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.

Irene looking at Jeremy during a wine tasting trip to the Russian River Valley. I’ve always been fascinated at the way people look at their partners. The chemistry here is pretty much palpable.

A couple of weeks later, these two got engaged.

A Bean.

Taken during a Wine Tasting trip to the Russian River in January. One of my favorites from that roll.

Another shot from Death Valley that made me think back to the martian landscapes in total recall. That place really does make you think that there’s gotta be at least a couple of ancient alien artifacts burried underneath all the formations.

Death Valley blew my mind. I was, in a way, expecting it to, but I guess you can never be truly prepared to have their mind blown even if you do know it’s coming. Sadly, I was not quite able to capture much of it on camera. Maybe next time.

The interesting thing is that the photograph that describes how it felt to me best is not a shot of the dunes or of the sand-hills, of which I took a few and will likely post here in a while, but a portrait of Marina. The more I do this the more I come to realize that it’s people that make photographs for me.

This was a four-person effort – Marina was posing, I was shooting, and two of our friends who went on this road trip with us were holding a reflector and a piece of tumble-weed to make the shadows really work.

To me, this photo justifies the 4 rolls of film that I shot and that barely have anything usable on them. I know that I will be coming back to this one later on in my life. It’s a memory that I now know will not slip away. This is why I do this.