Pok Chi Lau is a photographer and teacher from Lawrence, KS who has made Chinese migration and the emergence of China a focal point of his work over the past 40 years. Pok Chi was my photography teacher in college and had an enormous influence on me and my work in terms of how I approached image making as well as how I looked at different cultures through the lens of a camera. He still remains a strong influence of mine as well as a friend and so I was very excited to learn that he has a new book of his work out called Flow China!

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I’m really excited about the newest old camera that I’ve recently acquired! It’s a Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera and it’s in amazing shape! I have another instant camera, but what I’m excited about with this one is the ability to control the manual focusing and, to a certain extent, the exposures. There are a few tweaks I need to do including buying a neutral density filter, but it shouldn’t be too bad. Hopefully, I’ll get some good shooting in before Polaroid completely discontinues it’s instant film in 2009!

*sniff*

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In mid-March we took a trip to New York City to visit some of our best friends that live there. It was an amazing trip, not only in the fact that I hung out with awesome people, ate awesome food and saw awesome art, but I also got some new scenery for a week which was much needed!
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All photos: Designojek

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In 2005, my wife and I did a recital together where we each played a half-concert worth of music. In addition to some unaccompanied Piazzolla études, the big piece that I performed was a jazz improvisation with my father Vince Gnojek. I gathered together a series of 10 photographs which were a combination of my own photographs and some found images. All of them were abstract and had strong elements of texture and color. I projected them onto a large screen and we each stood on either side of it and, with the lights turned out, we performed an improvised piece of music that responded to the photography that we were looking at.
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I’ve been working on some different kinds of photo post-processing lately, so I went out and shot some practice shots of Lawrence this weekend to try them out on.

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I shot some new photos of the chamber music trio, Allégresse this past weekend. The morning of the shoot there was a wind advisory and the forecast called for rain. Somehow, as soon as everyone showed up, the wind calmed down and the sun came out. Go figure . . . They are the most fun people to shoot and I hope we can do it again soon.

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