Erik Seo Photography Blog

Every Day is a Saturday Teaser - Poor Boyz Productions

Erik Seo — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:59:10 +0000

The next installment of the teaser season brings “Every Day is a Saturday” by Poor Boyz Productions. PBP is one of the three film crews that I regularly work with, one that I spent about 3 weeks this Spring shooting with at Mt. Hood Ski Bowl and at Mt. Bachelor, both in the Oregon Cascade Mountains. We shot a lot of pretty sick features this Spring, some of which is shit that you just thought went down in video games. Check out the teaser below.

4th of July

Erik Seo — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:26:26 +0000

Every year I can remember except for one I spent in Park City and the Summer I spent in New Zealand, my 4th of July has been spent back home in Seattle at the Harris’s house. I started going there in pre-school, it was the perfect spot for a 4th of July party. Private beach location on the Puget Sound so anything goes with fireworks and views of 3 fireworks shows, Tacoma, Vashon Island and Three Tree Point. Add in good old friends I get to see every year and it’s something I knew I always had plans for. As we all grew up, the fireworks evolved. We all started with small, “safe and sane” fireworks you can buy at all the fireworks stands with my brother Stan and Sam’s older brother Ty going for the bigger and better fireworks (both of them are in the military now as it turns out). Undoubtedly the influence of our older brothers made myself and Sam get creative with our own fireworks, eventually creating things to destroy our entire collection of GI Joe toys in one day.

We’ve all grown up a bit. They 4th at the Harris’s has reverted back to how it started for the most part. Kids running around and playing, some shooting fireworks. Instead of my friends and I, it has become the children of my friends running around. It’s a pretty cool thing to see, pretty much watching what my childhood was like right in front of my face. The same place, the same day, add in a lot of new faces. It’s a fun day.

Everything has evolved and although we have grown up, we still blow shit up. Now we have more resources to buy more shit to blow up. Here’s where things haven’t reverted back to where the 4th of July at the Harris’s started out. Enter Dan Randall to the situation. Dan started coming to the 4th when we were in college and has been bringing more and more to the beach every year to blow up. A little background, Dan enjoys all things that blow up. From throwing little firecrackers one by one, to his time in the US Army as a demolitions specialist, blowing up more shit than you can imagine. As you would guess, Dan loves the 4th. The past 2 years he’s brought a large bottle rocket launcher that does 10,000 bottle rockets in a few minutes. This year he stepped it up a bit, making a small barge to float the launcher out to sea a bit to keep things at a bit of a distance and make things a bit safer. We’ve had to dodge stray bottle rockets in the past few years so a bit of distance should help things out a bit. Doug Earle also came in to help out with this monstrosity adding in a remote start capability to the barge making things a bit safer and more enjoyable for everyone.

This year the massive 22,000 bottle rocket launcher went off exactly as planned. The barge floated, the remote igniter worked, all the bottle rockets went off, nobody had to duck for cover and it was just pretty damn cool. Photos are below, video of the bottle rocket launcher to come as soon as I get it.

Cheers to Dan and Doug and of course the Harris’s for making another great 4th.

Cobey and Sarah’s Wedding - Blessed Sacrament Church in Seattle, Washington

Erik Seo — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:36:28 +0000

I got in touch with Winnie Forbes (now, Winnie Brinker) about doing a wedding with her as her 2nd shooter last summer for Cobey and Sarah’s wedding. As it turns out it was at Blessed Sacrament Church in Seattle, Washington where I had shot a wedding the previous year so she was stoked, already knew the location, etc. Winnie brought me on to roll with the guys and shoot with them while she took care of the girls. Yah, the guys are easy so I was stoked. It was a super laid back group so it was pretty easy and to make matters even better, Casey from Mindcastle Studios was there doing the video so for a lot of things, he directed what he was doing and I just rolled with it and shot what was going on with that which was really cool. Casey had some good ideas and was super good work with and Danielle.

