Late-July monochromes!

How’s it going, Hive? It’s probably too late to be starting a blog right now, but here I am. We just celebrated @guthrie’s birthday and mine is in a few days. I did make it to @caffetto today but the heat permeated the coffee shop and made it miserable. My hands were so sweaty just sitting there that it was fucking up the touch response of my Intuos tablet. I did manage to finish a few new edits from a recent shoot but it was for a client that asked me to not share the photos publicly, so when I got home, I revisited some older work for new monochromes.

Once or twice a month, I like to do this. I find stand out color shots that’ve never been run trough the process of becoming well produced black and whites. This first shot is from a shoot I did in 2019 in New Zealand. I toured both islands but stopped in Auckland first. I stayed with my friend Miss Victory Violet and she arranged our shoot location; a quaint, eclectic bar called Shanghai Lil’s. As it turned out, the surrounds of the space was build from the set of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This was the model’s first professional shoot and she killed it. So good!

Next up, this shot was from 2014. This was when my LA career was really taking off. I couldn’t keep up with the opportunities. A west coast model named Angelique reached out to me a few weeks before making a trip to Los Angeles and we set aside some time for this collaboration. I had a friend with a boat near the Long Beach port and that’s where we met. I was shooting with a Nikon D7000 that is now owned by @tarotbyfergus. This has become one of my most recognized portraits from that time. It’s a great color shot but as a black and white, it’s timeless.

Lastly, this shot is of my long time friend, Cindy. I’ve done many posts about how effective she’s been as a muse over the years. This was a shoot we did at the Clark Gables estate in Pasadena. Her hair was so beautiful during this session that I had to do a few shots where she was laying down and it was sprawled out across a table. This was lit with only the lamp above her. The dramatic result is a noir black and white that feels like a still frame from an old Hollywood movie. This is my first time appreciating it as a black and white. Thanks for reading!