Notes from the Road | America reCycled

We just posted a video, story and photographs from our first leg of the biking journey. Check it out at www.americarecycled.org

hitting the road, finally

*Cory, bear pelt and fox cod piece, Hawk with bowling ball*

My brother and I are leaving on our cross-country journey today. We planning to leave in summer, but the great group of people we've met here in Asheville have kept us for several months. Winter is here and we will bike through the cold, despite the cringes from our friends. With our departure, we are launching our Web site where we will host all our short films, photos and musings. We'd love to have all of you follow along.

Check us out here:

www.americarecycled.org

My Workspace, at the Moment

...the cutest workspace ever.

America reCycled Update

It's been a long start, but we're finally at what feels like a tipping point. People say Asheville's the kind of place that sucks you in, where a week turns into a year and ambitions of global proportions give way to sipping a hot cup of maté while your friend plucks a rusted out banjo to the gentle chorus of a million insects.

This place has sucked us in, with so many amazing stories to tell. We were planning on leaving on our bikes a couple of months ago, but the story has actually kept us mostly in one place. Between building bicycles, developing the concept, raising funds, accumulating (and discarding) equipment, endless research, and documenting some truly inspiring pockets of Asheville, we've had our plates overflowing. We've been staying at a community house, forming perspective-bending friendships with the twenty or so residents and a constant flux of travelers. We're now editing the story about this community, and along with a piece about bicycle culture and the cooperative where we learned how to build and repair our bikes, we'll have two stories to launch the website with.

Thank you to everybody who has been so supportive and patient as we get this project off the ground. It's been unbelievably encouraging to see so much faith in a project still in its nascent stage. Thank you to Tim Klimowitz and Jacky Myint for their time and enthusiasm in giving the project a home on the web. We're ecstatic about the site design. Thanks to our sister and brother-in-law, Sarah and Thom, who have been enormously generous and have helped us find a home here. And thanks to 82 generous backers (and counting), we have surpassed our initial fund raising goal, taking some financial pressure off of us and allowing us to focus on story-telling. And our endless gratitude goes out to all our new friends in Asheville who have taken us into their lives and dealt with the constant probing. It's not easy to live in the presence of a camera and microphone, but everybody has been wonderful. You have all done your part to create to what is turning out to be a massive community effort.

The air is growing cooler and the road is calling. It will be well worth the wait.

-Noah and Tim


Our bikes are close to complete.


Noah has a 5-Watt solar panel to power our electronics on the road and I built a camera mount for the front of my bike (see video below)


After scratching previous ideas for the mount, I ended up finding metal brackets to attach together to hold a wooden plate with a bolt for a tripod head. After hours of sifting through nuts and bolts at the bike shop, I finally found enough to make it work. The wood plate is attached at five points. Four to the front rack and one to the upper fork. I'll attach some more brackets before I leave for extra security. Right now it is pretty rigid and reacts to bumps noticeably, but I'm working on making some rubber washers to absorb some of the shock.



This is our solar setup. The 5-Watt panel powers a 10Ah Lithium-Ion battery. We have a solar controller between the two pieces so we know the level of charge.


The panel is 12V, so I got a 12V power cord for my laptop. Works like a charm.

Below is a beta test of the bike cam.



We have 2 weeks left on our KickStarter project. Support the project at www.americarecycled.org

Little Secrets: Pano Pt.3

Surrender to Summer Pt.2

Tie strings to clouds
Make your own lake - Let it flow
Throw seeds to sprout

"Do Go" - Jónsi

Surrender to Summer

You wish silence, released noise in tremors
You wish, I know it, surrender to summer
We should always know that we can do everything

"Go Do" - Jónsi

watch and listen

Bele Chere

Meaning beautiful living in an ancient Scottish dialect...an annual street festival in Asheville. At the surface it was a hodgepodge of greasy food, beer and abundance. But there is some truth to the initial intent.

Pano Pt.2

Little Secrets: Pano Pt.1

I borrowed a Hasselblad X-Pan during my Nat Geo internship and shot some color and black and white in my free time both in DC and Bolivia. It's always refreshing for me to use a new format, to see different and work on composing within a strange frame. These images were shot with Neopan 1600 and Ilford 3200 black and white film.

