It’s been a banner year, and I’m so very grateful. Putting together this highlights reel was a bit cathartic– almost surreal– as I thought back through all of the projects and places that this year has taken me. Dozens of shoots, 13 countries (if I’m counting right), and a broad range of stories. Frankly, I’m overjoyed and humbled. And I’m so excited for what 2012 has to offer.

90% of what you see in this little piece are from the last 12 months.

Here’s to another adventurous, inspiring 12 months!

It’s a drizzly morning here in Hamilton Heights on this tiny over-populated island in the Northeast. Bryan John Appleby is the quiet morning soundtrack.

If you’re like me, and busyness is an instinctive state of being, quiet seasons are what you long for – and at the same time what you dread. For five years I’ve worked myself ragged to get my business to more or less thrive. And now I sit in the aftermath – in limbo, still and anticipatory. Stillness is necessary for the human soul to thrive. But sometimes, especially when I’m out of practice, tranquility can be restless and even terrifying. It takes practice, and believe me I’m practicing hard these days, to find a balance in the quiet. To not collapse on your inward thoughts or your forward ambitions.

I’m certainly not complaining. I’m loving it. Coffee, t-shirts, paint on my hands. Music, laundry, rain. Contemplation, fiction-reading, and conversation. I love it. I’m up for the challenge. So much has happened. This year alone… Uganda, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Yemen, Uruguay, Colombia, Samoa, India, China, Italy. Much of that time spent alone, wandering but not lost (as my cousin Melena says), filming and absorbing. Sometimes the feast of life stuffs me full and puts me into a Thanksgiving-like food-coma. It’s hard for me to slow down enough to peer over my shoulder and process it all.

But here I sit in quiet. Still but moved. Staring forward, peering through the curtain if only for a hint of what’s next but working with every muscle in my inner being to sit tight so I don’t miss one second of this gift of silence.

Oh yeah… here’s some stuff from China with my dear friend Nate. We were there for a shoot but had a few days of the travel. Hope you enjoy. The great olive/leather bag you see Nate & I with is my new favorite piece of luggage. Ernest Alexander. Get some

Thanks to Lane Wood for his producing efforts.
I worked closely with photographer, Esther Havens, on this project.
Thanks to Neil & Dave from Warby Parker for bringing me in on this project.
Music by Balmorhea.

Head over to Warby Parker’s site to buy pair.

At the end of my trip with Warby Parker to New Delhi, I took a pre-crazy-season vacation in Kerala, India. I spent 5 rejuvenating days on the cliff-covered Southwestern coast. While I was there I contemplated my upcoming months of work and had to use restraint to hold down a feeling of panic at the busyness that awaited me. Now I’m sitting, at 3 in the morning, fresh off of a plane from Beijing… and though I’m exhausted, I feel a tinge of relief that I’m over half-way done. I’m behind on work, but the time of being caught up is just ahead of me. Or… maybe it’s not. It always seems ahead of me but never seems to arrive.

I’m thankful. But tired. The last day I was in China – 30 minutes before I left for the airport – I went to a barber and had him give me a straight-edge clean shave off of a 6 week old beard. My good buddy, Nate Pelz, who was along with me on the trip, took a picture of me at some point during the week. We laughed when we looked at it because I looked about 20 years older. It was the light in the room, the beard, and tiredness all wrapped into one. But I looked older. It seems silly that I thought anything of it. But it made me a little sad. I mean, I don’t think I actually look that old. I wasn’t sad over my appearance in the picture or in general. But I thought of myself as aging– which was new.

When you’re young, it’s incredibly easy to ignore the fact that you’re getting older. And I’m far too young to be having a mid-life crisis. But I am getting older. We all are. And although I don’t want to waste too much of my time worrying about it… it did give me pause. My days are numbered. And like it or not, every day I’m becoming someone. Every decision I make – regrettable or otherwise – slowly makes me the person I am. My choices today intrinsically effect who I’ll be tomorrow. And nothing tends to happen overnight. Little by little, decision by decision, I am becoming someone. And I don’t want to one day be old – truly old – and look back and see how all of those decisions, little though they were, made me something I wasn’t created to be.

