the things we think but do not say

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

Starting tomorrow at 8am, I will become the new Lead Designer for the Chicago Transit Authority. I accepted this newly created position a couple of months back and I gave me notice to my studio (IDEO Chicago). While I thought it would be best to give me office the benefit of an extended lead time (mainly as I wanted to finish my final project properly and on good terms) I think that two months is way too long. After the announcement, everyone was initially sad to hear the news, then very soon after, people were like, ‘Are you still here?’…

I can say though, that my final project was a blast and the final presentation was a hit with the client (some very sweet doctors and administrators for a new children’s hospital in Orlando). My final day at IDEO was a huge rush of very many mixed emotions. Excitement, sadness, some disappointment and then huge excitement again. For seven years, landing in Chicago just before turning 25, IDEO became my life, my work and in many ways, helped define who I was. It was a crucible in which I learnt everything I know about what design means, what it’s capable of and what immense impact it can have to society. I will look back upon my time there with great fondness and never forget that I was lucky enough to have worked some of the brightest and best in the world.

So, wanna know more about this new CTA gig, huh? We to be honest, there’s only so much I can tell you as I still don’t know what it will all entail. Will I find frustration at the speed of bureaucratic process? Probably. Will I have a chance to have real impact here? Most definitely.

I still can’t quite believe that I managed to make this transition from design consultant to public servant. Did you know that the CTA carries about 1.5M people a day! Holy crap that’s a lot of people. And from what I’ve seen, many of them look about as happy as these people in the photo.

Watch this space. Wish me luck!

Hubwear in Chicago magazine

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

Hubwear is nearing the close of its second year and it’s been a thrilling ride. But let me back up a second since some of you might not know what I’m talking about.

Hubwear is the project that I created with my finacee and partner Sara just under 2 years ago. It’s a website that sells t-shirts (currently) to urban travelers that have a story to tell. And watching it happen right in front of my very eyes, it’s grown and grown and become a real business, with real products and real customers.

Back at the beginning in April 2006, it grew from a tiny stem cell to what’s now a rather healthy young kid. And to take the child analogy even further, when I started working on Hubwear at the beginning without anyones help, it was a scrawny, ugly kid with little to no sense-of-self or direction. It was a spotty, acned pre-teen. But once Sara got on board, the rebellious brat got a rude awakening and got sent to Excel boot camp! Suddenly, orders were being recorded in a timely fashion! Shipments of shirts from American Apparel were flying in just in time for finishing. Rigorous quality control was finally in place and there was a dramatic drop in errors and wasted product. Our spotty pre-teen was finally growing up and getting ready for high school.

Last year we got a lot of good blog links, referalls and endorsements (most notable was by Springwise ) and this year has seen more of the same. But just in the last week, we got our first major, printed publication!

Chicago Magazine included us in their Christmas Gift Guide this year and we’ve been bombarded with orders. (Irconically enough, here’s a link to the feature on their magazine’s site

There’s just something about being printed, on paper, in a real magazine that somehow gives any product legitimacy. Even in a time where Web 2.0 interconnectivity is everything, having our t-shirts in magazine means we can reach an audience that might never have seen our concept before. This year, Chicago Magazine. Next year, Lucky!

So, Horray for Hubwear! Horray for good press! And here’s to a thrilling 2008!

It’s been a long time since I made any mention of Hubwear, but the site and the business is doing just fine. Sara, my girlfriend, partner and all round best-thing-in-my-life, has become a major part of the company and we’ve refocused and clarified a lot of what Hubwear means. We’ve got a brand spanking new site and it’s a hundred times clearer to navigate, explore and shop. It was a little too art house for mass consumption. Kudos to Sandy Weisz, our wonderful website designer.

But there’s more. Today I have fantastic news as Sara and I were interviewed in Gridskipper.com (the urban travel guide) the othere day and the post went live! We discuss at some length, in which city we’d like to be imprisoned Odd question, it might seem, but it yielded some interesting questions about where we’d go to eat, shop, hang out. Thanks to Brittany Belgardt for the opportunity to talk.

As with any small business, one hopes that each year leads to new and a exciting opportunities. I have a good feeling that this year will be a good one for us.

