Shooting Danielle with Film

Got to spend a cloudy morning shooting with actress/model/photographer Danielle Barnum the other day.  This is the second time we had to shoot together because my old Mamiya RB67 had back focus issues the first time.  Six rolls of film later plus a $70 repair charge, thanks CameraTechs, and this is the result. 

Shot on the new Kodak Portra 160 and Portra 400VC.

Back To My Roots...In Multiple Ways

     My passion for photography stemmed from reading skate and snowboard mags as a youth.  The whole reason I picked up a camera in the first place was because all the friends I skated with in high school kept progressing and I didn't, therefore I began shooting them.  The sun finally came out here in the PNW and my friend Ryan Davenny and I decided to take advantage of it with a little skate photo sesh at the legendary Ballard Bowl.  That is after we repaired a window in my living room but that's a whole other story all together, just don't play soccer in the house.  I really wanted to use the Mamiya I had just got back from the shop so I loaded a couple film backs, yup film, and but new batteries in the light meter and what you see below is the result.   Can't even begin to explain how much fun I have shooting film, especially medium format.  There was no shooting 10 frames per second then choosing the best one.  It was pretty much one shot per trick then do it again.

Hope you enjoy!

Ben

Architect Jim Goodspeed's Condo

Here are some images from a shoot I did a few weeks ago.  Loving shooting interiors right now and hope to be doing more in the future.

Thanks
Ben

Corporate shoot in January

Here is one of my favorite images from a corporate brochure shoot I did at the end of January.  I'll post the tearsheets as soon as I can.

Ben

Not a good way to start 2011....

This year started out with a bang, and not in a good way.  While reorganizing my hard drives and incorporating a new backup system into my work flow, I deleted an entire years worth of images.  All of 2007 completely gone.  After a quick panic attack I started researching ways to recover data from hard drives and ended up downloading the StellarPheonix software.  So after 40 hrs and $100, I was able to recover all the images.   It definitely was not the way I expected to start the year but at least I learned a valuable lesson. That lesson being ALWAYS DOUBLE CHECK YOUR BACKUP!

Got a few shoots lined up for the new year that I'm pretty excited about.  I'll post more on here as I get them done.  In the mean time, here are a few shots that I had forgotten about until I recovered the images from '07.  I shot these pinups at my old studio at the Bemis.  Hope you like them.

Ben

This is Nigeria

I've recently been going through the images from my trip to Nigeria back in 2006 and wanted to share a couple that you more then likely haven't seen.  For those of you that don't know, I traveled there for a month with Eze Anamelechi and musician Norman Baker to take photos and experience life in West Africa.  From the minute we landed in Lagos, I was blown away by everything happening around me. Imagine 150 million people in a country twice the size of California.  Aside from the first and last couple days of the trip that we spent in Lagos, most of our time was spent in a village just north of the city of Owerri.  I realize the country has a bad rap with all the corruption and oil money and email scams but Nigerian hospitality is by far the best I have ever experienced in the world, even compared to the US.  Click on the images to see a larger version. Hope you enjoy them!  

25 more images after the jump....

Recent Work

Here are a couple tear sheets from a recent job I shot for WA-Magazine.  The story is about winery owners that are alumni from either Washington State or The University of Washington.  Check out the fall issue of WA-Magazine.