Mid-March monochromes!

What’s up, Hive?! This was the first day attempting to get back to my Minneapolis routine. @caffetto during the day, then a break in the evening for kickboxing. Holy shit, am I tired. After missing 9 days while in Texas; several classes, today was brutal. All that conditioning, gone. Even round kicks on the heavy bag hurt. Afterwards, I made it back to @caffetto to focus on some @mirrorpool art while enjoying a soy miel. I’m home now, resting in bed with documentaries on in the background. Heavy eyes, but I’m going to get this post on the blockchain while I still can.

Once a month, I dig up some of my favorite recent photos and convert them to black and whites. Typically, I look for images that have high contrast and strong compositions, like this first shot of Emily Boring, taken in January in Los Angeles. Everything with Emily is a beautiful shot, but this one caught the setting sun cascading through the window of the small Bohemian bungalow that served as the backdrop to this shoot. Commanding golden hour light on her face, which makes for a striking black and white photo, as you can see.

This second photo is of Desert Rose, or Holly, from Australia. She was in Minneapolis in the fall of 2019 for the Minneapolis Burlesquefest and she DM’ed me asking my availability to shoot on short notice. I’m almost always down for spontaneity and we set something up at my home. I pulled together some of my antique furniture, candles and dead flowers. This was lit with a vintage lamp and window light, soft and blue, but enough to define her figure and from from the surroundings.

Finally, this last shot is of my dear friend @vintagevandalizm taken in Las Vegas in 2017. We’ve shot together so many times and there are a number of photos that I feel define our collaborations. This probably isn’t one of them, but it did make it in to my book, Dark Pinup, by @wcpublishing. This is a personal favorite but until now, I never had a chance to see how strong it looks as a monochrome. Very Old Hollywood glamour. A delight to fall in love with all over again in a new expression.