Dave Stagner

The new Feng Shui Ninjas album is completed! The official release date is our cd release show on July 2 at Convergence, but you can buy it NOW from Bandcamp.

This is from a shoot I’ve been planning for a long time now. Stephanie Engebretson is a wonderfully photogenic dancer – full of dramatic motion, and beautiful as well. I’ve been wanting to get her on a big stage with studio strobes rather than theatrical lighting, to get higher resolution images. Taken at Patrick’s Cabaret in Minneapolis.

Rosie Palmer performing at the Nomad World Pub with the Gypsy Nouveau Cabaret. Sometimes, the timing of a photo is just right.

A near-final mix of the music for “Surviving”, as performed by Kalila Indivar of Smiling Lune at Patrick’s Cabaret, part of the Kinetic Kitchen series.

“Surviving” is one piece of a full production, “Dancing with Death”, part of the 2011 Minnesota Fringe Festival.

Surviving 110426 mastered by TropeStorm

I shot this photo several years ago, and recently took a couple of stabs at re-editing it to strengthen the image. Here’s where it is for now.

Annoying problem I’ve discovered… I use the Publish feature in Lightroom 3 to synchronize my Lightroom contents to Flickr. The problem is, if a change is made (even a tag), it breaks any links from outside Flickr back to the image.

I really hope they can fix that soon.

A quote sticks in my mind. I believe it was Arthur C Clarke who originally said it, and I’m paraphrasing, but this is the gist of it… “The only thing more amazing than how fast we got to the Moon is how fast we left it”.

I’m from the tail end of what I think of as the Apollo generation – those of us who were young and impressionable when people were actually landing on the Moon. In 1969, I was four years old. Some of my earliest television memories were watching the moon landings. For friends slightly older than me, it was a galvanizing experience that stays with them to this day. But now? My wife, born in 1970, is too young to remember moon landings. Many of my friends were born after the last human being left the Moon. For my children, Moon landings are as distant and remote an experience as WWII is for me.

What happened? Why did we take that first, tentative step off of Spaceship Earth, then jump right back in and slam the door behind us?

Lizzy at Ryan’s birthday, 2009

From “The Selkie”, part of the 2010 Minnesota Fringe Festival.

A conversation with a friend who is teaching a film appreciation class got me to thinking about movies that I consider must-sees. I’m going to try to draw up a list here. List will probably be updated regularly, and I’ll keep it in alphabetical order rather than some sort of ranking.

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