Jimmy's Been a Busy Boy

Wow! I've been busier this past month than I have been in any month in the past few years! Leastwise, I don't recall a month as busy as this for quite some time. And to finish June out, I'm booked every day till the first. Unfortunately, I've been kinda flaky updating the blog. Interestingly, I don't have a single gig lined up after the 1rst. What's with that? Oh well. I'm sure that will change in the next week or so. Or, maybe not.

I've been shooting at a variety of locations, each with their own unique challenges. For a couple of days, for instance, we were at a location house way up in Topanga Canyon. Topanga, BTW, is a small burg nestled in the Santa Monica mountains between California's San Fernando Valley and the beach community of Malibu. The home that served as our location was built on a steep hillside half-way down a gorge. It's all steps and stairs, both wooden and masonry, that take you down to the house from the roadside. One hundred and twelve steps to be exact! One hundred and twelve steps down and 112 steps back up to the top! As you might guess, I decided to minimize the amount of gear I took down there with me-- All I packed on my back was my backpack camera bag containing camera bodies, glass, light meter, and other accessories, and a couple of collapsible reflectors. I photographed all the models outside using ambient daylight and reflected sunlight. That presented a number of lighting challenges since being in a steep gorge meant the available direct sunlight (needed for the reflectors) was mostly available in the middle parts of the days-- Not my usual preferred time of day to be shooting pretty girl photographs.

We also spent a few days in Hollywood at a gay men's sex club. It was a fairly bizarre location and, believe it or not, really didn't offer up much in terms of interesting shooting environments.Go figure, right? Everything inside was painted black: The walls, ceilings, furniture, hell, the floors were even black. Fortunately, the A/C worked as we were shooting there during the fairly intense heatwave we've experienced in Southern California this past week.

Image at the top is Sascha. I opted for a B&W treatment for no particular reason. (Utilizing the simple, Channel Mixer, technique; not much other processing than that.) Sascha is posing in a very narrow passageway just outside one of the many Glory Hole booths. If you don't know what a Glory Hole is, maybe it's because what you don't know is what you don't want to know. Or, maybe you would like to know. If so, try Googling it. It's not my job to explain such things to people.

I captured Sascha with my Canon 5D w/ 28-135 IS USM, ISO 100, f/5.6 @ 60th. My mainlight was modified with a 36" transluscent Larson Reflectasol. I mounted it in front of a 500ws monolight as a shoot-thru diffuser. I also set a couple of small, white, shoot-thru umbrellas up high and behind the model for highlights. It was very cramped shooting in there and light placement was extremely limited. MUA was Melissa.