Vanessa Carr

Walton from Mash SF on the podium at the Bay Area Super Prestige race today at Candlestick Park.

Laundry night with the mittens.

This documentary about iconic fashion editor Diana Vreeland was just released in theaters!

You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.

These are my working conditions. 

I cannot wait to see this film! An ode to the power of timelapse photography to tell big stories.

Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of that first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers.

Meet Bowie & Fox, my 5-month old Russian Blue rescue kittens. They are sisters and love to hang out together all the time!

The second DFL cross dressing cyclocross race of 2012 in San Francisco. See more photos here. 

The Glory Hole is a 30-foot tall, 300-foot deep overflow pipe in northern California (I swore I wouldn’t say exactly where, bro’s honor) popular among BMX riders and skateboarders that is only accessible by raft. When I saw pictures that SF photo crew Full Frame Collective posted, I knew I had to try out some long exposure shots of BMX riders lighting up the full pipe at night.

Nine of us hiked our gear down to the river, only to discover that we’d forgotten some key items, most notably the valve for the raft. Luckily, Paul was wearing his “Let’s Wing It” t-shirt and managed to procure an electric pump and some duct tape at 11 o’clock at night in the middle of nowhere.  We inflated the raft, covered the valve with duct tape, and prayed we’d stay afloat!

Buoyed by some liquid courage, we ferried the group, seven BMX bikes, and and all my camera gear out to the pipe where we set up camp for the night. A near harvest moon lit our way but meant it was too bright for any starry shots. 

Paul and I spent the entire night experimenting with long exposures in the pipe. Without road flares (also on the list of forgotten items), all he had to light his path were two bike lights, which revealed a ghostly route in the deep pipe. The somewhat abstract images that resulted — mostly 30-second exposures shot on a 16-35mm lens — came out pretty well, although I wish that I had shot at a higher f-stop so that the full depth of the pipe would be sharply in focus. Noelle, Monti, and I also had some fun with light painting. As the sun rose, it poured down the back of the pipe (which slopes vertically toward the sky) and lit up some almost painting-like striations — and kept us up way past our bedtime.

Thanks to Paul for making it all happen! You can see more images from the trip here.