Curtis Parks, a rising hip-hop artist from Orange County, stopped by today to do some portraits. We spent a few hours in the studio and outside experimenting with a variety of lighting setups and here’s what came of it. More photos after the jump!
Aug 182009
Aug 172009
Good Hurt bar, Venice, California
This is something I shot at a Venice bar called Good Hurt while there to see some friends play with their band, The Squid. It has an interesting bar/club atmosphere and is a pretty good small music venue.
Aug 162009
Man's best friend - Ventura Pier
Drinking wine at Paradise Pantry
Two weeks after attending the VJ Multimedia Workshop in Ventura, I returned with Erinn for a nice little day trip. Having only been there for the workshop, much of which I spent holed up in a computer lab, I thought it would be a good idea to head back up and actually take a look around. We spent much of the day strolling Main Street, ducking in and out of shops and grabbing a bite to eat, and a bit of time out on the pier, where I found this man and his dog napping in the afternoon sun. We then decided to drop back in on Paradise Pantry, the shop I had done my multimedia project on (see previous post), and spent a good hour or two sampling some great local wines and an excellent assortment of fine cheeses. Seeing as it’s only an hour north of here, I’m sure Ventura will become a nice little getaway in the future.
Aug 062009
A Local Paradise from David Zentz on Vimeo.
I had a great time over the weekend as one of 50 photojournalists participating in the inaugural VJ Multimedia Workshop at the Brooks Institute in Ventura. I was in a group focusing on local businesses and their relationships with the community of Ventura, which is proud to be one of the few undeveloped old-school beach towns left on the California coast. Within that category I was assigned to focus on one of the owners of a local artisan wine and cheese shop called Paradise Pantry. The workshop was an intensive three-day shoot and edit session beginning with a full shooting and audio-collecting day on Friday, followed by one and a half days of editing using Final Cut Pro and then capped off with a showing of the final presentations Sunday evening. The workshop was split evenly between students and professionals who had been laid off in the past two years. I was qualified thanks to the buyout I took on my way out the door last year. Between funding my trip to Haiti and now this, that thing’s really paid off! Interspersed throughout the day on Saturday and Sunday were a series of excellent guest speakers, including one-time National Geographic picture editor and fellow Gator alumn Tom Kennedy, Dave Labelle, Wired.com’s Jim Merithew, Photoshelter co-founder and cool-last-name-haver Grover Sanschagrin and others. Multimedia is something I did a fair amount of at the Journal Star and even dating back to the St. Pete Times when I was there in 2005, so this was kind of a brush-up course that I felt I needed for lack of practice over the past year. It also gave me experience using Final Cut, which I hadn’t actually used for my previous projects. When the final show came around it was amazing to see the quality of work people were able to produce in such a short time. It turned out to be a great weekend. Another thing it did was inspire me to keep pushing myself with multimedia, which shouldn’t be a problem as it’s a form of storytelling I enjoy and something that I’ll be incorporating into future work, whether editorial or commercial. So, now I’m working on getting a multimedia showcase incorporated into my website. Hopefully it will be up in some form in the next week and will continue to get better. One thing missing from this version is an underlying soundtrack that incorporated ambient sounds. It was there for the presentation, but is now somehow gone and I can’t fix it because I don’t have Final Cut! Hopefully I’ll get a hold of a copy soon and will be able to post a corrected version.
Update
The VJ Workshop has just posted all of the projects on their website. There’s some great work there, so check it out. A version of my project with the full soundtrack can also be found there.
Laura Ling and Euna Lee
Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Laura Ling and Euna Lee at the Burbank Airport
This morning I got up at 2:30, a time which is much closer to that at which I usually go to sleep, to shoot the arrival of the American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee at the Burbank Airport. I covered this story a couple months ago (both times for the Associated Press) when things were quite somber. But today was the exact opposite as the pair from Al Gore’s Current TV arrived, along with their new hero Bill Clinton, in a private, Steve Bing-owned jet, to reunite with their families after 4 months without communication while they were being held prisoner in North Korea. As I’m sure you all know, the two had been sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp after being arrested for crossing the North Korean border while working on a documentary project for Current TV. That was, until 30 hours before their speedy arrival home following successful negotiations by Clinton for their release. I was trying to imagine how surreal it must have felt to be in the mindset that you’re about to be shipped off to a labor prison, and then without warning to have a door open and see former president Clinton standing there waiting to take you home. Hard to fathom. Despite the early wake up, and despite being part of a media pack that I usually try to avoid, it was a cool story to be a part of.
