Normally I don't try to shoot for Fauna and Into the Wild on the same trip, and when I do I shoot for Into the Wild first...it just makes sense. But over a year ago now Circa and her partner Danielle shot with me for Fauna (Patreon Post Here) and afterwards Circa asked if we could a couple quick Into the Wild photos to which I said "absolutely."
I try not to take up too much of any models ...
I think Evelyn is technically actually the second ever shoot for Pulp, but somehow I'm only getting around to posting these images now. At the time I still wasn't sure what Pulp should be. I was definitely missing the years of practice I had with Temperance, honestly I think I still am a little.
I've found the longer a series goes the longer the shoots get. The figuring it out stages are always the hardest to get through...sometimes I don't figure it out. I...
2017-11-05 22:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Mt Shasta is a location that has been defeating me for as long as I have been traveling. Its a town, its a mountain, its a beautiful place, and for whatever reason I can't seem to have a successful shoot with that giant mountain in the background to save my life.
My first attempt was back in 2012 when I was shooting for 50 Models 50 States. I was just stopping to shoot sunset at a reflecting lake. The goal wasn't an outdoor nude because it was February, and temperatur...
I'm digitally packing today. Trying to get my computer files, social media and Patreon ready for my trip to Japan. For two months I shot over our goal, and for me that was enough to get everything booked, and planned for a trip of creating abroad.
Amber, Nicole, Porcelain, Henry and I will be leaving Monday, but I've queued up an entire months worth of work to go live, while I am away shooting, and I'll be trying to jump on Patreon to include a few other updates from Tokyo and...
Moving is change, and I think one of the biggest things that affects our work as artists is environment.
I started The Jungle and its sort of off shoot project Madam because for years I was either in Philly or traveling to other cities where the parks we could shoot in weren't awe inspiring quite in the way I wanted for my outdoor nude projects Into the Wild/We Were Wanderers. Or the parks would be great, but also filled with people making shooting nudes hard/dangerous/ille...
2017-11-01 21:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Where does one begin with something like this? I don't really know. Its weird how falling in love works. I fell in Iceland at first from a far, more of an infatuation. I saw it in photos in 2010 when I was contacted about assisting a couple from Philadelphia that was teaching landscape workshops in large format black and white. I would need to pay my own way, and spend almost an entire month away from Nicole to do it.
I was broke, but I reached o...
2017-10-25 20:48:00 +0000 UTC View Post
I don't even remember when we made it down to Vegas. I think it might have been July, but the past few months have been a whirlwind...I just checked it was August, which is some how more confusing. Vegas was a little bit of a mix up. Nicole thought she had to be there for work, but it turned out she had to be in New York for the same job the following week, so instead of Amber and I lounging around Vegas while Nicole worked all day we decided to make a little bit of a work/r...
2017-10-21 19:52:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Life
When the wheels fall off I'm normally going 90.
21 hours from Marseilles to Seattle. We wake up at 6:30 in the morning after a restless night packing, and laying on mattresses that I think you could compare to a wood floor. I have too much anxiety to travel with any sort of risk, so we show up to the airport two hours early for a flight that gets delayed an hour. Amber is already starting to come down with the flu, and I know I won't be f...
2017-10-11 20:33:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Allie Summers came over a couple weeks ago to go out and shoot some photos in nature with me. I don't remember the exact situation, but Amber wanted to come along, but was either heading to work, or heading to a shoot of her own, so we decided to shoot some Instax in the backyard. I got this new 2017-10-07 23:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
I made it. August and September might have turned into two of the busiest months I've ever had, and October isn't really slowing down. I don't even know how many shoots I did in August, but I know I had to start turning down shoots with people I really wanted to work with. Then I spent all of September traveling for shoots.
Nicole, Amber and I went down to LA for Nicole's birthday the beginning of the month. Then we came home for two days, and flew off to Iceland...
2017-10-07 20:12:16 +0000 UTC View Post
Have I told you guys that the Pacific North West is fucking magical?
