A little while back I had a studio shoot at 5th & Sunset Studios with a celebrity for a popular magazine. You just never know what you’re gonna get on celebrity shoots… sometimes it’s an all around lovely experience….. and other times it’s….. well, let’s just say it can be a challenge.

After it was over we had a couple hours of studio time left so we decided it would be nice to shoot some photos just for fun…. and as a way to get the previous experience off our minds!  As it turned out, one of my favorite models, Danielle Donn from Nous Model Management, just happened to be in the studio next door at a casting.  What luck!  She was kind enough to spend time with us just having some fun, and these photos are the result.

It was a fantastic way to end the day and really made everyone on the crew feel pumped up about our jobs!

My fan holder and tattooed hand model was the amazing hair stylist Daven Mayeda.

As an added bonus, Fitness Magazine ended up using a photo from the shoot to illustrate one of their articles.

Here are some still pics from a recent motion shoot I did. It’s going to take a little while longer to finish editing the video but thought I would post these stills in the meantime. Enjoy

Here is a little Behind the Scenes video that Wet Seal made from our most recent shoot.

I’ve always wanted to do one of these portfolio videos….  but now I don’t have to because Wonderful Machine was kind enough to do it for me!  Check it out below.  This is actually an older version of my portfolio, but the format is the same.  Essentially an 11×17 coffee table book printed on a digital press and bound with thick “lay flat” pages.  I get them done over at Paperchase Press through their Portfolio Program.

Here is a test I did last week, a little fun before the 4th of July weekend!

My friend Scott Chrisman, a talented Director of Photography here in Los Angeles, shot a really nice behind the scenes video of a recent shoot I did with Wet Seal, check it out below.  And visit Scott’s site at http://scottobotomus.virb.com

A few days ago I posted some images from a recent editorial shoot that had clean and classic studio lighting.  Here are some unretouched images from the light test I did the morning of that shoot to show the client a completely different direction we could take it.  The client chose to go for the more classic lighting which totally makes sense because that is their market.  But it was great they gave us the opportunity to play around a little and show them some other options.

My number one goal on a job is to make the client happy……  that means that sometimes I don’t get to shoot each job exactly the way I want. It’s  just the reality of being a working photographer.  But it’s fun to play around a bit when given the opportunity.  After all, deep down we are all artists in the photography world no matter how commercial our work is, so having the opportunity to push the creativity is really satisfying.

That is why one of the best ways to develop as a photographer is by doing as many shoots just for yourself as possible. Test, test, test!  Nick Onken wrote a great post about this subject on his ShopTalk blog.  He calls it Always Be Shooting, or his ABS Philosophy.  Also here is a great interview with Nick from Rob over at aphotoeditor.com I definitely need to adhere to this philosophy a little better, it’s tough to follow when you are busy with jobs.  But more than ever it’s really the way to develop your career.

For you techies, the look in these images was created by using a mix of strobe and tungsten hot lights with a slow shutter speed.  We were probably shooting around a 2 second shutter speed which captured the ghosted movement of the model in the tungsten lights, and then we would manually pop the strobes once or twice during that exposure to get that clearly frozen image.