A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.

After he fixed my bike, my friend Cary showed me around his house.
Y’see, when he’s not out riding bikes with the cool bike-race set, he’s a contractor. He builds things in people’s houses to make the houses pretty and raise their property values.
And he’s good at it.
Heck, the space he nonchalantly refers to as “The Bike Shed” is really a man-cave of the highest caliber.

Anyway, he asked me if I’d be interested in shooting some of his projects from time to time. I was all for it so when he suggested I start with some shots of the killer living room he’d put into his house, I was thrilled.

This is one of the ones from a hurried 1 hour session earlier this week.

I’m looking forward to working with him on more projects as the opportunities arise.

Kick It!

My Father’s Day presents were twofold, and both cooler than anything I could’ve asked for.

First off, my wife and children saw to it that I merged into the information superhighway’s fast lane by getting rid of my old phone and getting me this behemoth.

To make matters even better, my wife took the kids away for the afternoon (to my mother in law’s house where a killer dinner was prepared, but that’s a different story), allowing me to catch up with an old buddy who kindly let me shoot some portraits of her.

We had a place to shoot and had some nonstandard portraiture lined up, but when I got to her house, she had this amazing couch. We moved it outside and began. We got a lot of really good shots, but this is one of my favorites.

Again.

I’m actually gonna reshoot these with a little more care with regard to a lot of things, but I had a quiet moment this morning before class to look at the images again. While I think I can nail these, I kinda like this one, too. I should’ve posted it with yesterday’s image. Shrug.

Happy Friday, everyone.

Sometimes A Lady…

I almost called this post “Location. Location. Location.” ’cause I lucked into this beautiful space in which to shoot.

The ladies of the Junior League of Richmond were kind enough to let me use the Mayo-Carter House. It was built in 1895 and is done in a style called French Renaissance Revival. This house was designed by New York architects Carrere & Hastings, the same architects who designed the Hotel Jefferson, just one block east.

The house is beautiful. It has super high ceilings and is furnished on the ground floor with stuff that feels like the scenery from a high fashion catalog. As I understand it, this is just a reflection on the important outreach work the Junior League does.

Anyway, we were there for about two and a half hours and snapped a few digital images and a few film ones, to include a roll of black and white and a roll of cross process. I think I had greater success with the film than with the digital. These two are film.

On the Couch.

She kinda looks like that’s where you’d sleep ’cause clearly you’ve crossed her.

But really, what Amber was doing was looking a little angry for Jim. If the owner of that couch had returned to her house to see we’d put it outside, there’s a distinct possibility that we’d have gotten that look, too. But like I said, this one’s fabricated. Jim was making real photographs (with his film camera) and I was loitering in the wings, snapping with my then new Pentax. I didn’t know at the time that I could shoot RAW to have more information to work with in post so this only exists as a high res jpeg.

I was looking through some of the old images in my Flickr stream and found this image, so I found the original jpeg on my hard drive and had another crack at it. I cropped it to a square and changed the levels a bit. I like it better this way; it’s warmer.

Anyway, it’s a good Friday piece. Have a good weekend. Hopefully I’ll have some new stuff to share on Monday.