This is another version of the photo I posted a few days ago.

I am torn between these two.

One of the major players in this photo, a big rusty nail, can’t be seen in the frame. By the time I took this shot, I had already removed it from my heel. As soon as I finished shooting, I went straight to Urgent Care to get a tetanus shot and remove pieces of my shoe’s heel that got lodged in my foot. Good times.

In any case, it was kinda hard to concentrate when I was taking these, and developing the film was a nervous ordeal – I had no idea if I was going to get anything at all. I was balancing ambient light with flash and could have easily screwed up on any of the readings. Plus, the lensbaby  at wide aperture is kinda hard to focus even on the best of days, when you’re not in pain. In any case, here it goes. From where I sit, it was all worth it.

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 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

Another portrait from our quick session with An’ka. This was, amongst other things, an experiments with perceiving dimensions. Profile lighting (with a slight rim-light coming from the back) makes the face really pop while the back-lit smoke (from a hookah) is flat and almost two-dimensional. Together these create what I think is an interesting effect.

Last Friday night we did a quick get-to-know-each-other shoot with Anka, who turned out to be one of the more interesting models we’ve worked with for a while. All in all, the force has been strong with us lately when it comes to finding people to shoot. We flowed quickly from one set-up to another, from simple portraiture, to some fashiony stuff that Marina did (and is yet to process – I think there’s a good shot or two in there) to nudes and then back to portraiture. It is perhaps telling that my favorite shot from the evening is also probably the simplest.

Yet another shot from the series with Lena (pervious ones here and here).  I barely ever post so many pictures in a row from the same photoshoot, but I think these are worth making an exception.

There are times when you finish a shoot, wipe the sweat off your brow, and hope for the best when the film’s finally developed. This shoot we did on Sunday with Lena was not one of those. We got an early morning start, something like 9:30 or so in the morning, and by the time we were done at 2 PM we were wiped out, hungry as hell, and secure in the knowledge that we nailed it. And nail it we did.

This is the first shot in a series that I happened to process. It was a lighting test, a digital polaroid, that I took with Marina’s old Digital Rebel that’s been sitting around collecting dust for at least a couple of years and that I thought till a couple of days ago was broken beyond repair. There’s a roll of developed film waiting to be scanned and two more waiting to be developed. It’s safe to assume that I will be posting more of the images here. However, even if every single one of them is a complete and utter failure and this one is the only one I wound up getting, I will be perfectly happy.