Monday evening I had the pleasure of joining Josh as he headed up to LA to shoot and direct the second half of the season for A Comicbook Orange (the witty web series all about comics) by the talented Casey McKinnon and her partner Rudy Jahchan. While Josh has been working on various projects with Casey for a while now, this was my first time getting to meet her.  Needless to say, the entire night was a blast and things seemed to flow quite effortlessly with Casey’s animated acting and attentive hosting, and Josh’s focused directing.  I was thoroughly entertained by the entire production, and very much content to offer a helping hand in setting up, snapping photographs, and even making my acting debut as the Hell Boy Right Hand of Doom.  After wrapping the shoot Casey generously brought us to a delicious dinner of Japanese Curry, where I got to meet Rudy for the first time as well.   Rudy was delightfully contemplative the entire night about what Josh and I found to be an awesome idea for a new web series (with an added feature that I cannot go into, because it’s top secret!).  To finish up what was already an incredibly fun evening, Casey and Rudy expanded our horizon by introducing Diddy Riese into our life.  If you have never experienced this establishment, you MUST go to LA right now and try what I consider to be the BEST idea ever: custom ice cream sandwiches!  You choose the cookies, you choose the ice cream and then you EAT IT!  To conclude, I’d like to thank everyone involved (Casey, Rudy, and Josh) for including me in an awesome shoot and a great night–I definitely had a great time.  I’ll leave you with a few photos from the shoot:

Casey’s awesome lamp giving me a fisheye view of the setup

Diligently going over the outline!

Focused director hard at work.

Ready to KICK ASS!

Way back in late April people swarmed the Vegas lifestyle to indulge in two things…maybe three, one for sure for most travelers was NAB. For me NAB was my primary purpose as well but my secondary purpose was to shoot a first time model to help on her way into stardom. The picture on the left was taken on the roof of the Jockey Club which sits on the strip right next to the Bellagio Hotel and has a great view of their water show. We had an “in” at the hotel that gained us access to the roof I cant say who or how so dont go asking around your attempts will be feeble. This shoot on the roof may have been a once in a lifetime kinda thing that may never happen again.

Our shoot started below inside the hotel in a not so traveled part down a random hallway, I did this for a couple of reasons one to get to know the model and have her feel comfortable working with me and two the sun was still pretty high up in the sky it felt like high noon even though it was 4 pm, thirdly for some reason i feel like i need to warm up my photography abilities it takes a few to get into the rhythm/flow of the shoot. BTW All of this is to ease our way into the shoot before we went 13 stories up to the exposed rooftop (i could literally roll a ball off the top there was no safety rail or anything just flat and open). My setup was two flashes, one in my newly acquired westcott Apollo 28″ softbox and they other was either bare, snooted or shoot through umbrella.  All in all it was a great shoot, Michelle is a fantastic model and really looks great in front of the camera which some people cant pull off they look good in person but sometimes that doesnt transistion to in front of the lens but thats not the case with Michelle shes just as good looking in person and i think she would be great for the modeling industry, so if you’re heading to vegas and need a model for a shoot i think she will be available. For the rest of the images check my Flickr