Tsukushi-0323

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

I’ve finally returned to Chicago after several weeks of travel taking photographs for two upcoming book for London and New York.

Each city’s schedule included 50 locations in a week. Invaluable to me during each shoot was my project manager Shane Parton, who magically arranged everything to line up, coincide, and be in place at the right time for all the shots.

The photo here is one of the last shots I took before leaving New York. It was at very discreet Japanese restaurant in Murray Hill called Tsukushi. At another table I noticed that one of their party was practically sleeping at the table. When I saw that one of his mates thought it funny to take a snapshot of it, I reached for my camera. I love shots of people taking photographs themselves. To see what another photographer is visualising is revealing.

So, some stats from my trip

2 cities covered
50 locations in each city
8-10 days in each city
non-stop, grueling, 12-15 hour days
3000 exposures in London
4000 exposures in New York
100+ cab rides
25lbs of equipment lugged all over town
35gb of images
20+ portraits of artists, bakers, restaurateurs, designers, and entrepreneurs.

During the trip I would go through all sorts of pressure, excitement, tiredness and disappointment. But there was simply nothing more invigorating or inspiring than finishing the shoot of a space or interior and then taking a portrait of the creator of that environment.

The proprietors’ taste, personality, even their demeanor, came through in everything that we saw or touched in that space. It seems so obvious now, but taking these portraits connected me so personally to the space in which it was being taken.

As a growing photographer, I think that taking portraits of the inspiring individuals who have created these unique businesses was the most rewarding part of my trip.

Chelsea Physic Garden (1 of 1)

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

The last four days have gone by in ridiculously fast order. Shane (my photography partner) and I have been whizzing back and forth across London in a feverish panic and I’m frankly exhausted. We’ve still got about four days left and every moment’s going to count toward getting all our shots done.

But this post is less about the photography itself but more about the gear. I’m an unashamed camera whore and I get excited about the equipment almost as much as I do the photos. And what a great chance it was for me to get intimately familiar with my current set of tools and some new ones for this shoot.

At this point, the list of shooting gear is thus:

Nikon D70
Nikkor 35/2
Nikkor 17-55/2.8
Nikkor 12-24/4
Nikkor 85/1.8

Epson P2000, 40gb portable hard drive and image viewer

Gitzo 1540 tripod
Really Right Stuff BH-40 LRII, ball head for tripod
Really Right Stuff BD70-L, L bracket for mounting into RRS ballheads

Nikon SB800 flash
Bogen 3373 light stand
Pair of Pocket Wizard Plus II, wireless RF flash triggers
Westcott compact silver umbrella

Spare batteries for D70, flash.
4x 1GB Sandisk Extreme III CF

The camera, the lens and the batteries all go into a Domke F2 black canvas shoulder bag and the tripod and head, the lightstand, the flash and the Pocket Wizards all go into medium sized Calumet tripod bag. Since I don’t have any proper scales to weigh all this, my shoulders can tell you that it feels like about 20 lbs + 10 lbs. I could be way off, but all that Nikkor glass adds up.

So, in a Michael Reichmann (of Luminous Lanscape fame) way, what worked, and what didn’t?

The most commonly used lens so far: 17-55/2.8. A very useful range for the sort of photography on this shoot; interiors and details shots. At a constant aperture of f2.8 this lens is fast and heavy. Makes the D70 look a little wimpy.

Least used lens so far: 35/2. A big surprise to me was the almost non-existant need for this lens. After almost three years of using this lens exclusively, I’ve become just too accustomed to it’s length that now visually, I’m looking for something with either a tighter crop or a much wider point of view. My trusty old partner is becoming strangely defunct.

The most annoying malfunction: The 1540 Gitzo tripod is one of the latest and greatest new fangled ‘6x carbon fibre’ tripods from Gitzo. With a rock solid reputation and a life guarantee, I am very dissapointed with my experiences so far. The main locking collar that allows for the centre column to be at any different elevated position is all screwed up. Inside the threaded collar is a sleeve which, when tightened, squeezes onto the centre column, letting me control how high or low my final camera height will be. Somehow, the sleeve has slipped around just enough that it’s now jamming against the threaded collar, instead of riding nicely inside of it. The outcome is that I’ve got a very expensive camera support that I can’t quite trust. Argh! When I get back to Chicago, I’ll have to call Really Right Stuff (where I bought this from) to look into this.

