Another shot from the same series as this one, slightly darker this time.

Finally, after weeks of travel and chaos, I was able to do some serious shooting last night. This is our first shoot with Sarinka, who I’ve met on ModelMayhem, and who completely blew me away with her ability to show emotion through movement. We had a pretty abstract concept going into the shoot, a marionette as she’s pulled up by the strings, and she nailed it, time and time again. We shot this at an abandoned artillery bunker overlooking the San Francisco Bay.

I’ll be posting more from this shoot over the next few days. Plus, there’s a couple of rolls of wide film waiting to be developed.

Another shot of my aunt Tanya and her dog Dazzy from the same series.

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.