My Photography Will Change Your Life: April 2011

Video: Thought it would be nice to share clips of the day.

Everyday I'd wake up.
Peek out the window shades.
And I'd just want to cry, cause it looked like a living hell outside for the past ten years here in Erie, PA.
These winters are getting old, ha.

BUT THEN!!!

This past Thursday reminded me why people don't throw themselves down large flights of stairs before they get up to go to work all day.

The sun, ALAS!

So what did I do???
I threw a bunch of junk in the back of my car, grabbed a model, and hit up the country roads to arrive at my destination.

In this shoot I wanted to "Re-Shoot" (with Mike Herget) an old concept I did with my relocated model, Michael O'brien, that I tried back in May 2006. I absolutely refined everything about it. Photographed it in color, and created a magazine cover story out of it for my edgier magazine portfolio.

Cover: I cropped him from the knees up leaving a portion of brick above his head for the header name banner. I also made room for featured articles from his left to right side. But the very most important thing to capture for a cover of a magazine featuring a man or a woman is their sexual presence. It's not about his shirt being unbuttoned, its how he wears his shirt unbuttoned. It's not about him standing their, its how I help him carry himself through the shoot. I also shot him against brick to make it an easier deselection for post production (had it been needed).

Inside Lead: Based off the concept I once read on a coffee cup, "Don't talk to me before I've finished my first cup of coffee." Can you feel the rage?!?! But its not even about that at all either hahah. Its about having fun and taking things out of context. Look at any given parallel in day to day life. If it makes your brain think, comes off weird or funny, it'll make a great concept if you keep at it.

Cover Story Outro: This is all just a simple formula I've noticed over the years. Cover = sex appeal / 1st feature spread = Humor / 2nd feature pic = sex appeal in most all cases. ...So here we are with this beat up, rustic, broken glass window image. Dude's always look cooler leaning up against broken crap. Proven fact. But, yeah in most instances sex appeal will be the outro, usually due to running out of page space throughout the magazine and are unable to fit an image in like below.

Extra Page Content: This little guy, and like several others that day I took of him, are a great example of "Useful filler." Maybe the article's word count was reduced, so we take this guy and throw him in on a text page but an 1/8th of the pages actual size. Or even better! Toss him in somewhere in the table of contents to surprise and remind you. That always works too.

Here's some extra ones I took and set a side.

I'm personally a huge fan of feature photos that are wild and funny.

It's like pouring my personality out onto a page.

woah. ...That felt artistic.

eeewww. I hope I don't start wearing scarfs and creating sick beats that aren't so sick. hahah.

Well hey, I'm going to be pushing out tons of photographs like this with several different models all summer, so stay tuned cuties.

I was standing out front of the locked doors to enter Sherlocks waiting for a band member of Ivera, a new up and coming Erie, PA band to let me, my fog machine, and equipment inside to photograph their first live performance. I was greeted by Jesse Erickson (bassist) and led to the stage where I set up shop.

After some informal introductions, and some observing I got to know the other four band members: Brandon Colao (vocals), Eric Buman (guitar), Brian Goganour (drums), and Brendan Burbules (guitar). And before I knew it the place was packed and their band was up on stage blast’n some impressive heavy tunes my way, get’n all gnarly and nasty on stage. Which was really awesome for me.

Over all their live sound was excellent, they had an interesting set of songs that set the mood, picked you up, and throw it down, but if you’d like to hear their studio recordings for yourself you can at: purevolume.com/ivera

Below is my photo edit from that show and some contributed video from a friend.

Get sick!