I’ve been working with dancers for over a decade and I still struggle to come up with fresh ways of capturing their movement in a way that conveys their power and grace. But this challenge doesn’t keep me from trying…
Read MoreMy Travel Gear Kit
This is my travel kit. I’ve whittled down my gear over the years to get the leanest and meanest kit possible. With this two camera, two lens, two light setup I can easily travel and solo shoot, creating a broad range of indoor and outdoor scenarios.
Read MoreEpisode Two of The Creative Portrait
Episode two of The Creative Portrait is now live. In case you missed my previous post, I am teaching my entire creative process in a multi-episode video series. In this episode I cover the following setups:
Read MoreOld Man Gloom
It’s always great when I get a chance to reconnect with Jim. We worked through a range of creative scenarios in this shoot. I shot his reflection with a broken mirror. I shot through a distressed air filter. I played with mylar. It was my first time splattering water onto the mylar, and found that the warped nature of the material in addition to the water added a nice graphic novel-look to the images. These techniques are all part of a new video series I’m currently working on, titled The Creative Portrait. Keep an eye out for the first episode, dropping soon!
Read MoreCreative Portraiture Workshop: New York City
It was great to be back in New York, teaching my two-day Creative Portraiture workshop. Photo god Lindsay Adler graciously lent me her Manhattan studio while she was off killing it in Milan. We had a blast experimenting with light, color, and technique.
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Creative Portraiture Workshop: Columbus
My sold out, two-day Creative Portraiture photography workshop took place a week ago and we had students travel from three other states to make art at my Columbus studio. We began by covering different qualities of light (soft vs. hard) and how to intentionally create different types of shadows. Next we covered a bit of color theory and how to use cookies (cucoloris) with gelled lights to create colorful shadows. For the rest of the weekend we covered a vsat range of techniques, such as making multiple exposures; creating prismatic effects with a broken mirror; shooting through different materials; photographing warped and colorful reflections with mylar and prismatic window film; using shutter drag; making custom shapes and images by way of projector. It was a jam-packed whirlwind of a weekend but we all came away feeling inspired and ready to go back into the world and create.
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Vibrant Vivian
This was my first time working with Vivian. I kept the session relatively simple, focusing on capturing the vibrance of her personality. I started off by using the prism film with just window light. Then I added red and blue-gelled LEDs that I used in combination with window light. I finished by giving the images a grainy, saturated film look to make them feel older.
Shadows and Simplicity
I love the brutality of hard light. Especially when used with a high contrast black and white treatment. Subjects emerge or recede into darkness. Features that might otherwise be missed are accentuated. Everything is stripped down to shapes. All too often I overcomplicate my setups and run the risk of missing the essence of my subject. When I can make myself slow down and simplify, that seems to be where I mot often find truth.
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Waiting, Watching
When I was teaching at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops last August I had the fortune of sitting in on a presentation given by Tony O’Brien. During the talk he discussed his photo series, Light in the Desert, wherein he spent a year living with and photographing monks in a monastery. He described how he had waited seven months before he even picked up his camera to take a picture. He wanted to earn the trust of his subjects before attempting to capture their image. It absolutely blew my mind. That level of patience and intentionality is unheard of. No one had directed him to wait that long. No one was watching him to make sure he captured his subjects with honesty and integrity. It was apparent to me that this is the way he lives his life and in turn also carries out his photography work. All that is to say is that I’ve been working a lot on modeling my life after a slower, more intentional way of living…
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Trash Talk
These images were created during sessions with three different models. I love the variation between each of them. The textures are just so stunning. I can’t decide whether I like this series better in black and white or color. I suppose it could also work to go back and forth. Thoughts?
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True Blue
One Man's Trash...
This marks my third shoot with Melissa this year. Though she now lives in NYC, she was in town for the holidays and asked if I’d be interested in doing a plastic-themed shoot. In preparing for the shoot sent me a few images from a recent Vogue Portugal fashion story that implemented single-use plastics into their shoot. I really enjoyed how they repurposed trash into the creation of something new and beautiful. I knew that I would want to take a different approach to the idea by capturing the texture of the materials and experimenting with creating more abstract portraits, and so I asked Melissa to “rescue” a range of plastic from her life over the next week and bring a range of options with her to the shoot…
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Rae of Light
Rae is a dancer with Balletmet and a frequent collaborator with me. She’s as willing to experiment as she is talented, which means we always come away with a great range of images. We started off by creating fragmented portraits courtesy of my broken mirror, before moving on to creating golden images with slow shutter speeds and mylar reflections.
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Psychedelic Fever Dream
I recently picked up some prismatic window film, which is both reflective and transparent. I experimented with shooting the warped reflections on the surface and then moved on to shooting through it while lighting the model from behind. After going at it a few different ways I decided to start adding layers of texture to it by crinkling the film, splattering water drops on it, and layering up my fingerprints. The best thing about it? It’s portable, rolling up into a small tube…
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Finding Inspiration at the Hardware Store
Over the past year I’ve been pushing my images into more abstract, painterly directions. As digital images seem to be moving into a realm of hyperrealism, I find myself longing for gritty tangibility. Since I have always more in the get-it-in-camera camp, I have been experimenting with a range of techniques and materials to try and achieve the look I’m after. I started off this past spring by adding substances such as coconut oil and honey to glass and then shooting through it. After that I moved on to shooting with imperfect, fungus-covered lenses to get a hazy, dreamlike quality. Next I tried my hand at capturing distorted reflections in mylar. Most recently I explored what broken mirrors can add to an image.
All these experiments have worked together to inform my process in terms of optimal focal length, aperture, and light quality/direction when working with multiple planes, layers, and reflections. Now that I better understand how to manipulate these mediums I can walk through a hardware store, for example, and visualize how certain materials would look when photographed and lit a certain way, which is exactly what I did last week…
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Ransom & Rose
Ransom and I go way back to the JackThreads days. Since we’ve been shooting for the better part of a decade, we have an old, easy rhythm together. I don’t even have to speak as he moves from pose to pose. He’s also a fantastic stylist, meaning that he always brings the best wardrobe to our test shoots. This session was different than any of our prior sessions, however, as this time he brought his girlfriend Rose to model with him…
Read MorePhoto District News: Equipment Guide 2019
This was a fun surprise. One of my portraits of Sydney Lafaire made the cover of the new Photo District News equipment guide. I’ve been reading this magazine since I started out as a professional photographer, so this is certainly an “achievement unlocked” kinda moment…
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