Street Magician

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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

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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)

How Stocksy Came to Life

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Stocksy

I was traveling much of yesterday so I kind of missed the whole excitement of the launch of Stocksy, a new co-op stock photography site. If you haven’t heard much about Stocksy, do a quick google search and it’ll certainly peak your interest if you are a photographer. How did it come about? Read it here, straight from the man himself, Bruce Livingstone.

Here’s a review of Stocksy by Stock Photo Secrets, which uses my profile as an example in their article and links straight to my Stocksy portfolio. Cool. =) Thank you!

Stocksy is now LIVE

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Remember that whole Google Drive fiasco a while back? It got a lot of photographers selling stock photos really amped up. People were dumping their accounts in rebellion. Well that’s not what this post is about. This post is about something that’s never been done before. A new stock photography home where the photographers split 50-50 of sales and 100% of extended licenses. It’s not that easy to get in to contribute though, you have to be invited. Stocksy, founded by Bruce Livingstone (founder of iStockphoto), is not your everyday run of the mill stock photography site, they focus on “high end” stock. So if you shoot people on white seamless, you probably won’t get in.

Stocksy is now LIVE.

Stocksy

Oh and if you’re wondering, yes my photos can be found on there as well.

Famous Supermodels (Then and Now)

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Time flies doesn’t it. I better enjoy my good looks while I can. ;)

Check out some of these famous supermodel faces, then and now. Sometimes I wish that I was a vampire so that I can remain the same, but we all get old. Some more gracefully than others.

Twiggy

 

I think Christy Turlington is so beautiful. She aged quite well.

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Check out the rest here.

Derrick Rose for Adidas

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Although I don’t follow the NBA anymore, ever since my heartbreak from when the Denver Nuggets crushed my Seattle SuperSonics. I’m now solely a Seahawks, one sport kinda guy. And even though I no longer watch the NBA, I knew who Derrick Rose was. Everyone knows about the NBA MVP. So when I got the call to shoot him along with a whole list of players in LA, I was pretty stoked! I was told that Derrick would be my last guy at the end of the day and that I had 30 mins max with him to do video and stills. The shots had to look like he was in a gym. So we created this 30×30 canvas of a blurred gym background, lit it so that it matched the ambience.

When Derrick got on my set, he was pretty much worn out by the long day of commercials and photoshoots, I was told I had 15 mins to do it all. Anticipating this, I had tested out the shots with my assistant and had her write down the settings for all the lights and camera, for both the video and the photography aspect. As soon as Derrick’s foot hit my floor, we pounced on him like Crouching Assistant, Hidden Photographer. After the video was done, we quickly switched over to photography mode. I gotta say, when you’re on a tight deadline and a big budget shoot like this, it’s a must to have a team that you can depend on because one error could ruin the whole production. Luckily everything went smoothly. Whew. We celebrated by hitting the pool.

Reflections and Onward

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Well the end of the world never happened, but with the way 2012 was going, it felt like it could have been. I for one, had one of the worst years of my life. It was a year of discovery, reflection, and growth. Made a couple of decisions that drastically change the course of my life, whether it was the right one or not, I just trusted my intuition. Here’s what I learned, and it’s not like it’s something that’s mind boggling, it’s something that we all know and talk about, but we don’t necessarily embrace it until we actually go through the life altering experiences.

1) I don’t need to become a famous photographer. I am an achiever, I like to do things to perfection, I don’t settle for good, but I do not need to be like Annie Leibovitz. What does it matter to me whether I’m well known or not, once I die it makes no difference.

2) Love is unpredictable. Love is work. You can’t take love for granted. Love and relationships are the most important things in life. Love makes the world go ’round. Love is some times having enough courage to let go.

3) Self discovery. I came to the ledge and I jumped with faith that I will be okay. I’ve learned to listened to my intuition. 2012 was the most difficult, but I’ve learned more about myself this past year than the entirety of my life.

4) Time can not be rewind, stopped, or borrowed. We all have the same amount of time. Rich or poor. Sick or healthy. What you decide to do with your time is completely up to you, but for me I’ll cultivate my relationships with the ones I truly care about.

5) Money is not evil. What frustrates me more than anything are people who are stuck in the grind, living paycheck to paycheck, making excuses like money isn’t important to them. If money wasn’t important, you wouldn’t be working a 9-5 for the rest of your lives to pay your bills. If money wasn’t important, it wouldn’t run the world. You don’t need money to be happy. But having money does not dampen your happiness. If you want to change your circumstance, you have to change what you’re doing. If you want to be financially independent, find someone who is and follow their lead.

6) Along the way I lost track of what was important to me, which was life experiences, travels, and relationships. I don’t need the latest and greatest of anything. I don’t need designer brands. I don’t need fancy cars. Gone is the beautiful mansion. Now I’m in a studio apartment. I don’t need anything except my camera, my computer, my desk, my phone, my bed, and my CRV. I’m not saying that I won’t want to spoil myself later, because I do like the finer things in life. But for now, I just want to live light, take pictures, and experience life.

So with that, I look back and bid adieu to 2012. You’ve been the hardest year of my life, but I do thank you for making me who I am today. Let’s hope there’s no more pitfalls in 2013 and it’s just upward and onward.  

Happy New Year!