10 minutes before this photo was taken it was almost completely empty. Within five minutes we had to push a path through it. I hate packing!

How cozy does THIS look?

I love new, awesome friends! This girl looks to be one of them. And she can kick it!

Taken while standing in line at the DMV to register a vehicle for my Burning Man camp and got some fun shots of these pens. I really like this one.

The only photo I took, apparently, was with my iPhone to show my friend Monika that a store in SF carries onigiri. If you haven’t had onigiri get some! It’s sooooo yummy!

My buddy Jay at the Magnolia in SF.

It’s much harder than I thought to get a good, clear water drop falling from a facet. Live and learn.

If you have the chance to check out the Bohemian Carnival do it! These are my friends on the way in. I love these guys!

How do you truly surprise someone with a party for their birthday? Easy: just throw it a full four weeks early! Casey Ann and 30 of my closest friends threw me an amazing surprise party at the nightclub Swig in SF. This is me with three of them replicating my “surprise face”

As seen in a Barnes and Noble. I’m loving my 50mm lens and shooting just about everything with it lately. If you have a DSLR and want some nice shots it’s the best $120-150 you can spend on it.

Abstract in the kitchen.

As seen on the way to the grocery store. Kinda boring, maybe, but I really love it anyway.

I flew the red-eye back from Alaska on this day and landed just before 6am in San Francisco. This is the first thing that I saw after I sat down again inside my truck again and literally breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Why so relived, you may ask? Well, I didn’t exactly park my vehicle completely kosher. Instead of springing for a $10+/day lot for 12 days or leaving with a friend 2 hours from town I parked it on a street just a few minutes away from the airport that somehow didn’t have any street cleaning or no parking signs on it. Even so, I wasn’t completely convinced that it would still be there when I returned until I actually saw it again.

Oh, and the best part is that I parked it near a hotel with a free shuttle to and from the airport. Perfect!

(oh, the exact location is not marked on the map below. shhhh… it’s a secret

This is what it looks like in Homer at the end of the fishing day. Mmmmm… halibut….

There’s something about ‘Alaska’ and ‘drinking’ that goes together like ‘hand’ and ‘glove’…

Somehow we ended up taking a photo in the theme of the movie Hot Tub Time Machine. Can you guess which one of us didn’t like the movie?

I started a project several months ago where I wanted to have an arsenal of “unintentional letters” at my disposal. I’ve since made some pieces for family members spelling out their names, etc, in different framed photos. In Anchorage I passed another “m” and shot it to get back into it. So many more letters to go!

Casey’s mom Nancy spent a good deal of time last summer on her garden and it definitely paid off this year. Scenes like this one are scattered all throughout it. I love the colors!

Four shot glasses + one ski = shotski, of course – but only in Alaska. Of course.

The photo below would have been the photo of the day if I hadn’t shot it at such a low f-stop and everyone was in focus. Oh well, it’s still pretty funny.

Casey and I spent a day down in Seward early this week. Her parents had won a day cruise through the Kenai Fjords National Park and gave it to us to use. Before we even got on the boat I saw this boat coming into the harbor through the thick fog and got my camera in time to get what I consider a decent shot of it.

Sunflowers are so cool…

We took a ton of jumping photos in front of this sculpture in downtown Anchorage after a round at the pub but my favorite is this one where she’s on the ground. You’ve gotta love that smile!

I don’t know about you guys, but I think angles like this and this are really cool and I can’t get enough of them.

Casey Ann has this dog that absolutely loves to fetch. You can throw the ball for hours and she’ll keep running, fetching, and returning it to you. I’ve tried several times to wear her out thinking that eventually she’ll get tired and give up, but I’ve failed each time. Even when you eventually stop throwing it she’ll put it at your feet and wimper, waiting for you to pick it up for the next round.

Today I threw it down the stairs a half dozen times or so snapping pics of her running up until I got a few that I really liked.

Always obey your flight attendent, folks – at least when it comes to the tray tables. But I never turn my music off (and I have yet to crash a plane doing so

Monika and I were at Revolution Cafe yesterday for a BLT/mimosa combo (it’s even better than it might sound, yo!) when we befriended this pup. When I attempted the photo the dog popped up thinking he might be getting a treat – probably because Monika had earlier went out of her way to make sure that the pup got a leftover piece of our sandwich meat. But I now like that that the photo is blurry only where the dog is because the dog was actually mostly blind. It’s interesting to me to see him as he might see the rest of the world.

Now this is how I like my dogs cooked.

Cam being Cam.

Onions.

I love angles like this.

Two things you may or may not find interesting about my sleeping habits:

1. I (at least try to remember to) photograph every place that I sleep at least one night
2. I actually love sleeping on couches

Case in point: In the summer of 2006 I took a motorcycle trip around the US where I slept on 52 different couches. Well, make that 51 since twice I slept on the red vinyl inflatable I was dragging around with me. Out of that total I remembered to snap a shot of all but one of two of them (damn you, Nashville and Kansas City!). I started slacking again for a while but I’ve since been back at it strong for the last few months.

