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…

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.

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.

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.

I’ve finally figured out how to achieve this effect last night. I first saw it in use by Eugenia Kirikova, a Moscow based photographer whose work I really admire. It took me a few tries to get there and I learned quite of interesting stuff as I was messing with creating out-of-focus spots of light to give an image a dream-like appearance. This shot, for example, came from an earlier attempt at a similar effect. Yesterday night I finally nailed it.

Now on to the next step – to make it my own. I’ll also need to figure out how to better control the intensity and the positioning of the spots – I want to start shooting film this way and, as is, the process is way too unpredictable.