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…

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.

A little while ago, I started participating in a weekly themed photography group. Every week, on a Wednesday, the theme for the week is announced, and all the members get to submit a single photo. This week’s theme is “games”. Initially, I was going to shoot a 70-s decadence scene, with a pair of dice, white powder on a mirror, a tired girl in a black dress wiping her brow… Then, thinking about it some more, I figured that these aren’t the games I’m particularly interested in, and I brought the whole thing around to fit better with my overall vision for where I want to take my photography. Here’s what came out of it.

To get this shot, I took advantage of the fact that I can point one of my lights through a window in my living room to make it shine out of a window in my bedroom for a dramatic morning-light effect in the middle of the night.

Another shot from the same series as the previous one. Can’t make up my mind about which one of these I like more, so I’m putting up both.