :)

It has been a super crazy couple of weeks filled with good times and much music!

Monday the 9th
After an early morning meeting with some clients I decided that I should spend some quality time with Andy (my snowboard) & Cypress Mountain.  So I took to the hills! The snow was swell and there weren’t many people about.  Most of the Eagle chair runs were still groomed for the world cup and thus not available to be ridden, but the raven chair runs were awesome as per usual.  I wish that chair wasn’t so long :)

Tuesday the 10th
we started the day with an awesome headshot session followed by working Mexican lunches with Trevor Jansen

Wednesday the 11th
Did some photo wandering and out and about errands

Thursday the 12th
Thursday was this jerk’s birthday, so with the exception of a mid day meeting I didn’t do much of anything work related. I played my guitar for the better part of the day and collected my Mac from the Mac doctor.  While I was at the Apple store I also grabbed a little 25 key midi controller that I have been eying up for a long time. I called it a birthday gift for me!

It is quite swell it recognizes how hard I am pressing the keys and they are weighted much like a real piano, so it and garage band are the awesome!! I will be learning to play the piano via YouTube.  Don’t laugh, seriously there are some decent lessons on the You Tubes.

My Friend Lisa also had a Jam session at Rockspace that evening which was a little sketchy at first until we found our way around the PA system and what not. Shan & I both sang on what will be an awesome version of the Communist Daughter which needs some works so you don’t get to hear it yet. Typical Frog beer after and then an evening of playing guitar/piano/garage band.  All in all an awesome birthday.

Friday the 13th
Friday was regular work and such, no scary unexplainable phenomenon that I was aware of but that’s not to say that it didn’t happen. :) There was a chunk of awesome on Friday though Tracey that awesome gal that she is came by and gave me the perfect b-day gift ever….

The Crate Acoustic-60 Amp!!!!

It has two channels so I can plug in a Mic or a Guitar or both at the same time!! It is the only amp that we would really need for an acoustic show! It has lowZ outs to tie it into house sound and the like. :) Tracey You really really really really rock!!!! Thank You!

Saturday the 14th Valentines Day
We had a party at the studio where we met some new people and somehow managed at our tame party to scandalize a number of other people.  Kimli tells it best.

Sunday the 15th
Sunday was a take it easy day. We had a photo shoot in the middle of the day but outside of that it was a hang at home day. We watched Revolutionary Road. Not a great movie really… It was well made and well acted but nothing really remarkable about it other than its predictable build up to a un-climactic ending.

Monday the 16th
As Mondays often are we had kind of a busy day with work and what not. That evening we were invited to speak for the PPABC. For those not in the know PPABC is the original photographers association in BC. It is the true definition of old school. We were invited to discuss what we do and marketing and such. Being that most of our marketing has an online component we discussed things like Facebook and twitter and I got the impression that most of what we said was complete gibberish to the vast majority of people. It was good though I enjoy talking to groups of people like I am an authority in subjects, and they are talking about bringing us back for a full day session. Good times!

Tuesday the 17th
Tuesday was another busy day but somehow in the middle I found time to hit Long & McQuade for a bit of awesome shopping. I was there to get some better guitar pics and possibly a mic stand but I ended up finding a used/returned bass for very cheap!! It is not going to win any awards for spectacular sound or anything but it serves my functions. I have been playing with the four track a little playing guitar and then laying down some simple bass tracks its really fun. It is a short scale Bass so it is smaller and easier to handle. It is perfect to try out different bass line ideas and junk and as I said before it was super cheap :)

Later there was some Third Tuesday action, but other than that, this has been a busy week and a bit with The Jerk. I will try and keep up with the actual posting of things when they happen so I don’t have a crazy week in review thing going on :)

When it comes to playing music for other people I am actually extremely shy believe it or not.  It takes quite a bit to bust out and really play my guitar when I am in the company of others. (‘cept when I am loaded then all inhibitions go out the window but then i sound terrible.) I am twenty times better at playing for people than I used to be, mostly because I am constantly forcing myself to take these leaps out of my comfort zones and I force myself to do scary things.  The result is that things are not so scary after a while.  An example of stepping out of comfort zones was at our New Years Party this year,  I was sitting on the kitchen counter playing my guitar when some people decided to go outside to the street to grab some air and watch the no pants crowd stumble about. I decided to join them and I brought my guitar with me.  So here I am playing random things outside on the streets of Gastown with all sorts of people walking by and listening, all of which was fairly tough for me to do, but I did it and I am glad that I did. So now imagine my fear of singing with people around! I assure you it is a ridiculously large fear
Today I was playing with the four track abilities of the Zoom H4 and I came up with this cut. This is me doing a cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s The Communist Daughter. It is not a difficult song to sing or play (it is actually supposed to be sung so monotone) and this is not a prize winning performance by any means, but I figure that if we are going to have a band that I need to over come my fear of performing in front of people. Performing to an anonymous internet audience is my baby steps :)

I played one of the Guitar tracks first, then recorded the singing track, followed by a couple of different guitar tracks and then a hint of tambourine. 4-track recording is awesome!!!

So it’s only one day after I complained that I am lazy bastard and I get to say that I am moving forward. I think that today would really qualify as at least a good step.  In fact it was a super busy day filled with pure awesome (:  The day started at the early hour of 5:30am with a bit of morning driving about while M was at her weekly cult meeting. While they were toasting kool-aid and such I was chasing the sunrise around.

Harry Jerome Statue with with morning in the back ground…

…and my favorite tree in Stanley park.

Next on the list of awesome today was a photo shoot with a couple of new models that I haven’t worked with before – Leanna and Amie. We had a blast shooting with old cameras, vintage clothes, and some old furniture.

Amie out in the wilds of Vancouver and in the studio.

The same place with Leanna. These four shots are taken with my standard run of the mill Polaroid 600 Camera

I took a few rolls of film that I will drop off to the lab as well but these are a few of the digital shoots from the day.

I think we are going to do a whole fashion inspired chair in random place series.  Mostly because chairs in random places = buckets of awesome! And Buckets of Awesome is what I am all about!

Continuing right along with the awesomeness of the day, I had band jam time in which we did a few takes of our favorite songs. I managed to somehow tear my fingernail half off yesterday on the mountain so I was playing with a bandaged finger. Shan played us a hidden track from a band (I forget the name of the band) where they ‘cover’ Guns and Roses. This prompted us to start playing Bon Jovi and well it all went down hill from there. Luckily the Zoom was recording the hilarity that was our version of Dead Or Alive :)