Week 8 EOC: Bang-Bang Club

The Bang -Bang was a great movie that I’m for sure going to watch again. The movie did a great job of showing the life and the job of a conflict photographer as well as how the job and the awards affected the photographers. The photographers faced extreme danger not only physically but emotionally too photographing these conflicts. The men in the Bang -Bang club took the stress differently but they all had some type of reaction. The scene when the man that want to be in the club gets shot really shows the danger they face on the job. Some of the photographers won the Pulitzer prize which you would think is a great thing but for them there was negative reaction to the prize, some said Greg was lucky, others said it was for whit man’s purposes and others said Kevin was evil for not helping the little girl in Sudan. The Pulitzer prize is a great award, the problem that it makes for photographers like the Bang-Bang club is the attention that it attracts for people to be negative.

Week 8 BOC:Gentlemens Relish

The photo challenge for this week is inspired by the movie Gentlemen’s relish, the photo is a artistic black and white nude. People have many opinions on nude photography in my opinion as long as it is done tastefully it is a beautiful art form. I chose to use an image that I had taken at a Boudoir workshop in 2010 for the challenge. This image was my first experience doing nudes and it changed my path as a photographer it made me view nudes as a art form and made me much more comfortable booking boudoir and maternity sessions. Many aspects must go into a nude session to make it look good and to make the model comfortable such as lighting, posing and overall mood. I like to talk to the model or client before the session to find out how comfortable they are with nudity and how they want the session to go. This dialogue makes the model or client comfortable and they know how the session will play out. Lighting is another big element in nude photography depending the body type of the model the lighting can make them look beautiful or not so beautiful. Editing over everything is my secret weapon for nudes, boudoir and maternity I can make most imperfection on a woman’s body disappear, this is a technique that isn’t discussed with the model before the session but always blows them away when they see what they look like as if I have a magic lens on my camera. This image was taken in a hotel room with a black backdrop using a single strobe with a strip bank attached. The single strip bank created very nice directional light while still keeping it soft to make her skin look soft. I used a Nikon D700 camera with a 24-70 lens and edited in Adobe Lightroom to make it black and white, then uploaded to Photoshop to add the frame. 

Week 7 Eoc: Adult Content

I own a company named The Pin Up Bride Photography specializing in Wedding, Boudoir and Pin Up Photography. Needless to say I am very comfortable with adult content and think if done in good taste it is a beautiful art. I enjoyed The Gentlemen’s Relish and it’s different views on nude art and how people treat it and react to it. I was inspired by Kingdom’s remakes of the classic nude art and may try to replicate some old paintings myself. A couple different types of adult content I do are boudoir and maternity photography. I truly enjoy taking boudoir photo’s most of the time the woman are a little out of shape and want to look sexy for their man, by working the pose, lighting and some magical editing to make them stunning is amazing. A big part of shooting nude images is being able to make someone comfortable by you being a comfortable and being a professional. Maternity photos I also love doing, a lot of the time people don’t realize the beauty of a woman’s body while pregnant. To create tastefull beautiful art of a pregnant woman that she can hang in her home and be proud of is what makes me love this type of work. Pin Up is another form of photography that I do that would sometimes fit into adult content when it takes a burlesque route, Pin Up art is a passion of mine, I love everything about that era of art. I haven’t worked any erotic or pornography but that’s not saying I wouldn’t if the chance ever came about. I like to be very open minded and very comfortable with my work as long as it’s artistic and tastefull.

Week 7 BOC: Colloge

To create a collage that truly represents me I decided to include different elements in it. The first thing that included in the collage is some of my recent work as a photographer to show my style as an artist and an image of the camera I use. I also included my wife Deborah and my fours kids Canyon, Clay, Cash and Marcus because family is very important to me. Another very important thing to me is my faith so I added a cross to represent my Christian beliefs. The logo of my company The Pin Up Bride was added to piece it all together in the fact that my photography, family life , business and religion all connect together and I try to be the best at all these things. I decided not to put a picture of myself in the collage so the focus would be more on what defines me as an artist and person instead of what I look like. Collages have been used for many years in many ways in art, I like them because there is no wrong or right way to make them and people seem to enjoy viewing them. I regularly make collages of a few of my favorite images from a Wedding or photo shoot that I do to use as a preview for clients to see. The Wedding collage gives me an opportunity to be artistic in combing multiple scenes of the Wedding into one.  The application I use to make all my collages is Collage Creator for Mac, this application gives you many options to customize including resize, background color and border color. There are many different applications to create collages out there, the challenge is the creativity of choosing the images that you want to put together.

