These four photographs I made in Venice Beach, CA are ones I keep going back to. I don’t think they need much context, they’re just images that speak to me personally and artistically and I thought I’d share them here with you.
Pinterest is a great thing. You can find inspiring photography in just about any practice of the craft. Much like YouTube is for video, you can chase an idea and end up in unexpected places along the way, sometimes going off in a completely different direction.
It’s also a problem. You start to see patterns in a derivative way. A search for maternity photography will garner a plethora of similar results. Some expertly executed mixed in with a bunch of terribly imitated images. After a few minutes, everything seems so similar. Photography really is an insestuous form of art – But I guess every form of art suffers from this. It just seems that photography is more readily copied than any other.
So when Brian & Mira announced they were having a baby (and by announced, I mean I accidentally figured it out, but that’s a story for another time), I was excited to try a different approach to maternity photography.
I wanted to put the couple in an environment that captures who they are and what they represent at this time in their lives. They are both very outdoorsy people, and Mira works a lot with Charleston Area Therapeutic Riding, a horse farm that specializes in improving the lives of children and adults with disabilities. What a perfect environment for these two!
They also recently celebrated a non-traditional baby shower under a tree in Hampton Park. No silly “Guess what’s in the diaper” games going on, just a nice picnic in the park for family and friends to come together and show the new parents-to-be some support.
Earlier in the summer, I snapped this shot of Mira at Folly Beach during the 4th of July celebration. It captures her just as she started to become a little more obvious with her pregnant state:
We’re super excited to welcome “Baby X” into the world with them, I just hope they hurry up and pick a name so we don’t have to keep calling it “it” 🙂
This has been the longest I’ve waited between blog posts since I’ve launched this site – What happened? Nothing at all. I think the distractions of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Vine, etc have been satisfying my need to communicate in a very basic and concise way. I’ve also been busy with my businesses, my family, and trying to enjoy the summer (albeit a wet soggy one so far). So, I’m going to share some of my photos since last we spoke on this old blog of mine…
That photo at the top was taken this weekend. For the first time since summer began, we made it out to the beach! I went specifically to capture a sunset on Sullivans Island, and I didn’t come home empty handed. A few days before was the 4th of July, where we went to Folly Beach to check out the fireworks. Here’s a shot I made that evening:
More importantly, my brother-in-law & his girlfriend are having a baby, and Mira’s finally started to look the part of an expectant mother:
I’ve also been shooting lots of headshots and commercial stuff. During one shoot for a local veterinary hospital, one of the vets may have posed for a shot of her latest tattoo…
Speaking of headshots, it only took a year to get Dr. Colleen Boylston in front of my camera again to update her headshot:
I’ve recently started watercolor painting stuff on a whim. I found some $12 kit at the bookstore and found it utterly relaxing and fun. Here’s a close-up of one of my creations:
I had one of the most unfortunately soggy and stormy beach weddings ever to shoot, and the couple certainly made the best of it. Here’s a shot of their muddy feet underneath the gazebo on Sullivans Island:
I continue to add ink into my left arm. Margo has been a blessing in this department. She’s really turning my arm into a fleshy art gallery, and I couldn’t be more excited as I have a lot of skin to color in before this sleeve is done.
Of course, we took another trip to Disney World. I believe this was trip #4 on the year (I got the family annual passes this past Christmas). In an effort to keep things fresh, I’ve resorted to street style photography of people in the park. I love this shot because it truly doesn’t look like we’re in a theme park (which is not an easy feat to pull off):
We took a trip upstate to Freedom Weekend Aloft to check out the hot air balloons. I may have had drank some bravery during the festival as I was running right up to the balloons and snapping away. This was my favorite balloon shot from the trip:
As far as my other favorite past time is concerned (live music), there has been no shortage of fun this summer in that department. One of the lowcountry’s best events is the annual First Flush Festival out on Wadmalaw Island. This year’s headliners were Old Crow Medicine Show and they were pretty damn awesome.
And I couldn’t help but take advantage of the scenery at the tea plantation and the tattooed attendees. I love this shot of to willing subjects:
Over at the Music Farm, on of my favorite singer/songwriters, Ryan Bingham put on a kick-ass show:
Those are just some of the highlights of my summer so far. I’ll be back to regularly updating this blog now that I’ve had a little break. Thanks for having me back. TTYS
I’ve been chasing down my muse lately in one way or another, from getting tattooed to collecting art prints and books, and basically scouring the web for inspiring images and creations (check out some of my findings on my pinterest feed). I don’t think we ever settle down as artists. Sure, we may hit peaks, and sure we hit rough spots where nobody connects with what we’re doing, but we always strive to keep growing either way. One of the worst things that can happen is that you get so bogged down with work that you forget to play. That can drain your soul quite quickly.
Don’t get me wrong, shooting anything is better than doing just about any other kind of work for me, but if I go too long capturing other people’s visions, dreams, and desires, I can start to feel the burn out demon creeping up on me. Every once in a while I need to reset my brain to fine tune that creative spark that got me into this mess in the first place. And with every step I climb up of this ladder, I get a better view of what I want to be doing with my photography and where I could take it.
That brings me to Ashley, who I met via an annual photography event here in Charleston put together by Modstudios. I was hesitant to participate for working reasons (and I did end up passing up a paying gig to do this on Saturday night), but I knew that it would be a no-pressure situation to try something a little different. And, by no pressure, I mean total timing pressure as I lost track of time with my wife at Holy City Tattooing Collective as she got this kick-ass Mehndi-style peacock tattoo by the awesome Margo. Time has a way of disappearing when watching a great artist work. As I rushed to Folly Beach afterwards, I ended up missing a shoot with another cool girl with tattoos (hopefully she understands, I’ll make it up to you Kelsie).
