Megan and I did another shoot today to test out some more stuff with the beauty dish. It’s been a good many days that we’ve been able to shoot and hone these skills and the quality of what we’ve been able to shoot has gotten dramatically better since we began. We’d hoped to shoot outside today, but it was just too dang cold.

Megan brought a chair from her home to shoot and we had a lot of fun seeing how many weird positions she could twist herself into. She says this is the chair that she does all of her post in at home when she’s working on her own projects. What a weird chair to work in. I suppose my trusty sidekick would have a weird chair.

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Man the allergies are brutal this time of the year. Megan is my yard stick of allergies because she’s pretty quickly effected by whatever is blowing in the wind. I haven’t lived here long enough to know if I am dying or if it is just an allergy. She keeps me informed that I am not dying and it will all be alright if I can just make it until something isn’t growing in Texas.

She found this tree while attending an event at the convention center so we packed up everything and drove down to downtown for a little while for another experiment. It’s a giant tree with a lot of stuff that looks like tree cancer, but I’m not a tree doctor so my prognosis can not be used against me when the tree decides to sue. We also dropped into a creek bed underneath 6th street to a place that really didn’t smell that good but looked pretty dang cool.

We then went back to the studio and played with coloring the strobes for a while.

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New lighting techniques have opened my eyes to new possibilities. My artistic knowledge sabbatical continues with todays few tests in the studio. We played with lights in different places and unusual ways of posing. Megan just won’t accept that she is a rock star. I should just be quiet or her head will get to big. She keeps promising it wont, but I just don’t know if she can take my perpetual prattling about how good she is at everything she touches.

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I spent part of the weekend making myself a beauty dish. Why? Because I wanted to do something with my son and I’ve been meaning to do the beauty dish thing for a while. It caused a lot of smoke in the kitchen, lots of noise and lots of paint fumes to create this dish, but it was well worth it. Today was the first day that we had available to use the new dish so Megan got together with Jo Ella who created a very dramatic look with very wild hair for us to shoot in Taylor today. It was way too cold but Megan is an incredible trooper and never said anything about the cold. Megan is the very best Trusty Sidekick ever! We love photographing downtown Austin, but parking is always such a pain that Taylor works out better when we are looking for that warehouse district look.

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New year. New Logo Old pictures that I found from the past.

Christina in her most daring role to date. This is the master suite in our rental house in 2004. When I’m not taking pictures I can do some amazing things with wood, drywall and paint and then some. Visit my studio some time. I was painting some shelves for my studio in this room while we were remodeling the house and the studio at the same time.

I put plastic sheets up on the wall to protect the walls from the black paint I was spraying with an airless sprayer.

After an hour of spraying the shelves I wasn’t all the way there anymore and started painting words on the walls. Yes, paint fumes tend to fuel the mind in mysterious ways.

Called my wife and said to get on her weird hippie clothes and do herself up because I had an idea. After calling her I spun around and around on the floor to mix the black paint into the crud on the floor and give it some wild circular patterns. Then I walked home in the rain to get the wife. I left foot prints on the street for 1/2 a mile because I had caked so much paint onto them with the spinning.

I used one strobe on the camera bouncing and cranked it up an extra stop to make the room really white.

I haven’t ever used drugs, nor did I start drinking until I was 32, but this is the second time I’ve been high from paint fumes. The first was with my father-in-law. Weird, huh?

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Today was day three of our sabbatical with Megan, my trusty sidekick. Today we spent a glorious day outside in what must have been 75 degrees or hotter. We went out to visit the sad little downtown of Taylor, Texas; a lone abandoned wreck, mostly half filled with businesses trying to fight off a a painful end brought on by the city’s Wal-Mart.

But what a place to shoot! No one’s around except the occasional truck filled with onlookers circling the block more than once to gawk at us, mostly Megan. I love Taylor deep down. I just wish it wasn’t so far away. But what fabulous pictures of Megan!

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More from the sabbatical with my trusty sidekick, Megan. More lights and outside across the street from the studio at the abandoned Countrywide building.

We went back to the studio when a light stand got blown over and spent a bit more time playing in the studio.

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Just got a strobe back that I broke five years ago.  I was kind of mad that the strobe broke all those years ago and just put it on a shelf and just left it there.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  It’s a Quantum Qflash and is a pretty spendy flash.

So Megan, my trusty sidekick, came out for some test shots with the strobe in the studio to see how it was going to work.  It is an awesome flash.  Poor Megan had allergies and was kind of exhausted so it was a short test for today.

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The Sabbatical continues.

We have a very odd tree fruit tree behind the house. We call it the freaky fruit tree. The fruit is largely un -edible due to the fruit being as hard as wood. It’s kind of a apple / pear hybrid, but needs to be boiled to make it soft enough to eat. Making juice from the fruit is possible but is not recommended due to the volatile nature of the fruit once consumed in a large enough quantity. So it grows fruit and we just look at it. That’s relationship we have at this point and I think it will stay that way for some time.

Christina got the old 60s jumpsuit out for this shoot and we enjoyed about 15 minutes of shooting before an emergency arose and we had to pack up and run. But we were able to get a few good shots.

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As an artist who is creative I get bored with doing the same thing over and over. Typically I try and one up what I did the last shoot, creating something better that makes me feel like I’ve achieved something in this directive. Since admitting that I was an artist rather than a technician in the world of photography I’ve pushed as hard as I can to be better always. And I’ve decided that I will hence forth be going on sabbatical from time to time to refocus my mind to be sharper and more creative. Gary Larson, the creator of the Far Side comic strip did and I’ve decided that so will I. Today was the beginning of my sabbatical.

Behind the studio is an old blue Datsun truck and just by coincidence, Christina happened to be wearing blue. The landlord stores it there because our rear parking lot is as big as our front parking lot, but not one person parks back there.

The above picture reminds me of a still from a Hitchcock movie. Love the feel of it in B&W.

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