Selfportraits (Patreon)

I’m not gonna stop shooting in pools until I get a result that makes me piss myself

It’s funny — I rarely collect references for my shoots.

Experience taught me that I simply don’t know how to use them once the camera’s in my hands. Either I forget about them completely, or the location, the light, the model — everything starts screaming “this is not where we’re going, bitch”, and I just say fuck it and do my thing.

But it never works like that with pools. The mood, the movement, even the colors in post — it all turns out nothing like what I had in mind. I even have a separate folder on my phone now: “pool references.” It keeps growing — I keep finding things that grab me, that make me think “yeah, that’s the vibe!”

But then I get to the actual pool, and… something just doesn’t click. The inspiration switch flips off in the first ten minutes because nothing looks right. Even when I try to literally copy the reference — like, shamelessly steal it — it still crashes and burns.

Don’t even get me started on color grading.

Even in this shoot, I was chasing a specific tone — you’ll notice it’s not my usual palette — but it’s so fucking far from what I see in my head.

Maybe it’s my karma — to keep shooting in pools and bathrooms till the end of time 🫠