I like having the different outlets because they all reflect different parts of me and it’s nice to keep them compartmentalized sometimes. I already get enough of my work life spilling into my personal life which is stepping on the feet of my love life which doesn’t realized it just knocked over my creative life … I see enough of that in my day-to-day. It’s nice to be able to send them to opposite corners every now and then, especially as each has a very specific role to fill.

You’d likely get a variety of answers if you were to ask different photographers to name the most important trait a photographer should have, but I think we’d all agree that confidence is pretty high up there.

Photography can be a pretty expensive endeavor, especially when you’re still starting out and slowly building your arsenal. “Do what you can with what you’ve got” becomes your mantra, and “DIY” quickly joins your panoply of other photography acronyms. My little in-home studio won’t work very well for more than one person, and living with a roommate means that I have to set and strike it whenever I need to use it (rather than just keep it up 24/7), but for what it is, it does a pretty good job. And for one-person shoots, it performs admirably.

Like most people who grew up outside of the States, I grew up with a very specific view of the country that lead the world, which I developed through exposure to its greatest export, popular culture. The only difference was that my view was time-shifted by a few decades. And while I recognized that America was made up of fifty states that were home to millions of people living in thousands of cities, it only ever came down to one of them: New York.

Though I’ve known Herb Manila and Mike Hanson (aka Herb & Hanson) for well over a decade (indeed, it was I that built their website, many moons ago), we’d never done a shoot before. We’d just never gotten around to it, I suppose. So when they suggested doing a shoot while I was in D.C. last weekend, I was completely on board.

Tasha died last Monday.

I’ve been watching my cursor blink for going on ten minutes now, unable to think of what to say next. Dozens of thoughts and narrative threads flood my mind but none of them feel right.

When Joyce approached me to update her headshots, the short time frame made finding an affordable studio pretty much impossible so we opted for shooting in my apartment. I’d never done any shoots in the new digs, and was excited to try it out. Our living room / kitchen was big enough and had a 5′ white wall on one of the long ends. Not huge, but workable.

Jack Frost isn’t done having his fun with the Northeast, it seems, and has decided to give it to New York for a little longer. Naturally, this meant I was compelled to run outside with my camera

and shoot the same damn things, all over again. Three snowfalls, three sets of photos from the same park. And I already used up my Waxing Philosophical card on the last one, so that’s out.

Chuck and Julie are two of my favorite people around. I have friends I’ve known longer or friends I know on deeper levels, but when it comes to just simple, unadulterated (keyword unadult) fun, Chuck and Julie are a tough act to follow.

Growing up on a tiny island in the middle of the Philippines meant that, for the most part, we were fairly behind on the States when it came to new fads, TV shows, fashion, or other pop culture. While normally an annoyance, it worked in my favor when, in 1985, my best friend came over with this game his dad had brought back from Japan, Dungeons & Dragons.