Here’s some of my favorite stuff with Aferdit.
Aug 022011
It’s been a long time comin’, but the sign is up at last. I’ve created a ton of memories in this house, but it’s time to move on.
I’ll be moving towards downtown Salt Lake City and I’ve got to say it; I’m thoroughly gonna enjoy living in an apartment again. I just hope my neighbors there are as good as one of my neighbors here! haha
Oh and here’s a more artistic shot of my house, taken with a Holga when I first got one:
I love that shot… It’s the kind of scratched up 5×5 print I can imagine showing to my grandkids someday as a place where “the old man used to live”.
Goodbye house…
My girlfriend recently invited me and my boys to a treasure hunt. Yes, a treasure hunt. Apparently there are little cans and other tiny containers, hidden throughout the city and the country, that have little trinkets inside…
Once you find the (hopefully) well-hidden container, you open it up, fill out the log with the date and location, place another item inside and put it back in its hiding place. Some of the trinkets have little tags on them so you can see where they’ve traveled and how long they’ve been traveling.
Intrigued, I said yes. The following images (aside from that first one) is what resulted. All the shots were taken on my Elan 7E.
My little boy still carries around the golf ball like it’s the most valuable thing he’s ever found.
Jan 282011
After picking out a bunch of personal favorites from Justin & Melanie’s beautiful wedding for the sneak peek, I decided to do something very bold (for me at least) and go almost exclusively to black & white on all the images.
I’m really happy with what that did as a whole and it seems as though black & white is becoming a habit of mine. Almost anytime I try something in black & white, I fall in love with it and decide to leave it that way. Some of my shoots are even designed to only be presented in black & white, though these are usually model shoots (doing one later this afternoon! Woohooo!!)
Maybe my body is preparing itself for something I don’t know is coming… Like going color blind…
I’m going to start with my personal favorite from the whole wedding and possibly one of my all-time favorites:
If you haven’t seen Part 1, go check it out to better understand where I’ve been going with this. Progress is happening very slowly on it, but it’s happening.
So here is Part 2. It was inspired by another one of Regina Spektor’s songs, on the same album as Part 1. The song is called “Lady”.
It started as a simple idea to show a performer getting ready, then performing. Pretty boring now that I’ve had some distance from the original plan, but as I listened to the song from time to time, I started seeing much darker images in my head. Anger, hurt and just overall self-loathing.
Once that happened, I immediately realized that it would be much more interesting to marry her wildly contrasting character facets into the same shoot and turn the subject of my study into a successful but self-loathing artist, something I’m sure many artists can relate to.
On one side, her impeccable, performing self, then on the other, the day to day agony that feeds her inspiration to create the kind of music her audience loves her for.
I worked once again with the wonderfully talented Shanda Palmer (makeup), Ashlen Saunders-Duke (hair) and for the first time, the absolutely gorgeous Cosette Jarrett, who incidentally had a really hard time with the character I threw her into.
Cosette is such a joyful and sweet woman… Asking her to smoke, smash a guitar, violently throw booze at a brick wall and generally appear very hurt, angry and troubled was a stretch and very much the opposite of what she’s like in real life, but she pulled it off incredibly well.
Last but not least, many thanks to Suzanne Walker for allowing us to shoot backstage and on stage.
Oh and speaking of which, yes, it was snowing HARD at the end of our shoot! It was an amazing experience and gave the images a different feel than I’d expected. One that I think helped us in the end.
Hope you enjoy!
Dec 052010
Yep, I had a model recently break my guitar.
Nope, I’m not kidding.
Seeing as I only had one shot at this, what you see above is the test shot before she did the real smashing, to make sure I had the look I wanted, she was hitting the right spot on the wall, coaching her to make the right face, etc.
Stay tuned for the real shoot, coming soon!
Jun 042010
I’m a little behind on my weddings (on the blog at least), but I was working on Derek & Summer’s wedding today and came across this:
I love this shot of Summer… So elegant…
The little dressing room had two light sources. One large soft light and some overhead lighting. Kind of a recipe for disaster although at least they were the same temperature (tungsten lighting), but Summer just happened to be in the right place, turning just the right way, for the light to land on her perfectly. I turned the flash off and used available light.
But it made me think; I gotta get a model to do this in a controlled environment. Maybe with a haze of cigarette smoke or something. Can you see it?
Anyway, Derek & Summer’s wedding pictures are coming soon.
