I Miss My Boys

My dear friend Karen aka @ok2baprincess always refers to her “boys” as the important guys in her life, her closest male friends.

Being a gay male, you’d think that I have a lot of really close gay friends, like you see on television.  Well, TV lies.  I do have a few great gay friends but really… in Columbia, besides my amazing incredible beautiful wonderful boyfriend… I only have two or three super close gay friends.

I won’t name them… you know who you are.

So, when I say “my boys” I mean the guys in Columbia that for any particular amount of time were of the most importance to me.  In particular we’ve got Chase and Corey ( @clettenberg and @coreyschmidt respectively).  They are of the awesome band, Scouts (check them out at http://scoutsmusic.com or on their MySpace).

The band recently moved outta town, off to Kansas City Missouri, you know, where all the big bands really make it… Well… hopefully that’ll be the case for them.

Ever since, my life has been a little empty.  I miss the late night bad decisions they helped me make, the trips to the tattoo parlors where I drunkenly asked for full sleeves and various body piercings.  There’s the incredibly open conversations about sex, relationships and emotions that I don’t think I could have with any other friend.  I miss Chase’s insults on my clothing, taste in music, taste in television, taste in movies, taste in… well my taste period.  I miss the apparent battle between Chase and Corey for who could wear the gayest outfit, the tightest jeans, the deepest v-necks.

I miss their concerts, taking their pictures, shooting the shit with the band and just generally experiencing all the good, and bad, that we all went through together.  Breakups, new relationships, shit jobs, shit classes, you get the point.

I miss the random trips to St. Louis to hang with Chase’s insane(ly awesome) cousin and the completely EPIC beer pong tournaments at Corey’s apartment.

Bottom line, I miss my boys. And Chase coming into town the other day, seeing a movie with him and Karen at RagTag Cinema just brought back all those positive memories.

Soon I’ll be moving to California, well in about a year.  There I will be reunited with all of my old wonderful friends.  Meanwhile, I have a few of those really special friends in Columbia; as time passes and external forces push us away, again I will look fondly at the times we had together.

So here’s a cheers to my best brotastic friends, even if they abandoned me here in the great abyss that is Mid Missouri.

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Profile Pictures

Over the years I’ve had only a few different profile pictures.  Probably cause I don’t like pictures of myself.  I’m trying to get over that and make some self portraits, get me over that whole “I take pictures of other people but never of myself” thing.

Also, it gives me the chance to see what I can do with Photoshop, to learn new techniques and make some cool pictures.  I don’t really care that the picture looks very little like me or the original picture, the idea is to make something totally different than the source.

I think I’m going to use this picture as a canvas to mess with. I’ve already made several other images from this picture.  It’s pretty fun.  Maybe this summer I will have time to make more pictures of people instead of the stuff I’ve been doing for my photography course.  I sure hope so.  I miss taking pictures of people.  Maybe I’ll do a whole before/after series with these portraits.  Anyone want me to take their picture?

I did this with Micheal (@mdanbom) (website) last year, wish he was still here, he has AMAZING eyes.

Alright, off to do something else.  Would love ideas for photos though!

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I Almost Got Arrested

Well… I did get pulled over tonight, from within a parking lot because I was taking pictures.

Apparently, it is against the law to take pictures of anything, but especially what I was taking pictures of, at night.

Total bullshit. Wanna know what got me pulled over and my plates/license ran through the system?

I took this picture.

Yup. A picture of a bank at night. I wasn’t even zooming in on anything. Just a picture.

They told me to not take anymore pics, it was a warning that you cannot take pictures of buildings, especially banks, at night. Only, that isn’t a law and I have every right to take these pictures.

He was nice enough but this whole, “photography is a crime” thing is really getting old.


Tape Me Up

Mark Jenkins

Image by C-Monster via Flickr

Ryan send me a link to this really awesome artist named Mark Jenkins and his tape sculpture project.  You really must check out his site and view the incredible scenes he has created with plastic wrap and packing tape.

I have taken this idea on and will be making pictures tonight using one of the models Micheal and I made.  He was such a good sport holding still for a few hours while I wrapped him in plastic wrap and then taped him up… followed by the sometimes painful cutting off of his exoskeleton.

