moving on....

the other day i was at a shoot with another photographer. she said, "i think i know you. you shot somebody famous." certain she had the wrong person and certain i had never photographed anyone famous i said "who michael warren". she said no so i went down my short list of potential candidates. apparently my friends act of congress are more famous than the pop phenom. congrats guys!

so anyway i get a call the other day from one of the guys in the band. he kindly informs me that my photos will soon be replaced. turns out they've gotten in with ryan russell. i don't know ryan but he's shot a lot of folks. he is certainly one of the top entertainment photographers in the area.... so i guess if i'm going to be replaced, it's a good thing it's him. i look forward to seeing what he comes up with. it will not doubt have a yellow tint.

all that got me a little sentimental and i realized i never posted anything from that shoot. so 7 months later i present act of congress... quite possibly the last time you'll see these pics.

derek trucks band

i got to shoot a concert the other day. i was an official photographer... i felt like a rock star or a least a person taking pictures of a rock star. this is the opening act which i don't know why more people didn't come to see this. he is amazing. only 28 years old and he's played with all the living legends. lots of signatures on his guitar... see if you can make out any. headliner pics to come.

the cowboy way...

funny this wasn't how i pictured it.

i've been wanting to post something for a while but haven't had the time to put in a good one. these pictures just crack me up so this will work for now.

finally some photography

for some reason i haven't wanted to post much of my photography recently. not sure why. i think partially because i've been doing mostly commercial stuff and haven't felt like the time was right to show the images.

anyway, i went out and shot for a paper the other day and my assignment was to capture the atmosphere of the event rather than get the typical newspaper shots. they were running a gallery on their website and wanted a little different style. nothing special... just wanted to post some of my stuff since i haven't in over a month.

beer, art, & God

well this post is going to be disappointing because there are no threats on my life or fictitious love affairs... and no photography. but it is quite relevant to my current state of life and thus photography.

there is only one beer out there that has ever made me want to create a blog post. it's called Tilburg's Dutch Brown Ale. it is one of the best tasting beers i've ever had... actually it is the best. i won't bore you with why but one of it's highlights is it's label. you can't find this beer just anywhere in fact whenever i get together with my friend Brave we go on a scavenger hunt...it's seems Fresh Market & Diplomat Deli are the safest bets. anyway the reason we first tried this beer was because of it's label. that's right it's a clothed bird eating a naked human with birds flying out of it's booty. about as weird and hedonistic as one could imagine.

the story behind is that this brewery opened in an abandoned abbey. this artist, Hieronymus Bosch, apparently lived in the area when he painted his masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights around 1504.

if you look closely in the lower right hand corner you can see the Tilburg logo (sorry if it won't open... sometimes blogger bites... do an image search for it if it won't open... it's worth it). so what's the point?

point is that i was made aware of a historic masterpiece because of something as trivial as my pursuit of a better tasting beer. this painting is quite imaginative and somewhat uncomfortable due to the uninhibited nature of the creatures depicted in it. i think it's fascinatingly sick. furthermore the real point of this painting was to depict the extreme nature of a fallen world... creative imagery of the garden of eden post fall... anything goes. my understanding is that Bosch's point was not to be humorous but rather to provoke thought and some real emotions about the severity of mankind's situation as a result of sin and brokenness. who want's to live in a world where giant birds eat humans who apparently eat birds who pass them as they are about to be passed by a bird. really this is an amazingly creative and Truthful piece of work.

there's a new documentary movie coming out from ben stein... you know "bueller, bueller, anyone... bueller". his objective is to show how creationist are being "Expelled" in academia because they don't fit in with modern science and evolution. he makes a great point that science is divorcing itself from God (and i'll say vice versa too... the church and science) which is giving an incomplete view of the world, science, and nature. his point which i think is excellent is that life/matter/gas must have started somewhere by something thus making God & science married or joined together. evolution was a great 19th century simple solution to some issues but it does not do a good scientific job of filling in the gaps of the 21st century. we know way too much now about the complexity of cell structures to not demand more answers to the bigger questions. his greater point is that Einstein, Newton and even Darwin operated on the premise that there is a God and thus a creator.

it is historically substantiated to suggest that the majority of influential & timeless thought & art was based on the idea that there is a Creator and there is Truth in that paradigm of thought that all other things can safely be placed on. i know this to be true in my own life, with my own emotions, with my own world view etc. as an artist however i believe that i can make truer more significant art as i base my creation on the premise of this Truth that there is a Creator. i believe thought & art based on this Truth tells a much deeper story than that which is not. back to the beer....

my favorite beer uses a logo from a painting that debuted over 500 years ago... that author of that painting had a connection to the Creator and made a magnificent, imaginative, creative yet truthful piece of art because of his beliefs.... the product of that creation has been getting attention for a very long time. my point to all of this? i long for our art to have substantial significance and hope that we will always draw from this same source that has historically proven to provide a timelessness to thought & art.

things they don't teach you in business school...

