I Love A Quickie

Did I ever say how much I love black and white photography? Well, if you didn't know before, now ya do! I mean, I started out as a photographer using black and white film in a 35mm camera and developing photos in a dark room. My first introduction to "photography" was through black and white images, and I've always found shooting that way very dramatic, raw and magnetic. It reminds me of the classic photographs I'm often entranced by from photographers such as Richard Avedon and one of my all time favorites, Gordon Parks. There are loads of modern-day photographers who do this very well also that I love, and I think it's cool sometimes to just strip away the color, and bare a photo in all its artistic simplicity. So a pretty popular "modely" friend of mine, Billy Payne, happens to be in New York as a pit stop before his move to L.A., and we got together really to just meet and catch up after more than a year since last we saw each other, and that meetup quickly turned into a spontaneous photo shoot.


No stylist. No grooming. No concept. And no real idea what the hell we were going to do, lol...but I knew, since we were shooting, that I wanted to shoot him in black and white; nothing else. I just wanted to keep it as simple as possible. I also wanted to execute minimal retouching on his photos. See, in film photography, when you're developing your photos there is very little to no retouching at all! Photography of old bared the TRUTH of someone in a portrait. Whatever wrinkle, mole, growth, scar, or lazy eye you might have was there and there to be SEEN. So good makeup, lighting and angles were KEY. Now I can't say I didn't edit the photos of him at all (I actually shoot in color and then adjust to black and white in the editing process, because I feel it's always good to retain the RAW color file, just in case), but I can say, with all honesty, there is relatively NO retouching on the photos OR Billy to enhance him or the look of the images in any way. It was actually really fun to shoot freely with no intentions, no pressure...just all for the love and art of photography...and in Billy's case, modeling.