#2: I really do love sleeping on the couch. As opposed to a bed, it’s my preferred place to nap. If sleeping on a futon I typically prefer not to fold it out.

Of course, given the choice I’d always pick the California King

PS: I forgot to mention that I slept one night on the couch on the left and the next on the futon on the right.
PPS: No Peters or cats were harmed during the making of this photo.

This light on the laptop, while visually appealing, is typically just really annoying to me. See the little glow coming from the power cord? You’d see more of it if I didn’t wrap black electrical tape around all but just enough to know that it’s drawing current. The glowing circle also used to shine on the other side of the PC, too, but I found a way to unplug it after removing the keyboard one day. Having a laptop radiating a massive glow in the same room I’m trying to sleep just ain’t my thang.

$0.01 sake and half off sushi rolls in Monterey. Yum!

If these guys were in a band, this would be the album art.

You can serve your wine chilled or at room temperature, but if you want to add an extra touch of class all it takes is dropping in a few ice cubes, of course. Classy.

The view from 9i at night. Ah, what a nice site to see right before drifting off to sleep…

Thursday had lots of great photos to choose from. I went to lunch with a co-worker and friend at this really great hole in the wall that I can’t recommend enough called Jodie’s. Then we went bowling. It’s been way too long since the last time I through a ball down a lane. Too fun. Later that day I ended up helping (mostly photographing, honestly) the gutting of an old RV to make into a shower/toilet setup for BM. And then more time with friends just longing around near the end of the night. Fun, fun times.

But I really love this shot most of all (even though this one is a close, close second). Thanks, Jill, for the games (and the shot!)

Ah, lunch at Tommy’s. Yummm….

I took one photo on July 13 and this was it. I don’t even remember why I took this photo but I’m glad that I at least had one photo to share today.

I pulled this cup out of the cabinet of the house I’m currently house sitting in the Richmond area of SF to pour some of the expensive Pom brand pomegranate juice drink that I rarely buy but decided to splurge on tonight and only discovered after I poured that the inside was heart shaped. Pom is the perfect color for its shape (and the table behind it, of course).

The title is kind of stupid but it’s the first thing that came to mind. If you’re a Dylan fan you might get at least the pseudo-reference.

A significant part of each day for me is seeing stuff that I find beautiful.

At least a dozen times a day I see beauty that I want to hold on to forever. Most of the time its in the little and common things around us. That’s one big reason why I have a camera within reach almost all the time.

These power lines are down the street from the place that I’ve been housesitting on Potrero Hill. I keep seeing them when I walk out the door to my truck while looking left before crossing the street. If a car had ever hit me coming from my right, these poles would be why.

Colleen, Peter, Peter’s dog Bacon, and I made it to a couple of hours of the SF Superhero Street Faire. It was last minute and I wasn’t prepared in terms of costume, but we went anyway. There was good music and lots and lots and lots of superheros all dressed up. So fun!

Yeah, they really are that good.

San Francisco is the kind of city where you need to leave your house prepared for weather at least three seasons worth of weather. It might be sunny and hot when you leave the door but windy and 15 degrees cooler when rounding the corner. And then fog turns into rain into sun. If you’re cold walking down one side of the street try crossing to the other side and see if that micro-climate is more in line with your preferences.

It may technically be summer here right now but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t look like the other sides of the spring/fall bookends at the same time. Have I mentioned how much I love this city?

I love this city. Only in San Francisco will you find a firehouse with pink lights. And this firehouse isn’t even in the Castro.

These are fun to make.

View from Potrero Hill.

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon an image that I just had to learn how to duplicate. Once I figured it out I made one of my own on my first try.

Since then I’ve made a few other attempts that haven’t worked out well at all. But then today I made this one and love it.

It’s really fun to take a series of panoramic shots hoping that it turns out usable and then having it look actually cool.

Maya and her gorgeous daughter Madeline on the 4th of July.

This is the first photo in a long time that I’ve posted as shot (without doing any Photoshop tweaking whatsoever). Anything that I did was the light/exposure/contrast/saturation/etc just didn’t look better than what you see right here.

My aunt/uncle’s pool (where we all spent a significant amount of time around this holiday weekend) in Odessa, TX.

I’m back in Texas for my grandmother’s funeral. We miss you, Big Mama!

July 1 was an incredibly long day for me. In fact, it officially lasted a grand total of 37 hours. My plane took off of the island of Bali just after midnight to start the new day and brought me to a 1/3-day of siteseeing in Japan during a far-too-brief layover in Narita. In between navigating several public transport options and eating some amazing sushi we were able to get lots of locals off the ground as seen here. Monika, my great friend from SF, just happened to be flying back from Bali at the same time as me and also had the same layover so I had the joy of gallivanting around the city with her. She’s the gorgeous one in between all of the school boys.

