Cold Muggin

i let Craig's baby, Oliver (who, by the way, I am named after) free reign of my Mighty Muggs.  he gets bored quickly this child.

Dawn....like the sunrise

shot over the weekend at Rome's casa.  The model is Dawn, who I instantly fell in love with.  It was a relatively impromptu shoot, just a couple of half baked ideas going in.  Dawn was pretty much down to do whatever it took to get the shot, which was just wonderful.  A wonderful way to finish off a great, relaxing weekend.

Wong. Oliver Wong.

finished business

will probably redo the linework on this.  Did it in PS, and fine detail is not my forte.

This is a sketch that sat in my books for like four years at this point, that I'd always wanted to finish.  So  i scanned the rough work and rendered it in greys, and then hit it with color.

I thought it really came out well, til i flipped it horizontally, and saw all the glaring flaws and my obvious weaknesses with hand drawing. 

After some reworking and reorienting, and a beefing up of the lines, here we are:)

yay for big ass windows.

Gimme some sugar, baby!!!

from the second Sugarpuss shoot.  Since I've been so lazy, I'll upload a few of these over the next few days.

old photos

scanned a bunch of old photos to play with. Which has led me to the realization that I really should be scanning the old negatives.  But these are mostly for web use only, so nothing to stress over anytime soon.

It's weird looking at my old photos, taking into account old aesthetics, old shooting styles.   I'm trying hard to recapture some of what I had before.  I denno if ignorance was bliss,  but I liked the old photos.  No narratives behind them, standing on the merit of being itself, a good photo, not representative of anything, no stories, etc.  

Sugarpuss

fun day, did some shooting for the updates for Jen Summers' lingerie line, Sugarpuss.  

Hair by Maggie, Makeup by Bara:) Mitra hittin the poses and me on the one's and two's.

Shot on location at Minx on Sutter, this very cool lil bar with some innnnnnteresting decor.

Assisted by Albert today, and Dave provided support.  It was a great vibe, everybody got along really well, and there was a nice casual vibe throughout the entire day. I forget, but I think we did five? outfits, quickstyle, as we ended up with only bout two hours to shoot in the allotted time.

I may have picked up two quick gigs out of this, one of em being a calendar, which is nice.  

The image above was just me fuckin about.  Desaturated, dodged and burned, blurred, etc. etc.

Charlie Brown and the Lil Redhead Girl

something  I needed to get out of my head. My buddy Dave, and Jeska.  Maybe I'll write more about this later.

more LeVesque:)

fine. she's holding the can wrong.  Obviously she's never crushed one on her forehead before.  I must revisit this idea. meanwhile, dang, lookit that body:P

Welcome to the Gun Show!!!!

I need to do some more stuff like this.  Fun times:) Rome had  great attitude.  This is a few months old, had to go back and take a second look.  I'm wondering if when I'm shooting this stuff, I should be composing in camera or not.  If i'd had been farther back, I probably could've done more with the image, etc.  

Michele Levesque

Michele and I've been wanting to work together for over a year now.  Not an easy thing to do considering she's from Canada, but I fiiiiiinally got a chance to earlier today.  Freaking amazing and great fun.  Wish I had more time.

SuperMaya?

another shot of Maya, just to keep me occupied.  She's an amazing, very physical model.  Wish I'd thought out what I'd wanted more.  My Steampunk Mazinger toy is behind her, and in my head, they're two members of a whole league of characters.

Note to self, need more gears and miscellany for my brush collection.

starting off the new year...slowly.

starting the New Year going through a lot of the unfinished work from the previous year, and files I hadn't looked at in awhile.  This one is an image of Maya Lei that I just started working on earlier today.  There's a whole series of her with just amazingly cool facial expressions.  I spent a lot of time evening out the color and smoothing out the skin, then discovered I liked it better in black and white. Ah well.

