With Kinfolk – Herb Drying

Summer has gone by so fast (what a shame)! Mercifully, cooler weather is slowly creeping back into the schedule, and it’s nice enough outside that I can comfortably wear my Pendleton shirts without looking silly. In any event, it has become a regular privilege this year to shoot for Kinfolk Magazine. Yesterday marked the release of their fifth volume which you can order here. There’s probably not much more of a fallish thing to do than throw on a big wool sweater, pour yourself a flippin hot cup of coffee, and give the new issue a good read.

If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, you can pretend.

This time around, I was able to partner up again with my friend Amy Merrick (we worked together on this too) to do a story about drying herbs for fall cooking. Skye Velten lent us her substantial modeling skills, and after much debate we decided to shoot in my garage. This is interesting only in so much that it attests to Amy’s styling skills — my garage was an absolute ugly mess at the time we picked it as our location. A little elbow grease, paint-scraping and cat-litter-sweeping, though, and we had ourselves a bonafide herb cellar.

The best thing about this shoot is that my house still has a faint lavender-and-rosemary aroma. The worst thing about this shoot is the amount of photos that had to be nixed. Truly, I cannot remember the last time I had so much fun with a shoot and got so many good photos that ended up on the cutting room floor. I suppose that there is only so much page space that one story can lay claim to. But that’s why we all have blogs. Just for the record though, I really can be bad at playing the photo editor. I want to include everything. I cut fairly liberally, and there are still twenty-eight images in this post. Sheesh. With all that said, the resulting story for Kinfolk is something I am very proud of, and Amy’s writing more than makes up for the photos we had to leave behind.

In addition to the herb drying article, I was also able to shoot the product photography for the new issue. A few of my favorites are included below. My special thanks to Ms. Julie Pointer and (the incredibly lovely) Ms. Riley Messina, who were kind enough to do a little impromptu modeling.

And lastly, once again for those interested, all of these shots were taken with Kodak Portra 160 using either a Contax 645 or a Zeiss Ikon.

And with that I’ll leave you to the photos. Please do enjoy the new issue! If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and order a copy or two.

Happy October!

With Nylon Magazine and Carrie Brownstein

Man. Every now and then, something will happen that makes me just stop and think to myself “well then, this is pretty neat.”

Back in late July, I was contacted out of the blue by Nylon Magazine to see if I’d be interested in pulling off a fairly last-minute shoot with Ms. Carrie Brownstein for their September TV issue. As you may or may not be aware, Carrie Brownstein is the leading lady in Portlandia. She’s also acclaimed guitarist for both Sleater-Kinney and Wild Flag. So, being asked to work with her was pretty sweet — especially since I live in Portland (represent, yoh).

Two days later, we met at the home of Bowen Ames for a relatively quick 2-hour session. Without mincing too many words, I can say that Carrie is just plain likeable. She’s easy-going, gracious, and humble — almost to the point of shyness. She’s also neither taller, nor shorter than I would have imagined. And it’s always a pleasant surprise to find out someone of note is also not a total jerk in person.

Of the three looks we shot, the magazine ran only a single image – although they granted Portlandia a full page. As is usually the case, they didn’t use any of my particularly favorite photos, but that’s how it goes. Below are shots from my favorite of the three looks. Enjoy them.

One last note — I want to here officially thank Jeff Luker for passing on my name to Nylon. You, sir, are the business.

With Vera Balyura and Verameat

At the risk of sounding broken-record-ish, I will say again that my favorite part of taking photos is having an excuse to meet people. I first learned of Vera Balyura through my friends at Industry of One, and a few months ago, while in New York shooting with Kinfolk Magazine, I was able to meet up with her in real life to take some photos. Vera gets a gold star for impressive multi-facetedness. The lady is a talented model-turned-painter-turned-photographer-turned-designer-turned-entrepreneur who makes eclectic jewelry pieces and dispenses them like so many gold-plated, delicious mentos through her own boutique chain named Verameat. Vera is energetic, affable, outgoing, and purposeful. In short, Vera gets it done.