LookBetween

On June 11&12, LOOK3 hosted an experimental two night event to present the work of 90 innovative photographers on a farm 30 minutes west of Charlottesville. This initiative, which we are calling LOOKbetween, showcased early-career talent and engage the presenting artists with media professionals on practices and trends influencing the direction of photography today. The brave souls heading off the initiative want to turn the traditional mentorship model on its head and let the next generation of photographers, editors, publishers, curators, and media professionals share their vision for the future.

We all had a beautiful weekend. From talking with friends afterward, we all can't express enough how grateful we are for being a part of this and for being given the opportunity in our hectic lives to come together and reconnect. In short, it was a gigantic family reunion. I think we all walked a way with that needed inspiration. Special thanks to Jenna, Miki and Andrew for doing this for us. http://look3.org/events/eventslookbetween/

Little Secrets: Last DC Moments

Kenji, an awesome tech-saavy photo engineer at Nat Geo, let me borrow a Mamiya 7 during my last meetings at the DC offices. For a week I snapped photos here and there. On walks, with friends and around town. I hadn't shot film in a while, so there was something very liberating about using a new format. And if you look closely, you'll see that one of my stops before I left was the Nazi propaganda exhibit.

Little Secrets : On the Road '07

After finishing an internship at the Deseret News in 2007, I hopped in a car with two good friends and drove for weeks around the northwest. Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Oregon. A friend, Kristin Murphy, let me borrow her Holga and gave me a ton of expired film. It was careless, free and beautiful.

America reCycled

I just launched a Kickstarter project to raise funds to develop a really great Web site for my upcoming bike tour across America with my brother. Check out what it's all about here:

7dot7

Kids With Guns is featured on 7dot7 Digital Magazine under New Formats. Check it out, they are promoting some really great documentary projects: www.7dot7.net

Little Secrets

I've had rolls and rolls of film piling up since high school. All stuck in a plastic back with who knows what on them. Little secrets of my childhood. I threw them in a trunk a long time ago.

I started off shooting during family vacations with a cheap panoramic camera and eventually, my sister gave me our grandfather's old 35mm Minolta. I started dragging that around with me, shooting random pictures here and there. A lamp post, icicles, my brother posing with a snowboard. And once I actually considered trying to shoot for a newspaper, I picked up a digital camera and threw my old one in a trunk with rolls of undeveloped film. Thus began my photography career.

I pulled them out recently, brought them to the camera shop and scanned them with the kind help of my friend, Mike Belleme. Many were under or overexposed. Some whole rolls were black. Many showed age -- dirty, dark, grainy and mysterious. As I sift through them, I will post them here, show them to you, and remember.

I have only recently shot film again, with the kindness of Kenji at Nat Geo, who let me borrow a couple different film cameras. So, I will post film old and new, a delicious sandwich of sorts encompassing my digital life.

Hair for the WSJ

Matt Craig of the Wall Street Journal gave me a ring several weeks ago for a shoot about Dominican hair salons. Apparently they were posing significant competition to the African-American hair salons with less talk and speedier service. One of the ladies I talked to had been there for 4 hours already and wasn’t even done. “Speedier service?” I asked myself. I guess it’s all relative. I showed up the day before Easter and it was packed. I felt like a sardine in a school of mullet – a scrawny white male in the midst of a bunch of Latino and black women. It was hot and the fumes were intoxicating. But that’s what I like about this job, being thrown into totally foreign situations and navigating your way through. I took a deep breath and made some pictures.

Check it out here

Asheville: Lightness and Pain

"Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes." -The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The Woodlands Chalet

Family Vacation, near Asheville, North Carolina

Washington Post.

Legal Eagle

I made this picture back the days of my internship at the Monroe Evening News. I was at a marine's house for one of those freedom holidays -- I think it was the 4th of July. This was sitting in the corner of the room. It was caught and stuffed back in the day when they weren't so endangered. Even though they had this thing registered, every now and then they'd have neighbors report them to the EPA. The picture wasn't so interesting to me then, but I just recovered it and realize how strange it actually is.

Jeff Powelson for the Wall Street Journal

Building Mug for the Wall Street Journal

Kudzu for Nat Geo

The first day of my internship at National Geographic Magazine, I was sent out to shoot a picture of kudzu, the invasive vine that blankets vegetation. It's not the most invigorating subject in the world, but I set out at night to do some light painting to try to make it a bit more dynamic.

lost but found

I came across these images in the depths of my hard drives - Circa 2007 in Gainesville, Florida, when my way of life was engulfed by the college, with plenty of good friends and good times.

Snowpocalypse

There was a blizzard here in DC before Christmas. And I just found these photos on my desktop.