Portraits
First smiles….
I just got home from a trip back home with my family. During that time, my son really started to come out more and really engage people. He learned to ‘talk’ for extended periods of time and smiled almost everytime he saw his grandfather. It was amazing to watch it happen and to be sharing these experiences with my family….
This picture was taken while going to his first pumpkin patch for Halloween. The focus is a little soft for my taste but I love that I captured him during one of his first smiles. He’d been starting to do it more often by then and now I realize that he might have already mastered the skill by the time this photo was taken. Maybe. I’ll take gas induced facial spasm too.
This was taken with the D700 using my 85mm F1.4 AIS lens.
Mother Country
This is an image taken from a photo shoot for Maria Breaux’s latest film called Mother Country due out next year. The premise of the movie is a man who undergoes a personal transformation while walking from Austin to Los Angeles…a journey motivated by a peer pressured drive by and a wrongful death. This image was meant to convey a sense of arrival, change and transformation as well as the vast open horizon of potential of new possibilities.
Her current film that is out is called Lucha. The film is set in 1982 against the backdrop of the insurgency in El Salvador, Lucha traces the plight of two women in love whose only respite from the battles raging against their oppressive government is the solace found in each other’s arms.
I used the Nikon D700 and my trusty 85mm F1.4 ais Nikon lens for this capture.
Shining Through
Some friends of mine are getting hitched early next year and they asked for some photos to put up on a wedding website and they wanted something industrial and edgy. What I tried to do here though was capture my opinion of them by trying to communicate how crazy cool these guys are and stylish as they are kind. I was going for a retro hot so-cal style and their personalities just did the rest. I feel like you could walk up to these two and just ask them a question on anything and they’d give you the coolest answer and you’d walk away smiling.
This was shot on the Nikon D700 with a 28mm F2.8. There was some photoshopping involved with my goal to blow out the color more to give it that flare. That being said, the color of the building was pretty similar and it was a beautiful bright day. Makes you wonder why anyone would paint a building this color…must be hard to keep clean and bright.
Faith Based Charity
This is a still from an independent film out of SF called Faith Based Charity by Director Maria Breaux. The woman on the bed had lost her sick mother whom she had been taking care of most of her life. This other woman was meant to try to bring her out of her depression. I just loved the look in her face and the patterns in the kimono.
This was shot with my Nikon F3HP and 50mm f1.4 ai lens on ilford delta 100 asa film.
The Digital Dilemna
The haunting face of feeding time
I’ve been delving into photography for the last 10 years and of that time of off and on devotion, I’ve been adamant of my stance against embracing digital. This was mostly because I worked with computers and didn’t want to spend my off hours in front of the screen again doing photoshop. I had great excuses; the medium isn’t comparable, digital is too expensive for a decent body, the low light conditions are horrible to manage on a digital….all those excuses go out the window.
I’ve had the fortune of becoming friends with someone I respect as a person as well as a coworker and fellow photographer. I also had the joy have sharing the same addiction to all toys photographic, as we both have a deep love for film and manual cameras. That love has been betrayed when he purchased a Nikon D700. Full frame. Great integration with my manual prime lenses. Intuitive controls and features. Better integration with my SB-600 flash unit than my F3HP. Sonofabitch….
Some of the many things stacking up against the fans of the film medium lately is the ease with which we can view the shots we take. Everything is too expensive now. Chemistry. Darkroom space. Disappearing film and enlargement paper. Because of a few of these reasons, I have not been shooting nearly as often as I wish. It also makes the approach of doing the shoot, scan, posting something that now seems to be ‘work’. I feel lazy for saying it. I feel like I’m not giving forth the right amount of effort it should take to capture something and share it with people I want to share it with.
So here is the point of this post. I am recommitting myself to sticking with my film preference as my main medium, but I am now admitting that I will also throw in the occasional digital image with my posts.
I know this really only matters to an audience of one: me. That said, I feel like I needed to write it down as an admission to myself so I can come to terms with myself.
Here is a digital shot I took of my new son. Also another reason why I haven’t been shooting much, but also the main reason I will be shooting more again. This was shot with the Nikon D700 using my 28mm F2.8 AIS lens.
