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.

I actually have a series of these – photos of people (kids mostly) getting lost in the music – but this is the first one to make it on this blog. I took this shot of my little niece showing off her rapidly advancing skillz about a half a year ago, when we were both visiting my grandmother in Houston, TX. Since then, Dina has probably gone up a few more notches.

On an unrelated note, I’m about to go off to New Zealand for just under a month. As you may have guessed, I’m packing tons of film and certainly more cameras than I need. Hell, I’m still contemplating bringing along my alien bees complete with a giant battery pack for a full mobile studio. Still not sure which way I’m gonna lean on that one. It also means that there will likely not be any updates for a little while. Or not – the laptop’s coming with me and I may feel inspired to do something digital… You never know…

A little while ago, as Marina was looking for something deep in the bowels of our pantry (or was she cleaning?) she found a roll of film from a long time ago. Not knowing what it was, and taking a guess about how it was shot, I put it in HC-110 soup and hoped for the best. What came out were pictures from a trip to Point Reyes Station celebrating the birthday of one of our good friends. This was one of the first photos on the roll, and it does a good job describing the prevalent mood for those two days in a giant house with more rooms than we could count and a heated swimming pool.

This – the juxtaposition of something that is alive to something that is not – is a recurring theme in my photography. Here’s the latest addition to the series. There’s bound to be more.

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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.

A quick test pic of my little sister, Masha, taken with my DIY beauty dish (design courtesy of David Tejada) posing with my 2008 Bunny Suicides calendar. “Bunny” has been her nickname for years

I am going to need to use this thing more – I like the light here quite a bit. Looks like I have a shoot coming up this Sat. I think I’ll play with it then.

This image has a funny back-story to it. It was taken during a trip to the wine country, Healdsburg, CA, to be exact. I was staying in a boutique hotel and decided up front that I will be taking a lot of pictures while there. In preparation, I’ve spent hours scouring strobist, packed all of my lighting gear, home-made beauty dish and all and, in a feat of brilliance, forgot the bag with all the light-stands (and my tripod) at home.

Luckily, I had a couple of rolls of Delta 3200 with me, which allowed me to shoot my Bronica ETRS hand-held (and wide open) in the evening, with my lighting setup consisting of two bedside lamps and a dinky little reading light that I used for catch. Could this image have been better, had I had my whole arsenal at my disposal? Probably. In any case, I am quite happy with what came out.