Misha and His Girls

This is my friend Misha.  I asked him a few years ago to go out and help me practice with some natural, direct light photography.  We headed down to the levee that keeps the Mississippi from flooding downtown St. Louis.  The graffiti wall down there is spectacular, I highly recommend going to see it.  Unfortunately, much of the art has been tagged over with much lower quality work but there are still a few gems to find down there.

This is one of my favorite pieces, with the stencil of two women in pink against the blue background.  the colors in this shot really shoot off of the image which is one of my favorite things to do.  His shirt has been made fun of by a lot of our friends but for this image, the orange and bright red work great.  There are lots of colors here and he is a very colorful guy.

This location is a different angle of the same room that contains the giant, red wheel.  It's part of the Armour Meat Packing plant (which I talk about here).  I love the color scheme that the room has and the state of disarray of the environment makes for an interesting story in my mind.  What mad science is going on in the far corners of the building?

I really like the high contrast with all of the intricate lines and shapes and even colors in the image. It's personally one of my favorite photos of the place.

Big Red Truck and HeadStone Roses

A dear friend of mine for many years had been suffering from a migraine.  Yes, that's right, a single headache that lasted for multiple years and caused all sorts of damage to this poor woman's life.  She called me one day to ask if I would be willing to drive with her to Springfield, stay overnight and then drive her home.  She was going to get a medical procedure that would hopefully help relieve the pain she'd suffered for so long.

We were driving back from the trip and saw a house on the side of the highway with some abandoned vehicles in front.  So I asked my friend and she agreed:  we should go check it out!  We got off the highway immediately and drove over to the building.  It looked like a house but because of the interior and the trash we found, we assumed it had to have been some kind of business or municipal building.

I got a couple of good shots of the vehicles, my favorite being below.

There was a cemetary next door which we hadn't noticed on the highway so we went over there to see what was up.  Plenty of small, mildly interesting headstones but not a lot worthy of photographing.  But something about the headstone above really resonated with me.  I loved the color contrast between the cloth roses and the polished granite headstone. 

Update on The Motive - Mrs. White

Thank you everyone so far for your support on this project.  We've still got a long way to go but as promised, since we reached the $500 mark, here is the first photo to be released publicly from The Motive.

It took me a long time to find the right model and a hallway that would work for my purposes.  The hallway was probably the hardest part though you wouldn't think that would be difficult.  I did shoot this show on a shoestring budget, though, and didn't want to rent locations if I could get out of it.

That being said, my friend Nicole was kind enough to let us use her upstairs hallway to shoot the photos for Mrs. White.  I wasn't sure if it would work but I'm pretty pleased with the result.  I wanted the photos to have a simplicity about them, so that it was easy to see the important parts of the art without a lot of distracting excess all over the place.  I would have loved to shoot this show in an old Victorian Mansion but didn't have one available.

If we can make the next goal of $1,000 I'll share another character from the shoot.  Whoever is the donor who puts us over the top will get to pick which of the five remaining characters to see!  Thanks again for your support and I am really looking forward to seeing where this goes from here!

The Motive

I'm Sean M Posey, and I love to take crazy pictures. Right now, I am contemplating six dastardly murders, but to make this project possible, I need your help.

If you choose to support me, you won’t be asked to move any bodies. You won’t be charged as an accessory to murder. Instead, you’ll help me launch a photography show about murderers, their psychology, and our perceptions of these two things.

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At first glance, "THE MOTIVE" could easily be dismissed as a gimmick, using shock and visual cliches to elicit a response from the viewer.  But the intent of these pieces is actually to challenge our societal views on art, pop media, psychology, and crime.

Unlike other art shows, there is a motive for viewing these photographs, aside from appreciating their particular merits as art.  I want viewers to think about the people in the photographs, fictional though they may be, and use that as a mirror to consider them as real people and how they would behave.

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So go check out the video I shot in the middle of the night and tell anyone you think might find it interesting!

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-motive/x/3817548

Taylor

   

This is my friend Taylor.  She's an absolutely beautiful young woman with a beautiful smile and a fantastic laugh.  It didn't take me long to convince her to let me shoot some pictures of her so I tried my best to make them a little unusual but without losing anything significant in the process.

The day I shot the right and left photos, I was using a new camera body that I hadn't had very long and accidentally set the ISO to AUTO.  That means whenever I was trying to take a photo with the flash, the camera would adjust the ISO settings to shoot in the natural light and THEN when the flash went off, it was entirely too white and too blown out to use the work.  So I turned the flash off and shot using the natural light.

What I didn't know at the time was that my lens was also BROKEN and that's why everything has a slightly soft edge to it.  The lens wasn't able to focus correctly and so the shots came out just a tad bit soft and blurry.  But I don't mind.  In the picture on the far right I think it works with the colors and the background and such.  I'll toss a few more photographs of Taylor up here a few more posts from now.