Inessential Stuff

This is my good friend Del Engen. After a long career at Microsoft, he chose to pursue his passion, both in film and music, by training and then working in film scoring. He recently asked me, far too tentatively, if you ask me, if I would mind doing a photoshoot with him for his professional website. Del has been a friend for 20 years, so I was glad to shoot with him.

And I had some specific things in mind. First, Del’s condo has one wicked view of downtown Seattle and the Space Needle. So I thought it might be fun to shoot there. The outside, even on a cloudy Seattle day, is always much brighter than inside. So there was a bit of lighting challenge which I thought would be fun, and would create an appropriately cinematic look. It involved placing a strong light high at about the 2:00 0′clock position (if I am the center of the clock and Del is 12:00) and then a smaller fill light at the 11:00 position, which I triggered with my brand new RadioPoppers (which I use now instead of PocketWizards). I really liked the shadowing it gave, and putting the attention on Del, while showing a bit of the warm interior and still exposing correctly for the Seattle clouds and Space Needle outside.

We also shot at a coffee shop across the street where there is a piano. Again, I mostly went with dramatic cinematic lighting, keeping it to one light both for the convenience of shooting and for dramatic light and shadow. Finally, as we were crossing the street, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a shot Del in the sidewalk, with the road dropping down into Seattle below. It was a really fun shoot. I have up a small gallery here of some of the images.

This is Patti. We met through a mutual friend, though I had never met her in person before, since she lives in Las Vegas. That changed, during my trip to Vegas for a photography convention, where we met up and did a photoshoot.

I wanted the images to be trendy and fashionable, because Patti struck me as that way. We started out with a shoot outside at sunset and shot into the darkness, with a fine view of the city. And when my lights didn’t work as planned (I’ve since ditched PocketWizards for RadioPoppers), we used her truck’s headlights for some unusual off-camera lighting (see above). Then, quite cold, we retreated to someplace warmer and finished the shoot.

Patti is getting married in Chicago this fall, so if I’m lucky, I might get to work with Patti again.

It’s Britanne again.  We had done the car shoot before.  But we wanted to shoot again, and I had this idea for a photoshoot of using ambient street light at night, particularly from shop windows.  We also did a bit of off-camera lighting stuff.  Mostly, Britanne was game for anything, on a deceptively chilly evening, and was, as usual, gorgeous, as you can see from the photos.  Hopefully we’ll work again in the near future.

I had shot with Jennifer before, but a long time ago.  We decided to do a shoot on a country road.  She brought along her dog, Chopper, who mostly was good waiting in the car.  But eventually he got impatient and she let him out for some tongue-dangling romps through the weeds.  Here is a gallery of the photographs. I really liked the attitude she brought to the shoot: at times tough, at times vulnerable.  I post-processed these images a bit more than usual, just for the fun of it.

We ended up at a location with large yellow things with multiple off-camera lights.  Any guesses what the yellow things are?

Just a couple shots from a recent photoshoot.  I dug the purple dress, so I toned it a bit. We found the bench up where we were shooting, just waiting to be used.

Facebook is pretty cool (friend me there, if you haven’t already) in its ability to reconnect old friends.  It allowed me to reconnect with Jennifer, for example, with whom I hadn’t been in touch since college.

Not long after we reconnected, she was diagnosed with lymphoma, a type of cancer of the immune cells, and she started chemotherapy.  One day, on her facebook page, she mentioned that she was thinking of getting some pictures done, because even though she hated having no hair, and hated having to undergo chemo, and dealing with cancer, she thought, many years from now, there might be a time in her life when she’d want to look back on her chemo days.

I let her know that if she was serious, I’d be glad to drive to Portland and do those pictures.

It worked out that May 1 provided an opportunity to do the photoshoot.  Since I have very little knowledge of the Portland area, Jennifer picked Laurelhurst Park as the location, which was perfect, and the weather was outstanding, considering how grumpy this spring has been (and that rain was in the forecast).  It wasn’t too chilly, and there were even some moments of sun, but the possibility of bad weather meant we had the park mostly to ourselves.  So we just walked around the park taking pictures, among some early flowers and a few people walking their dogs and a few joggers.  I got to see Jennifer in person for the first time in *mumble-mumble* years, and I got to meet her fine husband Victor and her good friend Sunshine.  And I got to take some pictures.

And I got something else, too.  I’ve tried to articulate this before, but it really is an honor to be given the opportunity to take someone’s portrait.  It marks a moment in a person’s life, and often an important one:  the time a couple gets engaged, or the time someone graduates from high school, for instance.  Or even a time in life undergoing chemotherapy.  To be invited to take part in something that important, to be entrusted to capture who a person is at a moment in one’s life, and to therefore contribute to one’s memories of oneself, well, it is a humbling experience.

And as for Jennifer, in spite of natural misgivings and understandable insecurities, she was absolutely radiant.

Jennifer is the kind of person that one might say is beautiful inside and out, but Jennifer hates clichés, so she might smack you if you tried such a thing.  She’s also a talented writer and pretty damn funny.  You can follow her adventures on her blog,”stuff jen says“.

Here are some pictures of Isabel!  We did her senior portraits on the South Hill at a great red barn, and later at Upper Lincoln Park.  It was waaaay colder than it appeared, a testament to Isabel’s modeling ability (I’d call it “professionalism” were she a professional model, and maybe she should be!).

If you have a facebook account, you can see more pictures from the session here.