Another image from the same lazy Saturday morning, also taken on expired-in-97 Tri-X.

Marina, still mostly asleep, on saturday morning. I took it on a roll of Tri-X that expired way back in ’97. When taking the shots I had no idea what was going to come out, and now I regret that I don’t have any more – the texture of the grain is simply awesome for some of the things I like to do.

Also interesting just how capricious my relationship with my cameras is. The trusty old Bronica that I used here, for example, has been collecting dust for something like a year, all because of a slight crack in its prism, just barely visible in the viewfinder at just the right angle. A little while ago, on a whim, I replaced the prism, and only then realized just how much that really-hard-to-notice crack bothered me all along. Now, the Bronica’s back as one of my favorite cameras to shoot with. Go figure.

Sunday morning
Brings the dawn in
It’s just a restless feeling by my side
Early dawning
Sunday morning
It’s just the wasted years so close behind
Watch out the world’s behind you
There’s always someone around you who will call
It’s nothing at all

Sunday morning
And I’m falling
I’ve got a feeling I don’t want to know
Early dawning
Sunday morning
It’s all the streets you crossed, not so long ago
Watch out the world’s behind you
There’s always someone around you who will call
It’s nothing at all

Sunday morning
Sunday morning
Sunday morning

(c) Velvet Underground

This is the last shot I’m going to post from this series. Again, I absolutely love the statuesque quality here. I used to read and re-read the myths and legends of the ancient greeks when I was a kid and this image could have easily walked out of one of my pre-adolescent dreams circa 1990 or so.

I took this photo of Marina last week, while sick with the flue, and I think my state of delirium comes across nicely. I’ve been working on the technique of using flare and distortions as mood-setting elements in studio portraiture for a while now, and this is the latest installment.

Marina has always had this statuesque quality, light her the right way, and she looks like she’s made of marble and came from ancient Greece.

Another picture I took during our honeymoon in New Zealand. To be perfectly frank, I’m not quite sure where I took this one – I could have been either in Christchurch, or in the Franz Joseph glacial village. Not that it matters much. This wasn’t a premeditated picture – I just happened to notice the magical way light was falling on Marina while she was taking a shower and snapped it.

I’ve always been fascinated by how a little bit of light can change things in a picture. This exact scene, this exact pose, could easily have been a sexy picture of a girl in a shower…

Hi, it’s been a while.

This is going to be the first photo I post from our New Zealand honeymoon. They are not in a chronological order – I did a good job labeling the first couple rolls of film and then, unsurprisingly for those who know me well, let it go. Now, I’m going through the rolls, developing them one-by-one and will be posting the photos as they come. This one was taken in Christchurch, in the South Island of New Zealand. We were staying at a gorgeous government-building-to-hotel conversion and the second we walked into our loft-suite and looked up I saw this shot. It turned out to be hard to get though – our wireless flash trigger has given up on life by that point, and the ambient light was all wrong. What we wound up doing is setting the camera up on the tripod, posing marina as I looked through the viewfinder, then walking over to the light stand right next to her, on another floor, using a looooong shutter release cable that we happened to take along with us for self-portraits to trip the shutter for something like 1 second and then manually flashing the flash. It was kind of a pain in the ass, but I like what I got out of it.

Another shot from the same series as the previous one. Can’t make up my mind about which one of these I like more, so I’m putting up both.

I’ve finally figured out how to achieve this effect last night. I first saw it in use by Eugenia Kirikova, a Moscow based photographer whose work I really admire. It took me a few tries to get there and I learned quite of interesting stuff as I was messing with creating out-of-focus spots of light to give an image a dream-like appearance. This shot, for example, came from an earlier attempt at a similar effect. Yesterday night I finally nailed it.

Now on to the next step – to make it my own. I’ll also need to figure out how to better control the intensity and the positioning of the spots – I want to start shooting film this way and, as is, the process is way too unpredictable.

Last Sunday morning, Marina and I were taking some pictures of Nastya, a friend of ours. She’s never really had her picture taken before beyond your casual snapshot and came in not knowing what to expect and even somewhat tense. The minute we put her in front of the camera, however, her tension went away and things got easy.

In this particular shot, I wanted to make it dreamy, to create a feeling of being in a pleasant daze. I shot it with my Bronica, covering the lens with a translucent metallic scarf and deliberately catching it with the back-light to create lots of flare.

This weekend Marina and I celebrated our anniversary over at the Harbin Hot Springs resort, swimming in the warm mineral pools under the open sky.

Incidentally, the first ever photo in this blog was taken during our previous anniversary.