Marina and Laecee chatting at a friends’ wedding. From the same near-disasterous roll of film as this shot. This is also one of my favorite pictures from this past year.

A dramatic portrait of Sasha, a good friend of mine whom I’ve known since I was about 2 weeks old. It was a really foggy day and, with him standing at the entrance to an old tunnel I got a nice giant light source side-lighting his face.

Here’s another picture of him from the same roll of film.

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.

Taken at the abandoned fortifications on the Northern side of the San Francisco bay. I will need to go back there the next time the weather is all gloomy and the light is nice and soft. Lots of potential for some really dramatic photographs in those places. That would also give me a good excuse to really play with my DIY beauty dish I made a few months ago.

A lone listener in the musical space of the Contemporary Jewish Museum. This is probably the first and last picture here taken with my manual Olympus OM2. I’ve been trying to get used to shooting that camera for a couple of months now and I think I’m going to give up at this point. I like to shoot wide open, and wind up missing too many shots with that camera. Not sure what gives – I generally nail the focus in manual focus mode on my canon even when shooting fast-moving things. Love the glass on the OM2, but I just can’t justify losing so many shots that otherwise would have worked well – there were at least 5 on this roll of film alone. Pity.

I started this blog with a story of a near-disaster, so might as well continue along the same vein. This shot was taken a month or so ago at a friends’ (they’re both friends) wedding. I took my trusty old Canon, loaded it up with some HP5+, and went to town. I had an awesome time shooting and knew that I had gotten some good results. When I developed the film, however, I saw to my dismay that the film looked underexposed by about 3 stops. The culprit turned out to be an old batch of Rodinal. When I was pouring out whatever was left of it, it had turned from a light pink to an almost neon purple. In any case, it took lots and lots of fiddling with the scanner to get usable images out of those two rolls. It was all worth it though. I got something like 10 shots that I absolutely love, a much higher percentage than what I’m used to getting. Chances are, you will be seeing more of them in the future. When I’m on, I’m on.

This is an un-posed picture of Laecee, a good friend of mine and one of the prettiest people I know.