Texas Governor Rick Perry shares a cell phone with filmmaker, Robert Rodriguez at Troublemaker Studios during a bill signing in Austin, Texas.

Filmmaker, Robert Rodriguez speaks at Troublemaker Studios during a bill signing in Austin, Texas.

Texas Governor Rick Perry speaks at Troublemaker Studios during a bill signing in Austin, Texas.

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I did it again. By the grace of God I once again have a studio to meet people in and shoot if the weather is inclimate or if I just feel like exploring light! It was a long arduous journey through a lot of pain and suffering and yelling and throwing things and bending drywall and sanding and everything but in the end it was worth it! I had a party and invited everyone I know including clients, and photographers. Below are some of the guest pictures that I shot.

Ben and Sara

Andy Peterson

Mark and Emily

Farah and Spence

Nichelle and Darren

David Hill

Matt and Rhonda

Jeff and Alissa Marrow

Ulrike

Brittnee

Janna and Ryan

Sierra and Sandra

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Well, I’ll tell you what: Macs are slow. I know everyone in the audience out there is beginning to scream with incredible vehemence but dollar for dollar you all know it’s true. I will concede that Macs are beautiful, well built machines filled with quality parts and if you have the money to burn you are certainly able to pay at least twice as much and get a machine that is better than your typical Dell or HP. But what about the custom built PCs that have parts that are the same quality as that in the Mac? Where Windows XP is easily as stable as OS X? Can it be? Of course. Just don’t go buy a Dell or a HP because the only way they make money is by purchasing the cheapest parts in the largest quantity.

Now before you all spam me with your, I had a PC and I switched to Mac or Mac has never failed me or I’ll never read your blog again posts, I’ll tell you a secret. I own more Mac’s than I do PCs and as far as laptops are concerned I would never buy anything else. I have a couple of Mac laptops which are grand machines for the typical operation of an office, emailing, writing, taking notes. But they are terribly slow if youask them to even start Photoshop. At that point they come to a halt and that cute little beach ball of death torments you without end. I also have an iMac G5 which is quickly approaching 3-years-old which is considerably faster than both of the laptops but still is no comparison to my 2 4-year-old Pentium 4s. Not even close. The contest is over.

But lately, I’ve been processing more and more images as things get busier and I’m starting to see the P4 is just not fast enough anymore. So the time has come to build another machine. I hear you mac people grumbling in the background. It isn’t going to happen kids. To get what I need in a Mac, it would cost around $4k which makes sure I have plenty of RAM, ample harddrive space, and absolutely a 500GB raid 5 array. I can buy the parts for around $1500 and actually have a faster machine if it is a Windows or Linux machine and it will be equal in stability. Where is the contest?

The naming game has been going on for years. I wasn’t very creative when I started. The main machine is Blackbox. The back-up main machine is Mistertime. The iMac G5 used to be White Wonder but is now is Timelord in homage to Doctor Who. The Powerbook is named Gigaflop and the new MacBook is called the TARDIS in reference once again to our new found obsession with Doctor Who.

The new machine will be a Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHZ machine and I’m toying with the name Torchwood, another Doctor Who reference. It’s an anagram of Doctor Who. You’ll be happy to know that I didn’t obsess to that point about the show. The creators did that during early production of the 2005 revamping of the show to prevent it from leaking out to the press. The show was code named Torchwood to throw off any leaks about it’s true nature.

I’m open to ideas. Leave posts in the blog. Let me know what you think. But no hate mail about my estimation of Steve Jobs’ obsessive compulsive need to control the universe like a young, unmasked Darth Vader in the early years. His vision is nice, but it’s just kind of slow.

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I decided to start small in Austin rather than going in on a studio that was meant for a more established business. And I did that and stopped looking around for a studio space.

Then out of the blue, something just dropped into my lap and I couldn’t say no. 2007 Kramer Ln, Suite 104, Austin, TX 78758

It was perfect in more ways than something can be perfect. It was actually too big and gave me a little more room to design something really cool, somewhat like my last studio but bigger, better and cooler.

