While on my two-week sojourn back to The Bay, a friend and ex-coworker reached out to me. I’d shot her son’s first birthday a couple years back and as the family had since increased by one, they were hoping for some family portraits. I was more than happy to oblige.

When I had arranged my last trip to San Francisco, the very first thing I did after booking my flight was send out an email to Paciano Triufo, Ann Borja, and Roczane Enriquez, photographers and make-up artist (respectively) extraordinaire and good friends from my theatre days with Bindlestiff. I’d always wanted to work with on a shoot but had never had the chance, so when the chance presented itself, I hopped right on it.

One of the most important yet rarely-mentioned traits you need to be a good photographer is shamelessness. How far would Steve McCurry, Nick Ut, or Dorothea Lange gotten if they had said to themselves “I’ll just stand over here and politely wait for a photo to present itself. I don’t want to be a bother.” Fortune favors the bold, Photography doubly so.

I had another shoot just last night, this time with a coworker and friend who wanted some good photos of herself. We had planned on hopping over to a park and getting some nice fun little shots in the sun. The weather, however, had other ideas, for which I’m eternally grateful.

I’ve never been good at self-promotion. Chalk it up to something from my childhood or my upbringing or a million other possible reasons, but at the end of the day it amounts to the same thing: I’m about as deft at tooting my own horn as a lipless trumpeter.

I restarted my couchsurfing involvement after an almost two-year hiatus, and not a moment too soon. As much as I’m absolutely loving New York, my inner vagabond is starting to get antsy for the road and being around travelers helps sate the wanderlust, if only vicariously.

I’ve started using my ModelMayhem account more these last few weeks. I signed up over a year and a half ago, but I never really did anything with it. I had enough to keep me busy that I didn’t bother exploring it much. Lately, however, I’ve been itching to do more and more shoots, and as I was starting to run out of people to photograph, I figured being a little more active on MM couldn’t hurt.

Last week, comrade-at-arms Tasayu (previously) approached me to do some head shots and portraits over at at the “Institute of Higher Burning” and graffiti landmark 5 pointz. Never one to turn down an opportunity to check out new locations (and just explore), I was in from the word go.

I got together with Terresa again on Tuesday night for a second shoot, this one a glamour / nude shoot. And just as the shoots with Joyce and Jorge Luis gave me an opportunity to run my home studio through the ropes, this session with Terresa gave me a chance to see how many other locations I could milk out of my apartment.

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.