Post Christmas Glow
December 27th, 2010
Christmas is over and it may well have been the best Christmas I’ve experienced for many years. The whole family was at my house for Christmas morning. Everybody had a great time and was very happy with their gifts, especially my grandson who was experiencing his third Christmas. What a blessing to have good health, a happy family and a good time spent together.
My truck goes to the body shop later this week and I’ll be off to visit other relatives in Vermont. Looks like we are going to miss the blizzard, so the drive up there should go ok. Knock on wood…
The photo for today is from earlier this month when Peyton Fontaine came up to the frozen north country from her home in sunny Florida for a couple days of shooting. We had some specific goals for most of what we were working on, and those photos will not appear here because they have more illustrious destinations in mind. But I took advantage of the lovely lady to do some photos at an old motel that I’ve had my eye on for some time. This is one of the photos that I wanted to do at this location. It was late at night. Peyton had just arrived after a long day of travel. It was cold. Really cold. Stupid cold if you had been in Florida earlier that day. But Peyton is not only breathtakingly beautiful, but also a real trooper and seriously tough. But you can see all that.
Thanks, Peyton.
Happy Christmas
December 24th, 2010
It’s Christmas Eve and I have a few quiet moments before I start getting ready for the day’s events, so I thought I’d post something. This will be it until after Christmas.
Yesterday I did the drive down to Lexington, KY, to drop off my print for the Lexington Art League nude show that opens January 15. I plan to attend the preview party on the evening of January 14, so, if you are in the Lexington area, please come to the party and say hello.
I made that drive in my damaged truck. On Monday night, after we had gone to bed, I heard a crash on the street in front of my house. I looked out the window in time to see a big old black Cadillac back away from my truck and drive off. Turns out the woman driving was so drunk that she crashed into a van up the street and ended up in the hospital, so the police got her and it wasn’t just a hit and run with no way to follow up. My insurance is paying for the $4,000 repair bill. I’ll get my deductible back if they manage to collect anything from the driver. At first I couldn’t open the driver’s door, but when I took it to a body shop for the estimate they were able to pry the door open and get it so I can at least get in and out on the driver’s side. Lots of wind noise, but I can drive it. It goes to the shop next week and will be there a week for the repairs. This is even more expensive than the damage from hitting a deer a couple years ago out in Montana.
But it is Christmas. All my kids will be here tomorrow. Two of the three will be spending the night here tonight. My older daughter and her husband and my grandson will come over in the morning. It’s a good Christmas in these parts.
And I got a nice early Christmas present this week when Kelsey came by for a shoot while she is home from Seattle for the holidays. That’s her above in the evening street-light lighting in my studio. It’s always a great pleasure to work with Kelsey…a lovely person inside and out and a very talented model. I’ll have lots more to share from this shoot in the coming weeks.
Until next time I wish you and yours all the best in this season and throughout the coming year. Thanks for coming by and looking at my work and reading my thoughts.
Serene Kat
December 20th, 2010
Sorry it’s been so long. You all know Christmas is a busy time, so I won’t go into a lot of explanation. I haven’t been doing much shooting recently, but hope to get a couple shoots in before the end of the year. And I’ve been working on a few special projects that won’t be seen here, at least for a while.
I have my print framed and ready to deliver to the Lexington Art League for their Nude show next month. I was planning to drive it down there next week, but the Art League just announced that they are closing for the time between Christmas and New Years, so I have to make that trip this week. I’m still waiting to hear from them on whether the day I want to do that will work or not.
And I’ll be doing some other travel over the next couple weeks for family visits. So I need to come up with a few things to post here over the holidays. I haven’t had a chance to do any Christmas-themed shoots this year, but that’s usually a good thing. I still have plenty of fine photos of Kat, so that’s what you may be seeing here for a few more posts. I’m sure you don’t mind.
So, for today here is Kat in my studio after our West Virginia trip. I think she is looking all serene and peaceful here…as well as beautiful, as usual.
Famous Kat
December 13th, 2010
Beautiful model, Kat, who spent some time working with me in West Virginia in October, has been busy since she got back home to Miami. Check out her blog for her latest triumph which was covered by such notable places as Vogue and Elle, among others. Kat really is a lovely person, both inside and out, so I’m really pleased to see her involved in such a fine art project. She is truely deserving of success and fame as both a model and a photographer.
I did this photo while we were in West Virginia on the day when it was too cold for us to go out and shoot. It’s done with just window light in the condo.