I try not to emphasize this to most of my clients, but I can do just about anything. In my past I’ve learned a little of everything and done a little of everything especially in the construction world. The following pictures showcase some of that everything that I have done in the past and apparently still have the skills for today. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t read the blog and just looks at the pictures it just looks like someone came in and did it all for, but I did everything single thing in the remodel from the framing to the electrical. I just do photography because I love it and I am better at shooting a wedding than anything else I have done.

There are a few people must thank for helping me out of the kindness of their hearts because I am too cheap to hire people and refuse to hire illegal aliens to do the grunt work.

First off is: Nate Mayfield who is a world class trumpet player here in Austin, studied at Juliard and was reduced to laying floor with me for a couple of days.

Second is: My bother Adam who was all too excited about finding me in his driveway to unexpectedly pick him up before some awful part of the remodel. Cheerfully he would lend his assistance.

Lastly is: Victor. Drywall hanging crazy man.

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This is what it looked like after we began laying out the walls. The space was used as storage for the guys behind my space since the last tenant left early in 2007. One of the tenants behind me owns a company called Digital Vehicles, Inc, a company that makes realistic formula one racing simulators that tour with the races. That explains why there was a race car in the space when we began and for almost the whole remodel.


–121507
I framed these walls all by myself today because everyone else was busy. I think it took about 5 hours.

–121607
Victor came over and we whipped out all of this drywall in about 6 hours.

–121707
Christina helped me to do the plate on the curved wall. There are no picture from this part of the operation because I was holding the plate in one hand, had a drill in the other and had an extension cord strung over a roof truss hitch to the middle of the plate so we could get it up there. You had to be there to see it and if you had been there you could have taken the picture.



–121807
My brother Adam came over this happy day to finish framing out the curved wall and hang the drywall on it. To make drywall bend you have to soak it with water and then yell at it the whole time you’re putting it up while water runs down your arms off of it. Looks so easy when it’s all done like it is in he picture.

–122107
Everyone abandoned me for the tape, mud and sanding part of the project. I suppose they had good reason because I came home for a couple of days looking like I snorted a 5-gallon bucket of cocaine. I think the is probably the most annoying thing I have ever had to do. I hate sanding drywall mud. Next time I’ll just get hire someone to do it for me. Ya right.

–122907
Primer. Yeah, you missed the texture and one coat of primer, but it all looks the same after a while.

-123107
Paint. Do you like my colors? I don’t really care. I like them.

-010508
We began the floor and got a little more than a third of it done. This is where Nate showed how fast he could move.

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Cutting around this curved wall took a lot more time than I thought it would. I think I spent 4 hours just cutting around the wall. Aren’t my kids cute?

–010708
This is the office where all of my computers live now.

–010708
This is the office where all of my computers live now with a brand spanking new floor in it.

–010708
Nate Mayfield and his infamous Baroque Trumpet Drill.

–011207
Wiring the track lighting and finalizing how the switches were going to work. This is what I consider to be the end of the construction phase of the studio. Was it fun to look through? Did everyone learn something? I sure did. Hire subs and don’t try and cram it all into a month.

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This year I finally broke down and caved under the carefully crafted advertising and media hype of the iPhone. Actually I wasn’t all that keen on the iPhone because of it’s extreme price and devotion to AT&T and wished for a device like it but without the phone part and necessity to pay a cell phone company $60 a month even to use it as an iPod. They read my mind, those buggers. Out came the iPod touch and I was hooked. They had figured out a way to get $300 out of me. And I am the first to admit that this little gizmo is incredible. Though they’ve locked the iPod Touch up to the point that it’s a little frustrating when trying to view my own website, a custome designed PHP site with embedded Flash which is not supported by Safari nor does it seem they will support Flash, it still has a whole bunch of things on it that are really useful and I have enjoyed having a new toy that I can play with.

