2010 - Rae (Patreon)

Actually, let’s start in 2007 for a minute. Rae was a close friend of mine back when I lived in Vegas, in fact, Rae was my first model after I got my first DSLR, for only enough time for one shoot before I moved to SF tho, and those pictures sucked. 

Once I got settled I started hitting the clubs and met a French DJ named Maud who wanted me to take artsy promo pictures of her. She loved them and sent them out to all her French friends, one of which asked me to take nude photos of her, who then hooked me up with her friends to shoot with, and so on and so forth. Of course this is all prior to 2010, the year I want to focus on in this post, so just know that I completed about 15 shoots between 2007 and the end of the decade, and I’m certain I’ll share those pics with you folks one day but until then.. 

I returned to Vegas in January of 2010 for CES and AEE/AVN. I was doing video coverage of the events for the company I was contracted with and set aside some time after hours to work with Rae again. As I still do to this day, I took the space I had and prepped sort of a theme park out of it so we could get through every scene as quickly as possibly. First we shot on the couch, then in front of a blank wall, then on the bed, then shooting straight down with a sheet, then the hallway, then another blank wall, haha. It was a great opportunity for me to practice several different lighting setups in a short period of time, and it gave me a ton of varying content to play with. 

Now, one of the biggest differences between 2010 me and 2020 me, is that I used to shoot for an image and not for a series. I believe I mentioned this recently, but not until about a year before I started this patreon did I really start aiming to get more than 1-2 images out of a single scene. It also helped that the more practice I got, the more consistent my lighting would be. There are a couple sets with more than two shots that made the final cut, but I was still not 100% consistent with my processing so two pics from the same scene would be processed completely different (still in that singular image mindset). The above collection is most certainly a snapshot of a time when my skills were still a work in progress. What’s incredible is how much I improved between my shoot with Rae and my first shoot with Andrea, and also how close I was to walking away from photography after 2010, booking only two shoots between all of 2011 through 2013.. I’ll fill you in on all that later tho but tldr I met Lindsay and she pulled me out of my rut and got me shooting again. For now, tho, please enjoy some of my best oldest work.