You can see more photos from this day soon on my Flickr stream (when I get around to putting them up). You can see the link to it at the bottom left corner of this page.

After Narita I flew another 10 hours to San Francisco and crossed the dateline back into a second round of July 1. Another (fun!) six hour layover in SF, then on to Texas via a quick pit stop in ABQ. An hour drive from the airport put me at my dad’s house at 11:55pm in time to spend the last five minutes winding down the 37 hour day.

One of my goals in Bali was to ride my motorbike past the 20k mark and I finally made it on the last day in Bali. I even pulled over to collect the proof you see here while on a somewhat dangerous s-curve that I shouldn’t really have been stopping at. But driving is far from safe in Bali so I’m taking somewhat equal chances whether I’m on blazing down the road with the rest of them or stopping to officially document the moment.

This is quite possibly my last daily photo from Bali and I’m glad that I finally got a reasonably good shot of some of the things that people transport on their motorbikes (Casey got one of a guy sitting on the edge of an entire sheet of plywood while splitting lanes and dodging through traffic). You see just about everything in this place get around by these little 100cc engines. These guys were carrying canvas frames. I love it!

We went to this elephant cave temple called Goa Gajah on Casey’s last day in Bali. The best part about it was this huge area behind the cave/pool area that went on and on through a long valley. This was one of the pools in that area. Very cool stuff.

It’s difficult to not see these stone carvings at the temple entrances as laughing.

From our attic.

I kept trying to take a good photo of one of our many card games and this is the best one of the bunch.

I saw the coolest car ever at Havana here in Ubud. This is a pretty crappy photo of the car as a whole but I really love its grill.

In the front yard, after a morning rain.

I’ve taken a lot of photos of this house. It’s fun and challenging for me to find a different angle that I haven’t shot yet that ends up looking pretty cool.

I’m not super proud of this shot but on a photo-light day like today it’s just all that I have. It’s a little like the offerings that people put out in front of every shop you see around here, I guess. Some days it has something nice and fresh, other times you offer the gods an Oreo. But at least something is there.

Yesterday I saw a photo like this on Flickr and immediately had to figure out how they did it. I went out and shot a few different settings with ideas in my head about how it would work out but nothing happened even close. Then a friend pointed me in the right direction and it turned out to be WAY easier than I imagined. Here is my first spherical “planet” panorama of my house in Ubud for the month of June.

I’m embarrassed to say that I’m extremely critical of our home for the month of June. This place – especially when compared to the amazing villa that is Pantulan where we spent the first six weeks here – has more than it’s share of eccentricities that make it feel like living in a foreign countries. For example, we have five showers (and I believe 8 freakin’ toilets!) but not a single shower works as you’d like it to. Every day I have to decide whether I want to take a warm shower with ultra high water pressure but do it in a bathtub and hold the “detachable” (read: not secured) nozzle while trying (completely and absolutely in vain) not to drench the whole bathroom (epic fail, every time) or do I want to take an icy cold shower outside on the third floor balcony (definitely my preference of location) and have the water come intermittently (don’t even bother with the hot water heater). One other shower doesn’t give more than a slow trickle of water and I haven’t bothered with the other two because they seem so similar to the first one mentioned.

But that aside, the house is incredibly gorgeous and I love taking photos of it.

I’m (obviously) a sucker for sunsets, clouds, and cool tree outlines.

This is the view from our office/attic on the third floor. It’s hard to get tired of checking out the many happenings of a busy rice field.

I love clouds.

Ha! Apparently I only used my camera for a purely practical purpose today. Our home for the next few weeks is called the Monkey House (even the pizza guy knows it by that name, especially since there are no real numbered street addresses to direct people to your location) and it’s called that for a good reason. If you don’t shut the door at night you’ll find monkeys in the kitchen. Today Casey chased them out of the third floor office. There are so many monkeys that the owners of this house left us an air gun to kindly deter the monkeys from rooting through the cupboards. Unfortunately this gun does not shoot where the sight says it’s supposed to so I was sight it in (er, at least attempting to) by shooting and then checking my shot with my zoom lens.

One of my most favorite thing about Bali is the attention they give to detail, particularly around their temples and shrines – and they have temples and shrines everywhere!! This is one on another corner in a small village on Lembongan island. I love it!

Ok, I did take another good shot of Pandana, our private villa for the weekend on the island of Lembongan. This place was really peaceful and we spent 90% of the time there in the pool

Below is a panoramic view from the beach.

