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:

1. A bad picture could be turned into a good picture
2. A photo of a person could be turned into something more abstract.
3. Don’t delete your bad photos, because you may be able to do something cool with them later.
4. I was having a lot of fun doing this.

There were a lot of moments that made me love photography, and this was one of the first.