I met Divya and Adi at Discovery Park and we timed the walk perfectly to end up at the beach by the start of golden hour. These two are beautiful together and totally at ease getting photos taken—the great lighting just made the shoot all the better.
Bilingirl
Chika Yoshida runs a popular YouTube channel teaching conversational English to Japanese speakers. Online, she goes by Bilingirl—a portmanteau of bilingual and girl—and hearing her switch instantly between the two languages, with perfect accents in both, is impressive. She spent most of her childhood in Washington, but now lives in Tokyo, where she's recently been featured on NHK—the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation—in a documentary about young creative entrepreneurs. Chika is in Seattle for part of the summer, and I met up with her earlier this month to shoot some photos for her new blog, which will be a hub for all of her various social media activities. We headed down to the Seattle waterfront, and along with portraits and profile pics, I got some shots of her—always elegant and photogenic—capturing footage for an upcoming YouTube episode.
Google Glass at SoDo Park
I probably have five hundred photos of people with one finger held up intently at eye level. Not flipping me the bird, thankfully, but swiping backwards and forwards through the touch-sensitive frame of Google Glass, the semi-controversial new piece of tech that beams information into your retina from a tiny screen positioned above your right eye. You can ask Glass for directions and a map pops up near-instantly in your frame of view. You can use an augmented reality app that translates printed text into English (or any number of languages) on the fly. You can browse the internet. Check the weather. Shoot video with the press of a button and even take photos with a conscious blink of an eye. (You calibrate the device to recognize when you’re winking.) Google seems to recognize the challenge in convincing the general public that the device is more than a novelty, and to that end, they’ve been on a rolling road show of sorts, setting up demo events in cities across the country and inviting the curious get a first-person view through Glass.
I’ve shot events for Google’s Seattle and Kirkland offices before, so my name got passed along to the New York and Mountain View-based PR folks organizing the most recent tour stop, a three-day showcase at SoDo Park. They hired to me to take candid photos of people using the device, and on the third day I got to try Glass for myself, wearing it all day and taking shots with its wide-angled 5MP camera. The device’s ability to surreptitiously capture photos and video has been troubling for those concerned with privacy issues, and I’ll admit it was both convenient and a little creepy to be able to trigger the shutter hands-free with nothing but a deliberate blink of my right eye. (In the settings menu, you can calibrate Glass to recognize when you’re consciously winking and not just blinking, although this feature may not ship in the eventual consumer edition.) I think the issue is more about etiquette than legality or ethics—it’s just as easy and lawful to snap discrete photos with your iPhone—but this sense of possible invasiveness is definitely one of the biggest hurdles Glass and other wearable tech faces en route to acceptance. All that aside, I had a great time covering the event, and I think I got some solid shots of the awe people seem to experience when they try Glass for the first time.
Portrait Session: Jared
Last week, I shot some personal branding photos for the multi-talented Jared Kessler, a Seattle copywriter in the process of overhauling his website. We met up at Makers—a beautifully well-lit and quasi-Mad Men-ish workspace for freelancers/creatives in Belltown—and then traipsed around Capitol Hill for a bit, grabbing lunch at Oddfellows and chatting about the challenges of marketing oneself. (A topic with which I could use a little help!) Next week, we're also going to shoot a video for his site which—if all goes according to plan—should turn out really cool.
Waiting Game
For the past two weeks I've been in a perpetual state of can't-sleep, night-before-Christmas suspense, waiting for this baby to make her grand debut. Though she's the one with the physical discomfort, Julianna is handling it all far better than I am, I'd say. She's been nesting and relaxing and working on small projects while I fret aimlessly about the house, distracted and over-caffeinated, prepped to bolt out the door with our bags at the first signs of labor. I'm not so much nervous as ready—ready to go, ready to pace the delivery room, ready to meet this kid and give her a name and take her home and into our lives. I used to have a dull terror at the thought of being a parent, but as soon as we found out we were expecting—thirty-odd weeks and forever ago, it seems—whatever anxiety had coiled itself up in my brain instantly unwound. This whole nine-going-on-ten-month process—all the preparations and appointments, the discussions and birthing classes and general urge to get our life in order—has been surrounded with an unusual confidence. Maybe a foolhardy, oh-ho-ho, you have no idea what you're in for kind of naive confidence, but a confidence nonetheless. And lots of love.
Waiting for Godot. Or whatever her name will be. Not Godot. Probably.
So, the past two incredibly long weeks. We took lots of walks. We juiced what felt like a metric ton of fruits and vegetables every morning. We made za'atar rolls—think savory cinnamon buns, substituting thyme and sumac for the cinnamon—and ground our way through two bags of coffee beans. I played around with some new lenses and worked on lining up wedding bookings for the summer. Juli hammered out a few pairs of gold hoop earrings. We watched all of True Detective...twice. We hypnotized ourselves reading a book on techniques for getting through labor and woke up two hours later wondering where the evening had gone. We walked some more. Down to the lake. Through a marsh. We visited with friends and went out to dinner and saw movies and were mindful of how our impending arrival may complicate simple outings like this in the future. We enjoyed, generally, this last stretch of quiet childlessness before the diapers and late nights and whatever else is in store. But we're ready for it, I think, and all the good things too.
To be juiced.
Za'atar and olive oil.
Turtles all the way down.
Now, how will Callie—our noble feline beast—adapt to life with a new baby? That's a different question altogether.