She was the saleswoman at the Vintage Clothing Store who was also a photographer and an artist and knew about the cool show at the Center for Creative Photography and she was right, it was great.
I loved her great retro style with the bobbed hairdo and the ‘little house on the prairie’ dress. Her face was serious but not morose, filled with intelligence and just a bit of world weariness. She was a student and had a lot of study on her plate.
Our daughter was housesitting at this gated ranch in Tucson and we waited outside after our initial conversation.
She ended up locking herself in the house and asking us to call her landlord, who came down to help out. She also called the police who came and told us (which we already knew) that she was an adult and could make her own choices, but that they would go talk to her.
They were able to talk her out of the house and she came out the same time her landlord arrived. She agreed to go get an evaluation, but only if her landlord took her, not us, and report back to us later that day. And that is what happened.
My middle daughter went missing earlier this year. We believed she was in Tucson but had no communication for about 6 months. Her younger sister went to Tucson and found her. Her mother and I (we are divorced) followed a number of days later to talk to her about some issues.
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.