We've had three months of straight sunshine in Seattle, which to most people sounds amazing, but honestly for me...not that great. I moved here because I love clouds! So I've sort of switched strategies for location finding to what I normally do in Arizona and Southern California look up swimming holes, and hit them on the week days.
I found this spot called the Green River Gorge Resort online and th...
2017-09-16 22:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Shooting out of series is fun. It keeps me fresh, gives me new challenges, and I think makes me better at the work I normally do. Just like teaching doing something new is basically a puzzle that needs solved.
While I was in Philly Nicole was nice enough to drive me up to Sambalina's new place. They have this gorgeous backyard with a pool, which is not exactly what I'm known for shooting, but it seemed like something fun for me to do. Sambalina doesn't swim, but...
London came out to Seattle last month to shoot her calendar for 2018, and we decided to sneak in a couple shoots just for fun. Its been almost two years since we've worked together I think, so we had a lot of catching up to in terms of work, and just as friends.
Lillias came over for one of our days of shooting too! So we did duo shoots for Pulp and The Jungle! I'm working on convincing London to move to the North West, and honestly one of the best parts about being he...
2017-09-11 00:30:31 +0000 UTC View Post
It helps to have a back up plan.
This was supposed to be a shoot for We Were Wanderers, but when Nicole, Amber, and I arrived at Eagle Falls we realized that it just wasn't going to be our day. The weather was cold, so we had to shoot quickly, but groups of people kept coming, which is unusual for February at this local swimming hole, so we had to keep delaying until we gave up on a nude shoot happening. They were both getting way too cold, and we were losing daylight.
I've been working like crazy behind the scenes here to get Temperance ready to be published as a book. And its really starting to come together. I think I should I have a preview for you all in a couple weeks of the cover, general lay out, and an idea of how I'm going to do a pre-sale to get the book printed.
But in the mean time I want to share one of the last unpublished sets from Temperance with you all. Freshie and Rant came into town right around when I was getting ...
I shoot so much that its amazing what can fall in the cracks of where my memory meets the internet. Two years ago while I was still living in Philly London came down for a couple of days, so that we could plan our adventure in Iceland shooting her calendar for 2016.
Over the two days we spent together we shot for Temperance, planned a two week long road trip in what would become my favorite country, and went out into the woods near by for a quick shoot in the Wissahickon. Y...
Will this be the last time I walk these trails? I doubt it but it could be. I try to treat every trip we do like its the last time we will ever be in these places...even the places I have been hundreds of times.
The truth is I almost always go back, but they are never really the same. A flood comes washes away the fallen trees, the trees moved un-dam the stream, the stream flowing empties the pools we have swam in. I can know the paths like the back of my hand, a...
2017-09-03 19:37:22 +0000 UTC View Post
I hit my goal to take Amber and Nicole to Japan to shoot for We Were Wanderers last month, and I'm really at a loss for words. You all have given me the opportunity to create in ways that I never thought possible. For 6 years in order to travel I slept in the front seat of the car leaned all the way back, I saved money by hunting once or twice a year and doing all of my own butchering, I managed to see every state in the country that way, and once I crossed that off my bucket list I ...
2017-09-02 17:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
If there is one thing I love its find a place that feels hidden in a gigantic city. A path that you can turn down and disappear. In New York that is hard to come by. Winter and Fall are great times to be in Prospect Park...you can find those moments alone there, but this spring I was back east for a wedding and decided to fit in a quick shoot with Evyenia and 2017-08-12 21:30:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Some shoots don't need to be a part of a series. We explore so many places, but we also take moments for ourselves. I went to remember the way the light fell through the window, the day after we hiked out to the beach, the morning after we bounced around Portland strip club hopping.
I find myself always behind on editing because I find myself always wanting to hold a camera the amazing places we travel and the simple places we stay. I look forward just as much some tim...
