Wedding Season, pt. II

Larrabure Wedding

I've sure shot a lot of wedding this year for someone who is not at all a wedding photographer, or even close to one.  But the truth is I've always found them a lot of fun, and do genuinely enjoy going to friends' weddings.  So when a friend and colleague inquires about said services, I find myself inclined to say yes.  Especially if it means I get to shoot them my way...

Larrabure Wedding, 2015

For anyone who didn't get it, by "my way" I mean drunk and with a Pentax 67.  Moving on...

It was a small ceremony held at The Raymond in Pasadena, which turned out to be an incredible venue.  Both in terms of lighting and of space.

The Bride, 2015

The full photo book of the Larrabure Wedding can be purchased here.

African Fashion

In a collaboration with Fashion Designer Kabeh Ojo and Makeup Artist Vanessa Rene, today I shot four models in hand-made garments from fabrics sent directly from Africa.  It just so happens that the offices behind my production headquarters for According to Him & Her give off a heavy island / African vibe.  The perfect location for this shoot.

Ama

Today in LBC

Ama, Long Beach, 2014

Had a quick fun shoot with my good friend Ama today in Downtown Long Beach.

But of course no trip to Long Beach is complete without a stop at...

Photography Reborn

It All Started When I Got Bored

Back when I was a kid, I loved taking pictures of everything, everywhere I went.  I loved the act of it: walking around, looking for things that stood out to me, composing and shooting the image.  Mostly on little disposable cameras until digital started taking over and I’d have little point and shoots and then eventually a DSLR in college.  By then, I’d get home from a 60 minute shoot with 500 photos that I’d proceed to spend the next 4 hours narrowing down and editing to the only 10 or 20 that actually came out good.  And that was something I absolutely hated. 

I wanted to be out shooting, not sitting behind a computer desk for hours buried in Photoshop.  But that was what it took to produce quality photos then.  The unaltered digital shots just looked stale, there was no personality to the image until you put it under the Photoshop microscope.  And that wasn’t what I signed up for, and so eventually I just got bored of it.  Not that people can’t or don’t produce fantastic digital images, it just wasn’t my thing.

 So, Film Photography Here I Come

Fast forward a few years and now I’m living in LA, focusing 110% of my energy into my creative passions, I find myself really missing photography.  And the closer I get to realizing some of my filmmaking goals, the more I'm turned off by the industry’s push toward shooting everything digitally as well.  It feels like the personality is being sucked out of movies and being replaced by those really stale and generic looking images. 

So I realized if I wanted to have a fighting chance at pushing to shoot on film as a director, I’d need to have some more practical understanding of why I liked it so much.  So I bought a Canon AE-1 off of eBay for $35.  Now the real work begins...

Highlights from my first roll of film, Kodak Portra 400 shot on a Canon AE-1