I've made it no secret that I love Los Angeles. It's a beautiful, sprawling city with so much history, and a hub of the entertainment world. Working with entertainers and talent, giving them images that they can use for promo, marketing and behind the scenes, it's a city I want to get way more familiar navigating. 

It's a new week, which means it's time for a new episode of Starter Series, my YouTube series based on finding affordable equipment to help you create better photo and video content. This week, the topic of interest is the 35mm f/1.8 lens, and for this video, I'm using the DX cropped sensor version.

I've been trying to come up with a new project for YouTube, something I would get enjoyment out of making. What I ended up with was coming back here to the blog as a reference point, and looking at a post I made, called "Starter Series". The initial concept of that post was to give myself the advice I wish I had been given when I was first starting out with buying equipment for photography.

There have been a bunch of projects that I have been working on for the past few weeks. I've been reaching out to mentors and people with whom I'd love to collaborate. That time has been spent talking to fellow creatives in adjacent fields, asking questions on how to make something that you, dear reader, can get value from and that is authentic to myself. 

When starting out in photography, you might not have access to the best lenses. If you're lucky enough to jump into this with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, more power to you. But for the rest of us, we might start from a more humble origin, in the form of kit lenses.

This week, amid rounds of show renewals and cancellations in Hollywood, the unfortunate news came that after two seasons, CBS would not renew it’s multi-camera comedy Superior Donuts for a third season. Before visiting the set of Superior Donuts, I had breif interactions with high end professional productions. I was looking at video production on at it's peak. I have to stop and say thanks to that show for what it taught me.