Dan and Priscilla’s Wedding

I just got back from a whirlwind trip to Los Angeles. While there, I worked with Stephen Tobolowsky to put the finishing touches on our upcoming live show. I also had the opportunity to photograph Dan Trachtenberg’s wedding.

Dan and I have been friends for a couple years now (he’s guested on the /Filmcast a few times, always to great effect). It was an honor to capture images from his big day with his bride Priscilla, who looked absolutely stunning in her wedding dress. The wedding took place at Marvimon in Los Angeles. Beautiful location, great food, amazing people. I could not have asked for a better wedding to shoot!

Here is a video I put together of the festivities. It is my first attempt at assembling a video slideshow out of my photos. Hope y’all enjoy it:

The Wedding of Dan Trachtenberg and Priscilla Hernandez from David Chen on Vimeo.

Amazon’s Kindle Weighs More When It’s Loaded with Books

Does the Kindle weigh more when it’s loaded with books? A fascinating answer from the NYTimes:

“In principle, the answer is yes,” said John D. Kubiatowicz, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

“However,” he said, “the amount is very small, on the order of an atogram,” or 10–18 grams. “This amount is effectively unmeasurable,” he went on, since even the most sensitive scales have a resolution of only 10–9 grams. Further, it is only about one hundred-millionth as much as the estimated fluctuation from charging and discharging the device’s battery. A Kindle, for example, uses flash memory, composed of special transistors, one per stored bit, which use trapped electrons to distinguish between a digital 1 and a 0.

The Arrogance of Aaron Sorkin

I love Aaron Sorkin, but Nathan Rabin’s hilarious, exhaustive takedown of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip completely nails what’s wrong with the show (and with Sorkin himself):

[F]ailed television shows come and go; why does Studio 60 obsess us so?
The answer has a lot to do with arrogance. In premise and execution, Studio 60 was a work of unbearable, overweening arrogance. It began with making the lead character of Matt Albie both a clear Sorkin surrogate and a writer so ridiculously romanticized even M. Night Shyamalan might say, “Get over yourself, dude. You’re a fucking writer, not Jesus’ younger brother, the one God really likes.”

Some of My Favorite Trailers of 2011 (so far)

I was chatting with Russ Fischer this morning about the amazing trailer for Martha Marcy May Marlene, and it caused me to reflect on some of my favorite trailers from this year so far. Obviously this list will probably change by the end of the year, and the following definitely does not reflect my appreciation of the films themselves.

What do you guys think? What did I miss?

Fast Five – I wish I knew how to quit this series of films. Thankfully, the latest iteration was a highly enjoyable, mindless heist film.



Martha Marcy May Marlene – This film is so disturbing and so well-made that I’m loathe to revisit it, yet feel I must.

Hanna – It is safe to say this movie did not live up to my expectations. Great Chemical Brother score though.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Amazing.

The Red Envelopes

The NYTimes’ Brian Stelter and Nick Wingfield try to deconstruct what went wrong at Netflix. Their theory? Netflix discounted the emotional connection that people have with the DVD service:

Like many other companies built in Silicon Valley, Netflix prides itself on its analytical, data-driven approach to making decisions. But it made a classic business misstep. In its reliance on data and long-term strategy, the company underestimated the unquantifiable emotions of subscribers who still want those little red envelopes, even if they forget to ever watch the DVDs inside.

The Travesty of the NCAA

If you’ve ever purchased an NCAA video game, bought a college basketball player’s jersey as sports memorabilia, or watched a televised NCAA championship with commercials, it might have occurred to you that you’re paying for something that the players themselves (sometimes still teenagers) aren’t getting any compensation for. There’s a pretty striking level of injustice going on at the NCAA and Taylor Branch’s exhaustive feature in The Atlantic starts to get to the bottom of it.

The only consolation? Their tyrannical reign may soon be over.