Family: Dinner & Swift Birds

Tonight I went out to dinner with my parents and then we headed over to Chapman Elementary school to watch the swift birds settle in for the night.

Family: Race For The Cure

This morning my extended family came out for Race For The Cure in celebration of my aunt Drenda, who is a breast cancer survivor.

Hiking: Eagle Creek with Zachary

Today was Zachary’s last day in town so we decided to go hiking before he returns to the cement jungle of NYC. Last night while deciding what hike to do I realized I had never been on the Eagle Creek trail in the Columbia Gorge so that became the obvious choice. I’ve gone swimming a couple times in the stream near the trail head but never up to Punch Bowl Falls. The weather was a lot cooler than the previous day so it made for a great hike. We only went about 3.5 miles in but you can hike further in and make a backpacking trip out of it. I think I’ll try that in a couple weeks.

I just got back from taking Zachary to the airport. I’m hoping to make it out to NYC in the next couple months to visit him as well as a bunch of my friends. It was this weekend last year that I had just moved to NYC and was getting settled in and yet it feels like it was only yesterday.

Family: Mom’s Birthday

Last night was my mom’s birthday so we took her out to McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern for dinner. Zachary is also in town for the week.

Family: Brother leaves for college

My younger brother Nathan left on Saturday for his sophomore year of college at Emerson in Boston, MA. The night before he left I took some photos of him and our family (minus my older brother Zachary who currently lives in NYC). We found a really cool street out in Hillsboro that had trees lining the side of the street. With the sun setting it created a very picturesque location. I’ll have to go back there for another shoot.

Camping: Cape Lookout in August

Every August my family goes camping on the coast at Cape Lookout. It’s a great way to relax amongst the busy wedding season.

Camping: Cape Lookout

I joined my family  for camping on the coast this past week. We went down for the low tide which was supposed to reach   -3.0 (in our area it only got to -2.1). With such a low tide we were able to explore caves that are usually unreachable.

At night I experimented with long exposures and light painting. I’m still learning quite a bit about it so hopefully better photos will be coming soon of my experiments. For a couple of the shots I used my strobe to flash my brother multiple times. After the first flash we realized it is quite painful to have a extremely bright light in your face when your pupils are wide open. I ended up having my brothers face engraved in my vision for about 30 seconds. Quite a strange experience. Needless to say we didn’t do too many of these shots.

John and Jen goes to State

I was down in Medford last Thursday and Friday to support my two brothers in their production of John and Jen which made it to the State Thespian Conference as a select showcase show.

Back in the summer my younger brother Nathan (who is a senior in high school) decided he wanted to put on his own two person musical. He solicited the help of another actor, Sophie Moshofsky, and had my older brother Zachary and another person JJ direct the show, with both families of the actors funding and producing the show. The show went really well, selling out every performance in the black box theater at Sunset High School.

After it was over they submitted the show to contend for the State Thespian Conference. Every year only three high school shows get selected to be performed at the conference. They are performed in front of around 800 fellow thespians. It’s quite an honor to have a show selected for the conference which makes me pretty proud of both my brothers.

On Friday morning my brother and Sophie performed before a packed house of 800+ thespians. At intermission almost everyone had tears in their eyes from the performance (even the men where dabbing their eyes). And at the end the audience gave the two actors a exuberant standing ovation. It was a pretty amazing experience to see my brother up on stage like that. I’m sure it won’t be the last. Everyone involved did an amazing job.

I believe my younger brother has himself a fan club of high school girls now after that performance. While waiting to get lunch after the performance he had a girl from the audience come up and profess her love for him. I’d imagine there’s a lot more girls in the audience that felt similarly. 

Here are some photos from the trip.