I’m leaving Wednesday for Vegas for a friends wedding. I’ve been once before, at the tail end of a road trip in 2008. I flew into LA to visit my friend Liz, then drove through Route 66 and Joshua Tree while taking pictures by the full moon. This is taken on the west edge of Joshua Tree, facing west with the full moon and the city lights.
I’ve been sick as a dog for four days now. I am not happy about this.
This is some graffiti I found in an abandoned children’s hospital.
I need to post some of my more recent work, not just old stuff. This is my friend Bunny Aug. She’s an awesome artist in her own right, but luckily for me, not a photographer. She wanted phots for a wig website and asked me to take them. I describe my style (one of them) as “beautiful people in ugly places” and she likes it, so we shot in a friends warehouse. As I told a friend after the shoot, “It’s a good thing I have friends who know how to look hot posed on a pile of rubble.”
Check out Bunny’s awesome art at Dark Bunny Studios.
My first job out of college was at CNN.com. I worked there from 1998 until the beginning of 2001. At some point around late 1999 I purchased my first digital camera, an Olympus D360L. It cost about $300, shot a whopping 1.3 megapixels, and came with a massive 8 megabyte SmartMedia memory card. It was a fun toy. I used to take it out to clubs and shoot with the flash off, trying to grab some candid shots.
At one point, I got a badly exposed shot of my friend Wes. I didn’t think much about it until I was playing around in Photoshop and tried to see just how much detail I could pull out. I started with this:
I fiddled with the light levels, cropped the extra bits out, tried converting it to black and white, and eventually wound up with this:
I started with a bad photo and would up with something I thought looked awesome. I’ve described it as a “Goth Cousin It with a universe behind his eyes” or just “cool.” Either way, this was when I realized a few things:
There were a lot of moments that made me love photography, and this was one of the first.
I’ve neglected my website far too long. I build them all day long at work, so I usually don’t want to work on them more when I get home.
Recently I’ve been going back over years of photos, and I do mean years. I have just over 83,000 files in my Photos directories. I have stuff going back to 2001, and probably a bit before. My digital camera back then had a nasty habit of changing the date to 1/1/2000 when I replaced the batteries.
I’m going to try to post a photo a day, either from my current work, or from my first work.
Wings
Let’s start out with what is probably one of my favorite photos ever. My friend Becky’s back, shortly after her first tattoo. Probably shot around 2003, on 35mm black and white film. Becky, her tattoo, me and my photography have all changed a lot since then. I’ll go into that in later posts.