debut...

this is nina marie. she is the youngest person i know. she is the smallest person i know. and this was her first photo shoot...

easy like sunday mornin...

sunday morning brunch with my girlfriends is one of my most favorite things in the whole wide world. sometimes we go out, sometimes we eat in. sometimes there's just two of us, sometimes up to ten. but there are always always mimosa's or bloody mary's and lovely company in the mix. here's myself and one of my favorite people on earth, having a lazy sunday morning brunch a few weeks ago....

watch out baby gap... she's your new "it" girl...

it's not father's day, but this could make for a pretty great father's day card...

haloween...

my friend gina asked if i'd come over and take a couple shots of her and her man in their haloween costumes, before their big night... he's van gogh... incase you couldn't tell... and although i actually saw a few frida's that night, gina's takes the cake!

let your caged bird fly free!

I just love love love it when someone sees something that makes them think of how perfectly befitting that thing would be for someone else. and so i got just an email like that tonight... citing "Yes! I think you need this necklace. I know you love birds." and she was so very right... because this necklace screams my name and would you believe it, the designer believes in "telling stories and creating environments through her jewelry's moving parts." love it.

the generation m manifesto

i'm not usually one for reposting someone else's work on my blog. i'm amazed at the number of blogs out there that are simply compilations of snippets from other blogs. i try to keep my stuff fresh and original. but after reading the following "manifesto" i felt very compelled to repost it. umair is on to something... and what he write resonates with me. take a read and I'll let it speak for itself.

1. The Generation M Manifesto 8:01 AM Wednesday July 8, 2009 Tags:Economy, Generational issues, Global business Dear Old People Who Run the World, My generation would like to break up with you. Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences. You wanted big, fat, lazy "business." We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce. You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere. You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks. You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage. You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today's markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted. You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better. You didn't care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats. You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life. You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community. You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters. You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We're not for sale: we're learning to once again do what is meaningful. There's a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I'm going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation "M." What do the "M"s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It's a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth "M"s. Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday's way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who's Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from. Gen M isn't just kind of awesome — it's vitally necessary. If you think the "M"s sound idealistic, think again. The great crisis isn't going away, changing, or "morphing." It's the same old crisis — and it's growing. You've failed to recognize it for what it really is. It is, as I've repeatedly pointed out, in our institutions: the rules by which our economy is organized. But they're your institutions, not ours. You made them — and they're broken. Here's what I mean: "... For example, the auto industry has cut back production so far that inventories have begun to shrink — even in the face of historically weak demand for motor vehicles. As the economy stabilizes, just slowing the pace of this inventory shrinkage will boost gross domestic product, or GDP, which is the nation's total output of goods and services." Clearing the backlog of SUVs built on 30-year-old technology is going to pump up GDP? So what? There couldn't be a clearer example of why GDP is a totally flawed concept, an obsolete institution. We don't need more land yachts clogging our roads: we need a 21st Century auto industry. I was (kind of) kidding about seceding before. Here's what it looks like to me: every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday's profligacy — and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity. Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century - or the 21st? Love, Umair and the Edge Economy Community

old soul...

i've been hard at work preparing a grant proposal these last few days... i've taken a few trips to turkey over the last couple of years to document the kurds, and am looking for some funding to go back... more on that later, but i've been relooking through all of my photographs taken there and came across this portrait of a young kurdish girl that i found in diyarbakir. i'm not sure why but i just love this photo. her intense expression, red headband, and gorgeous eyes are hard to look away from... but i feel like it's more what they eyes are saying... what they've seen. these are the eyes of an old soul... and they just happen to be on a very young girl...

Gentelman's Quarterly hearts coffee...

GQ magazine called... they needed a shot of a caffe vita latte and i just happened to have one they liked! the actual shot in the magazine is teeny, tiny, small.... but the nice thing is that magazines pay for web usage too!

an invitation to a destination...

as i was finishing up shooting Shawn and Erin's wedding in Kona, amber, their totally amazing wedding coordinator, made sure to get me a copy of their destination wedding invitations. i can't believe how awesome these were and how excited I'd be to get one in the mail. so cute and so much attention to detail... even the stamps were custom made! nicely done!