– turn the ethereal into your reality –

I just saw this guy’s work today, and he’s basically my newest hero:

http://www.woodthatworks.com/

His work basically exemplifies my ideal form of art.  If anyone asked me “what did you create your blog for” it would be to showcase stuff like this.  Preferably stuff like this that I made, but, I haven’t… yet.

This holiday season I’ll be making a donation to one of the organizations listed here:

http://www.thelifeyoucansave.com/organizations

This is a compiled list of the most effective charities.  The metric they use is an estimation of how much money it costs to save a life, which usually ends up going to impoverished 3rd-world areas.  You can be selective, too.  There are a few different choices for what the charities do, and I believe some of them even have donations specific to geographic regions.

I wanted to set it up and pledge to donate 10% of my photography net income, but I got to it too late in the game.  A quick discussion with my tax adviser revealed it would be a huge mess to do that  so close to the end of the year.  Oh well, I’ll just have to keep that in mind for next year.

So basically I can’t officially claim that I’ll be donating a specific percentage, and I can’t offer any of my customers the benefits of a tax write-off for donating to a 501(c)(3) non-profit.  But I can say I plan on donating, and I urge you to do it as well.  It feels good.  :)

Cheers,

-Martin

Hey everyone!  In the wake of the 2010 Catalina Grand Prix, here’s some useful information:

If you’re looking to purchase photos, or just want to check out my entire published album of 4,266 photos, you can do so here: http://miwanowicz.photoreflect.com/

If you want to check out highlights from the weekend, you can do so here:
Sunday Highlights
Saturday Highlights (Note: I’m sorry to report I didn’t get any shots of Race #5 – Sorry!)

Special thanks to Nick with RacerX for the article, which you can find here: http://www.racerxonline.com/article/red-bull-catalina-gp-participant-photos.aspx

Finally, you should check out The Catalina Islander (Friday, Dec 10, 2010 Edition)  for their great article on the competition.  Also – I snagged the cover shot ;-)
Shout out to Dan for this opportunity!

Cover Shot!

Cheers!

-Martin

Here are a few highlights from the races on Sunday.
You can view and purchase photos here: http://miwanowicz.photoreflect.com/

Cheers!

-Martin

Here are a few quick highlight photos from the races on Saturday.  Enjoy!
You can view and purchase photos here: http://miwanowicz.photoreflect.com/

More to come on Sunday…

Cheers!

-Martin

Hey y’all!

The Catalina Grand Prix is coming up this weekend, and I’m SUPER excited about it! Part of the exciting news is that I’ll be photographing the entire event with a Canon EF 300mm/f 2.8L IS USM lens. How’s that for a mouthful?  For those of you participating in the event, you will be able to find your photos from my online store, which will debut with this event.

Any news throughout the weekend will be published through my Twitter (link at the top of this page), but since I’ll be focusing on the photography, I make no guarantees about reporting the event throughout the weekend.  As soon as the weekend’s over expect to see all of my best work here.

Update 12/10/2010: You can view and purchase photos here: http://miwanowicz.photoreflect.com/

Cheers!

-Martin

Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion

I just read this book in one sitting.  It took about three hours, and now I’m going to…

CRUSH IT!!!!111

Single most inspirational book in terms of having a successful online presence.  Ever.  This book applies to everyone as we work our way into the 21st century.  It applies to all of us, as we continue to discover how the Internet continues to change the world.  It’s particularly pertinent if you have any interest in maintaining an online presence, or are actively involved in running your own business.  This book can guide your way to reaching not only more people – but more people that actually care about you and your product, and that’s great ROI.

After reading this book I literally revamped my entire blog, and took a completely new approach to finding readers.  It actually came down to one basic concept – be true to yourself.  Write about what you’re passionate about.  Care about your readers and the community.  Flex social networking as an advertising tool.  Don’t be fake, and don’t BS.

