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Well…. do you publicly blog about things? or keep them private? Who cares? I tend to always speak positively about other people publicly. Anyways.

With a huge epic participatory documentary not yet complete, I headed back to Burning Man for my second time. Last year was crazy epic in every way possible. It was my first time, and I was producing a huge documentary. Last year’s blog after BM. We loaded the bikes and headed out.

Welcome to Burning man 2009! This year’s theme was “Evolution”

The experience at this year’s Burning Man was extremely different from last year. This year I found myself alone most of the time. I did end up hanging out with a bunch of the As The Dust Settles photobook team! So that was really neat. Huge shout out to Katie Lee, Scott London, Lauren Randolph, Tristan Savatier, Ryan Jesena, Tomas Loewy, John Curley, and Gary Cohen

They each continue to blow me away with their genius work. I’m super excited to put together an awesome photobook, that truly captures the 2008 Burning Man experience. It’s gonna be great. Check out some of their work from this year’s Burning Man:  Tomas’s 2009 slideshow, Tristin’s 2009 set, Ryan’s 2009 set, Scott’s epic 2009 set, John’s 2009 set, John also was blogging around the clock for the official Burning Man Blog, and Lauren’s 2009 set. This year, Lauren and her friend Audrey, ran Camp Emoticon.  It was an awesome photobooth on the playa.

I camped in Monkey Business Camp with several friends including Matt Scott and Star. We had a huge yellow banana above our camp and a bunch of little monkeys along the front of the camp. Lots of people commented on the yellow banana that Matt built.

A project that I have been following for years, was not at Burning Man 2008, but it was on the playa this year! Bigger and Better than ever!!! Mark Lotter’s Cubatron!

I ran into a bunch of people this year: I crossed paths with my friend Dillon Morris! I also found Laurent Le Gall, the director of a great Burning Man documentary called, Voyage in Utopia. It was awesome meeting another Burning Man documentary filmmaker, especially one who is such an inspiration. Here’s his trailer for Voyage in Utopia. I also randomly found Valerio! He is a really great person, a macro chef, and an expert on the Mayan calendar. Last year we met up at Kushi and had several lengthy conversations about the universe, we ended up discussing Burning Man quite a bit, and last year he joined our documentary project. He continues to be an inspiration.

This year I got to meet a few new people who have become huge inspirations. Here’s one of the unique stories: On Friday of BM this year I was wondering around. I ended up being led down a path to a tepee. Inside this tepee a bunch of people were listening to someone. I sat down and listened for hours. A truly genius discussion about life and the universe. I left totally inspired.  I then headed to the Do Lab/El Circo Stage to shoot that night. I ended up there a bit early and got to listen to the genius musicians, Lynx and Jamie Janover. After the performance I got to talk to Lynx, and became a huge fan. I got a EP CD from her.

When I got home after BM, I followed up, adding her to my myspace friends and sending her a message about how much I loved her work. I also messaged Jamie and told him how much I loved his work. I was able to check email and sync up with a few blogs I follow, and in one of the blogs was a link to Nassim’s Unified Field Theory paper as well as a video that someone had made explaining it. This led me down the path of reseaching everything I could about Nassim’s work. This led me to a video of Jamie giving his talk about Nassim’s work. The man I had sat and listened to for hours in the tepee at Burning Man was Jamie. Crazy small world. Everything is so crazy connected. I would love to work with Lynx and Jamie. Hopefully soon.

I did manage to find some of the people who worked with me on the documentary we did last year. It was nice seeing them.

Brad Templeton continues to create breathtaking panoramas. Check out his work here. I also found Andie Grace’s daughter Juniper! amazing how fast kids grow =) And I also payed a visit to Todd Huffman and friends at the Playagon Village. Todd is one of the founders of the BIL Conference and continues to do a lot of interesting projects.

I can’t wait to process some of the footage I shot on RED998 this year. Here’s my flickr set. It was crazy crazy dusty and windy this year. Here’s an average mid-day moment.

And lastly, I did end up finding Larry Harvey. I even got to say thank you to him eye-to-eye.

light and love.