A photo shoot with Fall of a Tyrant

A while back (months and months), one of my buddies told me to come and check out his band, being an average person of this internet age. I went to the bands website and was appalled by what I found. The pictures sucked (really, they did) and that they sucked so bad that I offered my photography services for free of charge to fix the problem, perhaps even shoot a video for them (my ulterior motives were to add on to my portfolio, perhaps other bands who had crappy websites would come forward to ask for pictures after seeing what I did for these guys). So last while I was off in Key West last month, I get a text message from Jason (lead singer of Fall of a Tyrant) asking if I could come out when I came back and take some pictures. Being the middle of the night, I texted him back to remind me when I was awake. So with the bride in tow, we went out to Club Retro in Fresno, an all ages non-profit music venue. We arrived and got permission from the powers to take pictures and below is a sample of what I came up with and a link to my Flickr Set. The band did a great show and I hope my pictures and video reflect that.

Pictures were shot with the Canon 7d, video with the trusty Iraqi Canon S3. I would have done the video with the 7d but the DSLR works better under scripted settings and I need a computer with more punch to edit the high def video.

Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?

Alright, I have a weakness for Joss Whedon but this video is actually by his brother Jed and stars the lovely Felicia Day. What does this have to do with Milblogging, why, nothing at all. From the people who brought you Dr. Horrible, enjoy.

Zuning out

In honor of picking up first class (and finally getting paid for it), I finally got a video MP3 player. Costco.com had Microsoft Zunes on sale for 149, I’m sort of an apple phobic, a couple of years ago, I plugged an external hard drive into a Mac to share some of my music with one of my guys and it reformatted it. When I plugged it back into my laptop all it read was a big 0.

I got back all of my music but had small playlists on one gig MP3 players, just waiting for the proper deal and it came.

First thoughts? I can put the WMV’s I made on it and the picture quality is amazing, haven’t used the WiFi functions though, have to find someone else that has a Zune. It did come with a 14 day pass to the Zune Marketplace of which I’ve taken full advantage off. It has a solid heavy feel to it, it’s covered with a clear plastic lining that looks rather tough and the buttons are easy to use even when you have a covering over it. One complaint I have is that it slows my computer to a crawl when it’s synchronizing, the laptop is almost two years old (HP Pavilion dv5000 with a gig of RAM) but it still does the job. I wish you could delete songs while using the Zune when it’s not docked, I’ve loaded 5000 or so songs on there and some of it is just crap. It would be nice to have a trash button.

It’s leaps and bounds over anything I have owned before and much less touchy then the Ipods that I used, road trips are going to be great! Well I got to strap it on and get back to cleaning, have a great weekend everyone.

Rock Down to Electric Avenue

Another fine music video from the front

JCB Music Video

I normally don't do Cute but being a father, this video hit the spot. It's unlike anything I've ever seen and it cheered me up. Great job man!

Watch it, believe me, you won't regret it, here's the youtube version, not as cool as the full sized one on the link above.



Don't click if you're using dial up though.


(H/T Swan)

Toad the Wet Sprocket at the OC Fair

A couple of weeks ago in passing, I entered a contest on the Toad the Wet Sprocket’s myspace page to win concert tickets to see their first show that they’ve performed in over a year at the Orange County fair and last week I got an email from Wahoo’s Fish Taco’s (people who sponsored the prizes) saying that I won.

So last night my son and I drove up there. The last time I saw them in concert was in September of 1996 with Neil Young. Collin was almost 3 and I was stationed at MCAS El Toro and married to his mom. The reason he knows Toad is because I gave him an MP3 player last year that had a bunch of their music on it.

Toad as always been one of my favorite bands, their music resonates somewhere inside of me but its sound has defiled easy description and a most people have never heard of them. I told my coworkers, “I’m going to see Toad the Wet Sprocket!” And every single one of them said “Who?”

Toad the Wet Sprocket’s music is sad and bittersweet, it’s hard to drop them into a genre, they’re a mix of REM, Jar’s of Clay, Nickel Creek and old Jimmy Eat World. Their music invokes loss, love and life mixes everything together into a rush of beauty. Most of their music is about something being wrong but somehow they get it just right. It’s strange that I can get such joy out of such sad music.

Great show guys, you’ve always been able to touch home with me.

Now we're heading down to Comic Con, expect pictures.