It’s Starting to Ad Up.

First assignment that involved making an actual advertisement.
The teacher didn’t hate it, though I missed the mark.
I can’t wait to get it right on the first try.

What Did You Say?

It’s been a long week.
I’m not listening anymore.

Have a great weekend!

My Money’s Worth.

I should say that I’ve gotten more than my share of good photographs out of these headphones. They’ve been on babies, people who listened to their music too loud, the occasional pretty girl, and even on the heads of small children. They’ve been in family portraits and serious attempts at photographic art. Yep, folks. These headphones have more than paid for themselves in the years since I bought them.

This time around, they were part of a series of family portraits I was working on — I needed something that was representative of each of the children. Her brother got to hold and XBox 360 controller. What sets this apart from my usual work is the overlay of notes and staffs (at least I think those lines are called staffs). In Photoshop world, that’s called a texture and I owe the fact that I’m learning how to use them to my buddy, Joe, who’s been posting pretty regularly to the Brainchild Collective blog. You should check it out.

This attempt is rough, to be sure, but I’m interested to see how I can add this to my small arsenal of digital tools.

Oh, and on a completely different note, for those of you paying attention, the English Premier League season starts up this weekend. Go Liverpool!

The Hazards of Personal Music Systems.

We played around with a recipe for fake blood to come up with this shot. It took a good deal of lighting and the best friend of one of my model buddies, but it came out pretty well. It’s amazing how good a mens’ room in an old classroom building at VCU looks in pictures. I’m pleased with the results.

The idea was that his headphones (and perhaps the music) were so loud that his ears began to bleed. There are several other images, and this is a very rough post-process (In fact, Joe at Brainchild Collective will undoubtedly do a better job on it later), but it’s a kind of work I’m interested in trying more of. I’ve got a couple of other projects like this in the wings for the summer. Keep watching.

Plumbing, Redux.

Truthfully, I have a lot of stuff in a queue to put up, but I’m a little behind on post-process. Moreover, I have a slew of interesting shoots coming up, not all of which I’m the lead photog for (read: I get to assist!).

In the meantime, I figured I’d share this image:

It’s interesting ’cause it’s the same little girl as in this image but she’s almost two years older. I’m thinking that it might be fun to make her wear these at intervals from now until I’m too feeble to hold a camera, just so she’ll have a history of herself. Interestingly, I only caught two frames of her looking like this before she was “all done.” I suppose I was right about how hard it would be to get those headphones on her.

All that aside, I really like this image, but I either wish for more cars in the background, or fewer. My one little Honda back there looks conspicuous to me. I assuage my guilt by saying that it’s just a snapshot and it’s okay that it’s not perfectly composed. Still, she’s got quite the look here, doesn’t she?

An Old Friend

“Got a call from an old friend, we used to be real close…”
(with apologies to Billy Joel)

This young lady stopped by my office after having been out of the country for several months, studying in Germany, Italy, and Austria. I didn’t recognize her at first because she’s let her hair grow and, while she’s still as pretty as this photograph, she doesn’t look like this anymore.

We caught up and conspired to grab lunch sometime soon. What the entire exchange reminded me of was how much a chance to visit other countries and study abroad would have been fun to me when I was in college. Judging by her photographs — and there were many that she shared with me — it was a great time.

Radio Silence.

School started on Thursday so I’m thinking that updates here will be patchier.
We’ll see.

Here’s another old one.

Plumbing.

Here’s me digging in the depths of my images to find something to post while I await a new scanner and several rolls of film. That being said, the photo pipeline is, how do you say, backed up?

On the downside, the black and white film I meant to process kinda got lost in the shuffle. I ended up heading to the gym instead.

So this is my daughter being nonplussed. She’s bigger now and wrestling her into those headphones again would be nigh impossible, but this is an old fave of mine.

The Ties That Bind.

I fancy myself a bit of a thinker and when presented with images that people want, I like to think I can come up with neat alternatives to the “ordinary.” This family portrait was one such example.

The client is an art teacher and I knew she’d get a little symbolism if I threw it her way in the photo. As such, this was the first idea I tried and the one, of the entire shoot, that turned out the absolute best. I’d found those headphones on eBay several years ago and, I have to say, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of them. I think they’ve appeared in something like a half dozen of my favorite images in the time since I bought them.

Unfortunately, in my brilliance, I processed these negs in chemistry that was 5 degrees warmer than it should have been. To the digitally inclined, or the vastly uninitiated, that sounds like nothing. The truth is the small miscalculation in temperature makes these really hard to print. Mercifully, they’re still pretty easy to scan.