The most satisfying pieces of kit: In contrast to the lower half of the camera support, is the top half, where the Really Right Stuff meet up. The RRS BH-40 ball head is pure CNC porn. The quality of the machined metal parts and the smoothness of the all the physical interaction is just so confidence inspiring. I know that when I dial in this knob or adjust this part, that the camera is going to do just that and nothing more. And in perfect harmony with the ball head is the BD70-L L plate.

I had never even seen an L plate until a year or so ago, but once I understood it’s purpose, I longed for a time to need one. And this shoot has easily justified the investment in both the L plate and the ball head platform in which they mate.

The RRS L plate is CNC sculpted from solid aluminium to perfectly fit my camera body. And it gives me 100% confidence in the permanence of your camera placement on the tripod head, but also let’s your flip orientation from landscape to portrait and back again without ever having to mess with the orientation of the ball head itself. After only an hour of use, I became to forget about my inexperience with tripods, ball heads and L plates and just started to think about what shots I wanted. I only wish that the centre column would bloody stay put!

The most invaluable item that lets just keep on me shooting: The Epson P2000 is one sweet piece of electronics. It’s only function in life is to be a viewing and copying station for your photos while out in the field. I have four 1GB CF cards for my D70 and I know that I can fit exactly 94 Nikon RAW files onto each one. Which means that I have only 376 exposures at any one time. And while I can go buy more cards and/or with memory per card, there’s a simplicity to it that I like.

Each CF memory card is marked in order, I through IV. When the first card is done, I return it to the case and turn it face over. The remaining, empty, cards are facing up and I reach for the card two, while trying to maintain rhythm in my shoot as best I can. Of course, I never seem to finish a card in between locations, only in the middle of them!

I keep this process basically; extract the FULL card, flip it over, put it back in the case, get the next EMPTY card, insert, resume shooting.

When I’ve reached the end of the cards, or the end of the day, I then methodically insert each card into the P-2000 and let it copy everything. When I’ve verified that the copy was successful, I then repeat with the next card. Once I’m sure that I have all the data is safely intact on the P-2000’s hard drive, I then format each card in the camera, renewing my 376 exposure limit.

Then when I finally get home, I back up everything to my laptop.

I do not want to ever, ever, lose any of work through some stupid mismanagement of data. Photography is inherently unrepeatable. Each exposure is unique. You’ve got to keep back ups and you’ve got to be careful. Keep your process simple and repeatable. Having one 8gb card for me at this moment just doesn’t make sense and makes me even more nervous of losing it! If I ever buy a new digital camera that spat out gigantic images, then I’ll buy the right sized cards that give me a nice easy number of frames to remember.

Outside Facets

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

About a year ago now, a project came up to create a guide book for the studio. It was meant to be a handy guide to the interesting places in the city for visiting clients, temporary transfers from other studios and other guests. The book was produced in record time (3 weeks) and it covered some sixty odd locations all throughout the city. We featured magazine stands, hot dog joints, karaoke bars, third generation family pipe stores - you name it. We made a tiny run of about 25 copies to share at a round table for our company.

And it was a hit.

The book’s writing and photography in this proof of concept was later shown to a publisher and they got all excited at the possibilities. Amazingly enough, they have commissioned us to make two new books for London and New York. The only sad part is that this Chicago book (as it stands) will not be made first. When is Chicago going to get the recognition it deserves dammit? Maybe on the next round if these do well.

So, in this coming week, I’m preparing for the trip to take the photographs for these new upcoming books. I have about a week in each city, shooting relentlessly and covering about ten locations a day. While I feel that I’m pretty comfortable taking photographs of people on the street and capturing images in a photo documentary style, I’m a little anxious about taking photographs of the interiors of the stores. I’m expecting that we will have permission for many of the locations we’re featuring but there’s still a lot of questions about lighting that I have unanswered. How to deal with multiple lighting types (fluorescent, tungsten and day light), how to deal with low light and a slow aperture wide angle lens, setting time for a tripod and a flash stand. And then there’s all the practical issues of traveling from place to place in a timely manner.

