I tuned in today to Vince Laforet’s CreativeLive workshop, and much to my surprise I discovered that my friend Miguel Edwards is the artist who is being featured in the documentary film that students are creating this weekend. Go Miguel! Yesterday’s workshop was pretty lame, with Laforet spending a lot of time doing weak overviews of Adobe products that he obviously didn’t know how to use himself. But today is back on track and well worth watching. Here’s the link: http://creativelive.com/live. I also caught a glimpse of Seattle photographer John Cornicello in the background of some of the shots, where it appears he’s on the crew as gaffer. He’s one of the people I’ve interviewed for Beyond Naked. Nice to see some familiar faces at this high-profile workshop.

This Seattle documentary film has been shot and needs to raise a small amount of money to complete the film. A small donation can help it across the finish line.

Today was my first day of filming with my custom shoulder rig. And to sum it up in a word: sweet. The rig is light, easily shifts aside so I can have off-camera conversations, and rock-steady when I need it to be.

One limitation is that everything starts to look like it’s shot at eye level because, well, it is. But I discovered a workaround for that today: wear knee pads. Seriously. With knee pads on, I can drop lightly to one knee while shooting, and put the camera at the same level as I’d be if I were hand-holding the camera football style. Touchdown!

Visual Contact relaunches officially today, a company that I’ve been running for more than a decade, but that until until now was focused on web development. As of today, Visual Contact will focus exclusively on producing videos for commercial clients, with a focus on the needs of schools. Check out the new site at http://www.visualcontact.com.

On Española, Darwin comes face to face with a juvenile waved albatross. These endangered birds have the largest wingspan of any bird, up to 11 feet. This one is nearing the day when it will awkwardly waddle about 200 feet from its nest to a cliff overlooking the ocean, to leap over the edge into it’s first flight.

I’m back from an extraordinary holiday voyage around the Galapagos archipelago. My traveling companion on the journey was none other than Charles Darwin, who spoke to me from a shelf at Archie McPhee, expressing a keen desire to make a return trip to the islands he visited 175 years ago, to “see how things have evolved.”

We had many adventures together. During the rest of this month, I’ll be posting a new photo every day from our visit to the Enchanted Isles that rocked the world.

I’m also cutting a short film shot during the trip on my Canon 60D and lovely little Canon S95 with Ikelite underwater housing, which I’ll post later this month. Enjoy.

Did you hear that big thunderclap that split the sky over Seattle last Wednesday morning? That was our first day of shooting on my first feature-length film, a participatory doc called Beyond Naked. I like to think of that moment as the film gods yelling “Action!” Herzog has his day-one, gaffer-tape-over-the-heart routine – I’ve got my thunder. I like where this is going!

Follow our progress on the film’s website at http://www.beyondnakedfilm.com, a WordPress blog that I’ll be updating frequently with stills, clips, and much more.

Here’s a few frame grabs that will give you a taste of the gloomy vibe we’re choosing to open the film with (this is Seattle in December, after all):

I met Vincent Moon a few months ago when Northwest Film Forum brought him to Seattle for screenings of his films and a one-day workshop. I was blown away by the raw emotional power of his work, despite the fact that he breaks every rule in the filmmaking book (no narrative structure, out-of-focus subjects, made with crappy camcorders, etc.)

Moon faces the same problem faced by lots of filmmakers doing interesting (but not commercially viable) work: how to fund it. Moon has made an art of the small exchange (exchanging, for example, lodging in a foreign city for a short film about the place). But that can only take one so far. So now he’s experimenting with Kickstarter to fund the Columbia project. I’m backing it, not only because I want to see what he comes back with, but also because I’d like to understand by participating how this type of funding can work, for supporters as well as filmmakers.