NorCal Photo Scene

Photographer: Inner Vision Images

Lou — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:47:45 +0000

Sacramento has a lot of photographers, and a lot of models. If you go looking around for local talent for your shoot, there’s a good chance you’ll find several models who have worked with Steve and Lee Folino, the husband and wife team that make up Inner Vision Images. And for good reason–their consistency and quality for studio portraiture is apparent quite soon into looking through their portfolios.

Steve and Lee have set up a pretty well-equipped studio in their north Sacramento home, and have created an inviting place for making fun and exciting portraits. Plenty of room for decent sized seamless backdrops, props, and whatever you may come up with make for a good shooting environment.

The couple have built a reputation in the Sacramento photography as a reliable and dependable studio where their expertise is in portraits. All kinds of portraits, really. Glamour, senior portraits, newborn/maternity, boudoir, headshots, commercial/executive headshots, you name it. Recently they have begun starting to shoot weddings as well, broadening their horizons into new markets and projects, however their strengths are definitely in what one of my personal favorite glamour shooters, JimmyD, would call “pretty girl shooting”. With a strong portfolio in their markets, they definitely are one of the stand-out studios in Sacramento.

Website: http://www.innervisionimages.com
ModelMayhem: http://www.modelmayhem.com/InnerVisionImages

Photographer: Paolo Diavolo

Lou — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:26:19 +0000

It’d be great to be able to make your living photographing beautiful women, experimenting with new concepts and techniques. Great place to do that? San Francisco Bay Area, for one. Bustling city, getting paid to photograph the city’s crazy edgy fashion scene, seems that’s one great existance right there.

Well, Paolo Diavolo is living it.

Paolo is a full-time freelance photographer servicing the bay area, and has made fashion, model portfolio work, runway shows, and editorial pieces his staple work. He is able to work on location as comfortably as in the studio, and handles the challenges as shooting a fast-paced runway show with aplomb.

“I take my work seriously, but try not to take life too seriously,” sums up Paolo’s take on himself and his vocation quite well, and is a very active and helpful member of the photographic community. A year or two ago, he was making a trip from the bay out here to Sacramento, and after a brief discussion, he offered to bring me under his wing for a shoot to gain some experience in pin-up photography. Sadly, I ended up not being able to shake being sick, and had to cancel. But his kindness was (and still is) much appreciated. This generosity is what makes our craft so enjoyable.

Website: http://paolodiavolo.carbonmade.com
ModelMayhem: http://www.modelmayhem.com/diavolo

Photographer: Tim Engle

Lou — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:37:13 +0000

There are a lot of glamour photographers out there. There are lots of alt shooters around. And of course there are plenty of commercial/editorial photographers making great images. Just look around, they’re everywhere. Sacramento’s Tim Engle, however, has a keen eye for being all three–sometimes at once.

Tim bills himself as a visual artist first and foremost. Much of his work comes from commercial clients, however he always finds the time to work on personal projects, and highly conceptualized photo essays and themes. From his creepy “Clowning Around” set–featuring a gothy horror girl and a seemingly normal clown who apparently is nothing of the sort–to a humorously named theme called “Ass Play”, which consists of random hot girls in odd and slightly dark/twisted scenes where one is wearing a donkey head, you can definitely see that something a bit macabre is floating around his creative senses.

On the other side of that is his very soft, colorful, and sometimes stark glamour work, playing down the typical bold overtones in a lot of beauty photography in favor of a slightly muted palette and allowing only certain elements of colorful strength creeping into frame. The result is often very dreamy and striking. The reciprocal of these are his experiments with lighting using LED flashlights of various colors, creating strong highlight tones in reds and blues, but allowing the shadows to run rampant through the image and model.

I haven’t personally been following Tim’s work terribly closely over the past year or so (something I am definitely rectifying as of recently), however every time I stumble upon his work I’m always finding something new to marvel at, and another interesting trick to learn about.

