If you follow me on Twitter you might have caught wind that we’re moving into a new building. Between traveling, we’ve started building out the new spot in deep SE Portland. It’s closer to my house, and we’re the only ones in the building, so we can make noise and use all the strong smelling solvents we want.

The deep SE part of Portland is affectionately known to long-time residents as “Felony Flats,” but it’s come a long way over the years, even in the short four year period I’ve been here. Shit, now there’s even a hip food cart pod called “Cartlandia” that sits along a bike path walking distance from our new shop. We’re hoping to take that progression one step further — we’ve been jokingly referring to the area as the “Flavel Arts District.” Portland’s prosperous “Alberta Arts District” was not so long ago a not so nice neighborhood. Some developers looking to make a few bucks added the “arts” and away things went. So we’ve taken the same approach and we made a logo (above). We also used the word “historic” which we feel also adds class. If nothing else, we found a cool building that works for us, and we think we should even have some skateable surfaces inside it.

I’m a day or two away from moving my desk and some of my stuff into the new place. We’ve still got a lot of work, and building, but my studio area is painted, and the trim is in, so hopefully tomorrow I can start loading into that section. We’ll slowly be moving everything over throughout the month, and should be in there on a full-time basis by the end of February (though likely before). More pictures to follow, but we’re excited to have more space. We are going to miss the Sweetpea coffee though (and Lisa).

Meta Filter founder/programming wizard Matt Haughey dropped off another nice custom bike (with an enormously tall stand-over height) to have shot. His DeSalvo cross bike, which he brought by last year, can be seen here. This time around it was a Cielo road bike, built by Chris King here in Portland, Oregon. Nice stuff. Built up with Chris King and SRAM components, in a Meta Filter-ish blue color. Coincidentally, Matt grew up riding flatland BMX in Southern California, and just built up a new flatland bike, so hopefully we’ll see him out at the flatland lot soon. Check out some more shots of the Cielo after the jump.

Dean Dickinson was by here early shooting some interview / behind the scenes video stuff of my for a project he’s working on. I didn’t have anything lined up to shoot at the time he was coming, so Ben Hucke was nice enough to drop by and lend himself to some photographing. Which made for some good footage, and a couple of cool photos. In addition to the shot above, there was also this photo, which actually happened.

Been shooting a few things with Ben Hucke for a magazine interview. Sitting on a lot of good stuff right now waiting for that to materialize. Not posting some of the bangers we’ve got is no easy task. But in the meantime, here’s a portrait outtake from the studio yesterday. You can also download a desktop for your computer of Ben here, as if we’re in 2004 all over again! Keep your eyes peeled at Dig BMX mag soon for some of the stuff we’ve been shooting. They have an iPhone app.

My studio site (souneymedia.com) has been horribly outdated for the last couple years. Old work, old functionality etc. I think the last time I rebuilt it was 2005. I added a bit of work since, but otherwise, it was dated. I got a BETA invitation to try out the Cargo Collective CMS platform recently, and used this as an experiment to see how the platform worked. So I spent the last few weeks digging through work, shooting images of it, and getting things together. I’ll be adding more stuff as time goes on — Cargo makes it really easy to do so. But for now there’s a lot of old and new stuff up there to look at. You can click the commercial portfolio link on the right to get there, or just click here.

My regular updates will continue to be on this site, and the commercial stuff will continue to live over there.

A lot of custom bikes rolling through here lately. If you dig these you can check out some previous bikes I shot here and here. If you missed it, you can also check out the video I did on Jordan Hufnagel for Level Magazine here.

Hufnagel and Argonaut are both Portland builders I shoot regularly. DeSalvo is a well-known builder from Ashland who I’m told cranks out a ton of high-quality builds, many of them (the below bike as well) in Titanium. Nice, very different bikes from all the guys. Check them out after the jump.

Shot some photos in the studio today for Dakine of a pro skateboarder and his signature bag. Of course, we couldn’t show the whole bag as it was just a production sample. Here’s an outtake from the day.

All of the shots were shot with a bright white background (and most of them are more of a high-key white style), but one interesting thing about lighting in photography is that in this shot he’s standing about 5 feet in front of the bright white seamless wall. A couple of grids on the lights to control spill, and boom, what white?

Off to California tomorrow for a couple days for the LG Freestyle Motocross Championships.