Meanwhile, as you surely know, I’m suffering through a serious bout of winter weather. It’s about 14F degrees here now and going down, with single digits predicted for tonight. And there is no prospect of it getting above freezing any time soon. My snow blower isn’t working right despite efforts to fix it before the snow came, so I guess I’m going to be resorting to a snow shovel when the next snowfall happens. We could end up with a white Christmas out of this, but with the way our luck usually goes it will probably get up into the 50s or 60s a few days before Christmas and eliminate all the white stuff. But that’s ok with me…the warm-up can start today as far as I’m concerned.
I need to move south.
Brrrrr
December 7th, 2010
It’s freaking cold. The highs have been in the teens for the past few days and it sounds like this is going to continue for a while. There is snow on the ground. I suppose this should be putting me in the “Christmas Spirit” but it’s just making me want to move south. I keep telling my wife that I want to live somewhere that they don’t have weather that I have to shovel…but I think our grandson is going to keep us up here in the frozen northland for at least a few more years.
But Christmas is coming whether I’m feeling it or not. ‘Tis the season for buying stuff. And Angie wants you to buy one of her calendars. A calendar could be a great Christmas present or just get one for yourself so you can keep track of the coming year and enjoy photos of the beautiful GoddessAngie all year long. You can buy Angie’s calendar here. If you’d like the smaller version of her calendar it is here. And you can see all my calendars at this link.
But you probably need more Christmas presents than just a calendar. How about getting someone a copy of the f-eleven, volume 3 book. Lots of great photos in there, including a couple of Angie. You know you want to be able to sit around like Angie is doing here and just enjoy all that fine photography. Need even more presents? Volumes one and two of the f-eleven books are still available.
Ok…guess I better get back to figuring out all the entries I need to get together for shows that have deadlines coming up…and I need to get this year’s Christmas card figured out and printed and mailed. Maybe I’ll stumble across the Christmas Spirit somewhere along the way.
Lexington Art League
December 1st, 2010
I’m pretty happy today. There’s an annual show of nude art put on by the Lexington Art League in Lexington, Kentucky. It’s a very highly regarded show and one I’ve wanted to enter for several years. For some reason I always would miss the call for entries and end up missing the deadline to enter. But not this year. I put it on my calendar and kept watching for the call for entries to go out and when it did I got my stuff together and sent in an entry. Today I got notice that they accepted the photo of Brooke up above there for the show.
I don’t make any secret of the fact that Brooke is my favorite model of all the wonderful models I’ve ever worked with. So it’s especially nice to have one of my photos of her be the one selected for this prestigious show. And maybe it will help make up for the suffering she endured to make this photo possible. It was very windy and sleeting when we shot this. Brooke is a total trooper and a tremendously nice person on top of being a beautiful and talented model.
The show will run in Lexington from January 15 to March 13. There’s an opening preview party on January 14. I don’t have details on the opening yet, but I’ll do my best to be there. When I know the details about that party I’ll post it here in case any of you want to attend.
Kat on a cold rock ledge
November 28th, 2010
I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. I did…and that’s why I haven’t been here posting new photos for a few days. We went to relatives out of town on Thanksgiving Day and then all my kids came home for a second Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. So I’m just recovering from all that today. In fact, there is still a pile of pots and pans to wash sitting in the kitchen. Maybe I’ll tie into those when I get this post finished…or not.
Here’s another photo of Kat taken during our week of shooting in West Virginia. This was taken the same day as the last photo of Kat and is just a little back in the woods away from Elakala Falls in Blackwater Falls State Park. I loved the slope of the ledge she is posing on, plus the colors in the rocks and moss combined with the colors of the fallen leaves. Add Kat’s delightfully beautiful figure to that scene and I couldn’t miss.
Couch Angie
November 22nd, 2010
Something a little different. I have lots more photos of Kat to post from our West Virginia trip, but I thought I’d stick this one in here for a change of pace. This is Angie at a derelict building near my studio. From the looks of things there are some homeless folk using this location, but we didn’t see any of them when were there to quickly do this photo.
I’ve been running around today getting the fixings for our Thanksgiving dinners. We’ll have two this year, one with family in Canton on Thursday and another at our house with all my kids and my grandson on Saturday…the only day they could all get home. I hope you all have a great holiday and don’t overdose on tryptophan.