I think that there’s only so much one can plan for and the rest will be learnt as I go. And while I can safely say that the original book’s photographs had a ‘rawness’ that lent them a certain charm, I wasn’t shooting a book that might potentially be in the hands of tens/hundreds/thousands of people one day. I’m freaked out, inspired, thrilled, and then back to being freaked out again.

There’s a photography maxim that says, “Never take new equipment with you on a shoot” This is very good advice. I’m doing my best to balance bringing as much kit as I can and then be so laden heavy with kit that I can’t take a single photo at all.

I just want to take images that best represent the locations in their truest sense. The frenetic energy, the exclusivity, the warmth. All of these emotions that you feel in a space, or a street corner or in a retail store. I want to capture it all the best I can.

The photo above is from last year and it was taken right outside Facets, an independent movie rental store (and movie theatre too). When I saw her standing outside the store, I immediately got the sense that she was of an independent mind herself.

My brother’s such a wimp…

Originally uploaded by Len Aye.

The other week, I was down in Florida to see my parents who were visiting the US for their first time. As part of the visit, my brother took us to an alligator farm. It’s something you do when you’re in Florida, ok!

Well, as you can see, the visit included seeing snakes, and yup, I thought it would be a fantastic idea to have a HUGE albino python around my neck.

Quite naturally, I’ve don’t have a lot of experience with huge albino pythons so I just thought it would be a great laught to have this thing resting on my neck.

What made me almost poop my pants though was the unexpectedly cold, writhing sensation that met me. The snake was far from an inanimate object that I had in my mind. Rather, it was a literally, a bed of snakes. A cold, tubular muscle flexing, bed of snakes.

Ugh.

My brother took the photo, hence the very accurate title.

hubwear on the street

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

Hubwear has been in existence for several months now and at launch it had its 15 clicks of fame. It got bounced around on a few blogs and with each new mention, the traffic to the site went up and up. I use ’sitemeter’ to track how many visitors I get and the graph showing the traffic was equivalent to my happiness.

Each peak was an emotional high and each lull was a low for me too. Ahh… the joys of riding nano-sized internet fame.

Things of course died down very quickly and I went back to work, printing orders, sketching up new ideas and working on the structure of the next few rounds. I am proud to say that we’ve now seen a great new development in the flexibility of the ‘routes’ we can offer. You can now mix and match over 20 airports for our Economy routes. But best of all, we are now offering fully customizable First Class shirts. Any city to any city.

But everything else aside, a small dream that I’d been keeping in the back of my head finally came true the other night. Obviously, despite having loftier goals of taking over the world (one shirt at a time), my little mini-dream was to walk down the street one day and see a complete stranger wearing one of my shirts. Seeing one of your mates wearing one is totally different to seeing someone that you’ve never met rocking one of your shirts.

And on Saturday night, it came true. I literally stopped in my tracks and I turned to Sara and said, “Look!”

We went in and casually asked the dude, ‘Hey man, where’d you get that shirt?”, relishing every minute of this of course.

He replies, “Oh my wife bought it for me at the Renegade Craft Fair”

At this point, I can’t keep it in any more and blurt out, “I made that shirt by the way” trying to keep my cool.

“Oh wow!” His mates go nuts. He goes nuts. I go nuts.

Eventually, I ask him, “So, why ORD-LGA?”

“Oh, I used to live there and I go back to New York a lot.”

“Cool. Good to meet you man”.

We chatted a little more and one of his mates takes a photo of us together (Sara took this one) but the really weird part of the whole thing was just how similar we looked. He wore a jacket over his jeans, he was Asian, he had trendy designer glasses…weird huh? I have worn almost his entire ‘look’ many times before… do all trendy Asians dress alike?

Hearing his story about the route is really what makes this whole idea so much fun for me. Knowing that each shirt can mean completely different things to different people is one of the most satisfying aspects of this concept. At the Renegade Craft Fair a few weeks ago (hubwear’s first public appearance), Sara and I met so many people and heard so many stories of why they loved our shirts.

“My parents make this trip every year”

“We’re making this trip as a family”

“I want my boyfriend to move here, so make it a one-way”

“I have a winter home there…”

But the best one was an interchange between a young girl and her mother. They both got the concept right away and I heard the young girl say to her mother, “Look, ORD-LHR! I want that one. Now I’ve got to go to London!”

