The last month or so has seen some great new projects start to take shape. I’ve already blogged about Faded & Blurred and how thrilled we are with the reception 2.0 has received. Not just from users either. We’ve been lucky enough to bring some great new partners and sponsors into the mix, which is fantastic. Also on the F&B front, we’ve got some great content going up on the site. Photographer Spotlight, gear reviews and in the next week or so, we’ll be adding some great interviews into the mix.
With F&B 2.0 up and running, I’ve been laying the groundwork to get back to my art. As many of you know I took a break for a while, but am now finding that new images and ideas are working their way into the light. New artwork is coming soon.
Finally, Nikki and I have been building on some of the discussions that the three of us started about what a Faded & Blurred studio might look like. Not a studio as a space per se (though that’s part of it), but rather a studio as more of a creative agency, of which the Faded & Blurred website is a product. So, we came up with the name Blurry Street Studios. First, as an obvious tie in to Faded & Blurred, but also as a more subtle nod to 19th century photo compositor, William Notman, whose own studio was located at Number 17 Bleury Street in Montreal. The goal is for Blurry Street to become a boutique media studio, providing design solutions for web, print and mobile platforms. We’re just in the planning stages now, but are very excited at the potential…stay tuned.

Well, after months of development and noodling, we pushed Faded & Blurred 2.0 live yesterday. It’s been a really wonderful process building this site. Though this site is for the users, the actual building of it was sort of a personal challenge. This site is built on a Joomla backend, and up until a couple months ago, I didn’t really even know what Joomla was. I knew of it, but had never really looked into it. When I was researching how to add a social networking component to the new version of F&B, I read through several web development blogs, many of which sung the praises of using Joomla. Looking into it, I found that it seemed to fit our needs moving forward. It’s modular, scalable and has a fantastic worldwide development community that are often more than willing to answer questions, even provide code snippets. I talked it over with Frank and Nikki, who asked if I knew Joomla. “No”, I responded “but I will.” I think they were a little hesitant, but they said go for it. So we started pouring over sites like Model Mayhem, Supershoots, DP Review and even Facebook and MySpace, trying to come up with a list of features that we wanted to integrate into F&B 2. At the same time, I began researching Joomla. I started reading books, blog posts and forum discussions, trying to wrap my head around Joomla’s rather different way of doing things. Monday, all of it came together and we released 2.0 into the wild. It’s a huge improvement over our initial site, offering discussion forums, social networking and bookmarking, twitter integration and a lot more. Also, we’ve made a commitment to trying to make F&B more of a destination site for photographers and image makers. We’ve got features, reviews, and some great interviews lined up with some of the most creative and interesting people we can find. We don’t know exactly where it’s going, but hey, part of the fun is just hanging on and enjoying the ride.

See for yourself at: http://fadedandblurred.com

Over the weekend, we took to the streets for the third Faded & Blurred photo walk. It was a gorgeous afternoon with 60 or so of our closest friends, walking through the Playhouse District of Pasadena. After the walk, a group of us met up at the Yard House for lunch (and to give Frank a chance to Tweet his beer…sort of a tradition). We also talked about the upcoming Help Portrait project that Faded & Blurred is so honored to be involved in. Not wanting to let the beautiful late afternoon light go to waste, we made our way to the Pasadena City Hall where we happened upon Miss Panamerican, who was kind enough to let us photograph her in an impromptu session. All in all, it was another great walk. I’m really looking forward to the next one in Griffith Park on the 25th. Also, mark your calendar for next month’s walk: Downtown After Dark. We’ll be walking and shooting in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, November 21st. Meeting time and location will be posted on fadedandblurred.com in the next couple days…Stay tuned.