Would I like to make a living from photography? Yes.
Is it possible? No.

Well, it’s possible to make a living from anything but I don’t want to eat noodles and put my kids in the shitty San Francisco public school system so there’s where that whole idea falls flat. Fast.

So, I sold some equipment and largely put down my camera, only shooting photo’s of my family (plus a few of my friend Adam Del Rio and one epic day of hiking with Bobby). We added one child this year, lost our dog and tried our best to keep the oldest one as normal as can be.

In amongst the chaos and rhetoric on Twitter I took these photos.

Recently I had the pleasure of photographing Bobby from Baytrailrunners.com, a Bay Area running group that enjoy trail running and the punishment that comes with it! Leo and I, just walking the trails with our gear…not so much.

Bobby was a fantastic subject and his knowledge of the trails and the surrounding area was impressive. He even pointed out various edible plants to us, which did make us wonder just how long a hike we were in for! All in all I think we only covered about 3 miles, at one point a 4 year old boy passed us. Shameful.

Many thanks to Bobby for the opportunity and for showing me the great trails so close to my house. If you are at all interested in trail running or even hiking some beautiful trails in the Bay Area Bobby should be your first choice. He also offers personal training. Thanks as usual to Leo Coral, we almost killed him on this shoot with all the hiking…sorry Leo! One final mention goes to the über talented Sean Hagwell for his stellar pre-shoot long distance advice, the Matilda’s are on me Sean!

The last time I photographed Adam, in October, it was pouring with rain and we were in a derelict building with water pouring in everywhere. This time we made sure we were warm and dry, at his house. With beer. Adam is a fun guy to be around, he’s also a very talented performer so we simply had him set up his amp, microphone (which for some reason I called microscope all day long) and just had him sing/play while we shot. Very similar to Songs for Eating and Drinking but on a much smaller scale.

Here’s some of Adam’s songs for you, very much worth a listen, you can follow Adam on Twitter right here.

Many thanks to Adam for the opportunity once again. As usual thanks to Leo Coral for his stellar help and to Will Valle for making a guest appearance.

Bernadette is a lot fitter than me. A. Lot. Fitter. How do I know? Because she kicked my arse (and Leo’s) climbing in and out of our location. We were suitably shamed! To be fair though, we had overpacked as usual so we were lugging a fair bit of gear, but still…shamed.

I’m going to break from my usual blog post describing lights, modifiers etc and just give you, as Jay Eads would say, a blog bomb of images. If you want to know what/why/how just ask in the comments.

Many thanks to Bernadette for being so willing to walk so far and hang out in the cold, dark forest for so long. Thanks also to Melanie Paulina for her excellent make up skills and to Leo Coral for his usual stellar help. Finally I need to thank Adam Del-Rio for helping make this happen.

Adam is an actor and singer based in San Francisco. He’s a good friend of Drew Piston who I photographed earlier in the year and they perform together from time to time. Adam already has the standard actor headshots so he wanted to go out and do something darker. We went out on a very wet day, even by San Francisco standards. We were confined to one derelict building which had rain pouring in everywhere, not so much fun…

We only took one light with us, a single Profoto Acute 2 D4 which we powered off an Alien Bee Vagabond II Battery. It’s not supposed to work but it does.

This last shot wwas a single 580EX (Gridded & Flagged).

That’s all for now. I don’t know when I’ll post again.

Big thanks to Adam for coming out and getting very wet.

Personal work is great, it lets you break free and become a bit more creative than you might be when shooting an assignment. So when Chelsea agreed to this series of shots I was pretty happy! I had scouted this location beforehand and it worked out well for us, it’s quite a bit north of San Francisco but sometimes you need to go that far to escape the fog.

Chelsea was great to work with, she stood in that long grass for ages while we took a series of photographs. On the subject of the long grass, if you have visited before you might recall on an earlier post I said “I’ll still take the girl in the long grass shot as soon as I have a girl to shoot and some long grass to shoot her in!“, well there you go…I delivered on my promise!

I think this was my favourite spot at this location, the trees, the road, the sun all just came together for about 10 minutes and Chelsea just shone!

And then we did this…

I’m not going to explain the photographs. There’s a lot of different sources of inspiration for these photographs; a song by my favourite band ballboy, a photographer, a beard, desire for personal growth….there will be more in the future.

These few images took a lot of work, a lot of preparation and organization to set up and take but it was a lot of fun! Working with a team with a single goal was a great experience. Many thanks to our super talented makeup artist Melanie Paulina, if you need an extraordinary makeup artist in the San Francisco Bay area you can find her at www.melaniepaulina.com. I also have to thank Chelsea for being so amazing and free and open to my eccentricity!

That’s all for this post. I can’t end without thanking everyone that made these photographs possible.

Model: Chelsea Rose Gascon
Make Up Artist: Melanie Paulina
Photographer: Leo Coral

I recently had the great pleasure of photographing Seattle based singer-songwriter Drew Piston which was a real treat for me as I rarely get to meet artists I am a fan of (well, I did meet Tim Booth in Los Angeles in 2008), so getting to photograph Drew was a very cool experience.

We started off shooting on white seamless, I picked up the chair from a local thrift store for $25!

Once we were done with the seamless Drew asked if we could take him to the Fleishhacker Pool House. We were a little hesitant as he had a gig to get to in the evening and it’s just that little bit harder to make it when you are in jail for trespassing. He said he was cool with that, so we went….