It was a great day shooting and it was fun to be on the other side of things, not being the main shooter. Sometimes not having 100% of the responsibility is pretty nice! As it turns out, things were good, and more than just a fun easy day of being the 2nd shooter. Photo District News Magazine (PDN) selected one of my photos from this wedding in their Top Knots wedding photography contest a few months ago! Check out the blog post here:

Refresh teaser - Level 1 Productions

Erik Seo — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:00:34 +0000

It’s teaser season for the upcoming ski moves and the second installment so far this summer is for “Refresh” by Level 1 Productions. Level 1 is one of the film crews I work pretty closely with throughout the Winter seasons. I’ve been able to go on trips with them to Montreal, Quebec City (for a feature in SBC Skier Magazine for this upcoming Winter), Grand Rapids, Copper Mountain, Mammoth Mountain and of course a lot of work at home here in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was a really good year and definitely working with Level 1. Check out the teaser below. I’ll be updating the blog soon with some photos that didn’t make the cut with the magazines for the upcoming season but that I was still really stoked on.

Level 1 - Refresh Teaser from Level 1 on Vimeo.

Winter of Wells video - Episode 1 of 8

Erik Seo — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:07:57 +0000

Jossi and Byron Wells are two of the most talented skiers in the Southern Hemisphere. Jossi has been winning or on the podium in most of the freeskiing contests out there and Byron had his first X-Games appearance this year in the Superpipe. The Wells family house in Wanaka, New Zealand is a breeding ground for New Zealand ski talent and it won’t be too long before the younger brothers Beau and Jack start showing up on the radar of the freeskiing world as well. I’ve known the family for 4 years now and have been fortunate enough to work with them now for the same amount of time.

Check out Jossi and Byron at Cardrona Resort outside of Wanaka, New Zealand in this first episode of a 8 part series this Winter season (in the Southern Hemisphere) so keep an eye out for many more of these to come this Summer (for us in the Northern Hemisphere).

Winter Of Wells - Episode 1, Cardrona from Zeros&Ones on Vimeo.

New geek gear!

Erik Seo — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:00:03 +0000

After dealing with the old Seagate 1.5 tb hard drives and their problems I decided to go with some of the very reliable and very fast Western Digital Cavair 1tb “black” hard drives. The WD1001FALS drive is one of the fastest and has become one of the most reliable 7200 RPM hard drives out in the market, almost as bomber as their server class drives but at consumer level pricing. Right now they are available for $99 making these a no brainer. I’m stoked I’m finally replacing my slow old Seagate 1.5 tb drives with these new WesternDigital HD’s. A fast and reliable hard drive has become more important to me since my entire liveliehood is on these drives.

I already have a RAID 1 system to automatically write data to two hard drives at the same time for an automatic backup which has already saved me a few times with some previous drive failures. Since then I’d never work without the RAID as it’s saved me from the time in downloading from my web backup or my other backup site. I’m able to keep working as I just put in a new matching drive and the RAID1 system automatically copies over all the data from the working drive to the new drive.

Now I just have to wait for all the data from the old drives to the new drives so I can get going on retiring my other old 500 gb RAID 1array and get back to work.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB Hard Drive review - RUN AWAY!!!

Erik Seo — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:00:20 +0000

A few months ago these new 1.5 tb hard drives from Seagate (Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA) and I’m thinking this is going to be awesome! Lots of space, two of these 1.5 tb hard drives in my RAID array (mirrored backup) can take the place of six total 500 gb drives in my RAID array! After using these things for the past 3 months, I’m pretty excited to retire them. There is a pretty big flaw in these drives that make them not play nice in a RAID array, they go to sleep and power down all the time. The problem with this in a RAID array is a lot of RAID controllers (like mine, the onboard Intel IHC9) think that the drive has failed when it powers down, the powers back up out of sleep mode, causing the RAID controller to start a refresh of the drive it thinks failed. So basicallly, the RAID controller is rewriting information to one of the drives making it run a lot slower. Not a nice thing to have going in the middle of an edit when you need all the speed you can get out of your machine! Supposedly this problem was fixed in a revision of the firmware however I wouldn’t want to mess with it as you really don’t know which version you are going to end up with this drive.