We only had time to make one and we didn’t actually get to take any pics with him, we were too tired after the four hour construction!  We also didn’t make him quite strong enough, needed a few more layers of tape but I felt awful holding Micheal up like that for 180 feet of packing tape.

I hope to make a few more for this project and will, but tonight I’ll have to make due with the one.

What would be really cool is if I had access to a mannequin.  Can anyone help?  I, for some reason, feel that Karen (aka @ok2baprincess) has a connection here.  She never ceases to amaze me.

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Defiance – Followup Post

Thanks guys, so much, for all the wonderful, constructive and flattering comments on my last post.

One big massive comment reply. Ready for it? Here goes!

@David Bickley

Thanks for your thoughts. The idea for the project isn’t just defying gravity, it’s defiance in general or surreal or… just things that don’t seem right. Though the post does say gravity… haha

I went through and removed the hand, as you can see now. 🙂 It was pretty easy to do. I couldn’t decide if I liked it there or not, definitely know now that it’s better w/o!

P.S. Did you get my email last week?

@Chase

Looking forward to the concert!

@Matt

Yeah there really is a lot going on in that picture! I want to do some more pics like that. I kept looking for a seesaw (teeter-totter) but I couldn’t find one out here! Crazy huh? I had a really cool idea for one of those. Oh well.

@Karen

As usual, overflowing with kindness and wonderful, thoughtful comments.

The swing set picture was actually taken at around midnight! The light appears to be a sunset from the use of an extended exposure. That picture was a three minute exposure!

Yeah, climbing up to that door was hella scary! There really aren’t any stairs!

@Newsy

Whether you’re on KATG, Twitter or my blog, you always make me laugh out loud!

@Hilly

Ditto!

My professor really likes my idea (whew) and I’m excited to stage some more fun, gravity and time defying scenes.  If anyone wants to model in them for me, lemme know!

Here are a few more from last night.  Again, thanks Micheal for being such a great model/sport.

If you have any suggestions of other things that defy logic, gravity, time etc etc… please let me know in a comment.  I have a few other ideas but I need a total of at least 20 really great pictures for this project.

Defying Gravity

Yet another idea for my photo project.  My professor wants me do to more of what I’ve been doing.  Said that I already have a style that is effortlessly dramatic (not always a good thing!) and that there isn’t anything technical that I can improve on.

In otherwords, just be creative.  Don’t worry about the rules, it’s time to break them.  Fun right?  Haha, well I’m pretty straight laced so breaking rules isn’t something that gets me going.

But… what rule is more fun to break than gravity?!  I bring you the pics from last night’s/this morning’s photoshoot.  Big thanks to Ryan and SUPER BIG thanks to Micheal for all of their help.  You will see Micheal a lot in these pics.

I’d love to know what you think!  I plan to take tons more pictures like this.  Not just defying gravity, but time, logic, reality… Just anything that seems not quite right

Not Really Duality But…

[Update…ish] People in my photo class really liked the pics 🙂  Even though it doesn’t fit my idea of duality.  They said I don’t have to be so strict with how I construct a photo. 🙂

So we had the idea but it didn’t really come to fruition.  Still we had a fun time taking pics!  Thanks guys for letting me blind you with 2300 watts of light for so long.  I need a set though.  Ryan reminded me we have a garage.

So, I think I’m going to turn our garage into a photo studio.  Thoughts?  It would be perfect!  Just need to get a background stand that can hold like a 10×10 or 10×20 canvas of white or black.  Black is what I wanted tonight.  I really need to get that set up.

Here are some random shots.  No photoshopping yet cause… I need to be sleeping.  Again, I am not sure I will be able to use these on this project; I’m just so torn as what to do for it.  Argh!  Why does this have to be my final project that I go blank on?

Now I give you the pictures from the shoot.  Plus one of Micheal in front of the setup and then one of my bedroom right now.  I should be asleep but it’s those damn light lines from my blinds that got me to post this!  You’ll see 🙂  Click the pics to enlarge and navigate through the shoot.