michelle likes pie: I'm the naked one in the room

I tend to get photoshoots in clusters rather than spaced out and after two weeks of not being in front of a camera, I had two extremely long sessions and one two-hour shoot with Scott, who I have standing photo date with every other Sunday evening.

The owners of Tye Studios were in town from Florida and so I spent eight and a half hours on Thursday with Andre and Donna, along with a colleague of their's, Ray, shooting at Arizona Falls and Goldfield Ghost Town. For being a concierge by day, I'm really ashamed that I'd never been to - or even heard of - either location. AZ Falls is a natural waterfall-cum-hydroelectric plant that the city of Phoenix has turned into a very unique "park" designed by Lajos Heder and Mags Harries. Goldfield contains the remnants of an old mining town that sits smack-dab between the Goldfield and Superstition mountains with some of the original (and some not-so-original) landmarks from the 1890's.

Saturday I got up at the ass-crack of before-dawn and met Johnny from Alchemy Photos at the Mesa Arts Center for a project he's working on currently. He agreed to a half-and-half shoot where we spent the first chunk shooting his idea (based around shoe obsession) and the last chunk shooting some things I've been wanting (bright colors with a punk theme) and we shot until the last possible moment at 10:30a.

My last shoot with Scott didn't produce a whole lot of quality work, partly due to the fact that he forgot the premise behind the setting he'd suggested resulting in some less-than stellar shots. We also have a tendency to improvise more and structure less, meaning we both go into the meetings without concrete plans so that we can just go with the general feeling. The previous three shoots went great working under that premise; the fourth, not so much. So this time we sketched out some basic boundaries this past week and that seemed to help greatly. Re-shot the one we muddled last time, did some contrast work on a tile floor and then some experimental slow-shutter pieces outside in the dark. All required a bit more set-up than normal so we spent less time actually shooting and I did my first outdoors winter shoot naked. I'm sure the world of art will be forever changed by my erect nipples.