I was a bit premature in my longing for spring and the garden because yesterday we had a terrible storm blow through Missoula and about shut the city down.  We ended up pulling all our UPS drivers in early because it was so bad, something I have never seen us do in all the time I have worked there.

Writing the blog this year, somehow, seems easier.  It flows easier as I feel I am better able to connect with my thoughts.  Those first blogs were a labor and often took hours to write and edit.  But I did not have much writing experience so I mostly just wrote what came into my head.  I am beginning to systematically rework this site.  I’ve been shutting down galleries that have broken links.  A while back I reorganized the structure of it and so if you find a link that goes nowhere, not to worry it should be fixed soon.  I am also going through my catalogs of images, cleaning up and reorganizing some of them to create new galleries.  I have a bunch of new models and many images that have never been shown and will try to add new ones each week.

Yesterday I added Seth; these are some of the latest images I have worked on.  Seth had a very hard angular body and expression and I designed the light to reflect his personality.  I particular love the lighting on this series.  The light sources are very narrow and sharp, with a tight focus.  In fact it was so tight I had a hard time keeping him in the channel of light I created.  In many ways I think these are some of the most exciting images because they have a very commercial feel to them.  Seth had a great deal of modeling experience and was easy to direct.  The lighting concept was to use one very strong key light coming in from a higher angle from the left.  I did add a little bit of fill light and slight sculpting from the right, but it is so subtle that it’s barely perceptible.  You will see it more so in some of the later images then the first.  The black and white images in this series where from a 2^nd shoot several months later.  I know these would be black and white and lit Seth more bringing softer lights in from both sides to accentuate more the textures of his skin and torso.  I also envisioned these images would undergo some processing in the conversion to black and white or desaturation.  I tend to not do a lot of processing with my images, but I also knew these would look a little better if I flattened the tonal curves just a bit.  I see my subjects as lighting test and experiments and constantly and tweaking and adjusting the lighting and the subject during the shoot.