We’re All Amateurs

We all have to start somewhere. We were all amateurs. I was cleaning out my email and I came across this email from Craigslist. Oh it brings back memories. I had just decided that I was going to walk to the ledge and jump, be committed to photography 100%, no turning back. So I posted this on Craigslist to find a mentor. A few people reached out to me, but I didn’t stay with them long. Their styles were different than mine. I knew what I wanted to create in my head, I just didn’t know how to execute it.

Where it began

Now I’m blessed enough to be where I am in my career that I feel like I have something to offer back to the photography community. I try to always take on interns, so it doesn’t hurt to always check in with me. Also it took me a while to get settled into LA, but now I’m ready to put on workshops again. The first workshop will be in Seattle, June 29th, and the second workshop on the books is in San Fran, July 27th. More details to come.

Keep clickin’

I’m also available for one-on-one workshops in LA. Contact me if you’re interested.

Another Year Older

Yesterday was my birthday. Definitely mixed emotions. I’ve been on this planet for a while now, still searching and trying to find my way. Most of us spend our lives looking for something, a niche, a love, a passion, a career. I count my blessings that I’ve found my passion, but I’ve also lost a love, and my career is in my hands.

Time goes by so quickly, half a year is almost gone. I feel like I’m running out of time. Maybe I’m putting too much pressure on myself, but I think it was ingrained in me at an early age that I was going to be the one in the family to succeed in America and be the one to support the family. My mom’s birthday is two days before mine. She didn’t sound to well when I called her to wish her a happy birthday. It seems like she’s been getting sick a lot lately, so I have this inherent pressure that my time to succeed is running out. I want to provide my mom with everything that she wants and take her on as many trips as possible, but I’m a small fish in a big sea here in LA. How am I to get noticed, get known, get requested? I know that I have the talent, I just need the opportunity just like the rest of the talented people here in LA. What makes me any different? Does it come down to luck then? Who you know? Well God, let those people I must know meet me, bring them into my life, I want to succeed so badly for my mom. I want her to look at me and be proud. Proud of the son that she snuck out of Vietnam in the dead of night on a fishing boat. Proud of me. That’s my birthday wish for this year.

Street Magician

Sometimes I wish I could read people’s minds. People just fascinate me. I went to school for Sociology with a minor in Psychology. I study people. I read people. I guess becoming a photographer was the inevitable step for me. I love getting to know my subjects and being able to capture a sense of them in the photographs. I love people’s backstories. Everyone’s got one. Sometimes I people watch, I make up backstories for them.

A couple weeks ago, my friend Kamyar texted me and asked if I would like to work with him again, only this time he wants to model for me. He had this idea of a panhandler who used to be someone, but now people just pass him by. We threw ideas back and forth and this is the final result.

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A Hero’s Tradegy

I’ll admit it, sometimes it can be frustrating to work with an artist, especially the ones who are OCD and ADD. The best thing you can do when you work with someone like us is to just forget about it once the shoot is done, don’t check in on us (especially at odd hours of the night, like 3AM), we know. We know those images are sitting on our hard drives begging to be shown to the world, but as artist we have bills to pay and mouths to feed too, thus we prioritize paid work above all else. And once we do have free time to go back to the project, us OCD’s want to make sure that everything is perfect before we release it. I still laugh every time a model ask, “Does it need to be retouch?” No, not really, but I want to. It would help if you laid off on all the soft drinks and sugar because your skin is horrendous to edit. Ok, I got sidetracked…

Anyways, I bought this Superhero outfit 3 years ago because I love the whole Marvel Comics thing. I knew who I wanted to play that part, the ever handsome KC Guyer. He’s been in quite a few of my personal projects. For this project, I wanted to do something different, so I waited. Like a retired Superhero, the outfit laid in my office closet for over a year. One day, a model writes me and tells me that he loves my work and would love to shoot with me someday. I stalked through his photos and saw that he was an artist himself, a very talented one. I asked him if he wanted to meet for coffee so I could tell him about this idea that I had.

The idea was that my Superhero was trapped in a comic book world, his environment would be etched like one. Part of him and some characters would be half sketched and half real. Does that make sense? So essentially it’s a photograph combined with a drawing, but they bleed into each other so the line between his comic character and his real self is blurred. Kamyar Jahan (you should really get a website Kamyar) was really excited about the idea. We talked about perhaps doing a whole comic series in this style.

We sent some sketches and layouts back and forth, finally it was time to shoot! Here’s the sketch that we green lighted back in March of last year.

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A year later, after sending it back and forth with Kamyar, it’s done. Well actually it’s been done since Christmas, I’m just finally getting around to blogging about it. =P I want to thank those that were involved in this project. Thank you for your patience and accepting that I’m an artist and knowing and understanding that I’m not neglecting our project, I want it done as much as you. Thank you for giving me the time and space to do it right. I wish you could see this in high resolution, it’s much better. Oh and the dying beauty is none other than Camille Collard.

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BTS by Chris Goddard416691_3226808184293_387532727_o (1)