Also, a lot of reviews out there are talking about DOA (dead on arrival) drives out there which is just the last straw to make you want to stay away. I had one of the drives fail on me, and had to warranty it. Forutnately for me, I have a RAID 1 setup and it was all backed up automatically. I wouldn’t reccomend this drive for anything really. The reason I put up a drive review here on my blog is hard drives are now a part of the endless gear photographers need now. Getting the right drives that are fast and most importantly, reliable is an important thing these days!

Stay away from these drives. Seagate has been really good in the past, however this is one you want to avoid at all costs, especially if you run your computer on a RAID array. Over at www.newegg.com (very reputable place to buy computer gear from btw) the customer reviews are currently giving 26% a 1 star review, which is the worst you can rate this drive at. Yah, not a good sign. Check out the bad reviews here

Trigger your Canon DSLR with your iphone!

Erik Seo — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:00:36 +0000

This is one of those things, it’s really cool and amazing as to how far things have come with the development of the iphone software and with digital camera equipment. A new app for the iphone is out called the onOne DSLR Camera Remote. There are two versions, the full version that allows control of shooting in full teathered mode with mode, shutter speed, aperature, ISO speed adjustment, and image preview, right on the phone for $19.95. The lite version of this app is $1.99. Yes, $1.99! The Nikon version is currently in development. So here is the catch, and for some it might not really be much of a catch. You need to have the camera teathered to a wifi enabled computer via USB cord like you’d normally have your teathered setup. So what’s different? You can walk around and have all the control like you would at the laptop, on your iphone or ipod touch. Seriously, what’s next for an iphone app?

Check out the full story I stumbled apon over here - http://www.ppmag.com/web-exclusives/product_reviews/

Action Sports photographers, are you over it with editorial?

Erik Seo — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:44:15 +0000

Talking with a lot of the action sports photographers out there, a lot of us are tired of doing editorial work. Tired of working so hard for so little pay. Tired of fronting their expenses for the season, to hopefully make it back at the end of the summer, 6 months later. Tired in general. So what is the solution? All commercial work? Sure, it’s an option. It’s a more financially stable option for yourself. Commercial work pays better, it is a lot less work for a lot more money. It’s completely the opposite of editorial that way and while it’s not making me rich, it’s making my life a lot more comfortable than when I was relying on editorial work in my tiny little niche of action sports.

What good is editorial for us as photographers then? Most of my work has been editorial work until the past 3 years. Editorial work does a few things for me. It builds my creativity, it builds my portfolio, it builds my style and in turn, builds my brand as a photographer. Sure, for those of you out there that are at the point where you just do commercial work and make a shitload of money doing so it is probably pretty good. You folk are making a great living, especially compared to myself. Does this come at an expense though? Are you so focused on someone else’s branding, are you losing your own style, your own branding, your own personal creativity?

I wish I could remember who told me their views on the panel of finalists in the Pro Photographer Showdown at the World Ski and Snowboard Festival in Whistler, BC this year…that a lot of the photographers there were jaded by commercial work. Is this the case or is it just a shift in style? Does a mass of commercial work make you lose the side of you that focuses on documenting the moments of action, the moments our lifestyles, the moments of our environments?

I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on this. As much as I want more commercial projects, the editorial assignments I worked on this year pushed me to come up with humor, to find personalities, to convey lifestyles in ways I previously have not. Would I have done this with commercial projects working with very specific concepts? Would you have?

Pretty Good - Rage Films Teaser

Erik Seo — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:04:25 +0000

Pretty Good Teaser by Rage Films from Rage Films on Vimeo.

Most of you guys that are following my blog have already seen this teaser but for those that haven’t, check it out.
This is the 9th ski movie put out by Rage Films - Dan Norkunas, AJ DeSaint Phalle and Hennie Van Jarsfeld. It’s always great to see what comes together after working with them shooting still photos all season and I’m stoked to check out the whole thing. The movie features Kyler Cooley, Dylan Natale, Mike Mertion, Ian Cosco, Joe Schuster, Derek Spong, Mark Dvorak, John Strenio, Alex Schlopy, Gus Kenworthy, Giray Dadali, Cody Ling, and Joss Christensen.