Out of the Deep Blue

(get this print and 2 others like it here)

Almost 4 years ago, I was working on a project for the Napa Valley restaurant Ubuntu, re-designing its website in collaboration with the extraordinarily talented chef, my friend Jeremy Fox (he later earned the restaurant a Michelin star, the first for a contemporary vegetarian, or as he liked to say, “vegetable” restaurant).

We were trying to come up with some iconic images for the site’s landing page, and I thought it would be cool to use x-rays of some of his favorite vegetables. My friend Dr. Lawrence Chan, who is a radiologist in the Bay Area, agreed to help me shoot the images.

(grab the Squash Blossoms X-ray print here)

We ended up going a different direction for the site, but the images did turn out pretty darn cool, especially after I reversed them out and colorized them. 

So, as the next 6x6x6 project, I’ve decided to do something with these x-rays, which have been collecting virtual dust for the last few years. You can buy prints at Society 6, or even a nifty iPhone case!

(trick out your iPhone with a sweet case here)

In addition to the vegetable subjects, I did another project with Dr. Chan, where we took specimens from my old alma mater Moss Landing Marine Labs (where I pursued graduate studies in Marine Science…pursued being the key word, as I sadly never finished the degree).

(make people jealous of your laptop with this cool skin)

The images ended up in the last printed issue of Wetpixel Quarterly, the magazine that I co-founded along with my friend Eric Cheng (now doing some great work as Lytro’s Director of Photography).

(keep people from touching your iPad with this fearsome Anoplogaster a.k.a Fangtooth image)

Some of these creatures were scary enough staring at you from their alcohol-filled jars, but the X-rays really brought out a new, sci-fi edge to them; with the intricacies of their skeletons revealed, they could easily be straight out of a Ridley Scott film.

(trip people out with the Hatchetfish on this sci-fi-licious iPhone case)

As usual, read below the break for the time and costs involved in putting together this project, and thanks for checking out my work!

(Update: This project was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle’s Inside Scoop! Thanks to Paolo Lucchesi for the writeup!)

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Hey everyone! Just a quick post to announce a new set of retina wallpaper images, this one from the Socorro Islands off the tip of Baja California, a spot that is often called the Galapagos of Mexico.

And I’ve decided to set the price to $1 for all my other wallpaper sets, though you can still throw in an extra buck or two if you’re feeling generous! Oh, and for the underwater images, 50% of the money will go to SharkSavers.org to help protect sharks and mantas from destructive practices like finning. Enjoy!

Update: in a stroke of good timing, Chris Guillebeau posted a challenge at his inspiring blog to offer up a free product or service; this is obviously just a small thing, but I’m excited to contribute to the project:

http://chrisguillebeau.com/3x5/help-someone-for-free/

(you can get the above nifty shirt, and 2 others, here)

When I moved back to Silicon Valley in 2011, I was a startup neophyte. I’d done my undergrad here, but that was in the early, heady days of the internet, right when the first browsers were being released, and before startups that no one had heard of were running superbowl commercials about herding cats. And after graduating I left the area to spend some great years learning be a research diver, building products to take pictures underwater, and starting an underwater photography magazine…all very fun and highly unprofitable ventures.

The argot of the Valley was strange to me when I returned to enter a startup accelerator program in Palo Alto. Disrupt: isn’t that something our daughter did to our pre-baby sleep patterns when she bounced into our lives? Viral, leverage, traction…after being inundated with these terms, I unconsciously, and annoyingly to my spouse, dog, and friends, began to use them on a somewhat daily basis (“yeah, umm, we’re working on a totally disruptive solution for small businesses looking to leverage their underutilized resources…no doubt it’s going to go viral when we launch”).

(accelerate your wardrobe with the above shirt here)

Sure, some of these terms are useful shorthand, but with overuse many of them have lost their shine…so we’re here to bring the sexy back! As the second project in the 6x6x6 Challenge (6 projects in 6 months, each taking under 6 hours, for under 60 bucks) I’ve worked at creating designs that attempt to illustrate several of these much maligned terms. You can choose to wear (or display) them with hipster irony. Or fresh-faced, eager gusto. Or both.

Who knows, maybe wearing the Traction shirt will magically bring you more paying users. Or perhaps putting up a Bootstrap art print will inspire your team to keep grinding away at less than minimum wage. Or you can just wear the shirt outside of any startup hubs and get confused looks from people.

For the uninitiated  here’s a quick rundown of the terms used, and examples of where you might want to use them:

Pivot: to change the direction of your startup, ideally while keeping one foot firmly planted (i.e. building from your learnings vs. breaking windows, throwing everything out and starting completely from scratch). Example: “When Bob realized being the next Pinterest for ham radio enthusiasts was not likely to get traction*, he decided to pivot and use his platform to create a dating service for lonely ham operators.” [*see traction definition below] Get your Pivot shirt or art print here!

Traction: That magical quality that VCs need to see proof of in your pitch deck, traction is a measurement over time of the number of active users you have, your revenue, or some combination thereof, and if you have a pretty graph it should look like an exponential function to have a snowball’s chance in hell of raising money. Example: “While Karen’s startup certainly appeared to have traction, it was unclear whether her strategy of spamming users with barfing cat videos would pay off over time”. Get your Traction shirt or art print here!

Bootstrap: This one gets my vote for the most practical; in startup-land, it means to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” or create your product (at least largely) without outside funding, by for example using your savings to build an MVP (minimum viable product), and charging your customers enough that you can cover your costs, and maybe even make a profit (gasp!) shortly after launch. In most of the rest of the world this is called “running a business,” but in SV we are often skewed to think of success as being funded to the tune of millions of dollars with no clear idea of how to make any money. Get your Bootstrap shirt or art print here!