Another Favorite Waterfall
November 18th, 2010
OK…on to my third day of shooting in West Virginia with the lovely Kat. We were staying in a condo just outside of Davis, home of one of my favorite places in West Virginia, Blackwater Falls State Park. Blackwater Falls is beautiful but too large and too exposed to multiple viewing platforms for shooting nudes. It would be very hard to get down into the gorge below that waterfall to shoot anyway. Especially since at this point my sprained ankle was still very painful. But, there is another, better, waterfall in the park, Elakala Falls. My friend Ralph told me about it some years ago and I immediately organized a shoot there with two models and produced a photo that is prominent in my portfolio. That waterfall was only a few minutes drive from our condo, so, of course, I wanted to see what else I could do with it and Kat.
So we went there at dawn. There’s a trail that runs right along the side of the stream with a bridge that crosses just above the waterfall. That upper waterfall is only a stone’s throw from the park lodge, too…so it is very exposed to view by anyone who happened down that trail. We took a look at the upper falls and the water flow was down and it just wasn’t as pretty as it had been when I shot it before. So we decided not to shoot there. But, as you’ve probably gathered, there is more than just the main, upper waterfall in this location. A short hike on downstream brought us to a lower falls that was well shielded from the trail and much prettier than the upper falls, at least on this day. So that’s where this photo was taken.
There’s a new sale for my calendars. Go here to order them. When you check out enter the code FLURRY and you will get a 25 percent discount on your order. This new discount code is good until the day after Christmas. So why not order some calendars to give to your friends for Christmas this year? If you really want to give a bunch of calendars away you can get a 30 percent discount on orders of 10 or more calendars by using the code BLIZZARD. That discount is also good until the day after Christmas.
f-eleven volume 3 would also make a great Christmas gift. You can still use the discount code: PROMO to get 20 percent off your order until November 26.
Day Two
November 14th, 2010
I haven’t posted for a few days because the weather here in Ohio has just been too wonderful to spend much time inside working on photos. It’s been in the 70s which is almost unheard of for mid-November. Thanks to this great bit of weather the house is finally completely painted and most of the storm windows are re-installed. And, in a bit of a nod to the inevitable, the snow blower is repaired and ready to go when the weather gets back to normal.
All the West Virginia photos I’ve posted so far were taken on our first day of shooting there. This one of Kat is from the second day. We took a bit of a drive to get to some really beautiful waterfalls where I had photographed before. There are three waterfalls, one above the other, with a pretty steep trail. There was one other car in the parking lot when we arrived. We soon found those folks, a couple obviously not in great physical condition, at the first waterfall. That first waterfall is the least interesting of the three and we didn’t really try to take any photos there. The couple asked about the trail on down and I was honest with them that there was a lot of steep climbing involved. They immediately decided that they were not interested in doing that kind of hiking and headed back to their car. That was the only company we had while we were on the trail.
Kat and I continued hiking down the trail. When we reached the second waterfall, which is a good setting, but with wooden walk ways and high railings making good compositions including Kat impossible from the approved trail. But we found the trail barricaded and signs proclaiming that the trail was closed beyond that point. The best waterfall is the third one and we weren’t going to be able to go to it. We could have climbed the barricade and gone on, but the trail looked unsafe, and there was something about a $5000 fine, so we elected not to do that.
Instead we found a place to get over the railing and down to the second waterfall so we could work out a good composition. The climbing was a little tricky, but not all that awful. Not exactly a “walk in the park” though. More like a scramble over scree on the way to a rock climbing location. But we made it down and back without incident and this photo was the result. I think it was worth the effort. Of course, now I’m going to have to make another trip down there after they repair the trail so I can shoot again at the third waterfall. (Pay attention, Brooke. ;-))
It was right after we did this photo, on the hike back up that steep trail, that I stepped in a hole covered by leaves and twisted my ankle. After all that scrambling over wet boulders to get down to the spot to take this photo I managed to injure myself on a flat rock on the trail. So it goes. But the injury wasn’t bad enough to interfere with the rest of the trip. My ankle is still sore as I type this, though.
And now for your regularly scheduled reminders:
Tomorrow is the last day to use discount code EARLYBIRD to get 30 percent off of an order of my 2011 calendars. So if you are planning to buy one, now is the time. You can buy my calendars here. They make great gifts and the quality is high enough that you can keep them after the year is over and even frame the individual photos if you want. The price will never be better.
And don’t forget to go to Blurb and order your copy of f-eleven, volume 3. You can still use this discount code: PROMO to get 20 percent off your entire order. That discount is good until November 26. Another fine gift idea.