Week 6 Eoc : How art changed me

Art has changed my life in a big way, in many different aspects. My career for ten years was working night shifts bartending and managing restaurants never spending time with my family or enjoying life when the sun was up. Today as a photographer I go to bed by 10:00pm and wake up by 6:00am and spend the day working as a photographer and spending much more time with my family, the quality of life is much better now. Although I do find myself at times a bit more secluded from society and get stuck in my own creative world in my office and sometimes have to force myself to pick up the phone and call a friend or go socialize in general. I have a greater understanding now of what goes into to certain things that we see everyday such as billboards, magazines, flyers, signs etc I tend to see everything in a way of how was it done and could I have done it. I also look at photographs and tend to see them differently now seeing lighting patterns and compositions that were used. This way of looking at things has actually spread to seeing everything this way, how I would photograph certain situation, how I would light it and what angles I would do it from. In whole Photography or art has made my life more complete in the fact that I don’t just wake up at midnight go make money go home sleep and repeat process, I actually wake up create what I want to create that day see what I want to see do what I want to do then go to sleep, and enjoy every minute of it.

Week 6 BOC

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This photo shows my editing area which is the space in my office that I spend the most time in. I edit all my images on a 13 inch Mac Book Pro and back them all up on two portable hard drives and online. Since I spend most of my time in this space I have myself a very large desk and a comfortable chair. When I sit down to start my editing process the first thing I do is turn on music to get me in a good mood, adjust the lights and close my office door to keep out distractions. The images are loaded into Adobe Lightroom 3, renamed and backed up right away then it’s onto editing process. My first pass through the images is to delete all the obvious bad images and highlight really good ones. The second pass I actually start color correcting and minor editing still highlighting really good images. The third pass through the images I will open the highlighted images in Photoshop and Nix softwares for custom editing. My style is I heavily edit my images with a vintage look, I have presets that I have created myself and purchased presets. In this image I decided to focus on the laptop that I’m editing on instead of myself since editing is the focus. I added a camera, book and props to make it more interesting , which usually wouldn’t be there. I used a on camera flash and window light to in this image to make it more natural lokking.

Week 5 Eoc

The PinUp Bride offers a substantial value proposition in that we offer many different services and know the wedding industry from all angles. Most couple that choose the The PinUp Bride to Plan and design their Wedding also choose to have The PinUp Bride Photograph the Wedding due to the fact they already have a relationship with The PinUp Bride and it saves time having to meet with many different photographers to find one they get along with. The Pin Up Bride Photography provides a high- end service at a high -end price that save couples time and they can rest easy that they will have a great Wedding Photographer.

Week 3 Photo Challenge:You Incredible

This weekly photo challenge was extra challenging due to the fact that it was a self-portrait and a incredible scene together. A self-portrait alone is easy but figuring out a amazing situation was much more difficult. A normal day in my life includes many amazing situations but none that really would make a good self-portrait scene, so to find a perfect setting I decided to take a small road trip to Prescott Arizona. My wives parents live in Prescott ,Arizona, I absolutely love the Landscape in Arizona which has become a passion of mine as a hobby of Landscape Photography in Prescott. The main subject of my landscape photography in Prescott are Dead Trees, I call the project Forgotten Trees.  The amount of beauty hidden deep in the forest, of trees, that have either fallen down or burnt down absolutely amaze me. If the trees haven’t fallen down yet, there are hundreds more that are dead and still standing and beautiful all the same. To me incredible is walking through this massive forest with beauty all around and creating art from trees that have been forgotten by most. The setting for a self -portrait for me couldn’t be anywhere but this amazing landscape that I love so much. To take the self-portrait I hiked deep in the woods until I found the perfect tree that would fit for my self-portrait. I found a tree that not only was fallen it was also burnt; it was perfect! Next step was to set up my camera and tripod, check my composition and exposure and set the self timer. Once this was all set all that was left was to sit on the tree and create my self-portrait. In the portrait I didn’t look at the camera or smile because I didn’t want to take away from the beauty of the setting. In the end I believe this image is a real reflection of my Incredible You.