to conclude the der spiegel space story i visited with george whitesides at the headquarters of virgin galactic. george was born into the field. his father is a harvard chemist, and prior to become CEO and president of virgin galactic he was the chief of staff at NASA. they build their spaceships out in the mojave desert, but maintain an office right in the middle of old town pasadena, next to a fancy soap store and a patagonia shop. you’d never know it unless you paid special attention to the little spaceship drawn on the doorway outside.

when richard branson got done flying balloons around the world he aimed a bit higher – taking private citizens into space, at a price tag of only $200,000 each. get in line, everybody!

ken bowersox, former astronaut, and astronaut hall of fame member was, up until recently, VP of astronaut safety and mission assurance at space exploration technologies (spaceX) in hawthorne, california. it seems he retired from the company at the very end of 2011. what he’s up to now, i’ve no idea, but in his life he’s spent two hundred and eleven days in space. that’s more than seven months. in contrast i don’t think i’ve even spent a collective seven months on vacation in my life, but ken’s hanging out in space.

spaceX was started by elon musk, who, when he grew tired of making money (paypal) decided he wanted to make sports cars instead (tesla motors) and then moved on to spaceships. spaceX’s hawthorne facility is awesome. it’s one of those places i walk into and think “i could spend the rest of my photographic life in this building and probably never get bored.” it’s huge. there are cool things everywhere. hell, even the trash cans are shaped like rocket ships. unfortunately, because of the nature of the work they do it’s also highly, highly restrictive. just getting permission to shoot where we did (in front of the dragon space capsule (above) and the falcon rocket (below)) was really tricky. we had dueling publicists, one said it was okay, one did not. just to be safe, i shot first and asked permission later. there was enough going on that it seemed to work, and ultimately, with the help of the good publicist, permission was granted. (thanks, roger!)

as much red tape as i had to cut through being a photographer, in this case it was far worse being the writer. the client was der spiegel magazine in germany and the writer, being a german citizen, wasn’t allowed within twenty yards of where we were shooting. throughout the facility there were walkways indicated with yellow tape marks. these went right down the middle of the warehouse, avoiding any areas where specific work was being done. apparently these weren’t just helpful navigation -  if you’re not a US citizen you can’t cross the yellow line. period.

when they were showing us around at first i mentioned to roger, the PR contact, that the place looked just like that facility mickey rourke used to build an army of robot drones in ironman 2. he said “oh yeah, that was filmed here. they didn’t really have to change that much around, either.”

this past summer i was very pleased to do a series of portraits for der spiegel magazine on a story about the privatization of space flight. we drove up into the california desert to visit XCOR, a company that makes space ships. more importantly, they make space ships that ordinary people can hitch rides in. well, maybe not ordinary people, but anyone willing to fork over about $95,000 for the chance to get a ride to the edge of space. people like victoria’s secret models. well, to be more accurate, they’re making suborbital spaceships, so they don’t actually go above the earth’s atmosphere. still, they get high enough that the earth looks pretty damn amazing. their lynx spaceship takes off and lands like a jet, on a runway, not vertically, like a rocket. it gets high up enough that you’d have several minutes of weightlessness, and a right to complain about every single other plane flight you’ll ever take in your life.

XCOR is housed inside a giant hangar in a remote neighborhood of mojave where it seems like every building is either abandoned or is housing some tremendously high-tech space gizmo. it’s hot enough outside that you wouldn’t want to leave the air conditioning unless you were going directly into space (where, hopefully, it’s cooler). their facility looks like your neighbor’s garage, if your neighbor was a genius and had way cooler toys than you expected. the vibe inside is very familial. the people who work there love it, obviously. there’s no other reason to live in the middle of the desert. XCOR has a policy where all the employees get rides up to space. how amazing is that? imagine graduating as an engineer and having the option to either work at a desk in some giant company where you probably won’t even have a window,  or going to build rocketships hands-on in the middle of the desert where you are guaranteed a trip to space. sure, it’s hot as hell in mojave and there are no girls around for fifty miles in any direction, but. . . that’s a no brainer.

as we were leaving a couple of the engineers asked if we wanted them to fire a prototype rocket engine for us. i don’t know about you, but whenever someone asks if i want to see a rocket engine i always say yes. this was, of course, a much smaller version of what ultimately goes into their lynx spaceship, but even so, it was very, very loud and very, very hot.

