I’ve become addicted!!!!!! Addicted to instagram! If you haven’t already, add me to your instagramfeed- my name is ChelseaSektnan, and I upload daily… unfortunately. Someone should throw my iPhone out a car window to stop this madness.
Instagram Chelsea Sektnan
Presley the kitty photographer
Poor Presley just reached another level of kitty torture- we bought a GoPro over the weekend, and since it was a rainy day, the only logical way to experiment with our new toy was to put it around his neck. It doesn’t seem to bug him too much, except when he tries to jump on to things… he just isn’t quite as nimble as before. We got a lot of blank photos from him sleeping on it, and a lot of duplicates of him looking outside the window for hours on end. But most of all it’s been pretty fun to see the house from a kitty point of view.
Presley's point of view
Kitty point of view- under the belly.
Around the house. Under a chair, watching John hang a frame, skulking on the floor and a reflective view of the litter box.
Even though we torture him with outfits and cameras, he’s still a very spoiled, happy cat.
Smiling kitty
Last month I was stopped on my way to a city council meeting by a traffic jam. I used my reporter nose and got out to find the reason of the hold-up, and found a horrible motorcycle accident. I was immediately reminded of my friend Jason Lenhart’s recent experience with a similar situation. I was amazed at the force of the accident which sent the man’s shoe into the car’s front end. From what I have heard, the motorcyclist survived the crash. But, of course, I’m still waiting for the police to confirm that.
An unidentified 45-year-old man on a motorcycle was hit by a silver sedan outside of the King Harbor Shopping Center near the shop Style Rage around 4:45 p.m. on Tuesday.
The sedan was driving northbound on Pacific Coast Highway and was attempting to make a left turn into the parking lot of the shopping center when it collided with the southbound motorcycle. A woman and her son were in the car.
“Did you see the guy’s shoe in the grate?” one onlooker asked as dozens of shop keepers and shoppers watched investigators attempt to find the man’s identification in the motorcycle. Photo by Chelsea Sektnan
The man was taken to the hospital with unknown injuries. According to Sergeant Chuck Prestia he was still conscious when emergency vehicles reached the scene.
The road was blocked off for approximately two hours as investigators processed the scene. Cars were backed up and honking throughout rush hour. On lookers were shocked by the sight, especially after one woman pointed out the man’s black and blue sneaker stuck in the car’s front end.
As the Redondo Beach reporter for the Easy Reader News, I’m tasked with going to either the School Board or City Council meeting every Tuesday and pulling a story from the agenda for the paper. The stories are usually pretty easy to find- but the photos are a lot more difficult. This is my favorite from the last council meeting.
One of the city's lawyers receives recognition for his service at last Tuesday's City Council meeting.
John and I spent New Years at the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley. It was extremely cold- but definitely worth it!
The Racetrack in Death Valley
The sailing stones are a geological phenomenon found in the Racetrack. The stones slowly move across the surface of the playa, leaving a track as they go, without human or animal intervention. (Looks super weird, and almost like a hoax!) They have never been seen or filmed in motion. (Although photographers use tripods to photograph them in the middle of the day… just incase they move apparently.) Racetrack stones only move once every two or three years and most tracks last for three or four years. Stones with rough bottoms leave straight striated tracks while those with smooth bottoms wander. Stones sometimes turn over, exposing another edge to the ground and leaving a different-sized track in the stone’s wake. The sailing stones are most likely moved by strong winter winds, reaching 90 mph, once it has rained enough to fill the playa with just enough water to make the clay slippery. The prevailing southwest winds across Racetrack playa blow to northeast. Most of the rock trails are parallel to this direction, lending support to this hypothesis. An alternate hypothesis builds upon the first. As rain water accumulates, strong winds blow thin sheets of water quickly over the relatively flat surface of the playa. A layer of ice forms on the surface as night temperatures fall below freezing. Wind then drives these floating ice sheets, their aggregate inertia and large area providing the necessary force required to move the larger stones. Rock trails would again remain parallel to the southwest winds. According to investigator Brian Dunning, “Solid ice, moving with the surface of the lake and with the inertia of a whole surrounding ice sheet, would have no trouble pushing a rock along the slick muddy floor.” A more recent theory is that ice collars form around rocks and when the local water level rises, the rocks are buoyantly floated off the soft bed. The minimal friction allows the rocks to be moved by arbitrarily light winds. (I believe it’s aliens who move them.)
Racetrack Playa "sailing stones" The sailing stones are a geological phenomenon found in the Racetrack. The stones slowly move across the surface of the playa, leaving a track as they go, without human or animal intervention. They have never been seen or filmed in motion. Racetrack stones only move once every two or three years and most tracks last for three or four years. Stones with rough bottoms leave straight striated tracks while those with smooth bottoms wander. Stones sometimes turn over, exposing another edge to the ground and leaving a different-sized track in the stone's wake. The sailing stones are most likely moved by strong winter winds, reaching 90 mph, once it has rained enough to fill the playa with just enough water to make the clay slippery. The prevailing southwest winds across Racetrack playa blow to northeast. Most of the rock trails are parallel to this direction, lending support to this hypothesis. An alternate hypothesis builds upon the first. As rain water accumulates, strong winds blow thin sheets of water quickly over the relatively flat surface of the playa. A layer of ice forms on the surface as night temperatures fall below freezing. Wind then drives these floating ice sheets, their aggregate inertia and large area providing the necessary force required to move the larger stones. Rock trails would again remain parallel to the southwest winds. According to investigator Brian Dunning, "Solid ice, moving with the surface of the lake and with the inertia of a whole surrounding ice sheet, would have no trouble pushing a rock along the slick muddy floor." A more recent theory is that ice collars form around rocks and when the local water level rises, the rocks are buoyantly floated off the soft bed. The minimal friction allows the rocks to be moved by arbitrarily light winds.
