The Fandom Nerdlesque - Send Noobs: Leveled Up Promo Shoot - 2022.

October 10, 2022

This shoot has easily been two years in the making. It’s funny how a global pandemic can just up and shut down an entire entertainment industry for a while. But let’s start at the beginning and work forwards.

The Fandom Nerdlesque is one of my favorite clients. Even though I still cringe when producer, Sig Sawyer, calls me (his words not mine) “The best cosplay photographer in Atlanta”. Back in 2018 I was invited to shoot some high speed video during the promotional shoot for the first scripted video game themed show “S3ND NOOBZ”, and I was excited to be invited back to create the promotional materials for it’s sequel show which debuts at Anime Weekend Atlanta later this year.

A lot of this material came from me teaching myself Affinity Designer sometime in mid-2020. I had just recently finished up a batch of comic book covers for The Fandom (Which mark my words, one day will see the light of day) for another show that ended up being canceled. In a fit of sadness I designed what would become the Gameboy assets that I got to use for this series.

To make things even better and several orders of magnitude harder, I decided to shoot part of this campaign on actual Gameboy Camera hardware, resulting in the some of the most thought out, lowest resolution images I have ever created.

Click for larger

Magenta Marie as “Player 1”

Dillon Darling as “Donkey Kong”

Desire Evoquer as “Jinx”

Titan Moon as “Naked Snake”

Sasha Sindragosa as “Springtrap”

Kil La Queenie as “Spyro”

Pixie Twixt as “Navi”

Violin Hips as “Anika”

At the time of this blog post, I’m fairly certain that tickets to Anime Weekend Atlanta still are available. And as far as I know that is all you need to see these nerds take their clothes off on Friday night of the convention.

Top 5(ish) Photos of 2020 - (As If We Needed to Be Reminded).

December 28, 2020

You know…it’s almost as if there was something that happened this year that just sucked all of the joy and energy out of the air, but I just can’t put my finger on it.

Normally I’m pretty excited about these roundup posts. I typically like going back and remembering all of the fun times on set, and reviewing old images that had been delivered, and picking out the forgotten gems that didn’t make the original cut. But this year I have struggled with making this roundup and have put it off about as long as I could possibly justify.

I still think that there were some great memories this year, even if I have to force myself to find the positivity in the process.

The year started off with an immediate trip to Europe. I had just started a new job and spent the first weeks of the year training and getting into the swing of what my days would be filled with.

Having worked for an EU based company for the last several years, I’m no stranger to flying for business. However Copenhagen was its own experience all together. I am so not used to the idea of a Nordic winter where things start to get dark around 3pm and by the time you are done for the day there is almost no daylight left.

I think this was one of the first times I got to get out and really use the Sony A7RIV I bought at the end of 2019. Shooting at extremely high resolution at night is not as easy as you would think! But I still was able to capture some of my “traditional” images of Europe’s various bikes and street art.

When it came time to start shooting portraits again, I had the end of 2019 fresh in my mind and wanted to continue a trend of very minimalist photos that I had been working on.

On my birthday I had the chance to work again with the wonderful Nina La Voix during a trip to New York City. I had planned on being in NY a lot this year (Ha), but even if that didn’t happen I always enjoy my time with Nina and hope to be able to work with her and her circle again soon.

My “home studio” also got a good bit of work at the beginning of the year when I had sessions with Ruby Marx, Gideon Hodge, Jack Calico, and Magenta Marie in what felt like back to back to back bookings

And then, “IT” happened. We had heard rumblings of some sort of illness that was circulating abroad, but it never seemed to be THAT bad. I personally didn’t know what to think or believe until I was in the Atlanta airport and saw the breaking news that the US/Canada border was closed until further notice.

To be honest I think I was more frustrated that my trip to Canada the next week would need to be rescheduled, but then I noticed how empty the Atlanta airport was, and thats when things got a little scary.