Website: http://www.englephoto.com
Model Mayhem: http://www.modelmayhem.com/thefoto
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/people/thefoto
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/timengle
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tjengle
Vimeo: http://www.vimeo.com/timengle
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/thefoto

Photographer: Beau Hause

Lou — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:04:45 +0000

Beau Hause is an up-and-coming Sacramento wedding and portrait photographer. He also has one pretty epic name, which may contribute to his success, or at least looks cool on business cards and websites. Either way, you can’t look at his work and not admire the quality he puts forth in his images.

While only having his current website up since April of 2009, he’s already begun building a great portfolio, and has already been included in not one but two of Damien Franco’s excellent Your Photo Tips lists of noteworthy photographers. There are two things you’ll notice about Beau’s work is the vibrant colors, although they’re within the definite realm of realism. The second being the burgeoning use of strobist techniques, primarily with Nikon SBs, and used outside as well.

In addition to his portraiture and wedding/engagement work, there’s a great body of other random work on Beau’s Flickr stream, including some beautiful photos of Sacramento at night. Unfortunately most of the new material is a medium-size image, and not able to view the higher-res images is a bummer, however it’s still definitely fun to look through.

I definitely look forward to seeing more of Beau’s work, especially with his strobist stuff. If you’re looking for a good local portrait/engagement/wedding photographer, you can’t go wrong with Beau Hause.

Website: http://beauhause.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/beauhause
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/beauhause
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bhause

Thomas Hawk on Flickr
Thomas Hawk on Zooomr
Thomas Hawk on Facebook
Thomas Hawk on Twitter
Thomas Hawk on Friend Feed
Thomas Hawk on Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection

Photographer: Thomas Hawk

Lou — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:11:41 +0000

This is actually the first real post for NorCal Photo Scene, and picking the inaugural northern California photographer was a bit of a challenge at first. But thinking about it a bit made me think of who inspired me when I first picked up a camera and got serious, and whose work I’ve always enjoyed looking at. That led me to a great first choice, the amazing Thomas Hawk.

Thomas Hawk is from San Francisco, CA, and his life goal is to publish one million photos in his lifetime. Yeah, that’s right, that’s a one with six zeros after it. Maybe a couple of commas, depending on your preference in digit formatting. One million photos. And considering as he’s already got over 33,000 posted on his Flickr page, he’s off to a pretty good start.

Thomas has an eye for city photography, as well as industrial and textural photos. Great use of light, colorful and imaginative pieces are a staple of his work. He also has a huge love of neon signs, and is one of the small-ish group of photographers looking to preserve the dying presence of glowing neon signs that once littered every city’s skyline. He’s got some of the most entertaining shots of Sacramento’s own Crest Theater I’ve seen in a while.

Thomas has also been a strong supporter of technology and the web for photography as well, being a huge proponent of Flickr (and critic, where need be), as well as the CEO of, oddly enough, Flickr competitor Zooomr. He is a strong advocate for photographers’ rights, and routinely puts up rather embarrassing stories of law enforcement and other authority figures overstepping their bounds when it comes to laying the smackdown on photographers for no valid reason. Thomas is also an avid fan of micro-messaging/community site Friendfeed, along with fellow photographer and tech geek, Robert Scoble.

I unfortunately did not get the chance to meet up with Thomas the last time he came out to Sacramento for a photowalk, and as you can see with the Crest photos in the gallery below, it ended up with some great results. Definitely take a look through his Flickr stream, and I’m sure you’ll find many great images to Favorite over there.

Thomas Hawk on Flickr

Thomas Hawk on Zooomr

Thomas Hawk on Facebook

Thomas Hawk on Twitter

Thomas Hawk on Friend Feed

Thomas Hawk on Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection

NorCal Photo Scene – Post Numero Uno

Lou — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:30:01 +0000

Here’s the initial post for NorCal Photo Scene… Not much here for now, but there will be in the near future.

This site will be for drawing focus on northern California photographers, locations, models, and events. It’s definitely in the formative stages at this point, however the goal is to have it up and running mostly full speed within a month, so we’ll see about that.