The alphabet made from things seen on Australia Day
Last year I was a school portrait photographer living in Perth Australia with my wonderful boyfriend John Schreiber. This year, I’m a reporter at the Easy Reader News in Redondo Beach California, and John is my fiance. Crazy how much can change in a year! I have finally gotten around to sorting through my Australia photos and I’m making a photo book on Shutterfly that I should be finished with about this time next year… It’s been really fun looking back on the year’s photographs. My favorite assignment is still the Rottnest Channel Swim, and looking back through all the wonderful roadtrips we took to different areas of Australia (Hutt River Providence?) miss me miss the red dirt and clear amazing waters of that part of the world. It makes me want to make the 10,000 mile trip again to see all the wonderful people I miss! I am very lucky to have had such an amazing experience and I would gladly hop on a plane and do it all again. (Hear that John?! I would!)
by Bondo Wyszpolski at the Easy Reader News
One for all, and all for one. Painters Jeff Honea and Rob Waxman, plus photographer Brent Broza, are as closely knit as the Three Musketeers, their mutual admiration for one another evident in “Paint Shoot Paint,” going on view Friday, Dec. 2, at Riley Arts Gallery in Manhattan Beach.
“We were all born and raised right here,” Waxman says.
He’s not referring to the Easy Reader conference room, where our conversation took place, but, as Honea clarifies, “Manhattan mostly, Manhattan and Hermosa.”
Not only are the three men local residents, their art is inspired by and reflects where they live.
Referring to the upcoming show, Waxman says, “It’s gonna be kind of unique, it’s gonna be cool because we are all doing surfing or beach-related topics. That’s what we know. It’s what we’d see, and we’ve all been surfers since we were kids.
“I have quite a few pieces,” he adds, “that are gonna be just local places, either scenes of PCH or the Manhattan Pier, things that are related to surfing and the beach.”
In Honea’s case, “It’s all waves; and not even surfing, per se, it’s just waves. Some more representational, some almost borderline abstractions inspired by waves, the lines and the colors and the motion – the movement of waves.”
“We gravitate towards the ocean,” Broza confirms. “So, shooting waves and stuff like that; that’s pretty much how I got started. I thought it was just cool. But more and more I find myself doing other things, and actually getting into more alternative stuff… I don’t want to get pigeonholed into just doing the surf stuff.”
Practice makes perfect
Of the three artists, it’s Jeff Honea who’s probably the best known and the most established. While Broza and Waxman clearly respect his work, Honea in turn feeds off their friendship and the exchange of ideas: “One of the things I think is really exciting, and it’s really driven my work, is knowing that these guys are doing really good work – and so it’s motivating and inspiring that way.”
Perhaps the progress they’ve made would suggest otherwise, but Broza and Waxman have not been pursuing their craft for very long, only a few years.
“I met a girl who’s an artist and so I started painting because she started painting,” Waxman says. “He [Broza] saw some of my stuff and said, I can do that. He went for it, painted some really cool stuff, and decided painting wasn’t for him. And then a year later he’s one of the best photographers in town. So, he had it in him. I think that was probably six, seven years ago.”
Broza points out that he “started shooting seriously in 2008.”
Early last year Broza and Honea paired up to show their work at Sangria in Hermosa Beach. That came about after the two had run into each other on the pier, where both had gone to photograph the especially large waves that day (in Honea’s case, he was gathering reference material for his wave paintings).
“I was a little jealous because I wasn’t involved,” Waxman says with a laugh, “but we got to talking and decided that we’d do a show.” A few months went by, and then a few more: Their hoped-for summer show is now taking place in December. “Summer in Australia,” Waxman says.
Why there, and how many?
Why are they exhibiting at Riley Arts Gallery?
“All three of us are represented at that gallery year round,” Broza says. “It’s like a no-brainer.”
“It’s a great space, and Kim there is a big champion of local artists,” Honea says. “We’d like to see it continue to grow as a real hub for the broader community of artists and collectors.”
Waxman adds that since all their friends and extended families are in the South Bay, it’s the place that will be best attended.
“It just makes sense,” Broza says. “We’re all local people, we’re supporting our community.”
Honea figures there’ll be 30 to 40 pieces in the show total. Broza’s hoping to have eight to 10, but as many as 15 of his photographs, while Waxman estimates 15 and Honea about a dozen. Almost all of the work will be new, or never before publicly displayed.
To return once more to our Three Musketeers analogy, Waxman says that they feed off of one another’s work. “Hopefully it keeps going forever,” he says. “I know that the quality of the work just improves every month, every week, everyday pretty much that new stuff comes out. As artists, every time we create a new piece we learn something and apply it to the next piece.”
“These guys,” says Broza, “have been great inspirations for me.”
Paint Shoot Paint opens Friday, Dec. 2, with a reception from 6 to 10 p.m. at Rily Arts Gallery, 1007 Manhattan Ave., Manhattan Beach. (310) 372-3681.