We met at her apartment in the East Village and spent most of morning wandering around the neighborhood (which also happens to house Verameat’s flagship store), shooting and talking and trying not to sweat too much. Almost on a whim, by late afternoon, we had hopped a cab up to the Bronx, to visit Sylvia Plachy’s show at the Andrew Freedman Home. As the light was fading, and the staff was pushing us out the door, we snapped the last few photos of the day. Back in the East Village, we wrapped everything up with some thai food and Moonrise Kingdom — really of those sort of random days that I imagine people in New York have all the time.

In any case, the take-away here is that Vera is just impressively ambitious. She recently opened up a new store over in Brooklyn (which is brag-able), and has her eye on a west coast expansion. So as I said goodbye to her on my way to catch the subway, I couldn’t help but ask myself what the heck I’m doing with my own life. All in all, a good day.

With SXSW — There and Back Again

I know that SXSW is already way old news, but I don’t care. And anyways, this won’t really be about SXSW because the best part of the whole trip for me was travelling there and back with some of my favorite people in the entire known universe. Although I suppose you should know that Greylag had the opportunity to play a few showcases in Texas, and the folks footing the bill figured it’d be better to drive the band and all the equipment down to Austin rather than fly. And so, the following are shots from the road to Texas from Oregon (and then back).

Driving from Portland to Austin takes a solid 35 hours. Factor in the kinds of miscellaneous delays, food breaks, and pee stops that accompany a group of six (or seven) people, and you’re easily looking at 40 hours on the road — most of which is barren wasteland. God help you if your van breaks down near, oh say, Melrose, New Mexico. If the coyotes don’t get ya, the locals probably will (no, seriously). But as someone who is A) from green, green Portland and B) only passing through, the desolation can be quite the beautiful change of pace, so I was excited to make the trip.

Since we had to make it down to Austin for a Greylag show, time didn’t really permit us to stop and look around until our return trip. As we drove through Moab, we were able to spend a few hours in Arches National Park, which promptly impressed us all (or at least me). Really, though, it’s amazing the number of different environments a drive like that will take you through. In a span of two days, we travelled through forests, rivers, mountains, deserts, plains, blizzards and heat waves. It’s enough to give one’s immune system a complex.

Landscapes aside, the real joy of trips like these is all the time spent in good company. It’s sometimes said that the road will test the mettle of one’s friendships, and I believe it. We all loved each other before we left, and the fact that we’re all still breathing is proof enough that the love is, indeed, stronger. I used to hate road trips, but that was before I realized why God made them. Now I look forward to each and every opportunity to travel with people like these (becoming a photographer helped, too, I bet). Yay, road. Yay.

With Kimbra Johnson – SXSW

Normally, I’m not really one for performance photography, but I dig Kimbra (if you haven’t seen this or this (lordy, those shoulder shrugs), you’ve probably been doing something else the last few months). So I made a point of making sure catching one of her shows was on my “things to do while in Austin” list. And considering that SXSW was her first time playing in the US, the timing was right for exceptions.

Kimbra played three or four shows during her stay in Austin, and I only made it to the first two — sadly, neither of them were during daylight hours. But in any case, here are a few shots from her first set during the Nikon party at La Zona Rosa. I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect as Kimbra followed acts by a beat boxer (who’s name I may have purposefully forgotten) and a blue grass set via the Punch Brothers. It definitely felt like someone had left things on shuffle. Let’s just say, though, that ‘expressive’ is a pertinent adjective with regards to Ms. Johnson. Either way, it was a real fine thing to be able to see her live. She has the goods. Yes ma’am.

While we’re all talking about Kimbra for a minute, it happens that her Portland show is kinda sold out. So, with that in mind, if you are a person who’s going and have an extra ticket, it’d win you infinite hugs if I could tag along.

Oh, and also, yes, she is as charming in person.

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