I’ve made the joke several times this year, but I’ll say it again. It’s very hard to be a portrait photographer when it’s not a responsible choice to be around other people. So I quickly found out I needed to buckle down and find other ways to get my creativity into the world, and take the time to add some new tools to my photographer’s tool kit.

I hope that in 2021 I’ll be able to actually show the many hours of work that went into this project. But until then enjoy these recreations of some comic book logos.

Additionally I did some work creating some other vector art pieces for myself and for friends of the blog The Fandom Nerdlesque.

(Psssst, If you want to see the photos we originally created for this show you can find them here).

Additionally to learning vector art, I wanted to get into some other arts as well. I managed to snatch up a decent microphone setup before COVID made them almost impossible to purchase:

In this episode your host learns the hard way that podcasting isn't as easy as it looks while trying to explain why we are all here spending this time together. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.

Blake sits down virtually with Comedian and Podcast Host, Rivers Langley to talk Headshots, Comedy, Podcasting, and some experiments with long gone Polaroid film. To see the photos talked about in this episode, make sure to visit the blog at: UNEXphotography.com/news/2020/7/19/rivers-langely-2020.

In this episode, Blake describes a new project that he is starting and sits down with some of the first friends he made after moving to Atlanta a decade ago to talk about one of the things he loves most in the world...cats.

I’ll be honest that this particular project didn’t exactly take off as much as I’d like for it to have, but I wouldn’t consider this to be dead just yet.

It wasn’t all bad though. I started a new project “The Cats Who Live with my Friends” where I bother my friends to let me take photos of their cats…

Church Bishop Nathan Sara 080220200070.jpg

I need to re-visit this project with some vigor next year and get some more entries lined up and in the can.

Ruby Marx asked me to photograph some non-traditional graduation photos of herself:

And my friends Cody and Tegan asked me to capture one of their most important days:

Devyn was recommended to me by her sister (and no stranger to this blog CharLee):

And now for some photos I’ve been holding on to specifically for this entry, the two sisters demanded that I took some photos of the two of them just being sisters and having a completely un-staged pillow fight. Really…this wasn’t staged at all…nope…not at all ;).

I also want to give a big shout out to Tom and Michelle from Apocalypse in Review for finding me interesting enough to have me on twice this year!

While all of the movies we've featured on our podcast have fetching titles in regards to the dumpster fire that is 2020, this one seems especially fitting. Doomsday (2008) is an action-packed hodgepodge of everything you'd want in an action movie: beautiful ass-kicking woman protagonist, great action sequences, gruesome deaths, and crazy cannibals.

We're so excited to have our friend and portrait photographer, Blake Griffin, back on our show! We watched Akira, the anime movie of all time. We discussed some trivia and Blake through out some cool facts about how Akira created a shift in action movies and became the movie that brought anime into Western culture.

Also please be on the lookout next year as Michelle and I are in the beginning phases of having some episodes of Let Me Take Your Picture where we discuss the art of portrait photography from both a beginner and professional POV.

I think it’s only fitting that I end this entry with a photo of a plague doctor. All things considered I guess I came out ok. I still have my health (mostly) and have been extremely fortunate to keep stable employment through this rollercoaster of a year. I can hope that next year will slowly begin to get more and more “normal” again and maybe by 2022 we will enter a new renaissance of the arts (a boy can dream anyway).

I’m trying not to get too ahead of myself because there is still a lot of bridges to cross, but I have some plans of what I’d like to accomplish in 2021. I want to do what I can to get some more content in the can before I launch it though. I hope to reconnect with some former regulars here on the blog, and continue to create content that is enjoyable (for both me and all of you) and back a little closer to my “roots”.

We’ll get the band back together in due time ;).

Until then, have a wonderful (and safe) new year. Wash your hands, Wear your mask, Get Vaccinated, and don’t gather in large crowds. We’ll get through this together. See you on the other side!

State of the Union - COVID-19 Edition

May 21, 2020

Hi everyone.

