Swamped with work lately, that’s a good thing! Been working late evenings and spare moments here and there on this site, tying to give it more of a shape and focus. I finally perfected the galleries and they are becoming closer to what I originally intended. One is now completed: Chad. I have reworked many of the images for the Chad Gallery and have removed some images and added many more images. I had only done four shoots with Chad and there are literally thousands of really great images of him. The first part of the gallery was the tests we did when we first met. The 2nd set was refining the light and the nudes in front of the mirror. The 3rd are the black and whites of him on the draped sofa. The 4th was the dirt and grim where I dirtied him up with the shower and dressing sequence comes out of him cleaning up after that shoot. It’s hard to narrow them down to just a few. Each of these shoots could lend themselves to an individual gallery. I tend to hate photographers that put every image on line and it literally takes forever to work through a portfolio and typically most of the images are similar or the same. I think it would be easier to be a painter, where you have one vision that become the quintessential essence of what you want to create and can focus on just it. Photography lends it self to so many variations, becoming difficult to sometimes separate out the original concept. This perhaps lends the media itself more toward a collective of images with their own themes and variations. I used the make the first 2 cuts of the images and discard all the ones I had rejected, but now going back and looking through this collection I am seeing and pulling out images I had originally rejected. I notice how my sense of aesthetics has changed since that first cut. Now I see images that are more powerful in what was originally rejected. I worked on this gallery originally a year ago when I began the project and I am surprised how I am still in love with the images.
I did run into Chad recently, he has a completely new look and his body has changed so much. Perhaps it’s time for another shoot and an addition to this collection.