So, back to Ashley. This girl might have the brightest & bluest eyes in the world. Check this out, here’s Ashley with her natural hair color:
And then I pulled out the blue wig and flowers to match that awesome colorful dress:
She looked like she stepped out of a painting by Camilla d’Errico. Once the sun started to do it’s thing, we just made some magical images. A beautiful location, a beautiful model, and an onslaught of color to tie it all together. This is the direction my head is going right about now:
Sure I’m posting this a day late, but I just wanted to share some photos here. These were all shot with my old recovered Nikon D40 which is my current back-up body, and the Nikon 55-200 VR lens. This is equipment that can be found on Craigslist or eBay relatively inexpensively, but still enables you to make great photos!
I use this camera as a family camera, for things like going to the beach or day trips – it’s very light but allows you the freedom to enjoy the moment instead of trying to perfectly capture the moment technically like you would with a more professional body. I shot these all as jpegs and did minimal processing in Lightroom as there was not much room for it in these 6MP files.
It’s not a weather sealed camera or lens, it gets it’s fair share of sea-spray and sand, but wiping it down immediately and using some common sense has kept this camera in my life for many years now. The 55-200 lens is such a fantastic performer on this camera. Check this out:
If I didn’t tell you that that was a D40 with a budget lens, not many people would assume it.
The secret to photography is simple at its core. Have an interesting subject matter, find some quality light, and the technical stuff becomes terribly easy after that. Sure, what’s an interesting subject is quite subjective, and finding quality light involves manufacturing it on many occasions. Don’t even get me started on composition! And the technical stuff constantly evolves and changes – but you still can’t trust the camera to get it right 100% of the time so you need to understand the basics of exposure, which can take years of practice to fully understand and execute in real-life situations that require split-second reaction time from you.
STOP!
The moment is more important than anything else.
This moment captures the day perfectly for me because it was a happy Father’s Day:
This is the best time of year to capture sunsets here in the Charleston area. The weather is beautiful and the sky seems to catch on fire for a brief moment. There’s also no shortage of fun stuff coming up, such as corn mazes, haunted house attractions, hayrides, and pumpkin picking. Halloween just might be my favorite holiday ever – it brings people together. What other holiday makes you go out and ring on your neighbor’s doorbell so they can give you treats?
I have a busy month ahead of me as well. One of the highlights include a wedding shoot this weekend on Folly Beach. I’m pretty stoked about getting some sunset portraits of the happy couple. October 22nd is BarCamp! If you remember, I did a session last year on photo editing (you can check out the post about that here). This year I’ve proposed a session called “Off-Camera Flash 101”
If you’ve never been to or heard of BarCamp, it unfortunately has nothing to do with alcohol. It’s a conference where the attendees are the attraction. Basically anybody who attends can pitch a session to teach. It’s really fun and you get a kick-ass T-Shirt. It costs a mere $10 to participate – get a ticket now!
Next up, I’m doing a photo booth for the Summerville Ghost Walk/ Harvest Fest/ Harvest Moon Hayride sponsored by DREAM and Summerville JSL. That’s on Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011 from 6:00PM-9:00PM. I’ll be on the side of the Prudential Southern Coast office at 112 W Doty Ave in Summerville, SC. I hear that Mistress Mira will be doing some fortune telling as well 😉
October 27th-November 5th is the return of the Coastal Carolina Fair. Check out my recap rom last year. I just ordered my prints for the Photography Contest. This year they have changed the rules slightly from last year as you can only submit 3 photos now. I guess the contest has grown a bit! You can see the official rules here.
Of course, I’ve saved the best for last. Just read my rundown of last year’s CupcakeCamp event. It was the single most amazing event ever conceived. All you can eat free cupcakes, no questions asked. If you don’t want to go to this, you’re not human. CupcakeCamp will be on November 5, 2011 3:00PM-5:00PM at Spirit Moves. Check out the Facebook event page here. Look at the sweetness:
As I was choosing prints I wanted to show for this weekend’s Kulture Klash Arts Festival, I was going through my library of photos to find water themed images. I found two that stuck out for me, but they didn’t work for the triptych idea I ended up going with. I’ve decided to put them up in the store and offer them to you!
The first one, which is shown above, was made in Freeport last summer. It’s entitled “Reef Rafters” because there is a silhouette of to people on a raft out by the reef. I originally processed this photo as a color image (shown here), but decided to crop it down a little bit and convert it to black & white. I love the way the clouds and the water work together and the monotone version really makes that feature stand out.
The other photo was made on Sullivans Island in South Carolina in August of 2010. The lone beach-goer sitting on the shore reading made for a serene subject. It’s nice to get a single subject against a vast backdrop like this – I find it quite peaceful. I’m getting ready to spend some quality time at the beaches again as the weather gets warmer, and these images make me want Summer to be here already!
I was out at a private plantation in Goose Creek, SC this morning and on the way out I took some shots along the road of the forest. The shot above is one that I always want to shoot when I’m driving and see the woods cut abruptly short at the edge of a road. The sight of the wall of the edge of a forest is daunting to me.
The cypress trees always make for interesting pictures because they grow out of still swamp water and sometimes have a very graphical interaction with their shadows and reflections.
This shot is an oak tree alongside a marsh in James Island, SC taken in 2009 with my D40. I like the relationship between the curves of the water and the curves of the tree limbs.
Here are some more cypress trees at Cypress Gardens in Moncks Corner, SC. This shot was taken in 2007 with my D40 and converted into a single image HDR photograph.
Finally, we arrive at Botany Bay Plantation in Edisto Island, SC. This photo was also taken in 2009 with my D40 (that camera is a fantastic little DSLR). The beach at Botany Bay is like something out of a dream; shell covered beaches, trees in the surf, and teaming with shorebirds and wildlife.