My mom forwarded this story to me that I wrote when I was 8 years old…

God asked him why he continued to fish when food was plentiful on the land. Flowers would pour fruit out to him and animals would perish at his feet. Adam answered that he longed for something that only fishing seemed to quench. He knew it wasn’t a hunger for a kind of plant or beast, nor a thirst for a specific spring of sweet water. But he could not explain the feeling inside of himself. He first felt the longing when he saw the lion’s cubs playing with each other. He felt it again as he watched a shivery nest of hatchlings emerging together from shattered eggs.

God knew the time had come for Adam to gain his companion. Granted with much of God’s own knowledge and powers for reason, Adam could feel that something was missing. Like a child frustrated with the knowledge of language it can not yet speak, Adam was frustrated that he was unique. So out of pity, love or a sense of adventure, God pulled a rib from Adam, using life to create life and from clay and bone emerged the most perfect beauty ever to grace Adam’s eyes. She blossomed in the light radiating a heat that Adam never knew he himself had held. Her short hair reminded him of when he was young, but it held more potential seeing it on someone else. His only view of his reflection came in distorted spurts while fishing. Now as he looked upon her perfect neck and dove-like eyes, he realized that the water had brought the idea of her into his mind, but apart from his conscious knowledge. Like a dream realized, everything about her was concurrently strange and familiar.

They were the only two people on Earth. Love from above warmed them as they stared into each other’s eyes examining the details within them. They could commune with the wind and sea, the change of colors and temperature an entire language upon which they forecast their days. The rocky shores toughened their feet as they explored farther together than Adam ever had alone. He plunged head-first into fields of unusual flora, returning always with handfuls of flowers he had named after her. And when she first laughed, how Adam’s universe expanded. A misty confusion of joy and longing waxed in his chest upon hearing her sing to the rhythmic melody of water dripping from a stalactite into a milky white pond. They laughed breathlessly on their backs after racing each other across a field of red tulips, Monarch butterflies shimmering above them. God would talk to them from time to time which they both enjoyed very much. But they loved discovering the world around them together as friends, muddy feet, sun-bleached hair, making love with the sun setting behind them. For Eve, it was an existence of Bliss, a world without want or equal.

Sometimes she desired to swim alone. Adam remembered the earlier times as he sat on the shore looking down at his reflection, fish swimming around his legs and in and out of the small dark places between the rocks. His lack of knowledge of another human hadn’t prevented him from longing the companionship. Now that he had her by his side, Adam felt a tenuous grip on his situation with Eve. Since he lacked knowledge of good and evil, he saw nothing wrong with demanding all of her time for himself. When Eve swam alone, he sat on the shore looking longingly at her with a tickle in his mind, a remembrance of loneliness.

His heart stuttered when she emerged crystallized from the water, her dark hair clinging to her narrow shoulders. And it started anew when she smilefully sang him a question asking what he was thinking about. He simply smiled and offered her the skin of the deer to dry off with. That night by the fire they built next to the sea, he rubbed tree oil into her feet as she made up a story which included small details about their day together. The wet wood snapped and popped and red stars rose from the logs high into the sky. The moon was waxing-gibbous and frogs and insects prepared for the coming evening.

It’s funny how some ordinary everyday objects take on a new life of their own depending on how you look at them.  Of course, for someone like me who has -5.5 vision correction in both eyes, this is how the bathroom looks to me every morning when I haven’t put my contacts in yet (except for the creative colors).  Those of you “blessed” with 20/20 or better vision unfortunately will never get to experience this sensation except through the medium of photography.  But I’m still jealous of you.

I made this video as a test for the camera placement possibilities within Grand Theft Auto IV’s PC-based editing system. It’s a great editor with lots of control and a few frustrating limitations. But overall, this has been a very fun experience.

For those who don’t know, the game records 20-30 seconds at a time. During that time, it records everything in the game within say a 100 foot radius around your character. While recording, you have the basic 3rd person view. But when you go into the editor and review the footage, you can move the camera to anywhere within that 100 foot radius. You can set up camera moves, lock the camera off, attach it to your player or different characters so the camera moves with them, you can add different levels of hand shake, do advanced blended multi-camera-position moves, and more. In addition to that, you have control over time (slow motion and fast motion), camera visual effect filters (sepia, b&w, and many more), what audio is played (separated into speech, special effects and music). For example, there’s a lot of swearing by bystanders in this game, so the ability to turn off speech from cut to cut while keeping the overall street ambience is a plus. The editor is very fast. I’ve set up some extremely quick half and quarter second cuts in sequence, and the game is able to keep up without any errors.

If you are a filmmaker, this is a fantastic way to get some new ideas. It also shows how much work is involved in shooting a car chase scene. I had hundreds of camera setups for this overall sequence. Obviously, doing this in game is much faster than in real life, but it took me a few days to edit this. Imagine how much time was spent shooting the chase scenes from Ronin.

Oh what drama the auditorium seats have seen.  So passive in their demeanour, yet always watching with a soulless intensity eclipsed only by their occasional occupants.

I took these shots at the Evanston YMCA’s ancient auditorium.

I shot these photos when I went to visit my sister in sunny San Diego.  Perfectly, I was there at the same exact time as the Red Bull Air Races. 

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This is a video I put together for the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the Research Institute of NorthShore University HealthSystem (formerly ENH).

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This was a video that I put together for the 25th Anniversary of the Kellogg Cancer Care Center at Evanston Hospital.  We were lucky enough to get a group of people who were willing to share their stories and open up to the camera.  The video was played at a large assembly of former and current patients, caregivers and donors many of whom came up to me later thanking me for making the video.