Off to China

I leave tomorrow at noon for Beijing, there I'll spend a few days with a friend of mine before continuing on to Linfen where I'll be teaching English for the next 9 months.

Here is all the gear I'm taking with me to China (Obviously I plan to do more then just teach). Inspired by Kevin German.


1. Sanyo N1-MH Battery Charger and 16 eneloop AA 2,000 mAh batteries.

2. Marantz PMD 660 solid state recorder

3. 3 ft mic cable

4. beyerdynamic M 58 N condenser Microphone and windscreen

5. Sony MDR-7506 Professional headphones.

6. Focal mini tripod.

7. Monster Power 4 port travel power strip.

8. Canon 35mm f/1.4 lens

9. Canon 135mm f/2 lens

10 Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens

11. Canon 28mm f/2.8 lens

12. Canon 1.4 Extender

13. Microtech firewire 400 card reader

14. Domke F-5XB bag

15. Canon ST-E2 Speedlite Transmitter

16. Canon 580EX II Speedlite

17. Giottos Rocket air blower

18.Kensington computer security lock

19. Gaffers Tape

20. General brand outlet converters

21. Apple Headphones w/ microphone

22. Various Compact Flash Cards

23. Canon EOS 5D body

24. Canon 5D battery charger with two batteries

25. Apple 17" MacBook Pro 1st Gen Core Duo 2.16 w/ power cord.

26. Apple iPod touch 8GB 2g w/ usb cable

27. USB to US outlet converter.

28. OWC Mercury ON-The-Go Pro Firewire 400 bus powered 160GB hard drive.

29. OWC Mercury ON-The-Go Pro USB 2.0 bus powered 1TB hard drive.

30. Plastic Film Camera issued by Time magazine in the 80's

31. Assortment of roll film.

32. Cloths for camera cleaning.

33. Vivitar 550FD with color gels.

Gilligans

My friend took me out for crab cakes and a few drinks at Gilligan's Pier. It's a quirky little joint on the Potomac River. Thanks Dale.

Logan County Fair

I received a letter the other day from an old subject turned friend. This ribbon and a short note were inside. Turns out she had entered a print I gave her into the Logan County Fair in Ohio and it received a honorable mention.

Finding what was always there

Cooperage Restaurant, Philadelphia.

Workflow, the web and where I'm off to next.

Things have been pretty slow the last month and a half so I've been trying to use this time to improve my workflow and web presence; exciting stuff I know. You may have noticed that I changed the look of my blog banner and added a few links. I've also made some minor changes to my website, mostly stuff you cant see but hopefully the google robots will. I've also signed up for a photoshelter account as medium for selling some of my work. I invested in Cradoc's fotoKeyword Harvester program to help with my keywording and potentially increase sales (which are currently zero) on photoshellter. I've also incorporated photo mechanic's ingester into the mix, which will automatically rename my files using variables and add basic metadata information, and ChronoSync for backing up to external drives. This is probably the least sexiest stuff a photographer could talk about but it's part of the job I guess and what I've been nerding out on for the past few weeks.

Anyways, my lounging period is coming to an end and I should be on the move again soon. All summer I've been trying to secure a legitimate teaching job at a University in China. There has been a number of hang ups and I wasn't sure if anything was going to come through, but after waiting in limbo for over a month I just got word that all my paperwork has come through and it should be in the mail state bound right now. From there I'll walk it to the embassy in DC and hope I'm good looking enough to be granted a work visa. If all goes smoothly I hope to be on a plane by the end of the month destined for Linfen City in Shanxi Province (well actually I'll have to fly to Taiyuan and then hitch a ride down to Linfen, but the prior sounded better). I'll be teaching Freshman english at Shanxi Normal University, a school with over 20,000 students. I just hope google is exaggerating about how polluted it is there.

Cheers to everybody out there in internet land and enjoy these pictures before you go. Kevin: An American Bad Ass.

Charles County Fair

Marisa

Polaroid Cameras in the Park

A stroll on Theodore Roosevelt Island.

Assateague Island Camping

Check out my soda can stove heating that pot of water! Actually it did a pretty poor job, it couldn't bring the water to a boil and I ended up burning through a lot of fuel, but our spaghetti was edible — well sort of. That label-less can on the right was some spaghetti sauce I found in my garage which had the year 2007 written in sharpie marker. Probably not the best decision.

Planned a trip out to Assateague Island with two of my good friends. In hopes of avoiding the crowd we hiked 6 miles down the beach and slept at one of the primitive campsites. However, while we left most of the sunbathers and swimmers behind, we had the pleasure of walking beneath countless reels of fishing line connecting four wheel drive trucks to the ocean. Luckily at night all the trucks cleared out and we were left alone under some of the best stars I've ever seen in my life. We ended the trip with a dip in the ocean and then stopped off at the first place we saw for crab cake sandwiches.

Portraits and Personalities II