This was my first Christmas away form home. I went to my girlfriend’s home town in Maryland and I saw a part of the US I had never seen before… well I HAVE seen the Amish in Pennsylvania, but that was a long time ago.

For this trip I brought my old YashicaMat, and some black and white film. The highlight of the photographic journey was having a photo shoot with Abe Lincoln. I got a great many looks with the old TLR camera, some older gentlemen nodding approvingly, young women who are photo enthusiasts shooting me a smile, younger men with expensive DSLRs either giving me a look of curiosity or snootiness and so forth.

Abe was shot with TX 400 since it was so dark in there and i had no tripod. The rest was just with plain old TMAX 100. Regrettably, after my shoot with Abe, the camera developed a severe problem - the focusing knob no longer functioned. Hopefully I can get it repaired… or maybe I’ll start eyeing another medium format camera…

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Tired of the digital world, I plopped a roll of Fuji Reala 100 in an old Minolta SLR. From there I set out to take some photos on a quiet Friday afternoon on the day after Thanksgiving 2006. Here are some shots.

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The Book I Illustrated

I met a man named Steve on the internet. We had a mutual appreciation of the BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who, and that led him to see my online portfolio at formerairline.com, then a much different and less interactive site.

In 2005 I decided to give the UK a try, as you may have seen by the pictures. And Steve was there to help me take a stab at the world of illustration in London. Well, it didn’t take, and a month after my move to  London I was getting ready to go to sunny Southern California. But I digress.

However the business relationship had been established and my skills still in demand with my UK contact. In 2006 I started work on his book TV Cream Toys. He doing the hard bit of adding the photos and content, and me doing an also hard bit of doing the illustrations. I’ll be adding more images of the work I did for this book in coming posts. It’s the first real book I’ve been a part of, and maybe the widest audience my book has ever had. I’ve very proud of it, and you should definitely buy a copy from Amazon.co.uk.

I’ll by uploading my work from the book regularly.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/TV-Creams-Toys-Presents-Pestered/dp/1905548273

Here’s a shot from Saturday night, more more accurately… Sunday morning. I suppose this is what blogging is all about, updating all the new things that go on in your life and so on and so forth. I just happened to like how this shot turned out. After a night of Karaoke in Los Angles’ Little Tokyo, the ladies take a break underneath a giant plastic Hello Kitty sign.

1/85, Æ’3.5, iso 800, 50mm, Canon 40D

I think August of 2006 is when I started to come into my own as a photographer. Before then I was sort of in the doldrums, nothing was inspiring me despite having better equipment. But at The Knitting Factory on August 19th 2006, things started to come together with the help of the Clientele.

I had a substandard strobe (which was not so much bad as it was difficult to use) and a lens I didn’t particularly care for. Rather than give up on both, I made the most out of it and made the two mesh in a dark situation. I set the camera for a long exposure, set the strobe for a flash and after it went off I painted the picture plane with the stage lights. It gave the photos the energy that was true to the show itself.

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