Sounds dramatic. But those are the things I think about at 3 AM when I’ve been staring at computer screen for 18 hours. Maybe I just need another clean shave.

This post is a little self-indulgent… It’s not that I assume every image in this post is going to blow your mind (ha) they just represent a collection of images from my weekend under the towering redwoods with my good friend Eric and I couldn’t sacrifice any of those moments. So deal with it! (Double-ha)

My life is loud. Most of it, whether in New York or not, feels New-York-paced. Often I catch up on sleep in planes, taxis, and trains. E-mails are answered in transit, and much of my post-production happens while burning the midnight oil. With September and October comprising the busiest season of my year, and this year being the busiest I’ve yet had, I cherish any moments of rest I can get.  Sometimes these times of rest fly by all too quickly. I think it’s my state of mind. If I sit in silence and let my mind go wild with what I could be doing and need to get done, rest is anything but restful, and speeds past me before I can shut my eyes and feel the breeze.

However, last weekend after a shoot in Napa I drove my rental car (convertible – yay!) down through the valley, past the Bay, and up into the beautiful Santa Cruz mountains. My 48 hour hiatus with Eric was exactly what I needed and we filled it to the brim with laughter, soulful conversation, delicious food, and time around the fire under a blanket of stars. Because it was so deeply restful and I released the rushing world that I live in, it crept by slowly and sweetly.

While I was in India a few weeks back I had the opportunity to have a similar time of rest. While relaxing on the cliffs hanging over the waves that crash against Western India, I read 100 pages of journals from the last 4 years. I meditated on my journey, the Goodness of the God I believe in, and hope for the future. Thought I’d share a few words from 4 years ago in Southern Thailand if you care to read. Otherwise, skip to the goods below…

“Outside the gray clouds shove their way greedily over the blue jagged mountains of the southern Thailand. The Krabi airstrip is desolate, surrounded by lush vegetation that extends for miles in all directions.

Meanwhile, here I sit. My California home is still an eternity away. I am completely isolated. I imagine myself as what I am—a tiny, organic speck, like a bacteria or microbe, squirming about on the giant face of a huge blue-green sphere that pummels through a black darkness like an orange being tossed into the night sky.

I arrogantly assume the trophy position of the modern human: independent, free-standing, mobile. Mobility is my pearl of great price. It is my loftiest treasure, my trump card, my fountain of youth. My island-of-a-self slides carefree across the planes, mountains, and oceans of the globe. I absorb what I can of the cultural atmosphere around me, mostly I just watch. I peer, as though my body moves without my will, through two blue-green eyes. My legs cover ground, my hands exchange money and purchase bus and boat tickets, my feet grow calloused and brown in my sandals, my shoulders peel from the unrelenting sun, and inside this shell I continue to examine the world that I’m crawling across.

The whites of people’s eyes slide across my retina. Their bodies—of many varying tones—are a blur. Their garments simply swim around the sea of eyes as though they’re being painted onto the canvas around me. Each set of eyes, blinking, determined, aged, have seen a lifetime. The rise and fall of the sun, daily. The pain and joy alike boil in the stew of glistening pupils. Each eye is its own tiny planet, sliding through the universe of our smoggy world, gathering the dust of the past millennia. They rest daily, wrapped in skin and eyelashes, if only for a break from the data-flow. If only to ignore the dirt and grime of humanity long enough to become sufficiently numb to it, to reawaken anew, and then gather more information. A death here, a massacre there. A birth in India, a slaughter in North Korea. A kiss in Laos, government collapse in Sudan. A loving whisper in Denmark, a car bomb in London.

Can I please shut my eyes for longer than one-third of it all? Let me sleep infinitely, awakening only long enough to gaze into an orange sunset, or a star-filled sky. Let me light my view only with the sweetness of things, and collapse my window shades at the faintest chance of an eclipse of my golden sun.

