Back From The Dead/New Year's Resolutions

The S.P.O.T.'s been idle for way too long. Too much dust 'n' cobwebs. Grab the Pledge and the Swiffer...ah, that's more like it.

Two Thousand and Ten's turning into an interesting year, photographically, for your old pal Mr. Stiff. More interesting/intriguing/dare-I-say-it scintillating portrait work (two words: pregnant model!). More black and white work (and more ways to create said B&W; plug-ins and filters are fine, but sometimes good ol' Adobe Bridge can give you great results). Maybe I'll even shoot a few more buildings, or boggy marshes, in addition to the usual cheesecake pinups and wrestling shots.

And maybe...just maybe...I'll figure out a way to restart/salvage the aborted high-rez 'n' widescreen MODEL BEHAVIOR DVD THREE project. In the interim, here's a fragment, shot in the style of your typical TV pharmaceutical commercial. While heavily censored, it's still very much Not Safe For Work, so view accordingly:


It's shaping up to be a verrrrrry interesting twelve months. Join me, won'tcha?

"Remains of the Martian Complex" (Daily S.P.O.T. for 5/11/09)

As I may have mentioned elsewhere in this bliggity, I am primarily a people photographer. Never got the Ansel Adams bug to go outdoors and photograph Mother Nature in all her wide-angle splendor. Or slap on the macro lens and get up-close-and-waaaay-too-personal with assorted flora and fauna. Nope, as a rule my subject of choice is the human biped, optimally female, and ideally cute and a bit naughty. But that's not to say I don't have my "exceptions to the rule" moments.

This is one of them.

Driving down Route 1&9 through Linden, NJ in March of '08, I came upon a factory complex that was in the process of being torn down. The scene you see here pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks; it looked as if Godzilla had reached down with one claw and swiped a chunk out of the corner of the building.

And, as (bad) luck would have it, I didn't have my camera along with me. So a week later, en route to photograph another indy wrestling show in lower Joisey, I made a point of detouring through Linden just to take some shots of the building, which luckily hadn't been demolished any further.

The original shot was taken on a sunny, blue-sky day, and while compelling enough in its native state, didn't have the sense of -- for lack of a better word -- "foreboding," or even "menace," that destruction on that scale would have suggested. So into Photoshop the image went. After cropping it to get the Panavision-style layout you see, I duplicated the image onto a second layer, removed all traces of the original blue sky to isolate the building (tedious work, when you consider the density of the structural wreckage), then converted it to a pure monochrome image. For the underlying image, I used Alien Skin's Exposure 2 filters and tweaked the color of the sky to get the blood-tinged hue you see here. (Think Edvard Munch's "The Scream" reimagined for the cover of a Joy Division album...)

For a long time, this image was the wallpaper on my work computer, and the default on my MySpace account, and at the risk of bragging (okay, just a little), it probably got more positive comments from more people than any other picture I've taken. One MySpacer wrote, "So Upsetting. Yet Beautiful." Another, herself a photographer, said, "I would like to see more of your regular photography!" -- knowing full well that the wrestling/pinup/people stuff IS my "regular photography." And when I had an opportunity get a canvas-printed enlargement made, my day-job department director insisted that we hang it on the wall of our office.

Maybe I need to find some more buildings being torn down. Until then, this one'll do...