How fitting then that the first stop we made at our location was, well I don’t know what it’s original purpose was but it looked like a jail. It also looked pretty good with Drew standing in it getting just a tiny amount of fill from an SB800 (1/128 power) and the ambient doing the rest.

Next we found this staircase, Drew fell right into this “please don’t kill me” pose which I loved, but it scared me just a little.

Finally we did some little group shots.

That’s all for this post, a big thanks to Drew for being so keen to get arrested and for keeping my ears entertained so often. Also thanks to his brother Spencer and his friend Megan for coming along too.

Please do yourself a favour and check out Drew’s music, at iTunes or at www.drewpiston.com.

Update (29th August 2010): Check out Drew’s New Video – Die Die

This is Angelina, the original plan was to shoot her in a car but the harsh mid morning California sun put an end to that idea pretty quickly. After a bit of searching and brain storming we remembered our top secret super special San Francisco location. If you recognize this place please don’t mention it in the comments as I hate to moderate people.

As you can see our location has a bit of history, it was difficult finding a location that fit Angelina’s unique look (given that I have no idea how to access private, non-derelict buildings without going to jail) but this place is so unique I think the two of them gel pretty well! We were traveling light on this shoot, in fact all of these shots were taken with a single Nikon SB800 in either a Westcott 28″ Softbox or a 43″ reflective umbrella….your classic OneLight setup.

This next shot was taken in the same spot as the shot that heads up this post but it’s just framed a lot wider, I loved this giant box of light.

Next up we visit the, umm toilet! Well who doesn’t take their female clients to destroyed mens rooms? Luckily Angelina was playful and just had fun with the location.

Here’s another one from the same toilet/cludgie/bog/pisser/lavvy/dunny/can…….

The last image of the day wasn’t meant to be the last image of the day but we risked being locked in this place all night if we didn’t leave, immediately. So we took this shot and left.

We will revisit this location again soon, it has a lot more to offer. We only visited about 1/3 of it and I know there are many amazing rooms that look like custom pre-built sets just for photographers in here!

Thanks to Angelina for being so amazing and willing to go in here and to Marvin for being bodyguard!

This first shot was taken in the biggest farmyard barn I have ever been in, thankfully it also had power so we could use big lights rather than our little battery powered flashes. This was shot with an Alien Bee B800 in a soft box at some sort of power setting that really isn’t relevant. Every time I shoot I use this technique, big thanks to Glyn Dewis for the virtual lesson!

Next up is a shot I took outside where we battled a swarm of mosquitoes, soaring temperatures and a very tricky angle. Luckily Ajay is very tall and I was able to stick the 135m f/2.0 L on and stand waaaaaay back and grab this shot!

This next shot was taken in Ajay’s living room. A single shoot through 60″ umbrella up close with a Canon 580 EX dialed down to about 1/64th power gave me this shot.

Here’s another one with the same setup.

I’ll end this post, rather fittingly with one of the last shots of the day. I know the girl in the long grass has become a cliché shot to the point of becoming a joke…but we have a GUY in the long grass so it’s different! Anyway, I’ll still take the girl in the long grass shot as soon as I have a girl to shoot and some long grass to shoot her in!

That’s all for now. Thanks for stopping by and reading. Thanks to Ajay for inviting me up to shoot and being so free and open to and with ideas.

This is Julius, he contacted me just because he wanted his photo taken. Who says you need any other reason, right? He liked the shots I had taken of his sister back in February so we went out and took a whole bunch of photos right up until it was dark and they started towing drunk party goers cars!

This shot here was supposed to have a different background but for some reason on this shoot we were really badly hassled by annoying park officials and a really annoying community patrol officer who I had serious difficulty taking seriously seeing as he was a fully grown man riding a full size bright yellow tricycle. Way to be manly there big guy! Guess what had just freewheeled on by as we took this shot….

We left the man child to his bike and stopped at a loading dock in an area of San Francisco known as The Dogpatch and took a series of shots using a single shoot through umbrella against a loading dock door. I remembered seeing this done at the OneLight Workshop in October but hadn’t used the technique (see this on Strobist). I kinda like it!

Next up we drove to a new location about 3 blocks from the loading dock. As we are unloading the car the cops appear! Thankfully a case of mistaken identity, that would have been just the final straw. The first shot here is simply completely killed ambient. It’s really simple to do on location with one light (except, ahem…this is a two light shot) and it’s fast to do.

This shot is taken using the exact same setup as the shot above, all I did was move position….as in, lay in the mud.

These last two images were the main reason we chose to shoot in this particular area of the city. I don’t have access to a fancy studio or elaborate sets but I am a firm believer in finding the best possible locations to shoot at. It’s not always easy, it’s often not even possible and it can become a tiring and frustrating task to find a location you like the look of only to discover you can’t gain access or it’s been torn down etc. When I saw this particular location in a shot on flickr I HAD to use it. It took weeks to find out where the location is but I’m happy we found it.

At night this is a very desolate area and I told Julius I had a particular narrative in mind for these shots; “You’ve been out at the club down the street and your girlfriend left. Forever.” He pulled off the look I wanted!

Here’s another one.

That’s it for this week, hopefully I’ll get another post up next week. Thanks to Julius for braving the cold for so long and to Leo for coming along and assisting which was a great help!