It’s the next best thing to the real Burning Man experience. Definetely had a bit of a flshback to 5 weeks ago. Great party, and as always CODA sound was off the hook.
If you missed my burning man photos, click here:

Now to the DECOMPRESSION PHOTOS—->
TO SEE THE FULL GALLERY CLICK ON AN IMAGE:

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So a few weeks ago I got a referral from Kid Loose’s buddy Bishop. Thanks Ian. Bishop is an aspiring rap artist, who is coming out with an album, “Passion before glory”. His schedule is not as flexible as mine, so we ended up doing the shoot at 10pm at a studio named “The Grill”, in Emeriville. Apparently all the big rappers go through there, so I kind of felt like a cool kid for a few hours after the shoot. Bishop wanted shots in black and white with red coming through. Although, I have shots like that on my site, I am not a big fan of these colorized images, since they are a bit cheesy in my opinion. I decided to go with a more subtle approach. It was actually one of the first times I used my alien bee flash units outside of the studio, but as always it turned into a great learning experience. I had 2 hours to do the entire shoot, in 4 different locations. In the end I was not excited at all about the photos, and rescheduled another shoot with hot hoes and pimp rides. However, after making love to photoshop this evening I really like the results of the shoot, and for what it was I am very pleased. I did promise a make up session with hot girls in hot cars, so its on!

The first shoot was on the red couch in the TV room of the studio:

For this shot I put a red gelled light behind the sofa, with a brolly box light as a main and another light with a 30 degree grid to ad aditional light. Actualy the grid was a result of forgetting a second umbrella, and some of the later creative uses of it were out of necessity. In the post processing I bumped up the red in the back, and created a nice contrasting skin tone.

In the next 3 shots, I use the light with a grid behind Bishop to camera left, and I use the brolly box to the right of me. There was a glass facing the sound engineer’s room, so I had to be careful about the reflections from the lights.

The last shot had a bit of flaring from the light in the back, so it kind of looked like smoke. I liked that look, and added some more smoke. Some more…

At this point I got tired of dealing with the bees, and went back to what I know best, my trusty on-camera 550 strobe…..and this is without the flash all together.

With the 55o. Does Bishop like red or what?

That’s it for now, until the hot chick photoshoot.

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1. DJ Dimitrius Mikonos @ Crash, SF

2. DJ Solomon @ Fahrenheit

3. Trevor Simpson on the Groove Cruise

4. Donald Glaude

5. Jason Knight

6. Scotty Boy

7. DJ Splyce

8. Dirty Hertz

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Ok, so I’ve decided to put up more of my intersting work from the past in order to jumpstart my blog. I did work for Mouth to Mouth after meeting their manager Joe. The shoot was very nerve wrecking, since I’ve never had to manage 5 people in a shoot at the same time. The shoot took place at Bruno’s, a famous venue in San Francisco. I had a makeup artist work on the guys and the shoot took 4 hours total. Initialy I rented studio strobes thinking that I would be able to have a similar style of photos as usual at a club or a bar, which was the location. However, after taking a testshot at home at the lowest setting, I realized that I knew nothing about these lights, since even the lowest setting is 20 times more light than I expected. I went back and rented another Canon 550 flash and two sets of umbrellas. Best decision I could have done. This move allowed me to capture the ambient lights of the club, while having full controll over the light on the subject. Also, the set up is very portable and I have prefered it over studio strobes for on location work. I don’t understand why the strobes have to be so powerfull at the lowest settings! Anyway, I knew the shots I wanted and I did not let a loss of $100 in a bad rental decision slow me down.

One of the guys from the group was feeling a bit anxious, so half the shots where he was supposed to look at the camera he was looking away, or had his eyes closed. Almost every shot we ended up using, I had to transplant this guy’s eyes from other photos. To make a long story short, the post processing was a nightmare.

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