2017-08-11 22:50:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Did I tell you this is going to be an amazing month to be a Patreon subscriber? Because this is going to be a really awesome month to be a Patreon subscriber. The past couple of months I have been shooting quite a bit...exploring a bunch of new projects, and this month I'm going to be unleashing all of that content I'm finishing up!
Sometimes it takes me a while to find the perfect edit for a group of photos. I finish up an edit, look at it the next day, and wonder wh...
Hello my fantastic Patreon supporters. I'm back in Seattle after a quick get away to the desert to shoot and scout some locations for a possible 2018 workshop! And I'm trying to get back into the sitting in front of the computer editing thing.
My best friend Porcelain has been coming over once or twice a week, so that we can have work days, which is nice because sitting in the basement alo...
2017-08-09 02:41:00 +0000 UTC View Post
For a long time I avoided direct sun light, but lately I've been playing around with it a little more. Letting the late day hard light spill through the windows of our hotel room. Having Amber and Nicole on the road with me has really allowed for me to experiment and push myself as an artist. As much as the pressure of working with new people, and new collaborations can be an amazing tool for growth as an artist it can also be stifling. When I work with new people there i...
2017-08-05 18:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm not known for Black and White photography,
but here I am doing it anyway. Anytime I send off a shoot to a model I have worked with, and I don't include color photos it is with some serious trepidation. I don't want to disappoint the people I work with, but also I think I need to serve the images in a way that looks best. I'm known for color. Temperance, Into the Wild, Ask the Dust all are different versions of a similar palette I try to draw from when I creat...
2017-07-21 22:43:39 +0000 UTC View Post
I try to do one of these public updates at the beginning of each month, but its been a whirlwind of two weeks for Nicole and I. When we first moved out to Seattle we thought that we would be bi-coastal. I was born in Virginia, lived in Pennsylvania for 27 years, Chicago for 6 months...I loved Philly, so of course I'd be coming back frequently...wrong.
Turns out being bi-coastal means flying back east a lot, and flying is really not my thing. I do it, but it is with great relu...
2017-07-15 22:42:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Ok, so this is really mostly a set of Lillias for The Jungle.
Things don't always go according to plan and this day we were actually all planning on shooting Wet Plates, but the ISO of collodion is 1, and it was a very gloomy day. The first plate I shot of Lillias was a 30 second exposure, which came out, but very blue. In addition to the super long exposures something was wrong with either my fix or my stop bath (it was the stop bath.)
I gave up. Each plat...
I think its been a year, maybe more. I'm pretty sure its been more. Columbus was my first time on my 4 month trip last year, and it was probably around April that we pulled up, and shot our set for my semi on hiatus and probably to be renamed and revisited series "Lady."
Reed and I tried to sneak another shoot in real quick that day before the storm chased us back inside, and I think...
2017-07-12 22:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Doing something new is always a challenge. Until I figure it out every shoot feels like a test shoot, and sometimes the series is an endless test. As much as I love how the images for Pulp are turning out I am not really looking for consistency. No two shoots have really been the same. I keep changing my lights, the window light changes, our dreary winter weather has given way to a summer sun, and with that the color and brightness of the light pouring through our front w...
2017-07-09 18:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Last summer I made my into the forests of Philadelphia for what would be my last trip. We had to shoot quickly, but fortunately by now or I guess then I knew the woods like they were home where the light was good and when it would bounce off my favorite pools.
Now I'm probably back home packing up the last of my things to leave Philadelphia for good. This city will always be the first place I felt like I belonged, and really the only place that I think I could move from rural ...
Its been 4 or 5 years since I made my first and until now only trip to our 49th state. But Nicole and I fell in love with Amber, and Amber loves Alaska, and well I love Alaska as well, so we decided that a trip to this magical place over the solstice would be a great opportunity to share something magical with each other, and create something magical to share with you.
Our initial plan of shooting in Skagway and Juneau sort of fell apart due to illness. The truth about travel ...