If that doesn’t pull on your heart strings then you should start watching the Oxygen Network.

Coming of age ceremony for a young cuban woman

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

After working non-stop with back to back projects since January, I finally got myself out of Chicago for a proper vacation. A good friend of mine and I had talked of all sorts of fancy trips for years but never ever sorted anything out. So in typical fashion, with only two weeks planning, I booked my flights to Havana.

Since the US has a number of issues of Castro and the Cuban government, we had to fly from a non-US point of origin, namely Cancun, which we stayed in for one day and night.

Our whole trip was only six days with only really four days of being on the ground. There’s plenty of reasons for hyperbole about Cuba as it is, but walking through Havana and being on tours in the countryside left me completely hypersensitive to taking images. I took almost as many photographs in those six days as I had taken for my entire five week vacation to Burma and Asia in February 2004. By the end of it, I was frankly a little sick of taking photographs but its really easy to go nuts there. It’s simply a country unlike any other.

One aspect of Cuban life that may potentially change after Fidel’s death is the distinct lack of commercialisation. Beyond the chromed letters of the vintage cars churning smoke around town, there was simply zero brand messaging anywhere. No logos, no icons, no overt imagery that makes most of the world sensitive to corporations and their ‘public facing’ messaging. We are bourgeois capitalist pigs after all.

Walking through Havana was very exciting for me, photographically, as I got to see a level of city-wide neglect and faded beauty that I’ve only seen in a few other cities: Beijing and Rangoon. Coincidentally they too share an oppressive governmental presence. There’s simply no other way to reproduce the effects of sun bleached discolouration, grime, smog and rain damage, unless you dedicate decades of governmental neglect. The 50s and 60s architecture of the time have become so faded that it has a patina that gives it a unique, aged beauty all of its own.

On this trip, a technique that I’ve been practicing for a few years now came into fruition here: “blind shooting from the hip”. I’ve become really good (and by good, 1 in 5 are in focus and on target) at taking street photography with my camera hanging from the strap around my hip. With your camera down by your waist and your face pointing in the opposite direction, you can get away with a few shots before anyone’s noticed. Just point the camera in the general direction and with lots of practice you’ll get the hang of it. The trick is in reviewing the photos on the back of the LCD without your unsuspecting subject noticing!

The most remarkable experience for me on this trip happened as my friend and I covered the city by foot. We heard as we walked a strong live drum rhythm (not dissimilar to a Fela Kuti afro beat) and we realize that it was coming from an open window of a second floor balcony. We looked around and saw someone else on the street point to the window. They pointed and said ‘party’ and encouraged us to go have a look. We looked at each other again, then back to the window and then decided to walk through the open door. As we entered this complete stranger’s house, we saw that this was place is packed to the gills with people all at the top of the staircase. We immediately got the sense that we were not really meant to be here.

After a few awkward seconds of standing with a dozen Cubans in this cramped corridor we soon established that no one was overtly offended by our presence. In fact we asked sheepishly, “OK?” and we got a thumbs up, even if the looks on their faces was a little incredulous. We had a short conversation with a young man in English and worked out that this was a semi religious ceremony cum house party and all these sixty-odd people were family, related to each other in some way. Everyone, except us.

From this narrow corridor we could see two rooms; one to the side was full of colourful fruits and decorations and the other was dead ahead bursting with vibrancy. Between us and that room were people craning their necks to peer at the dancing that was basically going off in someone’s living room.

From my vantage point of the corridor I realized that I would never forgive myself if I didn’t get myself in that room! So after almost an hour of patiently ingratiating ourselves with the group, I start my slow advance through the threshold to see a performance that will stay with me for as long as I live.

Five bongo drum players were lining the perimeter at one end of the room and in the centre was a singer in his fifties. Surrounding the musicians are three generations of about forty Cubans. The singer’s voice was incredibly loud and it manages to stay clear and true above the incessant drumming and a room full of people singing with him. His song carried a simple “call and response” format; he’d sing a few words and then be greeted with his words amplified a hundred fold by the room who knew the lyrics by heart. I got the impression that these Cubans had heard these songs ever since they were children.

