sun and shade (2023) (Patreon)

I am extremely proud of how I got this framed, lit, and focused as a self-portrait. The thing about ambitious self-portrait photos is that they're, I suppose, relatively average portraits as an end result, but they're so much harder to take when you have to visualize a significant and important part of the shot beforehand. I would be lying if I said I hadn't loved the challenge of taking these shots. Perhaps I'm just making things harder on myself for the hell of it, but it's extremely rewarding to realize I've succeeded afterwards. 

I've practiced both pre-framing and visualizing my poses enough that at this point I believe I would feel comfortable doing a project like this on film. I think I could still get the results I wanted without being able to check afterwards; I'm going to probably put this to the test when I start approaching the 40s/50s/60s era shoots for this ongoing project, but that likely won't come until after I've moved to Seattle (you know how hard it is to find Googie and MCM architecture in rural Idaho???)

In the meantime, I did actually re-edit some of these, write an intro, relaunch a sales site, and pop this up for sale yesterday as Volume 1, as I said I would. It's on Gumroad for $5. I've posted some of the photos here in the past (and today), obviously, but I'll try not to post too many more from this series here so it's not double-dipping or repetitive or anything like that. 

I also thought long and hard about it and when I sent out the launch email for this, I officially announced that I am done with Twitter. It feels strange to quit something that, despite its flaws, gave me a career, a platform, and an audience, but I genuinely just can't ignore how seriously dangerous and toxic it has become for me personally, my people, and many other minority groups. It's unignorably evil, and that comes from someone who worked at Werner Von Braun's NASA. 

Y'all don't get off the hook from hearing from me, though. These will still, unrelentingly, make their way to your inbox every day.