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.

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.

Hera and the Gazing Pool

This is my friend Nuria.  She was engaged to be married in less than a month when I took this photo.  She suddenly decided one day that she didn't want to marry her fiance' and she didn't want to waste the dress entirely, so she asked if I'd be willing to shoot her in it.  Let's see, beautiful woman, wedding dress, loose ideas of public behavior?...  yes please!

We went exploring down near some locations that I wanted to get her portrait in with the dress.  We went to a fairly nice part of the city and took some photos on the steps of some churches, in front of a couple of huge old houses and generally made a nuisance of ourselves while having a fantastic time.

This location is the courtyard for a church that has been vacant for quite some time.  I saw the pool and simply had to try and take some photographs with it.  She wandered over and we started shooting away.  Eventually, towards the end of the shoot, I asked her to look down into the basin as if it were a divining pool and this is the result of that pose.

After four years I can look at my other work and see how it has transitioned and gotten better.  But this photo still stands out as one of my favorites.  I love the way the colors are all very primary and distinct from one another, as well as all the textures too (the dress, the brick, the inside of the pool, her skin, the veil).  Since I like to think in terms of comic books and larger than life characters, looking at Nuria like this makes me think of Hera, Zeus' wife from Greek mythology.  I like to imagine she is spying on him right now, watching his philandering from a safe distance and plotting her revenge.