A Cali Afternoon

A good friend and creative collaborator Anninka and I took a stroll around Santa Monica while I broke in my new-to-me Bronica ETRS and Canon AE-1...

Meet Anninka, Costume Designer and muse.

This was my first time venturing out into Santa Monica since moving to Los Angeles.  I arrived here with the mindset of a permanent resident, so I never really explored the city much before just "living" in it.  Anninka graciously offered to show me around, and became my reluctant muse for the day.  A few of the photographs captured on this day still remain some of my all-time favorites.

This certainly wouldn't be our last shoot.

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