Tuesday, September 21, 2010

LIQUID BONEZ: Elena Dee

LIQUID BONEZ: Elena Dee: "Went to watch 7718 and crew perform @ The Fallout Shelter in Aliquippa, Pa. Struck up convo with the bartender about a pile of notebooks on..."


Elena Dee Photography from DARIAN STANSBURY on Vimeo.


I was interviewed for Liquid Bonez blog a couple months ago - our conversation is finally up!

Friday, September 17, 2010

Maternity - Katie

One of my good friends, Katie, is having a baby!!  She's 8 months along, so last week she and her boyfriend, Ed, had me do some maternity shots for them.   SO CUTE!  When baby Cody arrives, we might do some family portraits as well with all their kids, but these were about Katie and Ed and their coming child.  Ed is SO excited to be having a boy!


I LOVE this picture.  It's so freaking adorable, from the way he's kissing her belly to the way her hand is resting on his arm.  Just adorable.


Of course, I had to get a few shots just of Katie - this silhouette of her in front of the softbox is definitely a favorite.  You can still see the outline of her arm and hands touching her belly and the softbox is slightly tilted to give it an interesting sort of framing.  I dig.


Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Seniors 2011 - Katie

I was really excited about photographing Katie, not only because she sounded super cool, but because she found me via Facebook ads.  Glad to know people actually checked that out!  And she WAS really cool, so it was totally win-win.  This was one of those interesting shoots where I go to their house to photograph, which I always enjoy.  Keeps things exciting and eases my occasional worry of things starting to look too similar.  Katie's pictures are a breed completely of their own, so yay!

We started out in her backyard, which is gorgeous.  VERY well kept.  My dad would love it.



I set my backdrop up under their deck, and because the shade there was lovely - not glaring but not too dark - I didn't even have to use lighting!  Always good, if I can get nice lighting naturally, I'm going to utilize that.


We then went to this abandoned house down the street from theirs that I had noticed on my drive there.  Katie's mom, being awesome, totally encouraged this venture, and while we were there, discovered this...I don't even know what, some barrel thing that had "1993" written on.  I checked with Katie, and that was indeed the year she was born, so we took some pictures with it.  1993 and graduating from high school.  Geeze.  I just turned 23 a few days ago but this makes me feel old!


I couldn't help but post process some of these to look vintage - they did without any work already!!

Monday, September 6, 2010

River Runs Scarlet - Zosia West's shoot

A couple times over the past week, my friend Zosia West of River Runs Scarlet has come by to do a three-part photoshoot.  If you know anything about my photography, you probably know that RRS is a band I photograph quite frequently, even going to California with them in July to document them recording their EP.  Anyway, Zosia's in this magazine thing (not sure if I'm allowed to give details!) and needed three looks, two of which had to be a girl-next-door kinda look and a sexy look.

The first shoot happened on Thursday and Zosia brought a male model friend, Joe Costa, along with her.  We're both huge TrueBlood fans so wanted to do a vampire theme, with poor, clean-cut Joe as her victim.  He's such a good sport.  Didn't even have any problems with me applying coats of liquid latex to his neck - speaking of, I'm really proud of my skin tone matching on that!  I also did a LOT of post on the first image, as the fangs Zosia ordered managed to not be in yet.  Had a good time (really!) in PhotoShop copying and rotating bits of teeth of create a fang for her.


I had work Thursday night though, so we finished up the more "normal" parts of the shoot on Saturday. Not that vampires aren't normal, they certainly are for us!  First we did a cute, girl-next-door kinda thing.  Jeans and tank top.  The black and whites are my favorite, but I wanted to show you guys a color one too.




Aww, ain't she adorable and totally metal?  Of course, as all girls-next-door do, she gotta have a sexy side!  We tried a couple different things, but my favorite is probably the hair metal picture.  You'll see.



I wanted to keep consistent with the black background, but all the black in her outfit kept getting lost, so we switched to white to make her pop.  It looks super dark on the blogspot thing, the background isn't AS gray in the actual image.  Maybe it could be a little brighter, but geeze this looks dark!  Huh.  So yeah, anyway, hair metal picture = WIN.  Which do you guys like?