Or should I stare weary-eyed always. Sleep only when death forces it. Stare red-eyed into the filthiness of it all and never blink. Will my mind allow it? Will my eyes dry with the raw air of human suffering?

Will grace allow me to gather these thoughts, this wisdom, this darkness I never should have seen, and sort each vision, like an encyclopedia, bringing forth each page, one at a time, to examine it under the finest of microscopes. Will I find, after my sight is blurred from staring day and night at those twitching microbes, a hint of beauty and hope under each membrane?

Science or Religion, whichever brings me the proper answer. Or maybe something in-between the two. Something I can’t put into words because if I did it would slide readily into either end of the spectrum.

If science were prose, and religion were poetry, each on violently disperate ends of a long rope, what great work of the human psyche would occupy the center? A song? It would be too much poetry. An equation? It would be too much prose.

If making the choice between the two, I choose the indecipherable. I choose it not because it isn’t unknowable– it is very much knowable. But it isn’t knowable like something you read in a book. It isn’t something calculable. It’s like the flutter of the heart at the sight of a lover. It’s like a long and beautiful sorrow—gray like a rainstorm, with silver light around the edges. It rises and falls like emotion, and shutters, twisting and turning, like a kite in the wind.

It comes and goes, because it’s ever-presence would numb you to it. It is a whisper. It is a deep rest and an infinite un-rest. It is tension and contraction of the muscles of your soul at work, unweaving the great and terrible mystery, pouring light into a dark void, and, when you’re blinded by it, dimming it so you can properly see the visceral and tangible reality around you.”

I’ve had an amazing week here in India so far filming for Warby Parker along with founders Neil and Dave, as well as good friends Lane Wood and Esther Havens. It was great to see Esther in action and work in partnership to put together a great story of Warby Parker’s sustainable and dynamic relationship with Vision Spring. Warby Parker provides high-end quality glasses for just $95 and works around the globe to provide a pair of glasses to people in need for every pair purchased through their site. And the great thing is – they’re doing it in a thoughtful way that is sustainable and stimulates local economies around the world.

Within this post are a smattering of shots taken off-the-cuff throughout our time so far. Below is a video I put together from a day Esther, Lane & I spent shooting b-roll in Delhi. More photos to come – and of course, a finished piece from Warby Parker in the months to come. Please check them out and buy a sweet new pair of specs or shades!

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In the mean time until I can post images from this trip, please take 12 minutes of your time to check out this mini-documentary I’ve spent the last few months piecing together. It’s not as polished as I would have liked but, well, I’m in India and there’s really not anything I can do about it at this moment and I really wanted to release it this week. I’ll update the link as soon as I’ve created a finished cut of it. This little doc is sort of a “behind the scenes thesis piece” for Shake the Dust. I hope it will give you a little window into my creative process and my heart behind this project.

Oh… and a little video about dancer Antonio Bukhar in Uganda.

Well, I’m not complaining because I realize the rest of the country has been in the same state… but it’s HOT. And in my neighborhood, that means all of the fire hydrants get opened up for a daily block party. These photos were all taken in Hamilton Heights in Harlem on different blocks.

Also of note (but unrelated): Check out this TED talk by Nadia Al-Sakkaf where she chats about “Shake the Dust.” Nadia is the Editor-in-Chief at the Yemen Times and an important interview/voice in my film.

I recently ventured to Bogotá, Colombia for a 7 day research trip for “Shake the Dust.” It was such a great experience– I LOVED Colombia. And I really hit it off with La Familia Ayara, with whom I’ll be filming in August. Through graffiti, break-dancing, MCing and DJing, Ayara works with at-risk urban youth in Colombia to keep them off the streets, and aware and proactive toward a better future in Colombia.

I wasn’t really down there with the purposes of filming– just research. But I put together a little piece (below) from some of the stuff I shot off-the-cuff. Such talented kids!

Just spent an incredible weekend in the California desert (Joshua tree) with some of my closest friends (and a few great new ones) making music and putting another notch in a 4-year running tradition. I’m really excited about all of the footage that has come together from the last 3 years of music-and-merry-making. Many thanks to everyone and especially Laurel Dailey for all the hard work that has gone into this event.

