Art...

Did a series with my good friend Reby two weeks ago that was new for me. She called me from her friend William Quigley's loft on the corner of Broome and Mercer streets. William is a well-known SoHo painter, specializing mainly in portraits and commissions from celebrities.

His loft could be a film set for a film about SoHo artists in the 1980's (or the 2000's, I guess...) as it is a huge open space full of canvases, most complete, some works in progress. The smell of oil paint lingered in the air even with all of the windows open in the amazing corner space.

William greeted me downstairs in the freight elevator and escorted me into the apartment and very graciously said that I could do whatever I wanted, move whatever canvases I wanted and just basically gave me his home. Then he, even more graciously, took a walk.

I asked Reby to put on her kick-ass boots and we sorta played "Around the World" - starting in one corner of the loft and shooting in front of William's work moving counter clock-wise until we were back where we started. The challenge (or at least the one I made up in my head) was to equally balance the girl with the artwork - not to focus on either more, but to figure out how to compose the shot, pose the model, and feature the paintings to create a "whole" image.

Not easy. Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes my instinctual habits won out and I featured Reby more - the ol' "there's a really hot naked chick in kick-ass boots" conundrum...

Oh well, not the worst problem in the world I guess...

Just returned home from a week in Seattle. We shot nine models in 6 days for their agency books. Also talked one of them and one of the make-up artists into shooting some "personal work" with us later in the evenings...

I shot 6 gigs of digital, 8 rolls of Neopan 400 120 and 6 rolls of Neopan 1600 35, which means my boys at US Color Lab are gonna love me later this afternoon.

A special thanks to Leo Lam, Seattle photographer extraordinaire, for making our trip so successful and welcoming.