Freekmagnet is a collection of black and white images I published as a book of the same name. The images were mostly staged costume portraits arranged as tableaux with mythological, fictional and pop culture references. Some of them were constructions of my own using found objects. The props and stare structures I made and constructed myself, and the backgrounds were painted by friends. The models were friends and various acquaintances I’d met. I worked on the series for about 2 or 3 years and collected them into the book.

At the time, small printing set ups the produced one-off books were still prohibitively expensive, and the print quality was not all that. Freekmagnet was printed on an inkjet printer and spiral bound with the help of my friend at [link] . We printed up 40 initial copies and all of them sold. I hosted a book release party at the Auto 3321 Gallery in Oakland, California where all of the pieces and the writing were exhibited. Some of the images made it up to a juried show in Portland, Oregon, and I had a small showing in Ventura, California the following year.

Currently, I am been prepping for the printing of the second edition which I will probably do through Blurb books. The second edition will include some of the out takes from the first edition. Since I seem to have misplaced the original scans from the first edition, I have had to rescan the negatives. This is just as well, because my Photoshop skills have improved since I last scanned and processed them.

There’s a part of me that misses working on this series. At the time, I worked almost part time, came home and made props and did photo shoots with my old Speed Graphic. Now, my work on Freekmagnet’s descendent, La Loteria, is done digitally. I use a digital SLR and the backgrounds are often painted in afterwards on the computer. I guess times change and life moves on, but when I look back at these, they bring back good memories. I hope that I will have the opportunity to work on this series again in the future.

The first edition of Freekmagnet can be viewed at my website. [link]

I've been cranking away scanning negs, spotting and prepping for printing in my efforts to get ready for the show on August 2. The real story though is that the last few nights I've had a little visitor that has been wandering into my studio when I work late. It seems that a big black tarantula has decided to make a home near the door to my studio. It comes in through the open door after I've been working on the computer for an hour or so, it crawls around quietly and then scurries back outside once it realizes I'm in there. I followed it outside a couple of times and showed it to my girlfriend. We decided to take it's presence as a good omen.

It's good making new friends!

I got roped into doing a little show at the local coffee shop next month, which is pretty cool. They needed someone to hang a show, and the people I said I was going to schedule for them were not available so we decided to hang my stuff instead. I'd been playing around with these old Holga shots at the time, so we decided that they'd be good for the show.

I'm pretty happy about it. I'd never really planned to do anything with my Holga shots, but lo and behold, I'm going to be hanging 9 of them in a show!

Overall my recent Holga diversion has been a good thing. I shot a roll last week and turned another old one I found laying around in to be processed. We'll see how it goes. The old roll I shot on a newer Holga and I wasn't happy with the results from that camera. I've since found my old Holga which I like, but it's pretty beat up and pretty much completely held together with tape. I'll get some good shots, I'm sure. It's also been a nice diversion finding some good Holga-ists on DA. Nice, refreshing, fun stuff.

I shot a few pictures with my Holga a couple of years back. I was still living in The Bay Area and I would come down to SoCal to visit every once in a while. My girlfriend would work during the day and I would spend the day walking around town snapping pictures of stuff.

I've always liked playing around with Holgas. Their simplicity provides a needed relief from the precision of the modern digital cameras and the old view cameras that I am used to using. The sort of impressionistic look of the end result is nice, and seems to bring back the excitement to taking a pictures of the most mundane of things.

I've been spending time scanning these old negatives and even went as far as shooting a roll or two over the week. I can't wait to see the results.

Been chugging away at my Loteria project. Working as a graphic designer for my day job, I spend about 8 hours a day on Photoshop, so for me it's almost a miracle that I've been able to bring myself to working on the computer even MORE when I get home from work.

Lately I've been moving towards the straight up photo manipulation route, which works for me. My new studio is a lot smaller than my old one, so I don't have as much space to build sets. Not to mention the time it takes to build them; as it is, I've been doing most of my photo editing on my laptop while riding the bus to work.

I'm still toying with the overall design of the card set. For this batch, I've chosen to take "the best design is no design" approach and have kept it clean and simple. Maybe it's my reaction to the overwrought pieces I have to do for my clients at work.

Although I'm still in the "I'm not sure" stage of this work, I've been pretty happy with it overall. It's a long way from the old days of working part time, building sets and shooting Tmax on my Speed Graphic. Living in a rural area has been a big change, too. For one thing, finding folks to sit for portraits has been a little bit of a challenge. It's not like living in The Bay Area where every third person is practically ready to jump at the opportunity to dress up and get their picture taken for what ever art project you can think of.

GoGallery has been going pretty well. We've had 2 or 3 openings this year and they all have been a real blast. Great turnout, great work, great fun.