You’ll be seeing more footage throughout the next year as I begin to piece everything I have (including a grip of interviews) into a music-documentary, but in the mean time, check out the small clips below and then head over to Laurel’s blog for more great photos and the whole story from this years festivities.

As we near the finish line for the new official “Shake the Dust” website and the teaser from Yemen, I got a little distracted (as I did in Yemen) with a sort of “side story.” I’m not sure how much you all know about the situation in Somalia, but it’s pretty tragic. As such, there are Somali refugees all over the world. I saw/met them in Uganda, Egypt, Yemen and even down the street here in Harlem.

I’m still trying to decide if this is tangential to the original “Shake the Dust” storyline, but in the mean time I thought I’d post a little footage from Hada in Sana’a, where many of the Somalians live.

If you can’t catch the lyrics in the video, here they are:

The problem at home, the difficulties at home
And my brothers, my people
The land of my grandfathers
The land of my ancestors
Where I wasted all my youth
Line up in front of me / Listen to my rap
Nigga SO legends Somali is my home
Hey world repeat after me what I say
My man AJ Yemeni, Arab
My blue flag like the sky when the sun shines
From the middle east Imma free ya’ll
My people killing, children dyin’, nigga, for what?
Somali, Somali, muslim, Arab
Run after power, no one lives forever
“I advised, I warned, but you ended up dead” – (somali proverb)
Heaven of earth, in the corner of Africa
Somalia, forever.

This morning there was a pile of mutilated trash bags in front of our apartment from early morning scavengers and it was cold and generally rainy and wintry and, well… blah. Which means I’ve had a slight case of the blahs today in general. And on days like this, when life suddenly seems unnecessarily complicated, I sometimes just walk outside with my cup of coffee and look down the hill of our street toward Riverside Park and up at the sky and let out a deep sigh and remember that life really isn’t, at least as far as I can tell, ever as complicated as it feels.

A few days ago when I was doing just that and was staring up at the sky I saw what I thought was an Albatross. Well, it turns out upon some research that they don’t exist in the North Atlantic. But nonetheless, this bird was just floating on top of the wind. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere at all, didn’t seem to have any purpose. It was just hovering, waving gently, in the wind. Totally free– and not free like the birds we see all the time that are soaring about with places to go and crumbs to consume, but really just (seemingly) care-free. I don’t know what kind of a bird that was– but I think we could learn something from him (or her).

Okay, I have a lot going on… and only a few things I can currently share.
(1) My friend (and talented poet) Aaron Belz has a new book that you should buy. His previous book was “The Bird Hoverer” interestingly enough.
(2) Vera Wang’s front page today=me.
(3) 2 weeks ago I, along with an amazing team of people, worked on a small production- a short film I wrote entitled “Stay.” I’m so excited to share more with you about that– we had 2 incredible actors working with us, whom I also can’t wait to share about. All in due time…
(4) I don’t always advertise this widely everywhere, but sometimes I shoot documentaries for people’s nuptials if the story/location is right. Check out the “rough cut” of my current wedding reel and see a few moments of footage from Yemen.

Also, I went with a group of friends to Delaware this last weekend. Just a few photos from there…

I just needed to get this out and it’s going to take more then 140 characters. With the protests happening in Cairo and Yemen – and considering the fact that I will be in both places over the next 48 hours – I have (understandably) had multiple people ask me if I’m planning to document any of it. My honest inclination is that I have no desire to cover these stories. Yes, they are worthy stories to be told, but not by this storyteller. There are plenty of photographers covering the event and to be honest, the role I’ve been playing over the last 2 months has been to try and dig beneath headlines and find the stories that are underneath.

