Another picture I took during our honeymoon in New Zealand. To be perfectly frank, I’m not quite sure where I took this one – I could have been either in Christchurch, or in the Franz Joseph glacial village. Not that it matters much. This wasn’t a premeditated picture – I just happened to notice the magical way light was falling on Marina while she was taking a shower and snapped it.

I’ve always been fascinated by how a little bit of light can change things in a picture. This exact scene, this exact pose, could easily have been a sexy picture of a girl in a shower…

Hi, it’s been a while.

This is going to be the first photo I post from our New Zealand honeymoon. They are not in a chronological order – I did a good job labeling the first couple rolls of film and then, unsurprisingly for those who know me well, let it go. Now, I’m going through the rolls, developing them one-by-one and will be posting the photos as they come. This one was taken in Christchurch, in the South Island of New Zealand. We were staying at a gorgeous government-building-to-hotel conversion and the second we walked into our loft-suite and looked up I saw this shot. It turned out to be hard to get though – our wireless flash trigger has given up on life by that point, and the ambient light was all wrong. What we wound up doing is setting the camera up on the tripod, posing marina as I looked through the viewfinder, then walking over to the light stand right next to her, on another floor, using a looooong shutter release cable that we happened to take along with us for self-portraits to trip the shutter for something like 1 second and then manually flashing the flash. It was kind of a pain in the ass, but I like what I got out of it.

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 of Lena from a while ago from a roll of film I just developed and scanned.

Here’s another photograph from the same shoot with Lena. The first roll of film is now developed and processed. You’ll be seeing at least a couple more shots from it here. Next in line is the medium-format work Marina did while I was shooting my dinky 35mm.

Facepaint is one of many side effects of hanging out with faeries.

We had the Sunday evening to ourselves, taking it easy, and wound up doing an improvised photo-sesison. This was shot with my Olympus OM-4, which quickly became my favorite system. For this frame, I pointed the lens through a couple of wine-glasses and used two gridded strobes for a harsh light. This, combined with the refractions off the glass, really brought out the drama. This is one of my favorite shots at this point.

A couple of weeks ago we spent a weekend in Bodega Bay for a surprise birthday celelbration for a good friend of ours. The place we stayed, a house perched on a rock that is protruding into the ocean, was a photographer’s dream. That wasn’t what we were there for though, so most of the time was spent on drinks, food, and relaxation. We went through 100 oysters in one evening and a case and a half of wine on one of the nights to give you an idea.

I took my favorite picture from the weekend during the last 5 minutes or so that we were there just as everyone was finishing packing up. It’s tempting to actually go back there with the specific purpose of taking pictures this time around. I think I’ll do that one of these days…

Alex Zuzin, lead singer of the local band “Modorass” preforms at their inaugural album-release fundraiser at Retox SF. When I was asked to take pictures at the concert, I did two things: I duct-taped an old Vivitar flash to the ceiling and shot wirelessly using my digital canon for most of the concert. I also loaded a roll of Neopan 1600 into my Olympus OM-4 and did what I could with available light.

As you’d expect, the pictures turned out very very different. I will be posting some of the digital ones in a few days. I still haven’t made up my mind as to which ones I like better. Apples to oranges.