The creative world is small.  So here is a collaboration that Mo and I  did. 
Hmmm....now how do I trick Jes in getting it back to me..

Just when I thought all was lost in 2003 working long hours losing money by the day. But in 2004 I was in a juried show at the Louis Stern Gallery in West Hollywood. That was the year everything started to change. A number of shooters that I had assisted a few years prior participated in the show as well.

Louis Stern, has had a long and successful involvement in the secondary market. With a special concentration in Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Modern and Latin American art, the gallery has offered works by Degas, Gauguin, Giacometti, Leger, Matisse, Monet, Picasso, Pissarro, Ramos Martinez, Renoir, Rivera, Tamayo, Villon and last but not least Duarte ;).

This is an image I created in college for a font that I was designing called Flamenco. The assignment was to design an original font, along with kerning pairs and eventually a poster. So one evening I went by myself to a spanish restaurant that had Flamenco dancers and during the break I approached them about the assignment. We ended up using one of the classrooms that I had turned into a photo studio during my senior year. Love this image.

About 10 years ago when I was assisting Michael Grecco he was teaching at the Santa Fe Workshops and let me tag along to help him with the demos. It was like photography boot camp 7am to 11pm we just talked photography. The students were so cool, I loved it

Some photographers are not too keen on showing early work but I'm pretty proud of this particular image. This was shot in a run down building just north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. I remember walking into a room and the pigeon droppings were piled six-inches high. There might have even been a dead rat or two. When I went to Photo East in New York this image was made into a 36 x 48 print that they displayed in their booth. Wow...I forgot about that day.

Polaroids from my days assisting with Mr. Grecco and ABC.

My buddy Ejen who does a great job with the PIX blog mentioned that he likes to see a photographer's space/office. So here it is, my low-tech operation. I'm very specific what I surround myself by like the original Details magazines, Harper's Bazaar circa 92-99, Miles Davis in Fader and last but not least Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane. The office is located in the Historic Core part of Downtown Los Angeles. My parents met two blocks from here in the 60's and my dad did architectural salvage at Bunker Hill when he was 14 years. So you can say I'm LA to the core. There is another side to this office that is identical. This room is strictly used for shooting. The images on the wall were done there because the light is so fantastic. They are lo-res composites for a possible exhibit. Not only are the compositions perfect but they capture a perfect moment when the hair and eyes are locked right in. When I blew them up it really made a big difference. Get it. Big. Because...now they're big. Forget it.

The title of this blog should really be called Smoke and Mirrors. When I first started assisting/breaking into the photography world I didn't even know what a publicist was or what they actually did. Now shooting PR/direct client is about a 1/3 of my business. Nadia of Wagstaff Worldwide asked me to do a few shots that she needed right away for Red O that was designed by the uber- talented Gulla Jonsdottir. To my surprise the restaurant was lot more under construction than I anticipated. No need to panic since my job is to make the ordinary...extraodinary. So we lined up these shots and they really came out great and if you would have moved the camera even an 1/8 an inch in any direction you would start seeing plywood. The moral of this story is don't always believe what you see.