First half of the Year 2013

Well, its July already. I’m not sure how that happened but I’m fairly certain that it did happen. It’s been a crazy-busy year so far, both on the photography and the flight ends of the world (pun intended). I’ve been some amazing places and made huge differences for a lot of people out there. I wanted to say thank you to all my friends and family for putting up with my unpredictable schedule so that I can do this. And thanks to all my photography clients for being so flexible with your scheduling in turn.

Here is a peak at what my flight map looked like for the 1st ½ of 2013. I was quite surprised.

All my flight segments 01 Jan - 01 July, 2013

All my flight segments 01 Jan – 01 July, 2013

A Quick Pic from New Zealand

There was so much natural beauty in New Zealand and the people were some of the nicest that I have met anywhere! I’m planning to go back there on holiday sometime soon.

While I was in Auckland I went on a day trip to Rangitoto Island. It is an island that is only 600 years old and has no top-soil, everything there grows in the volcanic rock and sand. It was amazing and beautiful and rugged, … and I got sunburnt. I wanted to share a quick photo from my excursion there. Theres many more that I still have to go through…

Pohutukawa Tree, Rangitoto Island, New Zealand

Shot with: Nikon d700 16mm @f8 1/640 iso200
HDR: 5-1stop brackets. Edited in Lightroom & Photoshop.

Around The World in 7 Days

As a frequent traveler, an aviation buff, and just someone who likes to fly a lot. I was really excited recently when I had the opportunity to check off several items from my “wish list” all on one trip:

While I was in San Maarten I didn’t have enough time there to actually “ride the fence“, but I did get to fly out of there on a 747-400 and watch all the people charging towards the fence as we turned onto the runway. Hopefully next time I’ll get to stay longer.

My schedule allowed me to extend my stay in Osaka for a few days and it was exceptional! I wandered around town a bit and tried in vain to get to Kyoto. I ate some phenomenal Sushi (see pics) and saw the Osaka Castle. My only regret was not staying longer; I can not wait to get back to Japan!

As an added bonus, while rescheduling my return trip, the available routing changed which put me through Honolulu airport (HNL). While HNL isn’t anything spectacular in itself (it is neat in the fact that it is an open-air airport), it was a great stop-over point because one of my oldest friends had recently moved to the island for a new job. I took the opportunity to catch up with him over a drink and some Poke Salad at La Marina Sailing Club (wiki).

If you ever have a long layover in HNL I strongly recommend heading out to La Marina. Have their Mai Thai, you will not regret it!

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Trip Photos: Tel Aviv

I’m going to start posting an ongoing series of my travel photos here. Because of the nature of my work (Flight Paramedic), I will not be talking a whole lot about the details but you’ll get a lot of photos of the sights that I go see. They’re mostly from my iPhone and recently my iPhone with Olloclip (seriously, that thing is awesome! review to come).

I’d love any feedback on this stuff, follow me on twitter and hit me up. Now, on with the show…

Back in February I went to Tel Aviv and took the afternoon to go to Jerusalem  I saw some of the oldest structures that I’ve ever seen, tried to understand religious practices that I’ve not had experience with before, and was thoroughly impressed and awed. Oh, by the way, Hebrew is a tough language.

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grep -a james-stuff /www

Well, not “just like that”. It’s been a whole lot of work, much more than I initially expected, but I’ve managed to consolidate my photography website (AfterTheHOURS) and my personal website to this domain. It’s been a lot of sorting categories and editing posts, mostly fixing the links to images. There are some broken things and some missing images, oh well (also, I’ve deleted my Flickr account so that explains some broken images).

I wish that I could say that I wrote some fancy script that fixed everything but in the end, because of how WP holds the content in its database, it required editing a whole lot of posts .

My thoughts behind this move concentrate primarily around making it a lot more simple to describe to people what it is that I do, and secondly, make it more simple for me to manage content, e.g.: actually post something to the web.

A Time for Change

Over the next few weeks I’ll be consolidating all of my business websites into one site. JamesZambon.com will be this new home. My goal is to make it easier to point people to one place and to explain all the things that I’m involved in. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll fully execute this but its gotta be easier and more productive than stressing about which website needs updating and then not updating it followed several weeks later by the internal frustration that I’ve not updated any of my online presence for weeks (read: months).

Ok, enough of that… Along with all this re-branding comes, of course, new logos and new marketing stuffs. Here is one of the new business cards that I recent received for the Flight Paramedic work that I do.

Shot on an iPhone and processed using Snapseed