As per the rules of the challenge, I’ll run down the time and costs involved in putting this project together below the break.

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(get the above image and 5 others as a Retina resolution wallpaper: Bahamas Sharks)

(Update: Buy this wallpaper with Bitcoin here)

My wife recently shared an article with me called “10 Reasons Why You Have to Quit Your Job This Year” by James Altucher, a blogger/entrepreneur whose brash and honest style I’ve got a kick out of since discovering him last year. Having been an (often struggling) entrepreneur for the past 7+ years, the article really struck a chord: I’m probably not the only one who, during the downward slope of the entrepreneurial roller coaster, has wished for the perceived  security of a full-time job, and beyond encouraging me that I’m on the right path, it also reinforced many of the values that, as entrepreneurs (and humans) we should probably think about more often.

“…[surrender] yourself to an idea that you want to create something of value to other human beings.”

With my current startup, Storied, I do feel like I’m creating something of value: a way for families to collect, share, and preserve family stories. The idea grew out of my experiences with my father-in-law, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease 3 years ago. My sister-in-law Kathy put together a photo memoir for Don, and the benefits from it were huge, both for Don and for the family. Don was able to sit down with the book and reminisce about people and events that he would have trouble recalling in conversation; the family was able to capture stories from Don’s younger years that would otherwise have been lost as his dementia progressed.

I thought that creating a digital platform to make this easier for people, specifically an iPad app that uses the bundled technology to scan, annotate, and  create mini-documentaries from these stories, easily & intuitively, would be very compelling. Whether people are willing to pay for this, or whether we can figure out a way to create a sustainable business, is an entirely different question, which we are hoping to answer as we release the product and prototype a few business model ideas. As a father and a husband, these unknowns definitely add to my anxiety levels, and James’ next piece of advice lit a proverbial fire under my ass: 

“…diversify the things you are working on so no one person or customer or boss or client can make a decision that could make you rich or destroy you or fulfill your life’s dreams or crush them.”

Ok, so running a startup eats up a lot of time. Add to that a wonderful two-year-old daughter, exercise, sleep, and a healthy amount of time with my also wonderful (and very understanding) wife, and the slice of available time begins to feel very thin. So how to diversify? 

(get the above image and 5 others as a Retina resolution wallpaper: SF via Kayak)

Here is where the experiment comes in: over the next six months, I’m going to create six small side projects that can generate revenue. As my advisor and coach Corey Ford likes to say, constraints drive innovation, so:

1. Setting up each project/business can’t take more than 6 hours; this won’t count time used to create content, much of which will be pulled from pre-created stock (and I’m certain that I can sneak in 6 hours over the course of the month, though my pre-bedtime reading of books like Game of Thrones will probably suffer).
2. Each project has to have the ability to generate revenue as soon as it is launched (even if it’s just a dollar).
3. I’ll give myself a budget of $60.00 total for all 6 projects. With any luck, I’ll break even by the time the whole project is over.

For each project, I’ll list the tools that I used (not counting the standard tools in my arsenal as a designer & photog, including Adobe Creative Suite), how time was allotted, and money spent. I don’t expect these projects to bring in much (if any!) revenue, but they will definitely help me to learn a bit more about where I can create value for other human beings, and perhaps help other entrepreneurs, or would-be entrepreneurs, get excited about doing their own side projects.

And here is where the challenge comes in: I challenge you to do something similar! Maybe it’s one side project in 6 months, or 6 side projects in one month, but do something to diversify, to learn, and to get the courage to make the entrepreneurial leap if you haven’t already done so! 

So without further ado, here is:

Side Project #1: Retina Wallpaper

(get the above image and 5 others as a Retina resolution wallpaper: Ubuntu Garden)

In a previous life I was a professional photographer, shooting everything from food & wine, to weddings, to fashion (and even a short lived stint in the beginning as a baby-photographer; this was well before my own daughter came into the picture, and I lacked the necessary patience to deal with babies and anxious moms). I also co-founded an underwater photography magazine called Wetpixel Quarterly, and got to travel a bit and take pictures of big swimming things with pointy teeth. In the course of all of this, I shot tens of thousands of images, most of which just sit idle on my hard drives.

I’ve been told that some of these images are quite nice. I’ve also noticed a lot of folks out there with the new Retina Display macbooks that seem to have default images as their desktop wallpaper. So why not a snazzy, high-res shot to really show off what your hardware is capable of? (note: these images will still work perfectly well for the poor souls like me who have yet to own a retina display).

I’ve created three collections, each with 5 images, to begin with: Bahamas Sharks, Ubuntu Garden, and San Francisco via Kayak. You can purchase them at the links below (and above); name your own price, or at the minimum price of $5, that’s 1 buck per image, vhat a schteal!  (update: all wallpapers are $1, though you can throw in a buck or two if you’re feeling generous; and 50% of the money paid towards the underwater images will go to Sharksavers.org, to help protect sharks and mantas from destructive practices like finning).

The first collection, Bahamas Sharks, contains images from my Wetpixel trip to the Bahamas; lot’s of impressive toothy creatures including tiger sharks & lemon sharks.

Get the Retina resolution wallpapers here: Bahamas Sharks

The second collection comes from work I did for Ubuntu, a Michelin-starred vegetarian restaurant in Napa. These images are from their beautiful biodynamic garden.

Get the Retina resolution wallpapers here: Ubuntu Garden

Finally, a series of images I took from my kayak when we used to live in Sausalito (ok, one is not taken from a kayak, and you can probably guess which one). Several of them show the SF skyline from a unique perspective.

Get the Retina resolution wallpapers here: SF via Kayak

I’ll probably be posting more collections soon, so if you’re interested or just want to keep up with the overall project please sign up for my newsletter here.

Ok, so what are the tools, and totals for time & money, used to create this project? See below the break for more.

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