– turn the ethereal into your reality –

The truth is, Santana really knows how to rock it out with a guitar:

Citizen Cope/Santana – Sideways

That’s all.  I just felt like sharing.  Also, this song makes me feel good, and bad.  With it’s melancholy underpinnings, and spine-tingling guitar, it just seeps emotion… At least, that’s how I feel.  The great thing about music is that it speaks to everyone differently.

Cheers,

-Martin

General footnote:  Happy Holidays, everybody!  Remember, this is a holiday about giving.  As I imagine most of you are like me and live in the wealthiest nation in the world, how about you go check out The Life You Can Save and make a donation to those less fortunate.  If you find yourself with a moral dilemma in regards to feeding the hungry vs. population control, you can walk on over to Wikipedia, and check out the Demographic-Economic Paradox and rest assured that you are, in fact, doing the right thing.

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