As much as Americans love to hear about peaceful assembly and democratic exercises, I’m also aware (with these things happening in front of my nose) of the way in which the Western media sensationalizes and plays up such events. I want, in my heart of hearts, for peace and prosperity for the beautiful people of Yemen. And if they want to organize and protest their (corrupt) government – I’m excited that they’re leaving their khat behind and doing that. But I guess I just feel a little… tired. Tired of seeing Yemen in the New York Times only when there’s an excuse to start the headline with Al Qaeda in the first sentence. And with Uganda – where they only make headlines when there’s a reason to show how corrupt and undeveloped they are. It’s not just that I’m an idealist – I promise - it’s more that I’m afraid we in the West are just going to believe the insipid lie that the only thing that makes a Ugandan a Ugandan is war and poverty. And the only thing that makes a Yemeni a Yemeni, is that he may or may not have strong ties with Al Qaeda. These are lies – and they are pervasive. These are people, not headlines.

I don’t know why this is effecting me so much. As I said, I’m tired. I’m at the end of a long two months of filming. And things that seem so black and white from across the Atlantic, are not only gray – but shades of every color in the rainbow when you look at them from a stones throw.

I guess I’d rather hear about the war in Uganda from my friends at Invisible Children – people who are not only informed about the war, but entrenched in the battle to end it – and deeply connected to the real people and culture of Uganda. Or my dear friends from Discover the Journey, who eat, sleep, and breath the stories of injustice they’re telling. These storytellers KNOW and COMMUNICATE that these wars, diseases, and corrupt governments are most certainly NOT what define these people.

CNN, The New York Times, God bless ‘em because I know journalism is a struggling field, they’re in many ways hustling. They’re selling an angle. And as one who holds Truth up as something to strive after, I’m looking for the real stories in the places I’m visiting and the people I’ve come to love.

I had the honor of traveling with Alegria to Peru a couple of weeks ago.  I spent 5 wonderful days documenting the work that Alegria is doing in an orphanage called “La Communidad” in the mountains outside of Peru.  It was a lot of work that week keeping up with shooting cinematography and photography, but it was such a blast and such a meaningful experience.

Below you can check out some of my favorite photos. MTV has chosen to feature Alegria and some of my photos at an exhibit in their offices. You can check out that here. Look forward to a documentary to come!

You can check out the full story here.

And please check out Alegria – they’re a great new organization.

A few previews:

As much as I love this wonderful city in which I (sometimes – ha) live, during the summer it becomes a home base that I tag long enough to do laundry and (haggardly and frantically) try and catch up on responding to e-mails, paying bills, shoving disks in the mail, FTPing images, responding to phone calls, exporting, transcoding, etc etc etc…

Not that I’m not doing a lot of these things from the road, but most of my coffee-shop-on-the-road-work-time is purely post-production.

My brain is foggy, sorry.  Was up til 5 AM.  I had so much I wanted to say!!  Now I’m wracking my brain to piece it all together.  LA was great.  Seattle was superb.  Denver was delightful.  There was a lot of airports and take-offs and landings.  There were delicious free cookies (as usual) on Midwest Airlines, and there was a darn good sunset up above the gray clouds covering New York when I landed yesterday.

I’m wasting your time, so let’s just look at some pictures, shall we:

Haven’t been back here in 2 years. Still a magical place…

Well this California trip has been a much appreciated break from the heat/humidity of New York – but it’s almost been TOO cold (the grass is always greener). Yesterday morning I wore a sweater and flannel at 6 AM when I got up to go surfing.

But today, after 3 days of cloudy dreariness, we had loads of sunshine. I went with Chad and Katie to the beach and got a proper sunburn. Made a little video which is exporting… probably put it up in the morning.

Some random thoughts from reading today since I don’t feel like writing many of my own words:

…You cannot tell me who I am, and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you? Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.

That brings us to a second problem. Although in the end we alone are capable of experiencing who we are, we are instinctively gifted in watching how others experience themselves. We learn to live by living together with others, and by living like them– a process which has disadvantages as well as blessings.

The greatest of disadvantages is that we are too prone to welcome everybody else’s wrong solution to the problems of life. There is a natural laziness that moves us to accept the easiest solutions– the ones that have common currency among friends. That is why an optimistic view of life is not necessarily always a virtuous thing. In a time like ours, only the coarse grained still have enough resistance to preserve their fair-weather principles unclouded by anxiety. Such optimism may be comfortable: but is it safe? In world where every lie has currency, is not anxiety the more real and the more human reaction?

Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.  It is the fruit of unanswered questions.  But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked.  And there is a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions– because they might turn out to have no answer.  One of the moral diseases we communicate to each other in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.

But there are other diseases also.  There is the laziness that pretends to dignify itself as dispair, and that teaches us to ignore both the question and the answer.  And there is the despair which dresses itself up as science or philosophy and amuses itself with clever answers to clever questions– none of which have anything to do with the problems of life.  Finally there is the worst and most insidious despair, which can mask as mysticism or prophecy, and which intones a prophetic answer to a prophetic question.  That, I think, is likely to be a [religious person's] professional hazard, so I purify myself of it at the beginning, like Amos who complained, “I am not a prophet, nor am I the son of a prophet, but I am a herdsman, plucking wild figs.”

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

For those of you that have a self-hosted WordPress site like I do, you might be experiencing the same unbelievably aggravating image-upload issues that I am… It’s frustrating when you go through the trouble to upgrade software, and it’s a downgrade. Fix this, WordPress. You’re making my blogging life not-so-fun.

Now that I have that off my chest… Here are some photos from a week I spent in August in the Santa Cruz mountains with some of the people I love the most in the world in the place that I love almost more then anywhere else in the world. Having not looked at these images in 9 months, they have new meaning to me and I was surprised how much I love them– I almost don’t remember taking them.

This is also a prime example of how constantly behind I am on post-production… I just finished editing these photos.

It was a pretty incredible day– the park was packed with New Yorkers playing frisbee, flying kites, throwing the baseball around. I went on a long early-morning bike ride, had a huge roommate breakfast, and then bathed in the sun, studied French, and laughed with the friends that had gathered on the Great Lawn in Central Park.

On an entirely unrelated note, I’ve been wanting to post this little ditty for a while:

Let me be plain with you, dear reader.
I am an old-fashioned man.
I like the world of nature despite its mortal dangers. I like the domestic world of humans, so long as it pays its debts to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.
I like the promise of Heaven.
My purpose is a language that can repay just thanks and honor for those gifts, a tongue set free from fashionable lies.

A knave with a degree is a knave.
A fool in a public office is not a “leader”
A rich thief is a thief.
And the ghost of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer, returns in the night to say again:
“Let me tell you something, boy.
An intellectual whore is a whore.”

The world is babbled to pieces after the divorce of things from their names.

Ceaseless preparation for war is not peace.

Health is not procured by sale of medication, or purity by the addition of poison.
Science at the bidding of the corporations is knowledge reduced to merchandise; it is a whoredom of the mind, and so is the art that calls this “progress.”
So is the cowardice that calls it “inevitable.”

I think the issues of “identity” mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.
I know a “fetus” is a human child. I loved my children from the time they were conceived, having loved their mother, who loved them from the time they were conceived and before. Who are we to say the world did not begin in love?
I would like to die in love as I was born, and as myself of life impoverished go into the love all flesh begins and ends in.

When I hear the stock market has fallen, I say, “Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!”
I think an economy should be based on thrift, on taking care of things, not on theft, usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

My purpose is a language that can make us whole, though mortal, ignorant, and small.
I approve of death, when it comes in time to the old. I don’t want to live on mortal terms forever, or survive an hour as a cooling stew of pieces of other people.
I don’t believe that life or knowledge can be given by machines.
The machine economy has set afire the household of the human soul, and all the creatures are burning within it.

Nor do I believe “artistic genius” is the possession of any artist. No one has made the art by which one makes the works of art.
Each one who speaks speaks as a convocation.
We live as councils of ghosts.

And so I would like to be a true human being, dear reader – a choice not altogether possible now.

But this is what I’m for, the side I’m on.

And this is what you should expect of me, as I expect it of myself, though for realization we may wait a thousand or a million years.

- Wendell Berry, from Some Further Words