The team at @Unsplash reached out to me to commission a body of work around the theme of identity. Identity is such a broad, subjective concept that I ultimately used several different technical approaches to create the portraits.  My first idea was to photograph a subject from several different angles, then import the images to my computer and use a projector to display the images back onto them. My intent was to create cubist-inspired images that showed several angles of the subject’s face at the same time. My second idea was to shoot through a diffusion panel that was salvaged from a ..read more

My inspiration for this shoot was two-fold: the movie, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and the cover of The Industrial Culture Handbook. I have long loved the high contrast, black and white, cyberpunk / industrial aesthetic. I’ve been exploring the use of multiple exposures in my portraiture for long enough that I’ve figured out how to achieve this effect, in-camera. There is a machine shop in the building where my studio resides. The shop is a time capsule, with the grease, metal, and wood making a patina potpourri. I frequent the shop because they make me custom metal plates to mount projectors onto ..read more

I had a wildly varied session with @cortadh0e last week. The first part of our shoot consisted of me projecting her MRI scans onto her face (her wonderful idea). For the second part of the shoot I made a handful of multiple exposures, using different images of fluids in a range of different glassware. I finished by testing out a new blur filter (I partially inverted the tone curves of this set in Lightroom). I always go into a shoot with a vague idea of techniques or modifiers that I want to explore, never knowing exactly what the results will look like. I’ve found that it’s a lot more fun a ..read more

Here are a few more of the techniques that I taught in my workshop, this past weekend. The main thing that I communicate to my students is that I rarely go into a shoot with a fixed notion of how I want it to go, or how I want the images to look. I often base my techniques, color palette, and post processing on what the moment dictates. For example, if the subject brings a lot of flowing garments, I might choose to use long exposure to capture its movement; or I may light them from behind to capture the shape and texture of the fabric. On top of that, many of the techniques that I use have an ..read more

I had a blast hosting a sold out workshop at my studio this past weekend. Thank you to my students for coming from places as far away as Boston, Seattle, and the Cayman Islands. Shout out to my incredible models (@yesandso seen here) for making it easy to turn these techniques into moving art. There are two spots currently left in my May workshop, as well as spots in the August and October workshops (which are both currently at a discounted early bird rate). Details here. View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize V ..read more

It’s been nearly five years since I’ve photographed @kate_sweeney and it was interesting to see the parallel in tone with our last shoot (third eye vibes). With this shoot I wanted to continue my exploration of the collage/cubist aesthetic, and began by photographing selectively lit body parts. After importing the images and projecting them onto Kate, I found that the arm and hand images were more impactful than the other body parts, so I leaned into using those in a number of different ways. Some were lit against a gray background, some silhouetted, and some I chose to invert. I rely on the ..read more

Back in the lab, making galaxies. I created these images with vegetable oil, seltzer water, and food coloring. Now it’s time to use these in a portrait session, both as projections and as multiple exposures. View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize ..read more

I bought my first projector in 2017 and almost immediately began considering the different ways that I could conceptually employ the tool. I found myself honing in on the theme of time, and how it relates to my subject. Here are some examples: I asked subjects who had survived a traumatic event to bring images or videos that represent the trauma, which I projected onto them as a way of processing and moving through the painful memories. I projected childhood images of a subject back onto them, exploring the idea that the person we were as a child is always in us, no matter how old we g ..read more

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing a broken vessel with a precious metal, such as gold or platinum. A repaired vessel isn’t the same as it was before the trauma, nor is it diminished. The essence of the original vessel is still there, but golden scars now trace the lines where the fracture occurred… View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize I am a survival of childhood abuse. Because the abuse was such a regular part of my life, I never knew to seek help. It wasn’t until my son reached a certain age and I cou ..read more

I had a blast playing around with a range of different prisms, refraction panels, and ring lights last week with @rachelluree. As always, these effects were created in-camera, with the only post work done being color grading in Lightroom. View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize ..read more