What’s up, Hive? Still late, but slightly earlier than usual. I just finished Hellraiser III for those keeping track on my horror movie streak with @guthrie. Man, what a bad film. We started later than I would have liked so we’re ending later than I expected. I have to try and get this kid back on a normal sleep schedule now that spring break is over. I’m looking forward to a quiet easter tomorrow with him. Our late nights naturally give way to late mornings but once I’m up, I’ll be working on a personal project that I’ve been building towards for several weeks. More on that soon. I keep saying I need to do a freewrite. Maybe tomorrow night will be the night to catch you all up.

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In the meantime, I do these occasional dark pinup à la carte’s where I share some of my favorites and classics. This one begins with the shot that started it all — seriously. I’d just done through a terrible break up in 2011. I felt like the world was ending. @guthrie was just born and I’d been narrowly awarded custody of him. My ex attributed all my photography success to her creativity and in an effort to prove her wrong, I booked my first trip to Los Angeles and shot with a well known pinup model named Doris Mayday. I spent my last $400 on a fancy hotel in Hollywood and this shot kicked off what would become a decade plus of the dark pinup genre that I’d become known for.

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Picking up on from there, fast forwarding to 2015, this was my first time shooting with Gia Genevieve. Gia exploded that year. She was just on the cover of Playboy magazine photographed by Ellen Von Unwerth, my favorite photographer of all time. I was so nervous. She’d moved to New York City from LA and I was feeling the imposter syndrome big time. Also, another interesting note; this was my first shoot with the Nikon D750 camera. It was a huge step up for me. @tarotbyfergus actually owns the D7000 which the previous photos of Doris Mayday was taken with. All in all, I got a classic from this session.

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Lastly, this photo of my friend Lisa Del Toro. We shot this in 2018 in what would be the scariest photography related situation of my life. She booked this insane AirBnB with a bizarre, “house”, in the middle of Death Valley. It took two hours to get to an was owned by a gypsy polygamist cult leader [seriously]. He built the entire place out of scraps he’d collected from Vegas. He was extremely hostile when he found out we were leaving out of the shoot, especially insistent that Lisa, “…stay here with him and his wives.”. Five alarm red flag situation and we almost ran out of gas on the way back. I’ll never forget this shoot.