Last Friday me and eight of my closest friends all took off for a weekend on the island of Lembongan. For about $11/day each we rented out a private villa on the hillside. Somehow this is only of the only photos I took of it

It’s hard telling people where to find our house. There’s not very many easily identifiable markers for it and the new gallery it sits behind doesn’t yet have a sign (and maybe not a name even a name) so there’s no sign even saying what the building is. But there’s this really cool wooden bathtub that’s hard to miss. If I had a home here this is the kind of tub that I’d put in it.

Vanessa walked through our house putting flowers and Bali offerings everywhere one day, including the water where the fishies live. It looked soooooo cool. Thanks, V!

I love my life, I love my friends!

When we came out to Bali we invited our friends hoping at least one or two would show up. Amazingly, we’ve already had more than a dozen friends from the golden state come out to stay with us with more on the way! Here is a shot from a night out with some of our friends – new and old – that have helped make our stay here in Bali so awesome.

Here’s another day where I only managed to take only one photo.

Years ago, when I first started traveling full-time, I got in the habit of taking a photo of every place where I slept at least one night. I’ve tried to get back in the habit of doing this again. Here is a shot from our hotel for a night in Semenyak.

Casey and I went out of our way to visit Tanah Lot, a temple on the sea near Denpasar, but most of the really cool photos you see of it come from an angle that you can’t snap yourself without a helicopter. So we took our own photos (you can see the temple to the right of Casey).

One the way around west Bali we found this cool temple on the roadside infested by monkeys. All of the temple volunteers had slingshots not just on their person but in their hands with rocks ready to be fired at a moment’s notice. The clouds rock in Bali.

June 3 was day full of water when you needed a dry camera the most. We rode our motorbikes to this great waterfall in Git Git where it was raining so hard that it didn’t matter how much the waterfall drenched us, so we just walked as close to it as we could without getting knocked over. Then we rode over to Banjar where we soaked in a hot spring with these awesome sculpted fountain heads pouring the hot water into the pools. A really fun day, but no real photos taken except for this one that I shot with Casey’s iphone.

Out of three attempts, this is the ONE day that I was able to take photos from the beach in Lovina. So I took advantage of it and took like 200 of them. This seems to be the one that everyone likes the best.

I’ve been taking a lot of pictures of sunsets lately (as you’ll see in later posts). Here is one from a roadside pit stop near the Git Git waterfall on the way to Lovina.

Today was our last full day at Pantulan. We’ll miss you guys!

The Sunday night plan was to figure out how to use the strobe-eriffic setting on my flash and take some photos of Casey jumping into the pool. Shown here is one of my test shots along the way of further figuring out how to make good use of my external flash. The reason you’re seeing this instead of a strobed jumping exposure is that right before I finished setting it up I noticed that one of the staff members dumped in a heavy dose of chlorine. Oh well, maybe next time…

A visit to Ubud isn’t complete without a trip to the Monkey Forest Park so as a dutiful tour guide to our vacationing friends it’s a must to get them there. Monkeys get into EVERYTHING – including the offerings that the locals put out to the gods. Obviously, the monkeys aren’t very religious or they probably wouldn’t be disrespecting the god’s stuff.

Apparently we aren’t the only ones in Bali who scored a sweet villa. H and Michelle’s choice certainly wasn’t too shabby either.

Rain, rain, go away…

Late into the evening, and during a meeting, I finally noticed that I hadn’t taken any photos that day. I’m most definitely a multitasker.

Monday night I shot hundreds of pics for these professional poi spinners but none of them came out very well (they didn’t bother coming back to collect them, even). But we also seemed to stop right after I was getting warmed up. My best one of the night was this one featuring Casey. I really enjoy learning how to do this stuff better.

When a rice field has been harvested they must till the earth to get it ready for the next crop. To do so, this guy uses this loud machine that the locals call a “Japanese cow”.

Accoriding to Wikipedia, “Galungan is a Balinese holiday that occurs every 210 days and lasts for 10 days. Kuningan is the last day of the holiday. Galungan means “When the Dharma is winning.” During this holiday the Balinese gods visit the Earth and leave on Kuningan.”

I took this photo while walking with the people in Lodtunduh, the village I’ve been staying in, during their time of Kuningan. Along this walk I took quite a few photos of little kids being carried but this one is my favorite.

One wall of our home has an amazing mural carved into it. This is one view of that wall.

Duh.

They can also play soccer.

This is what the view of the sunset looks like from our pool.

I’m going to miss this place.

This is our under-used upstairs office.

It’s hard not to take photos of the four foot tall Buddha meditating over the reflection pool at our house, and today was no exception.

Finally caught the beginning of a good beach sunset at Seminyak this weekend. I’ve been up in the mountains of Ubud and have been missing my beaches – even if they are covered in people wanting to sell me massages, pirate boat kites (tempting), wooden bow/arrows combo (more than once, even), beer (bought one), cigars (bought two), sunglasses (overpaid for a pair for a little over $3, but I like them), and just about everything else. The sunset was free.