Another shot from the same series as this one.

The latest photo from my long-running collaboration with Sarah. I have a whole series of images in my head (they’ve been in my head for a long time now) that this is a part of. Now all I need to do is get out there and shoot them.

I haven’t posted here anything for a while. I guess mostly because I was too lazy or might be because I’ve been mostly using my iphone to take photos. I’ll try to change that if our daughter Nyusha allows me.
I took this photo while Alex was shooting Morgan

Here’s a shot from last Friday’s shoot with Morgan Barbour. Due to an unfortunate chain of events we only had something like 30 minutes at the location to set up, shoot, and break down the set, so I knew I only had one shot at the look I was going after. Originally, I envisioned an Ingmar Berman inspired image, I even bought a wall-clock and tore out the hands – it was going to hang on the wall in the background – but that had to be scrapped due to insane time constraints. In the result, I had to strip the image down to the basics and hope they worked and, well, you’ll be the judge of that.

Another shot from the series. This is the photo as I originally envisioned it a while ago.

I got this pic on my second attempt. I had tried to shoot it (and other like it, I’ll be posting at least one more) a couple of weeks ago, failed miserably, and reshot this Saturday.

7 weeks to go.

This is also my first attempt to use D-DX to develop Delta 3200. I like what I got better than my experiments with Rodinal at high dilutions and long times. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with that film for a long time now, but I think I’m actually beginning to get a feel for it now.

Another portrait from last Saturday. I couldn’t decide between the two of ‘em, so I’m posting both.

Here’s a photo I took last saturday while we were walking around McLaren park in San Francisco. This is a purely opportunistic shot – I didn’t do anything at all to the light, nor was I looking for it. It also breaks all the rules – it’s taken with uneven (to say the least) lighting right around noon on a sunny day and with some of the “worst” bokeh possible in the background. I’m a rebel like that.

It’s also one of my favorite shots of Marina to date. This is exactly how I saw her when I met her years ago. It’s exactly how I see her now.

Another photo from the same shoot as the last one.

The first photo from a series I took last Saturday morning. Quick and dirty, with natural light and Marina on a reflector to add a little bit of drama to an otherwise soft scene.

This is a great example of something that I’ve pretty much always known – something that everyone knows, or at least thinks they know – portraiture is all about love. Taking pictures of people you love is easy, there’s no need to crash through establishing rapport, the connection is already there. This shot, shots like these, they just work.

Doing this with strangers is a whole different animal, because you have minutes or at best hours to put in place a feeling of intimacy that usually takes years to develop. That’s what it’s all about when it comes to portraiture. The rest is just technique.