My brother Ryan is moving into a new apartment, and to celebrate his new living quarters, he naturally wanted a Two-Face style poster of him and his roommate to hang up. Ever the accommodating brother, I took pictures of Ryan (the face on the left side of the picture) and his roommate Taylor, and I photoshopped them together into this monstrosity. So just to be clear, this is not a portrait of a guy with an odd idea of hair style. It’s two faces stitched together. Now I kind of want to watch Face/Off.

Water + blue and yellow food coloring + a penny = splash.

I had never really been to the Western part of the US before my visit to the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ll go ahead and generalize an entire region of the US by saying, “It was pretty.” By the way, here are pictures. They don’t have color.

Buildings tower over a BART station entrance in Oakland, the city across the bay from San Francisco. The BART, or Bay Area Rapid Transit, connects several cities around the bay and links San Francisco to the East Bay through an underwater tunnel.

A girl dances and stumbles down San Francisco’s Market Street at night. It looked like the girl had a lot of fun during the evening and was probably still having fun staggering alone in the dark.

The top of the Bay Bridge disappears in the afternoon fog. Coming from the humid, upper-90′s weather of St. Louis, San Francisco’s fog and its mid-50′s weather were quite a change.

Tourists walk down a corridor filled with prison cells in the former federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island. The island operated as a federal prison from 1934-1963. Living in these cells didn’t even look too bad. It would be a lot like spending everyday in a cubicle. Zing!

Travelers walk through a hallway in the Los Angeles airport. I had a layover in LA on my way to San Francisco, so I spent some of my free time taking pictures. There are plenty of annoyances when flying, and layovers are no exception. However, I did eat a pretty delicious cheese danish in the Phoenix airport on my way home. Props to that Phoenix airport pastry chef.

The wing of my airplane stretches out over the mountains of Arizona. Perhaps the only advantage of out-of-the-way layovers (other than eating delicious pastries) is getting to see new landscapes from thousands of feet in the air. Being from the the Midwest, mountains are a pretty exotic sight. And how cool does that wing look?

I made some head shots for St. Louis comedian Andrew Topping, and I like the way this one turned out as a portrait. I set up a makeshift studio in my bathroom and used part of a table-covering for the backdrop.

Comedienne Tree Sanchez. I love the word “comedienne.”

I’ve been playing around with the noise reduction in Lightroom 3 for a couple days, and I’m reasonable impressed. I shot this image last night around 1:00 a.m. in lighting conditions I usually think of as unusable. I bumped the ISO on my old 20D up to 3200 and shot this at f2.8 with a 1/5 sec image-stabilized shutter. The image is a little soft, but I’d say it’s usable. Maybe it’s not ideal, but I think I’m more willing to shoot super-high ISO if absolutely necessary.

Max performs in a comedy/debate show in St. Louis’ Central West End. Max won his debate with a rousing defense of wrestler Hulk Hogan, who is apparently better than Stone Cold Steve Austin.

I saw Yeasayer perform at The Gargoyle on Wash U’s campus in St. Louis last week. Here are a couple shots.
Yeasayer’s Ahmed Gallab plays an electric drum during a concert in St. Louis.

Yeasayer’s Anand Wilder plays keyboard at the end of their St. Louis show.

Piles of broken bottles and glasses wait to get melted down and recycled into new glass products. Guatemala has a problem with waste management and littering, so it was great to see a factory that uses glass waste in a productive way.

Workers heat and shape glass in the factory.

A worker blows air into a ball of hot glass to create a bubble inside.

After the glass is blown, it is shaped using various tools including molds and flat surfaces. Here glass is shaped using a stack of newspapers.

Workers use tweezers to add detail to a hot wine glass.

When workers are finished shaping the glass, it is placed in a furnace called an annealer. The furnace controls the rate at which the glass cools. This regulated cooling helps the glass from becoming brittle.

When the glass is finished it is receives finishing details like polishing before it is sold. The factory in Cantel sells glasses, bowls and other kitchenware.