And look, it comes with  a snazzy new squid watermark:)

LA trip, pt. 2

so  I was sent down to LA to shoot attorney Carina Castaneda.  Not the most organized assignment I've ever had.  The instructions were....shoot attorney Carina Castaneda.  Didn't know if the image was gonna be used in a hard news piece, or a B1 personality piece, or for an ad, or column, etc. etc.  I didn't even know that the guy writing the piece was scheduled to be there at the same time, OR that he'd brought his OWN photographer.  Good job, there, lol.  Got to shoot in the courthouse, which was cool, wish i'd had more time for composition and to play around, but i got what i needed, i think.  it was also a good opportunity under pressure to figure out what little i know about using my speedlight, lol.  i honestly need more opportunities like this to keep me motivated and learning.  Nothin worse than screwin up AND lookin bad, ya know?

too much Photoshop

So I photographed my friend Jamie last year.  Like most of my projects,the image was already done in my head, but it's taken me this long to get around to working on it.  I denno why I had the idea of doing an ethereal, ghostlike quality to the image, but here we are.

This thing has PS all over it. 

did I mention

that she's 48? yeahhh, baby!!!!:P

LA!!!

hmmmm, ideally I should load a picture I shot of Attorney Carina Castaneda first, since I did shoot her first, and she was the whole reason for me being sent to LA.

But, uh, I've been working on pictures of Debbie K, my Saturday morning shoot, so that's what ya get at the moment.  Plus, I got to do these great, non-high concept natural light shots of her, so you have no idea how that made my day.  The chance to just sit somebody in front of an open window and just snap away as we talked, was highly rewarding.

Which is good, considering how unrewarding the majority of the trip turned out to be.  Of three models scheduled (and supposedly excited) as of the previous night to shoot at Megafunk's place canceled on me.  I've got a lot I'm holdin in to say about that, but hey, all you other people who I didn't schedule with this time....you can blame them.

thinking out loud.

Rest in Peace, Bettie Page. 
As a kid and huge comic book fan growin up in the eighties, i had no idea who Bettie Page was.  I just remember these amazing illustrations by this guy named Dave Stevens, comic books about a guy with a jetpack and his girlfriend, Bettie.  I remember finding out that this comic book ideal was based on a real person, a real pinup legend, in fact. I remember her being this huge underground secret...if you knew who Bettie Page was, and you were under a certain age, it was almost a lock that you first saw her in the pages of the Rocketeer.  So, unlike all these other famous models at the time, she seemed like 'our' pinup girl.  Seeing her little magnets and stickers and what have you at the record store years later just affirmed what i already knew, that she was representative of something apart from the mainstream...the subcultures, the weirdos, the geeks...and that the mainstream was finally embracing aspects of those things.  I felt strangely proud...like, hey, i was there for her second coming, lol. 
The story about Dave Stevens being the first person to actually take her into a Tower Records to show her a Bettie Page display, to make her realize how iconic her image had become, and how hard he fought to make sure that she got her fair share from all of that, always made me smile.  Inside I'd be screaming, "see?  Some comic book guy, some guy with a pen, some paper, and some imagination....." 
When I got older and started seeing more and more of Bettie's work....it was like buried treasure.  The whole innocence/ sexuality dichotomy.  The campiness and playfulness of her photos. A complete revelation to me.  
Earlier this year, Dave passed away.  His body of work was so relatively thin, that I scour bookstores and pore over the few items that I do have, wishing that an artist that good had been more prolific. 
And now, months later, Bettie herself has passed.  What must it have been like, I wonder, living in quiet obscurity, then to find out a whole world is in love with you, and credit you for inspiring them and setting them off on their own little journeys. 
Dave Stevens and Bettie Page.  Artist and muse. 
I like to think that Dave was up in heaven months ago, churning out these great stories and beautiful drawings.  And that somebody picked up a page and saw this angelic/devilish looking girl and asked 'heyyyy, who's this?' 
"You'll find out," says Dave (in my head).  "You'll find out.....but you won't be ready."

need to shave my head.