The art director and I decided on a desaturated, sepia-ish color palette. One of our inspirations for this was the movie Letters From Iwo Jima, which was filmed in a faded cinematographic style…like looking through old photos found in an attic. Our rendering was a little bit different, but nonetheless captured a bit of that faded timelessness. A pragmatic reason we decided to go in that direction was that the saturated summery colors of our location—the bright green fields of grass, the wildflowers—weren’t quite “fall” looking enough. Some deft tweaking in Photoshop took care of that quite nicely.

Fall Fashions for Denver Life Magazine is a post from: Aim For The Eyes

We were fortunate to have at our disposal the awesomely appointed space at Cluster Studios, which happens to be quite conveniently owned by my roommate. Their cyclorama was painted chroma-key green and it wasn’t feasible to repaint it in time for the shoot…so even though I was using a seamless paper background, I had to block off all the green with white flats to prevent any zombie-tone color casts appearing on the models’ skin or clothes.

One cool amenity we had on the shoot was a 52-inch high-definition television surrounded by couches, which I could plug my laptop directly into, so we could all review the images right away and in comfort.

While I tweaked the lighting, I pulled Nicole (in the pink dress on the right) away from the makeup chair to stand in for test shots, and I gotta tell you, she loved seeing herself so large in a rumpled sweatshirt and her hair in curlers.

Oh, and I can’t forget the other cool amenity, which was the blasting PA speaker setup…which again, I plugged directly into my laptop with my 40,000-song iTunes collection. I love being able to play whatever a model likes to shoot to! And it’s all my music, so I’m cool with whatever she chooses….

Autumn Teneyl Catalog Shoot is a post from: Aim For The Eyes

Petite redhead princess Michelle Irene was just what I needed…like all of my favorite models, she has multiple personas rolled into one. I first photographed Michelle last summer, shooting a wonderful series of nudes (which I should post, shouldn’t I?). With not an inhibited bone in her body, her attitude morphs continually from coquettish to bitchy to vulnerable to seductive, like a Swiss-army knife of feminine charms.

This is in fact, the first shoot to happen in my new studio! My able assistant, model/photographer/painter Sara Ford, did the hair and makeup. We took full opportunity to stretch creatively, especially towards the end, when we got crazy with lighting and props.

One of my favorite lighting techniques is to mix various types of light sources…continuous with strobe, tungsten with daylight, etc. Some of the images in the black bikini use this mixed lighting idea. Check the shot here, where she’s standing and grabbing her head…there’s a strobe in a large soft box coming in from the left, and a fluorescent bulb in a 12″ reflector on the other side.

Postage Stamps and Dental Floss is a post from: Aim For The Eyes

Industrial Debutante is a post from: Aim For The Eyes