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Overall I had a good time and it motivated me to continue pushing the limits with what I do and make images that are unforgettable. Below are a few images I shot of his models then tweaked with my own tweaks to make the images similar to his final output at the end of the day. In the end I didn’t buy his magic doodads and instead invented my own. I sell mine a little cheaper. Check out the Cheap Tricks section of our website to see what our Tweakers do. I’M DEAD SEXY!

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As is my style with everything, I am very spontaneous. I like new adventures. I’m the type of person who will call someone I know 1000 miles from home and see if I can stay the night 2 hours before I’ll be there. This has happened a couple times with my old friend Josh. He says that no one from the old school visits him very often so it’s always fun to drop in on him and go out on the town and eat around LA.

A couple of years ago, my brother and I moved my mother to Texas and called Josh asking if he had a 40 foot parking space in front of his place 2 hours before we would be there. He wasn’t really expecting us. You can tell that he was thrilled to see us as he took us to Burbank’s Fuddruckers

We’ve been out to visit many times and out to shoot with the 24p HD digital cameras that his employer has a couple times as well. It’s the same model camera that Star Wars: Episode 2 & 3 were filmed with. Our fist HD experience was us being goofy for the camera to see if we could figure out how they worked. Our second experiment was actually scripted, though very badly by me, and a volunteer cast and crew came out of the woodwork to make it happen.

Josh got a roughed-up make over by a professional make-up artist.

I don’t remember this guys name, but he learned his part half way through filming on the car ride to our location. He played a very fine russian fellow.

This guy was an Emmy nominated make-up artist who was just about to ship off to work on Pirates of The Carribean 2 & 3 so you can imagine how good this guy really was. I think we gave him $20 for lunch though he was a friend of a friend and was really just doing it for nothing. He’s working on Josh’s old room mate, Drew who provided most of the wardrobe by emptying his closet into his car.

Another woodwork volunteer. He’s basically holding onto an $80k camera, $40k lens and a number of other attached devices that probably cost more than my car. He and another guy donated their experience as grips and camera operators and actors when we ran short.

Lunch time on set with Drew and one of the mystery people who I can’t remember the names of.

It was a fun project. We spent about 4 hours of prep the night before the learn the basics of the camera and did the entire production in about 8 hours.

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My brother had left a note on our master bath toilet saying that the bob had broken and he had shut it off a few days earlier. I was happy to find it shut off and proceeded to buy the parts that I needed to fix the problem. I learned a valuable lesson that day. NEVER buy anything that is not factory sealed from Home Depot. I think they take customer returns, and put them back on the shelf with out even looking at the contents. I bought the first part and found bits missing, got rather upset because I couldn’t remember which of the 500 Home Depots I bought it at and bought another one with out taking the other back. I got it all fixed and was quite happy with out acconplishments for the day. At last I could have a toilet to myself once again. Happy days.

Well, since then we took over one of the kids bedrooms as an office while waiting to get a real office, rebuilt the website after hackers took down our server and spent an arm and a leg on having a part fixed on my air conditioning. All in a days work for the self employed home owner. Then it happened. I got the mail with zeal like I always do. There was a bunch of crap that went into the recycling pile, and a couple of bills. One was a bogus bill from an internet company trying to tell me I owe them money for advertising my website when they have never done anything for me and are just hoping that I’m stupid enough to send them money and the other was the water bill. Yes, the water bill. Sure, to people who have been living in their house, taking showers, washing clothes and watering their lawn it wasn’t that much money. But I had only been living in the house for two of the weeks that they were billing me for and it seemed a little high for that. I did the math and figured out that we had used about 5-6 times as much water as usual in our two weeks back. Kind of odd. It was about 45,000 gallons more then we usually use. It turned out that that had run though the toilet after the bob broke before my brother shut the water off. On our toilets thats about 32,000 flushes. It’s kind of a bargain if you think that it only cost about $80 extra.

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