i didn't actually go to business school, but if i had i don't think they would have taught me about last night. (this is long but worth the read)

let me first say that yesterday was a great day. church was great and immediately after that we set out for chattanooga with some friends to see the aquarium. i should also say if you live in birmingham and think birmingham is a cool place to live... don't go to chattanooga. they've got it together. as we were discussing with our friends, we think the key to their (and many other city's) success is that they have a river (and actual mountains), so what we suggested is we tweak/scrap the whole dome idea (as great as it is) to include a lazy river around the city. we could turn it green for saint patrick's day (is that today?) or you simply take a ferry tour for the evening. yeah, yeah, i know some of you may be saying "but we have the cahaba river." i know, and i'm very thankful for the cahaba and the medication i have to give my dog every time he swims in it.... but it's just not the same. anyway, i digress.... on to my story.

i would like to think i'm an optimist but i must say that when things start going really well, i start looking for the other shoe to fall. and, maybe through a self fulfilling prophecy, it actually does.

so it's getting late. erin and i are having some ice cream and watching some story on national geographic about people getting killed by polar bears (don't ask).... basking in the memories of a great day.... mind you there are only about 2hours left in this day. around 10 o'clock my cell phone rings. i check the caller id and it's not anyone in my directory so i let it go to voicemail (there's your proof stokes-if you read this). eagerly i wait for my message indicator so i can figure out who this is. Q: i mean really who would be calling someone at 10pm on a sunday night. A: someone who thinks i'm having an affair with his wife. still there?

the message goes something like this.... "corey nolen, i just checked a message from you on my wife's voicemail that said "hey baby, just want to know if you still want to do this, i still have the files". just letting you know that you better get rid of this number because if i ever see it again i'm going to track you down and kick your ass."... more or less.

let me really emphasize the lack of words i have to describe my feelings at this point. i'm being made aware that i'm having an affair with someone's wife and soon going to die.

so i call the guy back thinking we can somehow figure this out and come up with an explanation but unfortunately this guy really did just want to kill me and wasn't entertaining any other options than what he initially thought. after being threatened a second time i decided to pray and call the police.

erin and my first thought was "who would call someone saying they are me". honestly that was the worst moment, thinking someone was playing a prank/signing a death warrant on me (which is not beyond some of my friends). my sharp, smart, detective like, wife began to think outside the box and we thought of every single person i've called in the last 3 months. we even went into our cell & office phone records to try and find this #. during this time the fine officer who (really did a great job) i filed the report with called my assailant to try to figure out what was going on. he actually listened to the message that was left and ACTUALLY AGREED that it sounded like "hey baby!" i explained to the officer that "baby" is not in my vocabulary. i've never in my life called anything baby unless it was a baby. my wife was there to verify. i also, explained that we run a business and have to call clients on occasion, so the explanation must be somewhere in that.

no matter, the pressure is now on us to figure this thing out. it felt like some movie where the innocent guys fingerprints are all over the crime scene. erin and i sat at the computer for what seemed like forever looking through phone records. we found an outgoing call to these people on thursday afternoon... FROM OUR HOME PHONE! okay so erin's thinking who's been in our house... and who's in our house right now.... i'm thinking, am i having an affair and forgot? after maxing my brain out, cross referencing phone records, going through every phone number we have written down or in our directory, my beautiful and smart wife (i'll call her baby now) figured it out.

i am beginning to do some freelance work for a company who's CEO is named "beatty". beatty gave me 2 numbers to contact him with 1. his actual office 2. his home office. the number beatty gave me for his home office was the number of the assailant. apparently i did leave a message with beatty that was asking him about "the files" he had given me in which i was about to "do this" presentation with. it was like we cracked the case... it was awesome.

so i called the officer back, explained everything to him. he talked to my assailant explained the mistake to him. my assailant apologized and i was finally able to go to sleep. the end.

because this is a photography blog i thought you might like to see what it looked like through the various stages of this nightmare... all before the end of an otherwise wonderful day. and btw, the other shoe did fall.

the following is a dramatization...

my first love...

before this blog was about photography, it was about music. i love to write, play guitar and sing but especially love it when it's with ethereal. there has always been chemistry with us and somehow we have made it for almost 10 years.

we don't play very often at all. in fact we actually thought that we had quit. but somehow we keep getting sporadic gigs and we still throw a set together from time to time. a few months ago we all sat down at panera, the place where business happens, and talked about our future. we're not young any more and we all have fairly demanding jobs and home life's. but if you've ever performed music you know that it gets in you and stays in you and when you don't have it you feel a void. with an accumulation of new and in my opinion much more versatile songs, we decided to give this thing another year of focused attention. now remember we had thought we quit so this is a big deal. so we've been practicing for a month now and it's just like old times.

anyway, this weekend we had one of our bi-annual shows which was actually a 2 day event. we went up early and pretty much had the whole day together to play music and then just play. i had more fun friday than i have in very long time. i think after times like this we would all agree that it's as much about our friendships as it is about the music. i am very thankful for this part of my life which i feel like has been suppressed for the last year or so. hopefully it will re-emerge soon.

the pictures: at some point in the last 2 years stokes became an outdoors man. as soon as we had finished rehearsal stokes got us all to go "mudding" (and i use that term loosely) with him. after that we had a friendly game of paper hand baseball where will actually had a sustaining injury. it was a good time. here are some pics.