Let’s see if I can get through this update with as few Coronavirus tropes as possible. I’m going to do my best to limit any and all references to “these trying times” and the overwhelming feelings of uncertainty that are floating around everywhere these days. I’m fairly certain none of you have been living under various rocks or without any sort of connection to the world at large. It’s pretty clear shit is thoroughly fucked right now.

First and foremost, my loved ones and myself are all pretty good to go. The family is all pretty much doing their thing in the South, and I’m doing my best to stay safe here in Atlanta. I miss my friends, I miss my clients, I miss doing work that I enjoy…but we are all finding ways to keep safe and (mostly) sane.

Looking back at my last posts it becomes very clear to me that for a Photographer I sure haven’t picked up my camera for several months now. Sure, I totally could have shot some cool macro stuff, I could probably safely take a walk in the local nature preserve, hell…I probably could have shot various “Porch Sessions” or “FaceTime Sessions”, but honestly none of that stuff really does it for me. Nothing against anyone doing any of these things…it just doesn’t feel like me.

So I guess that leads into what I have been doing. Pretty early into all of this Serif graciously opened their arms and offered 90 day free trials to their suite of softwares (Photo, Designer, and Publisher) and offered them all at 50% off. I already had my copy of Photo for iOS that I had briefly played with back when I first bought the 2018 iPad Pro (more on this soon) and earlier this year made the jump to Photo for Desktop for all of my retouching.

So I figured it would be a good time to start teaching myself some other graphic design tools. After some time messing around, I think that I have developed some talents when it comes to making logos and other text based items.

I also drew a bird:

I also broke down and have been making some other assets for an upcoming project that I don’t want to let all of the air of yet. But let’s say that it involves comic books (and directly correlates to me re-making logos inside of vector art programs). I’m sure if you keep up to date with regular clients you can probably guess what is going on, but I’d rather not share too much until it’s time.

I’ve also been experimenting with the Gameboy Camera again, and have purchased the tools I need to print it’s photos onto large thermal paper (or at least larger than what the old Gameboy Printer used to do). It’s going to require some additional assembly before I can really play around with it…and I still may buy a doo-dad to physically rip files off the cart itself, but be on the lookout for some more of that type of content coming soon.

Editor’s note: Everything after this text box has been re-typed from memory after it was lost in an unfortunate accident while having multiple windows open at the same time. This incident really made me screaming mad after losing hours of work during troubleshooting.

Speaking of possible poor usage of funds, I bought an iPad Pro…again.

I know. I should have learned my lesson last time. But they hooked me again and this time for the better. iPad-os is now much more of a fully functional OS. The USB-C port on the tablet can now be used to manage files on an external drive, and the file system has been beefed up to handle that management. I’ve even been able to find an FTP program that allows me to connect to my NAS when I’m not on my local network, and with some kludging I can even drop RAW files from my camera straight to it.

And I can even edit this very website from it (mostly).

I’ll spare you my full review because we’ve already gone down that road. I mean, long story short, I love it. And now that I can actually use its power for editing photos and designing, this becomes a much more worthwhile purchase. I can see myself being able to travel with this in my bag and be able to crank out quality work without needing to have a laptop around.

On a non-photographic note I’ve also been teaching myself how to make pickles. What started as a craving for pickled carrots and hummus has turned into an adventure that fills the bottom half of my fridge. I am now well on my way to being the pickle-king of the South East. There is a joke here about surviving the apocalypse here somewhere, but I’ll just come right out and say it. No, you can’t have any of my pickles.

Unless you ask nicely.

Thanks, everyone for keeping tabs on me, I hope that soon I’ll be able to safely travel and be around other people again. I have a ton of ideas rolling around the old brain box and I’m so ready to get them out. But, until then, I encourage everyone to stay as safe and as sane as possible, keep washing your hands, stay away from people you don’t live with, and most importantly…be nice to one another.

We’ll all get through this together and I don’t plan on going anywhere any time soon. <3