This is a drawing of my daughter, Connie. I am thankful today that her sister, Chelsea, traveled to Tucson to find her after she had disappeared from our lives for a quite a while. She found her and she is now going to come home to the family and get help for some serious issues she has. I am very grateful and thankful that she has been found.
What are you thankful for?
Models getting ready for a shoot are sometimes more interesting and fun to photograph than the shoot itself.
She had been running around off-set wondering where her lip gloss was, so when she found it I followed her into the kitchen at the auto repair shop/photography studio and took some shots as she put it on.
We were having a photo shoot in an auto repair garage that adjoins the photography studio. We had someone in who was giving a tutorial on studio lighting. At one point he asked this model to do some poses on a divan/couch with her shirt pulled up, exposing her abs and belly button. I could tell she was a bit uncomfortable with that and was worried about what her parents would think, especially her father. The poses weren’t exploitive as such, but they were on the cheesy side and I could tell she was a bit awkward about it.
Turns out she has the same name as one of my daughters and graduated from the same high school, a few years later. We talked a bit about her going to college and what she wanted to do. She seemed to like the photos I took off-set. I will have to ask her what she thought about the ones I mentioned above.
Another image from my recent auto repair garage shoot. I found the scaffold to be much more fun than the set up studio situation they had put together so I had a model climb up on it and took some shots. I knew her dress was short, but I had no idea how short until she was up there. I actually had to make her move her legs a number of times so I didn’t see her panties in the shot.
I manipulated this image quite a bit, just experimenting and playing with some perspective and warping tools to accentuate the legs that were already so obviously the center of the image.
From a commissioned couples photo shoot. I jokingly suggested we go outside and do some shots among the leaves and bare trees, thinking she would say no due to the cold. But she was more than game and we came away with some fantastic shots of her.
November, 2008
Our photo club was having a photo shoot in the auto repair garage that is attached to the photography studio where we meet. They had brought out all the lights and back drops into the garage to do a tutorial on studio lighting.
It was a bit too crowded to really hear what they were saying so I stole a few of the models and went to another part of the garage where I found a scaffold for them to get up on. I went up a ladder and got this shot, among others.
I had the camera on manual settings for a long exposure and then added the flash at the end to get the effect.
Triptych of three studio shots with the Model A. From the first series with my new camera, the Panasonic G1.
First series taken with my new camera, the Panasonic G1. I was doing a shoot in my home and we had her sillhouetted against the window when we realized there was a fire truck in the lonely subdivision on the other side of the park. I asked her to go outside and look at the truck through the top of a broken picket in the back fence. She was a trooper and did so, even though it was windy and cold! I love the pose and the reverse voyeur feeling of the nude looking over the fence at the fire truck.
From a shoot over the summer in a auto repair shop. I didn’t particularly like this in color and didn’t revisit it until November. I like the view from above in this one. It gives a combination of sexiness and dirty work that has the underlying question of what sort of work is dirty, is she the dirty one because of her outfit, or is the photo dirty, is the place dirty?
I am a complete sucker for our elections in general but nothing in my lifetime is as grand and wonderful a statement about us and our predecessors as Obama’s election yesterday. I am not talking about him being a democrat and I am not talking about his policies.
I am talking about the people of America taking our obligation seriously and really paying attention to our world and what we want to see happen in it.
What I love most of all though is that how I raised my daughters, to be color blind and focused on who a person really is, is something that many of our generation taught our kids and it has come home in reality now.
In the end the vast majority of baby boomers and children of baby boomers (including the ones who didn’t vote for him) didn’t care if he was black, white or biracial. They cared that he gave them hope in their country and hope that we can be who we said we wanted to be 232 years ago.
And the answer to any who doubt, here and around the world, is
Yes We Can.
This week is about black and white portraits. I have a weakness for that look that has light showing off the skin, it’s texture and details. The one yesterday was about that. This one is from around 1990. It is a film shot so the skin details aren’t there the way I can capture them now, but you can still see my interest in getting the feeling of light and heat on the skin.
Plus, what’s not to like about the late 80s early 90s look of hair and clothing, right?
