I took this picture of my aunt a few days ago, when I was visiting her in Houston, Texas. I knew I wanted to take some pictures of her and grandma while I was there, so I took one of my alien bees, a light-stand, and a softlighter with me on the plane. All of it fit nicely into my carry-on, with plenty of room for everything else I needed for a 3-day stay.

Here, she’s holding up her dog, Dazzy. When Tanya got her from the pound, Dazzy was already sick with distemper, a disease that’s usually fatal for dogs her age. Over the next few months, Tanya faced a daily struggle, trying to keep her pet alive against all odds, and somehow managed to pull it off.

Here’s another look from last Saturday’s shoot with Erika.

Erika and I have been taking about shooting this for some time now and kept running into scheduling issues, on my end mostly. There’s entirely too many things going on in my life right now and it’s hard to find time to shoot anything involved. The stars finally aligned this Saturday and we hiked down to one of my favorite locations in San Francisco. Carrying all the gear, lights, battery, stands and all, was a huge pain, carrying all of it back up was an even bigger pain, but I think it’s safe to say that the effort paid off.

I absolutely love having the ability to take all my lights anywhere I want (as long as I’m willing to carry them all, that is). Saturday was an overcast day and there’s no way in hell I could’ve gotten this with just natural light.

Took this one a couple of days ago, at night. It was one of those times when I had the concept for a photograph (not this one, actually, more on that later) bouncing around in my head for days and I just had to shoot the damn thing to get it out of there. As I set up the lights and the background, enlisted my neighbor’s help in holding up the glass head-mannequin, and set up the lights where I wanted them, my cat Athena walked on set, plopped herself down on Marina’s chest, and simply refused to leave. The back-light was nice and warm, Athena was purring, and I wound up with a completely different picture altogether.

On a side note, I just finished Stephenson’s new book “Anathem” and it looks like I’ll be shooting simple geometric compositions for a while…

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.

Here’s another shot from the same series as the previous one.

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.

I got this image last friday, on my first shoot with E. We decided that we’re going to walk around in the San Francisco parks (this one was shot in the Presidio, a bunch more in the Golden Gate Park) and see where the mood takes us. What we wound up with was the closest thing to a fashion-style shoot that I’ve ever done before. I’ll be posting a few more pictures in the next couple of days.

This was also the first real test of my new Olympus OM2-SP, which I got in Portland to replace my OM4 – my primary camera for a good while that didn’t survive our trip to New Zealand. It, the OM2, is now officially my favorite camera. It just feels… right, much better than its fancier and more modern counterpart ever did.

Sasha is someone I’ve been wanting to photograph for a long time now and last Friday we finally got around to it.

It started out as a comedy of errors. I felt tired and had trouble focusing which was bad enough as of itself, and then, to top it all off, much of my equipment decided to start acting out. I had to duct-tape a loose light stand and took a long and painful time to figure out what was going on with a finicky synch cord, which I had to use because the batteries in my wireless trigger went out on me. On top of that, the lighting scheme I envisioned for this shoot, with a beauty dish key and on-axis fill was just not working for me at all. I don’t generally get frustrated when shooting, but this was probably the closest I’ve gotten in a while. Seeing this, I figured that it’s better to take a break, have a cup of tea and a glass or two of wine, and then try again later.

The tea-and-wine worked its magic. A couple of glasses in I decided that I need to really soften things up. Not only did I swap the beauty dish for my ginormous umbrella, but I also added extra diffusion by shooting through some wine glasses, and on top of that I threw on the lensebaby to wash things out even more with selective focus. I followed this with a lot of tweaking to get to this end result. I think I wound up with a second gridded strobe pointing at the glasses I used for diffusion material to get them to flare some and do double-duty to provide some framing for the composition and build on the whole whimsical theme I was trying to create.

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…