Seeking the World’s Soul

This is Karina, the first of the two mod­els I’ve been work­ing with and the rea­son I went out and bought stu­dio lights. We did a lot of play­ing around with props and poses — I love the golden age qual­ity of this image– sort of a vision of Queen Maeve of Con­naught via 1940s Hollywood.

Shot with one soft­box for light­ing on my usual Canon 350D, 18-55mm lens at 27mm. The matte black back­ground is wide rolls of crepe paper I taped to my book­shelf. I did a lit­tle bit of “paint­ing with light” on this one — above the basic image layer I cre­ated a trans­par­ent layer set on “soft light” and then dodged and burned that layer by paint­ing white, black, and golden yel­low at 8% trans­parency over the photo.

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So I couldn’t fig­ure out how to get that backup to work, but luck­ily I’d been cross­post­ing just about every­thing from this blog to LJ and was able to man­u­ally copy and paste most of my posts back in. I skipped some that were just links to gal­leries with­out text; I fig­ure it would be bet­ter to do some writ­ing about the pho­tos and then put some­thing like them back up later.

In the mean­time, I’m think­ing to use this as an oppor­tu­nity to redo my site a bit. Now I just have to fig­ure out how!

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Well, some bit of mal­ware just ate my site. I’m extremely annoyed — as if I wasn’t in the mid­dle of mov­ing to a new city and try­ing to get the apart­ment ready and all that!

I do have a backup file from two weeks ago when I last upgraded word­press, and I may even be able to fig­ure out how to use it. But, not tonight.

Any­way, if you’re here for my pho­tos, please view the gallery here. Be sure to check out the new work with Tamta in the “Mod­els” folder espe­cially — she looks like a Renais­sance beauty and I’ve really been enjoy­ing work­ing with her.

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I think my web­site has been hacked… the main site has dis­ap­peared and I can’t get into the Word­press admin area either. The other word­press blogs I’m host­ing for my fam­ily are messed up too. Arg, com­put­ers. I’ll deal with it tomor­row. Gallery still works, anyway.

Any­way, a bit of what I’ve been work­ing on:

First edits up here.

The model is Tamta, a Geor­gian girl who’s a refugee from Abk­hazia (and sort of a stu­dent though I’m not charg­ing her), who I’m help­ing develop a mod­el­ing port­fo­lio. She’s a treat to work with, though I had to do her makeup (just a touch of it) because all she has is col­ored chapstick.

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Went down to the Belaruss­ian con­sulate to get our tran­sit visas started today, but the line was too long and they said they wouldn’t get through what was there now before clos­ing for their 2 hour lunch break… Now I have to go back again tomor­row but even ear­lier. Ugh. I hate mornings.

Today was just… long. I felt like I was run­ning in cir­cles point­lessly. Did a shoot with a girl who’s sort of a stu­dent (we’re trad­ing mod­el­ing for a cou­ple lessons. She’s gor­geous and so poor she doesn’t even have makeup… not that she needs it. Sigh. She looks like a clas­sic Ital­ian beauty, and is sooo slen­der — seri­ously, every time I see her I want to feed her. She’s Geor­gian and lives with her mom, though, so it’s prob­a­bly just her metab­o­lism, given how heavy their food is. Arg.) Any­way, even­tu­ally got some good shots in spite of hav­ing light com­ing in through the win­dow inter­fere with my infrared flash sys­tem. Even­tu­ally I just gave up on it and used nat­ural light instead, even though it was pretty dim.

I do feel like I’m get­ting an increas­ingly good grip on how to han­dle mod­els, any­way. It’s mainly fun, but dammit one more thing to run around and do that I don’t really have time for right now! Right now it’s just feel­ing like yet more work, though I have to say I enjoy it a lot more than teach­ing English.

I feel like I’m going out of my mind, hop­ping around in cir­cles over and over, and am not at all ready to move.

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We’re doing it.

Yes­ter­day we went out and got tick­ets to Berlin for April 30th. We leave on the 9:15 pm train and arrive in Berlin 24 hours later.

So, yeah, we’d decided to leave later in the sum­mer. Get­ting ques­tioned by the FSB, the main Russ­ian intel­li­gence agency, for 2 hours with no trans­la­tor or recourse or any­one know­ing where I was… well, it rather muted any lin­ger­ing desire to stay in Russia.

It was a very cul­tural expe­ri­ence, I sup­pose. Gave me a whole lot of insight into how Rus­sia works. The responses of local friends and peo­ple at the agency was even more so, I think. I’ll write about it when I’ve cooled down a bit more.

Any­way, it’s time to go and I am damn glad to be get­ting back on the road and on to new things.

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Been hav­ing a stress­ful week… got stopped by the FSB (the Fed­eral Secu­rity Bureau, loosely trans­lated, and suc­ces­sor to the KGB) and ques­tioned for 2 hours yes­ter­day because I stopped to take a photo of a cute dog and it turned out I was right next to some “secret office”. Bother. It was scary, but they were pretty pro­fes­sional over­all and it was just some elderly for­mer KGB guy who kept me from leav­ing within 10 min­utes of get­ting pulled in.

Felt really jumpy today though. It was a plain­clothes guy who grabbed me and dragged me to the office, and I really didn’t know if he was a crim­i­nal or what, and today I was just look­ing at every­one and won­der­ing… really wanted to just go to the train sta­tion and get a ticket to any­where away from here. Fuck­ing police states. I left home because it was start­ing to feel way too much like one, and had no trou­ble for three years and then I go to take a pic­ture of a stu­pid dachs­hund in a rain­coat and end up spend­ing two hours explain­ing what I’m doing in Rus­sia.
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Any­way, got Win­dows rein­stalled today. Don’t have all the dri­vers in yet but I think I’ll have every­thing impor­tant back on it by this week­end. Spent Sat­ur­day doing a major model shoot with a girl named Karina, much fun, and need to get those processed.

In other news, I want to drop about half my stu­dents because they’re dri­ving me nuts, or because their “fastest way to the metro” hap­pened to go right by an FSB com­pound and thank you very much I don’t want to go through that again.

Any­way, stressed and tired, off to bed.

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