Todd

Todd is one of my oldest friends. I’ve photographed him a few times in the past, but this most recent time was a little more special.

Todd’s a very outdoors kinda guy; mountain biking, snowmobiling, paddle boarding, kayaking … he does it all and he does it intensely. He gets out there and really enjoys himself and gives it his all.

One particular day a few years back, Todd was giving it his all while mountain biking, and he gave it his all right off a cliff with his bike and fell a considerable distance. Luckily he was with someone and they were able to rush him off to the emergency room.

While there, the doctors discovered he had two Aneurysms in his brain. One was fairly teeny tiny but the other one was pretty large and the doctors said they needed to keep an eye on it.

Cut to 2019: the larger aneurysm that doctors had been worried about was indeed growing and they knew they had to get it out of there. So Todd went under the knife. They removed a piece of his skull and they were able to successfully remove both the aneurysm’s he had in his brain.

Three days later (!!!) they let Todd go home, and on the fourth day of him being released I dragged him over to the studio so I could make a few portraits of him.

He was totally up for it.

I wanted to shoot something simple that really focused on the scar and sutures he had on his head. I blew my background totally white and I took a single studio strobe with a grid to control the light spread so that it focused right on his wound. The rest of him went dark because he wasn’t lit from the front. I photographed most of him in a dark profile while the gridded light caught the top of his head.

Todd was photographed just a few days after his operation. There was still small droplets of blood forming from some of the sutures/staples.

Since making these photographs with Todd he’s had some complications from surgery; the piece of his skull that had been removed and then put back in became infected, and he had to go back a few times for them to reopen his wound and take the skull piece out. As of this blog post, he’s been without a piece of his skull while everything inside his head heals and chases out the infection, and once everything is good he’ll be getting a new, synthetic piece of skull that they will put back into his head (scheduled for April of 2020). He’s been doing awesome through this whole process, although I know he’s frustrated because he can’t go out and mountain bike or snowmobile as much as he wants.

It’s scary when you see dear friends going through such physical trauma.

I’m glad you are still with us, Todd.

Strength and Power

There is a lot of photography that I don't get to share sometimes that is done for larger companies and corporations.  That is just the nature of the beast.

But I did want to share this image, which I shot back in March of 2016.  It was for a very large company who had  hired me to photograph some of their clients on white, to match up with some video work another company down the hall from me was producing on the same day with the same clients.  These were portraits of survivors of trauma or sickness in one form or another.

When this gorgeous woman stood in front of my camera, she kinda took my breath away; she was really tall, towering over me, and she had this incredible jawline (I have a thing for jawlines - I have a weak chin which is why I have a beard: to cover it up), and as I had her stand straight and look directly at me, there was great strength and power coming from her.  You could feel it.  It was remarkable.

She nailed this in like two shots.  Some people are natural in front of cameras.  Look at that jawline.  Look how the light from the background traces the outline of her jaw.  Crazy powerful.  Crazy strength.  I love this portrait in black & white.  Being exposed to people like this, for however long or shot, is partly why I love photography.

Reverend Sam Seah

I've known my buddy Dave for a long time.  He's become a very close friend, and I love hanging around with him and talking geek-stuff and recording podcasts and everything.  His father, who lives in Taiwan, has visited Dave twice in the years that I've known him, and on his second visit last year, Dave hired me to make some portraits of his father.

I was going to write about a fantastic evening and dinner at Dave's and then how his father, Ingram (though he also likes to be called Sam) played some music for us and how we talked for hours about his home and his life working in missionaries in both Taiwan and the US, but instead I just want to focus on the image above, and how much I love the look of intensity on his face while he played for us.

You can see a few more images here, but I wanted to just concentrate on this image.  I love it.  I feel it's a beautiful portrait, and I'm so glad I finally got to meet the father of a very good friend.