How it all Began

I often get asked on shoots “When did you start?”

As much as I’d love to have a story about loving it as a child and picking up a camera and running around my high school and having photos in the year book. That just wasn’t the case.

Fact is, I was a theater and movie kid. I grew up wanting to make movies, and that sustains even to this day if you followed me on any of the other social media platforms.

I did Comedy Sportz which naturally led to doing improv and sketch comedy outside of school which eventually led me to UCB and the Pack Theater. I was on a house sketch team called Tiny Muscles at the Pack. During my time there, It became pretty clear that if one wanted to direct or shoot any of the video sketches, they needed to have their own camera.

My job at the time was working night crew at the local grocery store and let me tell you my knees to this day are very angry I did that job, but I saved up and decided it was time to get a camera, put my money where my mouth was, if I thought I could direct, I had to show it. When Black Friday 2016 came around, I bought a Lumix G7-KK.  My teammate Kat had the same camera and used it to shoot her video sketches and I liked how it looked.

Of course one had to wait to get their video voted it by the team, but I now had the camera. Rather than having the camera sitting around collecting dust. I decided to use it. We had a show coming up, and we had a sketch parodying the show GLOW. Me being a wrestling fan since age 9, and thinking I now knew how to do all this, told the team “Hey, why don’t we do some wrestling parody posters to promote the show? I’ll shoot them and edit them, y’all just need to show up.”

“Show up” meant come to the garage at HyperRPG and I’ll shoot you all against white and take you off the white backdrop and place your character into a different location. HOW HARD COULD THAT BE? (Worth noting, now taking someone off a background and placing them into a new location can be done with two button clicks in Photoshop, not the case in 2016)

Again, let me tell you, my passion was film, I had never used photoshop a single day in my life, didn’t understand a single thing about the value of lights or how powerful they could be, what was a mask, what did it do, camera raw, etc. Understood shutter speed and F stop thanks to film classes, but anything else… no clue. I was diving in, I was going to show the team I knew what I was doing (I DID NOT).

As much as I’d love to show the photos to be able to say “See, look how bad these are and all the mistakes I made.” Truth be told, no clue where they are. I know they were posted on the theaters insta at some point. Which means I probably emailed them over, but looking for that email, no clue. If I find them someday on some dusty hard drive, I’ll happily post them with permission from the people in the photos. But for now, trust me, they were FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE.

But here’s the thing I learned from that shoot.

1)      Lighting skin especially with a flash, different than lighting skin for a film which usually uses standing still lights (I say usually cause hey sometimes you use a strobe)

2)     Bright may not mean better, it’s okay to play with shadows and tone. I can recall just BLASTING these guys with a flash. It was over exposed, but it wasn’t good.

3)     Even though you have a flash, you don’t need to use it, maybe using still lights that you can see where things fall will be better for certain shots.

4)     You can play with genre

It was after this shoot that I realized if I wanted to do some genre filmy stuff, rather than wait for a sketch to get picked up or to try and see if I can get actors and sound and so on (something I wouldn’t try to really do till after the pandemic) I could shoot some genre stuff now.

I called up some friends and did a noir shoot, a cyberpunk shoot, etc.

Again, keeping in mind, I’m still in 2016 headspace and just figuring this stuff out. But figuring stuff out didn’t stop me from posting these shoots on social media.

What then started to happen was people began hitting me up. “Hey are you a photographer? Do you want to do a shoot?” Now could I have said “Not really, more into film, I’m just learning but sure.”

Nah man, I jumped right in. “I sure am!”

And those shoots, also Fiiiiiiiiine (though some shots actually turned out okay and that was purely luck and model)

The question remains. How did I get better? And how did it become a job? That’s for the next blog.

The OG.