on tuesday my uncle howard lost his battle to cancer. it’d been a long fight, through several rounds of lymphoma which he appeared to have beaten, but then finally, due to the intense treatments he had to endure, he contracted a form of chemo-induced (and resistant) leukemia that he could not overcome.

howard was a slightly mysterious but always warm and present member of the family. he was everything a good uncle should be: concerned, caring, earnest, genuine, interested and engaged in the twists and turns of an obligatorily dysfunctional family dynamic, and full of advice (especially on topics for which he may have been unqualified). also, like any good uncle he was begrudgingly happy to occasionally be the butt of a long-running joke, and wasn’t afraid to take strong or unpopular stances when he felt he was right (most of the time). he loved all things costco, especially the roast chicken. over the years he gave me several kitchen gadgets he saw on TV, when all i ever really ended up using was a chef’s knife. he was disappointed i never quite figured out what he was trying to explain to me about options trading, and i was disappointed, too. my brain doesn’t always work fast enough for quantitative things. he was happy enough that i bought a small amount of apple stock a while back, but stressed that buying options would’ve been better. i’m sure he was right, but i still don’t understand how it works.

being an uncle myself i will work hard to take the lessons i learned from my relationship with howard to my that with my own niece, willamina. most importantly, that i need to be there for her in her life, make sure my opinions are known, and trust her enough to take what she needs from them, the rest of the family be damned.

uncle howard was gracious enough to allow me to photograph him during several of his treatments, with the caveat that i also had to take an “after” picture once his hair grew back. the picture above is the “after” – after he was in remission from his first (or second?) round of lymphoma in 2008.

the photos below are the last ones i took of him, just a couple weeks ago, shaving with an electric razor in his hospital bed. when i suggested that now was the time to grow a beard if ever there was one he just smiled and kept shaving.

goodbye, uncle howard. thanks for everything.

you’re right, the sodastream was a really, really good idea.

visit mr. iliketotellstories himself, here.

kristen christian is the founder of bank transfer day. fed up with bank fees (most especially a charge bank of america was considering levying against customers using their debit cards) and the general bad behavior of corporate financial institutions, kristen reached out the way most any progressively minded, internet savvy 27 year old would: on facebook. a simple plea to get people to take their money out of big banks and put them into credit unions suddenly blossomed into a movement. that day was november 5th, 2011. what impact did it have? hard to tell. the facebook page for bank transfer day has 61,000 “likes”. the actual impact (and the persistent trickle of people still switching over to credit unions) probably won’t be definitively quantifiable right away. in all likelihood it helped credit unions more than it hurt big banks. some have even argued that banks would be better off without the checking accounts of individuals cluttering up their systems. the real money is in business investments and real estate, of course.

still, the idea of a movement is – in some respects, i think – to be a symbol. in this case, maybe the bigger victory was that bank of america rescinded it’s proposed debit fee charge amidst a slew of bad press. and kristen? she’s still going a mile a minute, juggling interview requests with reporters all around the world (many of whom she has to consistently remind that no, she’s not actually affiliated with the occupy movements), writing blogs and editorials and being on TV.

kristen and i were actually internet-friendly before she ever started bank transfer day. prior to this she ran an art gallery in downtown LA, but in response to some of the negative attention she received once bank transfer day became a phenomenon she was forced to close the gallery. she had received a few death threats, which she took seriously. it turns out, people can be angry on both sides of the political line. kristen told me she had contacted a security consultant who asked her if running the gallery was worth her life. the problem was that if she was running the gallery she was easy to find. she had to move apartments. she now lives in an “undisclosed location” somewhere in los angeles. she said that even her own mother doesn’t know her address, and apparently living at an “undisclosed location” puts a crimp in your dating life. for this picture, though, we met at a different undisclosed location. and no, the photos aren’t geotagged.

it’s a tough way to live. for kristen’s sake, i hope that some of the heat dies down for her soon, just so that she can have some semblance of normalcy again. on the other hand, not many 27 year olds get to be so prominent on the political landscape. many things in life are a double edged sword. kristen seems to be making the best of it, she seems committed and passionate about her cause, and determined to affect whatever change she can, while she can.

brandon perdue (more widely known as hapa) is the director of the los angeles branch of the scratch academy – a school to train DJs. i never realized there was such a thing, but there it is, tucked away under the 405 freeway in west LA. the day i was there seemed busy. students were practicing in a big main area full of turntables, while another class took place in a closed off back room. my first thought upon arrival, watching (and listening to) half a dozen people learn to DJ was something along the lines of i sure hope DJ classes come with complimentary advil. i was reminded of my father who, when i asked for a drum set as a kid, wisely commented that he wouldn’t mind listening to me play the drums, but definitely didn’t want to listen to me learn to play the drums.

