You see, back when Hasser and I did that cross-country road trip back in 2005, we both thought it would be fun to take photos of every roadside billboard we saw featuring local TV news personalities. Unfortunately we thought of it in the last twp hours of our 36 hour drive, passing hundreds of them along the way. And I’ve been meaning to start a photo collection ever since.

So I’ve started my very own Flickr group called, “Local TV Personality Billboards” and I’m looking for folks to submit shots of their area TV news anchors on roadside billboards. Anyone can join/post, and I give bonus points to those who have the “Mount Rushmore” shots of anchors cut-n-pasted together, defying lighting and spacial composition. Anyone interested? It’s like a scavenger hunt!

Apart from “doing the family thing” I’ve just been trying to get everything organized in my life, both offline and online. You may have noticed some housekeeping going on here at LLR and some of my tertiary sites.
I’m flipping switches and knocking out projects.

Here’s a quick list of my current obsessions:

Television - True Blood, Royal Pains
Music - everything M.Ward (as per usual), Depeche Mode’s “Sounds of the Universe”, and White Lies. I just realized that I totally forgot to get the new Placebo album!
Video Games: Oblivion, Peggle, and I’m dying to get online and do some gaming with friends soon (Gears2 or Left4Dead anyone? I’m hungry for Horde/Survival modes).

Did I mention this was all shot on my still camera? Aww yeah, 5D2 FTW!

There’s also an alternate version of this spot, with just the announcer speaking (and a really-alternative version that I’m hoping gets approved), and also each of the reporters has their own shorter personalized promo.

With all the cool 3D animations and Lensbaby HD video aside, my favorite part has got to be the ’street posters’ of the gang. My boss thought of it when we were out scouting locations for the shoot, and it worked out really well. Now I have three giant posters of the gang looming over me in my office, keeping watchful eye over my internet usage.

I’ve been snapping a ton of RAW photos, and I finally got the chance to shoot a project that can use some ‘high pass’ and bleach filtering that I’ve been dying to process some photos with. The investigative photos work better with this look than shots of my daughter playing with dolls, for sure.

Shooting with the 5D2 has its limitations, for sure, but the saturation and depth-of-field more than makes up for them. You just have to practice and come up with some of your own tricks to get exactly what you want. Actually, I can’t wait to see what my next project looks like now that I actually have full manual control over the exposure with the new firmware update. (For this project I only used audio as an enhancement, or to hear my shot markers. I have had some luck with audio on other projects — more on that in another post).

Anyway, I just wanted to show off some raw video before posting the actual promo spots with all the post-production enhancements. Not bad for a consumer camera sporting a toy lens, right?

This week a bunch of cool projects that I’ve been working on will finally be let out into the wild, and I’ll finally be able to post some rad photos and videos on the blog. Later this week we’re off to Atlanta for the Southeast Emmy awards thing, and I can’t wait to see dozen of old colleagues and friends while I’m in town.

I was toying with the idea of just converting my blog to a Tumblr blog (littlelostrobot.tumblr.com), but I’ll lose some functionality along the way. Also, Tumblr and Flickr haven’t exchanged APIs yet, which was the deal breaker for me. I think I liked the idea of going to Tumblr because it’s part of that whole ‘follow culture’ that’s going on right now….which is partly to blame in my lack of motivation.

I’m finding it hard to update my blog, and follow/comment on other blogs when everything is cross broadcast through Twitter and Facebook. Anyone else feeling that way? Well, I’ve decided to get back on the blog. I just have too much cool stuff to post this summer. I’m not sure about going back and restoring old posts though, but I’m going to syndicate all my WP posts to my Tumblr page so that I’ll have somewhere to go if everything implodes again.

Anyway, I’ll end this with a question to y’all. Do you still read blogs, or as many blogs?

Here’s a little HD video I shot with my Canon 5DII of one of my robots being battered by sea water. Trust me, it looks pretty sweet in full HD. I’m probably going to have to upgrage my Vimeo account (and upload it there) to prove it.

Accidentally ending up in Montego Bay, Jamaica is the least of the problems for the Channel 6 news team. The sea water has already began rusting away the live van, and all their debit cards have been declined because they neglected to call their banks ahead of time to notify them that they would be in another country. Looks like they won’t be able to buy any fancy dinners to put on the expense report this time.

Of course, all of this contributed to them missing yet another live shot.

I snapped this shot as the sun was setting on both the Gulf…and our cruise vacation.