What if I told you that i only used one light to create this image. It’s true. I used one of my favorite lighting modifiers— a DIY reflector…
Read MoreWater Drops, Light Painting, and Lens Fungus (Oh My)
When Lily arrived at my studio I decided to start off with some colorful water drop portraits before getting into the light painting…
Read MoreMy Shoot with Beartooth for Revolver Magazine
It was great to reconnect with @beartoothband for @revolvermag. I wanted to honor the album art that @tnsndvsn made for their new album so I decided to work within the same purple color palette. I was happy that @calebshomo was so patient and willing to let me experiment on making the image that ended up running as the newsstand cover. I’d never done that technique before and wasn’t sure I could pull it off (swipe for behind the scenes). It was a deceptively simple setup (just a flash, a sheet of plexi, and a projector) but super technical when it came to angle, distance, focal length, and aperture. Thanks as always to Jimmy and the crew at Revolver for the opportunity.
Coors Light: Hold My Coors Campaign
I recently teamed up with the creatives at Five Hundred Degrees studio to shoot the Hold My Coors campaign for Coors Light. We spent a day on location and a day in studio capturing this clever line of beer accessories. I legit want one of those hoodies now.
Read MoreStudying Time with Multiple Exposures
For the last week I’ve been working on creating content for a chapter about in-camera multiple exposures, which will be included in my upcoming book, The Creative Portrait. @yungallyce graciously popped by my studio and patiently waited as I worked through a number of different techniques…
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Conceptual Photo Shoot on Vision for The Wall Street Journal
In today’s edition of the @wsj there’s an incredible article written by Susan R. Barry about eyesight. The piece focuses on Liam McCoy who, at the age of 15, underwent corrective surgery to give him the ability to see. As Barry articulates in the essay, when a blind person gains the ability to see later in life “the improvements [are] discombobulating. Surgery plunged Liam into a world of sharp lines and edges. While we all see lines at the boundaries of objects or shadows, we know where these lines belong. We recognize an object immediately—all of its parts combine together, instantly and effortlessly, into a single unit. But after a childhood of near-blindness, Liam did not recognize the lines as boundaries of known objects. Instead, he saw a tangled, fragmented world.”
This is where I enter the equation…
New Work for Angels and Airwaves Album Lifeforms
Last year I teamed up with Brandon Rike and the crew at Tension Division to shoot art for the upcoming Angels & Airwaves album, Lifeforms. Modeling by Shelby Stephens and hair by Christine Pointdexter.
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Photo Shoot with Ronnie Radke of Falling in Reverse
In March I set up a makeshift studio in @ronnieradke ‘s dining room and in 10 hours we shot 25 unique setups. It was just the two of us, improvising and playing with light. He ended picking one of the shots for the cover of his upcoming book. I love when the creative process is allowed to flow, unchecked.
Read MoreAmerican Lung Association: Keeping Student Bodies Healthy
Back in December I teamed up with the creative team at Fahlgren Mortine to shoot an anti-smoking campaign for the American Lung Association. Bill Fioritto, one of the creative director at Fahlgren, came up with the concept of a group of students (aka student body) all posing together to create the shape of lungs, to accompany the tagline: keeping student bodies healthy. Since we were in the middle of a pandemic I suggested that we shoot 8 different models in a range of poses and outfits that could be composited together later on. I thought that it’d be advantageous to book dancers as half of the roles since they could offer much more dynamic poses, giving us more options when it came to compositing the final image. Thanks to all the models for doing an amazing job, as well as to Ryan Wyss, the composite artist. Finally, thank you to Bill and the rest of the team at Fahlgren Mortine. This was a really cool project to work on.
Read MoreWhat Nightmares May Come: Exploring Prisms and Mylar
I’ve worked with prisms from time to time over the years and enjoyed the effects that they offer but never really fell in love with them. Last week I decided to see what would happen if I used a prism while photographing mylar. The beautiful nightmarish images that were produced are the closest visual representation of a panic attack that I’ve ever seen. Now I’m in love.
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Americana / Film Noir with Skrizzly Adams
One day last year (what is time) I worked with @alexhaldi of @pawncreative to create art for the new @skrizzlyadams album cycle. We shot a bunch of smoky images on location at a bar to match the classic Americana aesthetic of the artist. My assistant @sethmosesmiller helped me position a snooted speedlite up near the ceiling for the first setup, which created a shaft of light in the smoke. For the second setup we wanted to imply sunlight coming through the window blinds but since it was in fact a rainy morning we had to fake the light with a projector. Less is more, more or less.
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A Fixed Point in Space Over Time: Photo Shoot with Ballet Dancer Kristie Latham Zurmehly
In my art my go-to techniques all center around the passage of time. Take this shoot with Kristie, for example. I made long exposures and multiple exposures in order to observe how she moved through a fixed point in space over time, which I otherwise wouldn’t be able to see with my naked eye…
Read MoreWhatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Vesperteen Promo Shoot
My buddy Colin Rigsby has a music project called Vesperteen, and he reached out to me to do a shoot last month. Colin and I go way back. His wife was friends with my wife before I ever met her. I attended his wedding, did several shoots with his old band, House of Heroes, and shared many great moments over the past two decades. It was great to catch up, shared some laughs, and create some beautiful art. We created a wide range of vibrant, kinetic images in promotion of his new music…
Read MoreWhat is Time?
The Descent: Capturing Movement with Dancer Sophie Bolton
Whenever I am planning a shoot with a dancer I face the challenge of coming up with fresh ways to capture their movement. Sometimes I put my camera on a tripod and use a long exposure to capture their fluidity. Or I might have the dancer stand still while I move my camera, which creates a similar-yet-different effect. Or I might fire a strobe multiple times during an exposure in order to crisply capture how they move through a space. In this shoot with dancer Sophie Bolton I opted to do it all…
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Photo by Sean Quincy Munro
Owning My Scars
I was born with a condition called sagittal craniosynostosis. It basically means that part of my skull was prematurely fused and lacked the soft spot needed for head growth. It’s a fairly common defect but if it goes untreated it can cause deformity, seizures, or even death. Though I now know how lucky I was to be able to receive that surgery, I grew up ashamed of my scar. As many of you can likely identify with, anything that makes you stand out from other kids makes you a potential target to bullies. I was called so many names as a kid that I feared ever having my hair cut short…
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Mylar Skull
Another of my mylar explorations. This is a 7-image sequence shooting reflections on mylar. All in-camera effects.
Photographic Mimics: Diptychs of People and Nature
I love symmetry. And I don’t just mean in my compositions. One of my main goals when it comes to editing and laying out my photos is to find parallels between images so that there’s a symmetry (or mimicry) between the pairing. When I do make the connection between a pair of otherwise unrelated images (such as a portrait and an image of a plant) it soothes something deep in me.
Read MoreMy Story: A Short Documentary by Brandon Goodyear
Brandon Goodyear is a local videographer that has an ongoing series focusing on makers and what motivates them to do what they do. Over the span of a month he captured a couple of my photo shoots, me climbing at my home gym, and me watering my vast collection of plants. We also got deep and chatted about my journey through trauma and where I find inspiration as an artist. Check it out.
Read MoreThe Many Ways to Photograph a Dancer: Shoot with Ballerina Caitlin Valentine
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…
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