I've never really embraced digital photography. All my black and white images have been shot on film because it's what I'm most passionate about aesthetically. I'm somewhat indifferent about color photography so I've never been super particular with how I shoot it. That's why I've used digital for my color images. I'd still shoot color on film if it weren't for the immediacy and convenience of digital. However, my black and white HAS to have my distinct look and feel, and I cannot get that with digital.
I've recently decided to take my love of film back to its basics - light and composition. To achieve this, I've gone super old school and have started shooting with a Holga pinhole camera. To make it even more textural and surreal, most of these images are hand-held with exposures at approximately 12 seconds each. Many are too blurry to count as decent images, but there are gems amongst the efforts. The photograph below is one of my recent favorites.
"Jessica, Los Angeles 2009"
Shot on Kodak Tmax 400 35mm film with a Holga pinhole camera. Processed in D-76 in my kitchen and scanned with a Nikon Superscan 9000ED scanner in my office. No Photoshop except the watermark.
A few more examples of my erotic pinhole work can be found on my Flickr account. However, in order to see the nude work, you need to have your SafeSearch turned off.
I also have portfolios of my non-erotic pinhole photography on my otherFlickr account. Warning: there are NO hot chicks there. For true lovers of photography only!
Hey everyone, I'm totally thrilled to be your guest blogger here. I hope to share some fun stories and photos from my many adventures of taking photos. Here's a photo taken during one of my Stockroom.com photoshoots. This is me being distracted from my duties by Justine Joli and Kimberly Kane. Damn girls, all I want to do is take pictures! Leave me to my craft damn it! This was taken shortly after we got the cover shot of the then new catalog. Here's a link to the final cover.
I'm just finishing up one of those weeks where something keeps you up all night every night and wakes you up too early every day. Yesterday I finished up editing a video with a deadline. I sat at my computer and edited for 30 hours straight, with one break to run to walgreens for some of those energy shots that fill you with constant fear. Well not getting to sleep in is one of the problems with renting a house that's on the market.
I've had trouble finding rental properties everywhere I've been the past few years. Every house is for sale, but not many are for rent. I think a lot of the mortgages have ballooned beyond the monthly market rental rates, and it seems all of the neighborhoods are starting to grow tumble weed... wait... sidetrack. Tumble weed? Is tumble weed alive or dead like dust bunnies? If it's rolling around and still living, then that would make it the most underrated plant I know of. I'm still in awe over the fact that ivy can grow it's wimpy little arm through a tiny space in a brick and then expand enough to crack the foundation of a building. I am sure we could make so many beautiful analogies about ivy, but really I just want to talk about how I live in a house for sale in the mountains.
The problem with living in a house for sale is that you have to be prepared at any time to be woken up by a real estate agent and a carload of people to come trampling through. This may not be a big problem to those of you with day jobs, but those of you who take naked pictures for a living and sleep 'til noon may want to just go and buy one of these million houses on the market, or at least get a proper rental. You can probably imagine that Amanda and I own more than enough things to creep out the average home shopper on any given day, and last week we were at our worse. We took everything out of our room and built the most elaborate set that I've built to work with in a long time. For the past few years I've been against doing a "Christmas" shoot, but this year we had incentive. So we took everything out of our room, bought a second hand fake Christmas tree, 5,000 ornaments, vintage garters, nylons, dress, bras, and gifts for the videos wrapped 50 prop boxes, and started sleeping on a mattress for the past 5 days in one of the 3 unused rooms in the house.
We normally keep the house in show house condition, but this is my work and we hadn't had a real estate agent by in a month. We shot from Sunday evening until Monday morning and went to bed around 6:30 AM. I woke up to a voicemail at 10 AM from a real estate agent who wanted to come by and see the place. You have to understand the terror of this call. I mean, our landlord isn't going to let us continue living here if the agent says it looks like a scene from Requiem for a Dream. We've got bed frames and cabinets and desks all turned on their sides and upside down everywhere... bras hanging from trees, vintage panties and nylons trailing through the house... a little mattress on the ground and these damn pee puddles we keep finding. Seriously? The dog weighs 3 pounds and drinks about two thimbles of water a day, where the hell is all of the piss coming from? Fuck it... there's absolutely no way we could let anyone into this place. The kitchen had been completely usurped by dishes and empty buddy snack wrappers. It's anyone's guess as to where these dishes came from, for I do not recall seeing or eating anything in the past week save these Little Debbie brownies and those Wheat 'N' Cheese crackers that I have developed an unhealthy relationship with. Also, we have been making our own colloidal silver in the kitchen. If you are not familiar with what a home made colloidal silver generator looks like, then you are not alone. Let's sum it up by saying that it isn't a set up that would look legit to some Arkansas fishermen trying to buy a house. Well Loki was having his usual laugh by sending us that old sales agent 3 and a half hours after we were done shooting, but I have one card I can pull. They don't have a key to the house... so we jumped out of bed, and took off. I don't like to lie, or i would have called and said we weren't home... so I left and called from somewhere in town to tell her we weren't home. That didn't seem to be a problem, as she replied that she had been by and shown it already. NO! and HOW? Well it would seem that they came by, knocked, and found one of the side doors unlocked... So anyway.... they came into that nightmare. We are hoping they don't tell the landlords that they need to kick us out if they ever want to sell this place. She said the guy was only interested in the structure and they all figured we had "some projects going on".
Well that leads to another point of concern. Old B and E Robbie next door has been creeping around like that beast from the "I would do anything for love" video, and i know he watches through our side window. So the other day he would have seen Amanda wrapping 50 empty Christmas boxes. I can just picture him getting all excited by seeing these possible treasures that could be his if he were just to risk one more forced entry burglary. In some ways we are hoping that these giant wrapped boxes may work on our favor. A lot of them are filled with random house stuff of zero value, yet leave so much to the imagination. We can only hope that if Robbie breaks in, he'll use up all of his time looting this giant pile of treasures. We can only imagine what Robbie would hope to find in this illusionary pile of Christmas giving... The first pressing of very album ever released by KISS? A full oak crate of aging Jack Daniels? The worlds largest block of crystal meth? A couple of gagged and bound lot lizards? A full set of new socks? A letter from the governor esponging old Robbie's record from any old mishaps... One can only wonder at what material good Robbie dares to dream about at nights.
Whoa... just went off a bit. Well.. here are a couple of pictures from said project. December!
you cant beat death, but you can beat death in life...