The beat, the chanting, the deep rooted culture of this experience all added to a heady mix of mystique and music. Twice during our two hour, mid afternoon adventure, we saw a young woman and an elderly woman in her sixties both dance themselves into a hazy, hypnotic, trance-like state. At times their spinning and singing would produce a freakish, startled look on their faces. We saw both woman collapse into the arms of those around them, while everyone else continued the tradition. The beat would play for long, twenty minutes lengths, through complex, improvised rhythms. But when the song finished, it finished dead. The music, the drumming, the singing, all ending together, perfectly in sync. All on one beat.

After several more songs, we slowly make our way out of the room not wanting to push our luck. On our departure we saw something that gave us a clear insight into what kind of ‘party’ we just experienced. On the back of the front door (which is way we didn’t see when we came in) was a white dove, breathing calmly, tied upside down with its feet bound together. We’d heard of something called Santería, a religion practiced by some Afro-Cubans before this day but never thought we’d see it up close and personal. I found this entry on Santería on Wikipedia. An excerpt is here: “Drum music and dancing are a form of prayer and will sometimes induce a trance state in initiated priest, who become “possessed” and will channel the Orisha, giving the community and individuals information, perform healing etc.”

I’ll tell you now, if the dove had been dead, or bleeding, I would have run like hell.

Despite the trade embargos, try to find yourself in Cuba one day. I highly recommend it.

Please enjoy the photos, they’re in three parts.

Walking through Havana, August 2006
Callejon De Hamel, Havana, August 2006
Tour of Playa Del Rio, Cuba, August

My laptop eats ultra portable laptops for lunch

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

A pretty significant change at work just happened and it’s one that I never thought I’d see. I’ve finally migrated to a laptop. After years and years of consistent dual processor desktop use (rocking good ol’ Pentium Pros back in ‘98, for reals yo) I’ve given in to using a laptop.
But the Dell M90 though is no regular laptop. In fact, I’d be impressed to find a lap, strong enough to rest it on top of. So rather than a laptop, or even a “mobile pc” I’m just going to start calling it a ‘transportable personal computer”.
But why the change from a desktop to a “TPC”? Two concurrent technology trends have finally converged on me. One is the rapid increase in pure processing power available to portables. The recent splash made by Intel Core Duo dual-core processors every laptop (and MacBook Pros) have let me get better performance than my previously beefy Dell dual Xeon 3 Ghz desktop.
Obviously if I had a dual processor, dual core desktop I’d be even faster still. But this brings me to the other contributing factor. The basic premise of ‘you can never have enough processing power’ is still true. While I’d love to have a dual core, dual processor desktop AND a dual core, single processor laptop, I went with the laptop and got my processor thrills some where else. Respower and other ‘remote rendering’ services allow me to leverage the power of completely web browser controlled render farms to render my images. This way, I can but the burden onto their network and not try to kill myself slogging away on my own.
Plus the usual benefits that I’ve heard for years about being a ‘road warrior’ are all true: I can move from project space to project space; I can leave work at a reasonable time and still be productive at my own schedule; I can look like a twat carrying this boxy bag everywhere.
The downsides though with having a laptop of this kind are plenty:
It kinda feels like GM’s Hummer division decided to make a laptop.
It weighs as much as an obsese toddler. Carrying it each day is inducing some sort of scoliosis that I have to correct for by carrying it on the other shoulder every other day.
It needs a laptop bag that’s almost becoming luggage. I found it really hard to find a decent bag that would fit a 17″ screen, but I eventually found the Brenthave Duo. It’s great but it’s huge.
The battery life is just 2 hours. Which is undertandable since it’s pumping out a 1920x1200 pixels display onto a 17″ of screen real estate

The freaking power supply is bigger and heavier than usual too.
The main thing is that it works, its faster than its replacment and I can (with some effort) take it places.
For the nerds in the room, the full specs are below:
Intel Core Duo 2.16 GHz
4Gb RAM (holy shit 4gigs in a laptop!)
Nvidia Quadro FX 2500M with 512mb (oh snap, 512mb graphics card!)
17″, WXGA+ resolution (1920 x 1200)
80 Gb HD
8XDVD+/-RW