a few months back i had a shoot that took place at wally’s barbershop in alta dena, california. ricky, above, is wally’s son, and helps to manage the shop. he wasn’t supposed to be our subject. we were actually there to photograph a doctor. it was a story about community health outreach being done in barbershops in an effort to educate people about high blood pressure and hypertension. it was a good story, a worthwhile story, about something that was intended to help people who normally wouldn’t seek help themselves.

the picture we were there to make was very different from this one, but i kept liking this great corner of the shop. and ricky, there to help us out on a day when the barbershop was normally closed, just fit so well there. once the job was done and the doctor was happy and off to lunch, ricky let us stay a bit longer and take his portrait. he even moved his deer head trophy to the corner for us. ricky killed the deer himself, in the mountains above alta dena, with a crossbow. as much as i hate the idea of hunting for myself, the thought of ricky dressed in camouflage hiking through the mountains with a crossbow. . . that’s pretty badass. that’s our next picture, for sure.

sometimes you find great people just hanging around the edges of photo shoots. i try to take advantage of this, and their kindnesses, whenever i can. i’ve done lots of pictures of security guards and janitors and executive assistants and passerby who had nothing to do with the assignment but just looked great and were curious enough to participate. often that turns around a day. it reminds me, sometimes, how great it feels to make a picture of someone with no ulterior motive, no intended purpose, no point other than to share something with a person who normally never gets to have that kind of experience. i am very grateful to them all.

thanks, ricky.

ramping up to a new website design i’ve been spending some time this week searching through old archives for things i might’ve overlooked before. the other day i came across this out-take of flavor flav from 2004. originally shot for a short-lived and well-intentioned publication called “pink and the almighty”, at the time i had printed only close ups of flav. the shoot took place on the sunset strip, in an alley behind one of the clubs where flav was performing that night. somehow he arrived almost two hours late, and with an entourage of bodyguards and a video crew following him around. the bodyguards didn’t seem especially mirthful, so i refrained from asking how it was that a guy who perpetually wears a two foot clock around his neck could end up being late to everything. maybe he’s looking at the time upside down.

in addition to being late, flav also forgot to wear a belt. as such he had to hold his pants up with one hand or they’d fall down around his ankles. a bodyguard who was three times my size firmly implied that i should only shoot flav from the waist up so nobody would see that he was holding up his own pants. of course, from that point on all i wanted was a photo of flav holding up his pants.

most of what i got instead was flav being. . . well, flavor flav. campy, over the top, mugging for the camera, playing the role of the good natured hip hop buffoon. looking back over the take the other day, though, i found this shot from the very beginning of the session and there was just something so different about it, something peaceful and quiet and unlike anything else i saw out of flav that day. thankfully none of the bouncers saw me get a wide shot.

lately most of the things i do that seem to work out do so in no small part because of the influence, assistance and efforts of paul. for nearly every picture i publish there’s a similar shot with paul in it, standing in place of the final subject. here are a collection of those, from recent shoots and long misplaced scraps of pixels on distant corners of old hard drives.

today is paul’s birthday, so this post is in honor of all those things that happen behind the scenes. it is very likely he will be horrified by these, so in that case i apologize in advance. thanks, paul, for always making me seem like i know what i’m doing.

visit cpl. bennett here.

in many photo shoots there exists a moment when it becomes possible to drastically shift the whole dynamic, tone and message of the picture. sometimes this shift happens in a decidedly weird or silly direction. then again, i’m a big believer in the idea that you can do very absurd things in photographs just so long as you play it totally straight.

i don’t generally like smiling pictures. you may have already noticed this by now. that is to say, i don’t like it when people smile because they’re being photographed. at it’s very best that’s disingenuous. people are usually not particularly happy about being in a picture. at it’s worst it’s just plain insincere. i always tell my subjects that they are absolutely free to smile in my pictures if the smiles are real – if something is funny, let’s say. very often things are funny, i’d like to think my subjects usually end up enjoying our sessions, though at the end i find that the serious pictures resonate with me much more. perhaps this has to do with my inherent cynicism or pessimism. that’s possible. perhaps it’s got something to do with people often grinning like idiots. hard to say.

anyway, we were photographing brandon for a serious publication, for a serious article; about lawyers who had been laid off of their jobs. brandon was recently let go from his firm and instead of going after a new law job he decided to take his legal talents into the music industry as artist management and promotion. the idea was to photograph him at home (where he conducted most of his new work) and see what life was like for the out-of-work lawyer.

once we were partway through the first set up i happened to notice that on the top of his bookshelf brandon had a plastic optimus prime robot helmet. sometimes you just have to ask. i mean, really. you have to ask. you’ve got nothing to lose. so i asked. and brandon said yes. he put the robot helmet on and got back into the same shot, and everything changed. the helmet even had a voice modulator so that when he talked it sounded like a cool plastic robot voice.

paul and i both knew that the magazine was highly unlikely to ever use these pictures. even brandon knew they were unlikely to be published. maybe that’s why he was so agreeable. but damn if that didn’t make the day a whole lot more special than i thought it was going to be when i loaded up the car in the morning. at the very least i thought the photo editor would have a chuckle going through the take.

the funny thing is brandon said he loved wearing the robot helmet. why, you ask? he said:

“i can smile in here, and you can’t tell.”

and just to reassure any current or future clients who may be thinking of hiring me (you’re saints, each and every one of you. . .) don’t worry: i did variations without the robot helmet, too. ultimately one of these were published, as the picture was just one of many in a larger story, and for some totally unexplainable reasons nobody else was wearing a plastic optimus prime mask on their heads. i know, hard to believe.

a couple weeks after these pictures were taken i was at a target and i saw a whole display with about two dozen optimus prime robot helmets. they were $30. i have to tell you, in all honesty, i stopped in front of that display for a very long time and thought long and hard about buying one just to keep in the light case. i mean, you never can tell.

my thanks to the indefatigable maggie for continually hiring me despite silly things like this. you’re a saint among saints, indeed.

ethan says you can’t get a good B&W conversion out of a digital camera. i disagree. this is an out-take from a recent corporate shoot, something that was never meant to be in black & white, but i couldn’t resist tinkering a bit. it’ll likely never see the light of day in this version, aside from here. so, there you go, ethan. i’m sure you’ll still disagree, but i tried.

thanks to seth, and cpl. bennett.