A few weeks ago, Marina, Nyusha, and I have spent a day in Montreal. Here’s a shot I grabbed as we were walking around with no particular goal in mind. I used to spend quite a bit of time in Montreal back in the day. This trip brought back memories.

A quick portrait I grabbed of my nephew, Max, when we were eating lunch in a little restaurant in Newton Centre, not far from where I’ve spent my formative years in the US. I came to Newton from Moscow a shell-shocked 11-year-old back in ’91. By ’97 I had gone through a small chunk of elementary school, all of middle school, and somehow managed to graduate from Newton South high school. I left to California in ’02 and haven’t lived there since.

There’s something, for lack of better word, special in the eyes of little children. They haven’t build up layers upon layers of the kinds of smoke-and-mirrors and defense mechanisms that we all assemble around ourselves as we get older and, generally, not any wiser.

I really love this picture.

Another wedding photo from the same roll of film.

Dima Gershenson dancing at his brother’s wedding this summer.

I don’t remember taking this picture. In fact, I don’t remember taking any pictures during Sasha Gershenson’s wedding. As the officiator, I wasn’t even going to bring a camera at first and threw my Canon into a bag as an afterthought. Sometime last week, I decided to develop one of the many anonymous rolls of film I have lying around in a vase in my kitchen and was amazed when I saw pictures that I didn’t remember taking. It looks like I took the 36 pictures in the course of about 10 minutes, as the dinner was winding down and the party was really getting started. I was very very drunk at that point. What’s incredible is that I kept 33 of them – the highest hit rate in my life. I will post a few of them here. I can only wish I could do this consistently

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.

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.