Mooooo-ving Day!!!

Pack up those bookmarks. Bubble-wrap your RSS and atom feeds. Put on your driving goggles and follow me!

That's right, we're moving!

Here is the New and Improved InessentialStuff Blog.

Click on over. Then bookmark away. And subscribe to the RSS feed. And make liberal use of the “ShareThis” feature. And invite your friends and neighbors over for an InessentialStuff Blog Party. And scatter comments all over the place. (If, when commenting, you make your signature a link back to your own site, I'll drop by for a visit, and I'll be very appreciative).

So let's go have some fun!

KnottyMuse & Glamarita

Lindsi and Ronnie are clothes designers in the area. They wanted to do a fashion shoot to showcase some of their creations, and I was honored when they called upon me. We decided to shoot in an alley and on the beautiful old loading dock of the Barrister Winery, whose owners were so kind and interested in what we were doing, that they invited us to take some pictures down among the barrels in the wine cellar.

The results of the photoshoot are in this gallery. However, you should swing by Lindsi's store, The KnottyMuse, and Ronnie's Store, Glamarita, and check out their clothes there. And maybe buy and thing or two while you're at it.

Industrial Ruins

Christalle and I wanted to do a shoot that was dark and gritty. And what could be darker and grittier than an abandoned industrial building. So we shot amid the industrial decay.

Octavier in an Alley

I wanted to do a shoot in an alley, and Octavier seemed like the perfect model for the task. His blonde hair and blue eyes and spiffy dress would contrast nicely, I thought, with the graffiti and bricks in the alley. We shot in the cold--very cold. We would have shot longer, but my fingers were too numb to work the camera. So we called it a short, but productive, day.

A Shoot in a Tub

I did another shoot with Poison Ivy, whom I had worked at the end of last summer. We did a bit of studio work, but mostly shot in a tiny bathroom, featuring a very cool, and very large, Victorian clawfoot bathtub. As a word of warning, the shoot is a bit, well, steamy.

DeviantArt

Sorry I haven't posted here in a while. I was finally persuaded to set up an account at deviantArt (which is a great place for photographers, painters, collagers, digital manipulators, artists of any time to showcase their work). It's addictive fun. My account there is inessentialStuff . Drop by and see what I've been doing there, or, better yet, join the community and show off your own stuff.

Anyway, I'll be posting some galleries here later this week, so stay tuned.

Marcus (and Cars) at Christmas

Here's a little gallery of snapshot-y pictures of Marcus at Christmas, plus a few details from a car museum we visited during the holidays. (Click on the "Play" button at the bottom for a slideshow.)

Marcus in the Snow

Marcus received, from his Grandma and Grandpa Brunt, a cool, Finnish-looking woolen sweater. I love it, and, amazingly, he is happy to wear it (he usually eschews clothing that would keep him warm during the winter). When it started to snow the other day, I thought it would be cool to get some pictures of him in his Scandinavian sweater in the snow. My only instructions: 1) please don't make silly faces, and 2) please stand still. Or, as Ringo used to sing, all he had to do was, "act naturally." Ummm. You can be the judge of how it went.

Kylie Again

Kylie and I did another shoot a while back, and I finally have the images ready. We were aiming for a sensual, detail-oriented, shallow depth-of-field, black-and-white, natural-light sort of feel.

She was, as before, great to work with. She claimed it was the easiest shoot she had ever done, in that she nearly took a nap; but she was being kind. In truth, she was very patient as we took several minutes to set up a shoot, only to have me say, "Hmmm, looks good, but let's do it in the opposite direction", and she'd flip over and set up the shot again.

We also couldn't decide if we should do white (undies) on black (sheets) or white on white or black on white or black on black. So we did them all. Thus, a fairly long gallery. If you press the little "Play" button at the bottom, you can see it as a slideshow.

Snowflakes

We've had a good bit of snow in Spokane lately. Last winter, I enjoyed going out in the snow and shooting away. This year, I thought I'd try something different and try to photograph the snow in action--that is, falling. It's not easy. The snow was thick and fast. I tried various things, including manual focusing on an area between a tree across the street and where I was standing, figuring that surely a snowflake would be in focus. I'm not sure the experiments were an unqualified success, but they are kind of interesting, if you want to take a peek.