as someone who is old enough to have bought vinyl because that was the predominant medium at the time (my first vinyl music purchase: weird al in 3D, so that should give you some idea), and someone who later contemplated being a musician (bass), i’ve always found electronic music and DJing to be somewhat puzzling. i once got sent to photograph a fatboy slim concert and found myself totally confused. as near as i could tell, it was a bunch of people watching someone listen to records. still, there were so many people there and they all seemed so engaged in what was going on, i’m sure there was something to it that i was just missing.

still, the people at the scratch academy could not have been nicer. hapa himself could not have been more personable and gracious. everyone seemed interested in the photo session and friendly. rarely do i go to any location where there isn’t a single person unwilling to help out or be involved. there was definitely a sense of camaraderie amongst the students and faculty at the school. it’s great to be in a place where everyone is really focused and enthusiastic about what they’re doing, even if what they’re doing is something that i could’ve used earplugs for. then again, i probably wouldn’t have wanted to hear miles davis learn to play the trumpet, either.

toward the end of the day i got to sit in a bit on hapa’s official class. even being there only for a short time, listening to him instruct the students was eye opening. he had a great attention to rhythm and detail and the feel of a song, to how passages of music work together and could play off of each other, and when he explained things to the students it was apparent how much he loved the process.

learn more about hapa here.

visit the scratch academy here.

thanks, brandon.

when you know time is short it helps to be prepared. since i knew in advance that hef was going to be beyond brief, and i knew what i wanted to do with him, it was nice to be able to test out the lighting the day before with the help of ali and james. they made off with a lot of my furniture, too, since they caught me in the middle of moving. all in all, a win-win, and we didn’t have to waste any time at the playboy mansion figuring out what to do.

to say that this, my second shoot of hugh hefner, was brief would be an understatement. the entire session lasted four minutes and three seconds, including two setups in two locations in the playboy mansion – a total of 26 frames. i first photographed hef for time magazine about five years ago. this time, for german newsmagazine der spiegel, i noticed the years catching up to the 85 year old hef. he seemed more frail, a little more unsteady, and he complained of a bad back. though when the lights and camera hit him the guy just looked great. he’s an icon for a reason. he’s got a charisma that’s hard to deny.

max kellerman and marcellus wiley host the max & marcellus show on ESPN radio 710AM, here in LA each weekday from 10 – 2. i’ve done a few shoots in radio stations and it always proves to be a bit more difficult than it should be. first, there’s glass everywhere. reflective glass. getting rid of reflections can be done, but it takes time. of course, trying to set up and get a decent portrait in the middle of someone’s radio show means that you can only do things during commercial breaks. so, wait around for 20 minutes, set up for 3 minutes. wait around for another 20 minutes, set up for 3 more minutes, and so on.

there couldn’t be anyone in the world less interested in sports or less knowledgeable about sports than myself. i’ve tried and i’ve absolutely failed to see any appeal in it. perhaps this stems from my complete physical inability to play sports as a kid. i went to exactly one day of PE class in 7th grade and never went back. the endless arguing that people like to do about sports facts and figures has also been baffling to me. (though i can appreciate the desire to simply argue for arguments’ sake) people choose teams because they like where they’re from, i guess. it seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual team. since players get transferred around all the time, if players that you like move to a different team in a different city, you’d think your allegiance to the team would shift as well, right? apparently, that’s not how it works. the arguments would hold a lot more water to me if someone just said “i like philadelphia. they’ve got great restaurants, and the parking at the stadium isn’t too expensive.”

sitting there waiting for max & marcellus’ commercial breaks i began to realize what sports fans were, though, and what the appeal might be. it’s so simple, i don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. sports fans are geeks. max and marcellus arguing about statistics in baseball sounds exactly like my friend benj arguing about star wars. to someone uninterested in star wars (i.e., girls) benj’s heated and excitable dissertation on the meaning and inflection in greedo’s speech in the tatooine cantina sounds exactly like sports radio does to me. so, i get it. you’re all geeks. jocks are geeks, too. except that marcellus wiley could absolutely crush benj’s head like a walnut if he wanted to. in the meantime, though, i’d rather listen to greedo.