Eight-year-old Tyrese McCray (right) of East Chicago, Ind., works with his step brother and sisters to help Maria Gonzales (background) dig her car out of the snow on the 141st block of Indianapolis Blvd. in East Chicago, Ind., during a winter snow storm, Wednesday, February 2, 2011.

Call me a skeptic, or perhaps a cynic, but I’m usually the one who goes against the grain and doesn’t buy “hype”. I don’t make investments in new gear until I’ve thoroughly researched the product (sometimes for months on end) to make sure it’s right for me. I won’t buy that shiny new car until I’ve taken it for a test drive, including making the salesman uncomfortable by punching the accelerator to see what kind of “get up and go” it has. And, even at age ten, I knew Crystal Pepsi was doomed from the get-go.

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Ice skaters are reflected in a glass ceiling near Robson Square in downtown Vancouver prior to the start of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

As I prepare to enter my 29th year of life on the planet Earth, I’ve become keenly aware of what has become a shocking, yet accepted, ideal of my daily existence: The older I get, the quicker time goes by. 2010 has been a textbook example of this theorem, with the year zipping past me more rapidly than my mental reflexes had time to react to. While lamenting on this accelerated time warp of life to a colleague at a holiday party last weekend (I could have sworn I saw the Grim Reaper smoking a cigarette against a car while looking at his watch outside that place), I was reassured that a year that seemed fleeting was only that way because I’d been busy and completed a lot of work. It wasn’t until I sat down and begin sifting through my photo shoots from 2010 that I realized that I have indeed done quite a bit this year!

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The lighting and set design for “Lyrics 14: The Best Of…” combined modern technology with home-brew creativity to achieve big-budget looks with limited resources.

When I started the reincarnation of this blog back in June, my goal was to feature entries about all the areas I work in, not just photography. Photography entries, as with the old blog, have become the most prevalent, simply because photography provides an immediate visual record of itself. If I want to share a photo shoot, I automatically have photos to post here. This isn’t always the case with lighting design, or more specifically, with the process of lighting design. I have to make a conscious effort to document the process of lighting a show if I know I want to feature it here, and I tried to do just this when lighting “Lyrics 14: The Best Of

The Las Vegas Strip as seen from Frenchman Mountain in Las Vegas, Nevada, Friday, October 22, 2010. The LDI trade show and convention was recently held in Las Vegas.

Last weekend, while strolling amongst the beautiful girls, the flashing lights, and thick smoke in Las Vegas, I got the overwhelming urge to gamble. I didn’t want to gamble on a card game or sporting event, however. I wanted to gamble on which new light fixture on display at LDI 2010 would change the game in the lighting industry over the coming months. Those lights and that smoke I experienced, they were coming from the hundreds of booths on the LDI trade show floor, not from a seedy casino. As for the beautiful girls, well, they were pushing some sort of rigging accessories, I think. Read More…