I’m also actively working through applying concepts in The 4-Hour Workweek (Expanded and Updated) which in a way provides a polar opposite view.  Crush It tells you to work longer and harder than ever before, but it tells you to work on what you love.  The 4-Hour Workweek tells you to work less, but work on something you don’t love – for the purpose of freeing up your time to do that which you love.  Crush It tells you to be extremely in-tune with social networks, and that every single person is important and should be treated as such.  The 4-Hour Workweek tells you to disconnect from the network, drop social networks in general, and cater yourself only to the customers that result in the highest return, for the minimum effort.

Sounds like quite the conflict, no?  In truth, I think the books compliment each other magnificently.  The underlying message of using your internal drive to follow your dreams and accomplish great things is the foundation for both books.  The 4-Hour Workweek can tell you how to start a business to support you, and give you the time to follow your dreams, and Crush It will show you how to make money by following your dreams.  Dreams that you now can follow because you took to heart the things in The 4-Hour Workweek.  Awesome!

It’s like – could two things go hand-in-hand better?  Peas and Carrots?  Horses and Carriages?

;-)

Cheers!

-Martin

Next weekend we’ve got this goin’ on.

I’m going, are you?

http://www.thecatalinagrandprix.com/

December 4-5.  Chillin’ in Avalon.  ;-)

Common misconception:  Using the built-in flash always results in awful pictures.  Case in point:

A sexy picture of me using built-in flash

Alright, I know you can’t resist that lovable face, but let’s be brutally honest – this picture sucks.  I s’pose I could have chosen a picture with better composition, or one that was in focus, or without such a doofy look on my face, but I’m trying to prove a point here – on-camera flash often achieves terrible results.  Many people think it ALWAYS achieves terrible results.  I beg to differ:

Slightly more flattering on-camera flash

Same photo shoot, taken approximately 10 minutes apart.  Much better, no?  Ok, so I admit – there’s more going on here than just the lighting.  The second picture is a completely different composition, and I actually managed to look half decent.  It’s probably the only shot in the entire series where I don’t look mildly retarded.

But I digress, I’m not here to talk about my modeling capabilities, I’m here to talk about being creative.  Let me give you some background – I wanted a profile picture for this blog.  For a variety of reasons I don’t want to use any of my stocked photos, so I decided to do some self-portrait work.  I don’t actually own an external flash, I always borrow my roommate’s when I need one.  Problem is – he’s out of town with all of his camera equipment.

I have motivation to do this photo shoot RIGHT NOW but no proper flash equipment.  The solution?

A hair brush.

Specifically, a hairbrush Lufthansa gave me when they lost my luggage, two or three years ago.  Also a rubber band and an extra Compat Flash card… Oh, and a white wall.

Bounce that Flash, Lufhansa hair brush!

First – I apologize for this crappy photo.  Instead of using a complex mirror setup to have the camera take a picture of itself (I did think about doing that) I just used my cell phone camera, which is awful, at best, but it gets the job done.

The setup:

The hairbrush has a mirror in the handle.  It is also a folding brush, so I used the rubber band to attach it to the pop-up flash on my camera, then angled the handle approximately 45 degrees.  The compact flash card just adds a little more support to keep it propped up properly.  Bounce that flash on a white wall, and voila!  Studio finish lighting!

Note:  I am holding a white reflector behind the camera in this shot, but I didn’t use it for my portrait photo as I had a nice white wall to bounce off of.  Also it’s worth noting that I turned the flash exposure up to +2, the highest my built-in flash will go.

I love creative solutions to absolutely unnecessary problems.  ;-)

Cheers!

-Martin

I kept having some formatting problems with my old theme, and thus wasn’t particularly happy with it.  Unfortunate.  I spent a good while getting the colors and the patterns all setup.

Lesson learned:  Try a theme for a while before committing time to it and modifying it.  This should’ve been obvious.  Anyways, this one looks really similar, just black/grey instead of blue.
Cheerio!