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I was privileged enough to have the Portland Japanese Garden's former Program Director Wendy Mitchell, who is now the current Director of Stewardship at the World Forestry Center, serve as my personal guide for a morning at the Garden and I wanted to share some of that experience, so this is a straightforward one.

Not many words.

A series of images.

A photo essay if you will.

Click through to enjoy a Saturday morning at the Portland Japanese Garden.

If you remember several months back, Ello came onto our radars with a vengeance. It seemed like within a 2 week period, it went from no one every hearing of it, to everyone clamoring to try to find an invite code. Then, seemingly, it died off. Not surprising in our culture of ‘it’s now or never’ impatience for the latest meaningful Kanye meme or cop-clobber-video. Through that whole thing, I was still curious and became a regular user of Ello despite so many thinking that it was just another passing fad. Well, recently, I got an email asking if I wanted to test out  the one thing that was glaringly missing from the Ello experience, a dedicated mobile app. YES! Within 24 hours, the beta version of the app was on my phone, and now that I’ve had almost two weeks to play with it, I’ve got to say, it’s nice. Very very nice. 

Although I’ve called these hills home for 7 years, there hasn’t been a single time that I’ve headed out into the Santa Monica Mountains without being pleasantly surprised by what I come across. While the terrain and the topography may prove familiar, the aesthetics are rarely a constant…the same hillside, or the same oak grove, or even the same sandstone rock will look different from hour to hour, day to day, week to week. Much of this has to do with the extremely colorful myriad of climate zones that take residence in this range due to its proximity to both the crisp coastal climate of Pacific Ocean, and the much warmer San Fernando Valley inland. The constant interplay between these various zones provides an ever-changing landscape, especially from the visual perspective. 

This was never as evident to me as it was last week. 

The driver met me at the house at about 7am for the hour-long drive to the orphanage. I was a bit concerned after reading a few reviews the night before about the treatment of the elephants, and this was something I had to see for myself. As we entered the grounds, the first thing on the schedule was to accompany them during a feeding. This took place in a large open field that was part of the expansive forested grounds. For about an hour, we were able to view the elephants and, if we wanted, to take pictures with them. Something felt way too amusement park-ish for me about the whole charade, as handlers would aggressively reign you in to take a picture, after which they’d ask for a ‘donation,’ so I refrained from the novelties, electing to stand back a bit and just observe what was happening.

Like last year, I had the incredible opportunity of being a fly on the wall as a house photographer at this year's PTTOW summit, once again taking place on the Southern California beachside Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes. PTTOW, which stands for 'Plan To Take On The World,' brings together some of the world's most influential marketing players from companies including Red Bull, Vice, Discovery Channel, ESPN, and GoPro with some of the planet's most visionary thinkers, futurists, and entrepreneurs