I have been splitting my focus working on my two websites, one day on this, and the next on creating a business site with my regular photography. This is the time of the year when the photography business tanks and I get to catch up on all the stuff I have been neglecting for a long time; a sort of nurturing and renewal before the spring. The www.cyrphoto.com site is nearly complete and then I will begin to turn all my energy back to only this project. It kind of all began, last month, with getting the Helmville Rodeo image accepted into the Missoula Art Museum, raising the bar for me to showcase my skills and talents. I am beginning to think more in the terms of the actual creation of pieces of art from my imagery. Though it feels like I am still a bit of a controversial artist in Missoula, I still need to create things that can sustain me. Yes, I do weddings and other portraiture. I love the whole idea of somehow getting into the gay wedding market. I love doing weddings and to do gay ones seems to be a perfect match. I did photograph one a couple years back and had the time of my life. Montana has not yet accepted gay marriage, though I think it will be soon to follow. The western part of Montana is quite progressive; it always has been, well since I can remember. I have mostly always been open about my sexuality and no one, even in the small town I grew up in gave it much of a thought. Looking back I see my fear was more internalized then actual. Spokane, Washington, just a few hours across the mountains has legalized gay marriage and could become a viable market.
A Valentine’s Day Promotion
I want to create a promotion for Valentine’s Day. Come and we can create a photo for your loved one sort of thing. They could be just a portrait or it would become something a romantic or ever a bit naughty. You can take the session anywhere you want. I do offer a full range of printing, matting, framing options with all the work I do. It could be just a picture in a card, or we can make a card with you as the artwork. Any ideas or possible graphic design element is possible. All images we create will be kept confidential. I am offering a special sitting fee of $50 and you of course will retain proofs. The session would take about an hour to shoot and you can bring whatever props you would like. I will do my famous specialty lighting to of course make you look fabulous. It could also just become a portrait of the two of you in the confines of my studio. For orders that needed to be printed, it will take about a week to turn around, so you will need to schedule the session about 10 days prior. It’s time to show your love and create a classic image of yourself. This becomes the perfect Valentine’s gift that will be remembered for years to come. If you are interested in booking a session you can reach me here.
A Lost Sense of Community
How is it that I live in such a small gay community and still not know anyone? It seems many people at least know of me! I feel somehow on the outskirts of socialization. The friends I have are dear and love to hang out with them when we do. We do not have any kind of gay bars here in Missoula, so I know it is difficult to get out and meet new people. I feel like I keep trying to connect with people on websites, but that doesn’t work either. I do a lot of chatting but never meet anyone in person. Is every one really that busy? Perhaps it’s me that’s busy? I’m not sure! This morning I linked to a guy in Columbia Falls that liked a posting I did and as
I browsed through his images and Facebook page I thought, how is it I don’t really know who this person is? Why have a never met him. He is just a couple of hours from where I live. I know that I tend to work a lot and my evenings are generally full with a part time job, but it feels like Missoula has always been this way. I have often wondered, why don’t we have a closer community here? I keep wondering if I lack the communication skills or am perhaps just socially inept? I am passionate about everything I do or get involved in? I am comfortable with myself and feel I am a charming host and love cooking and creating gay centric gatherings? But there just seems to be some people that don’t respond? I have a lot of offer to the next generation, but somehow feel lost in my connecting to them? I love to have houseguests and get to know others? I love to share my life, my experiences, my passions, but
no one really seems interested. Missoula is what I would consider the mecca of gay for Montana. It always has been. We have a University with a large population of artist, writers, and creative souls. It’s a semi-expensive place to live and many of us have to have many jobs or work out of state to actually make ends meet here. I am going to make it my goal in the next couple weeks to try and socialize and meet more of my community!
Deconstruction!
I was a bit premature in my longing for spring and the garden because yesterday we had a terrible storm blow through Missoula and about shut the city down. We ended up pulling all our UPS drivers in early because it was so bad, something I have never seen us do in all the time I have worked there.
Writing the blog this year, somehow, seems easier. It flows easier as I feel I am better able to connect with my thoughts. Those first blogs were a labor and often took hours to write and edit. But I did not have much writing experience so I mostly just wrote what came into my head. I am beginning to systematically rework this site. I’ve been shutting down galleries that have broken links. A while back I reorganized the structure of it and so if you find a link that goes nowhere, not to worry it should be fixed soon. I am also going through my catalogs of images, cleaning up and reorganizing some of them to create new galleries. I have a bunch of new models and many images that have never been shown and will try to add new ones each week.
Yesterday I added Seth; these are some of the latest images I have worked on. Seth had a very hard angular body and expression and I designed the light to reflect his personality. I particular love the lighting on this series. The light sources are very narrow and sharp, with a tight focus. In fact it was so tight I had a hard time keeping him in the channel of light I created. In many ways I think these are some of the most exciting images because they have a very commercial feel to them. Seth had a great deal of modeling experience and was easy to direct. The lighting concept was to use one very strong key light coming in from a higher angle from the left. I did add a little bit of fill light and slight sculpting from the right, but it is so subtle that it’s barely perceptible. You will see it more so in some of the later images then the first. The black and white images in this series where from a 2nd shoot several months later. I know these would be black and white and lit Seth more bringing softer lights in from both sides to accentuate more the textures of his skin and torso. I also envisioned these images would undergo some processing in the conversion to black and white or desaturation. I tend to not do a lot of processing with my images, but I also knew these would look a little better if I flattened the tonal curves just a bit. I see my subjects as lighting test and experiments and constantly and tweaking and adjusting the lighting and the subject during the shoot.
Nourished & Nurtured
I woke up this morning to hear the rain on the skylights above my bed. This generally means it’s beginning to warm up in Montana. The snow has been melting out of the back yard. I realized it’s only about 6 weeks until the bulbs will begin to bloom. I miss my garden in the winter and do not realize what a big part of my life it becomes. I put a lot of time in my garden last year and it was stupendous. Gardens take time, and that is the beauty of them. I had visualized what the garden would look like when I was designing the space. I came up with what I called the 10-year plan for it’s creation, but last year I leapt ahead several years. My garden is against a hillside below a vast mountain beyond. I have been digging into the hillside and building retaining walls of concrete stones. I also have an old irrigation ditch that runs through the back yard that used to feed orchards that were once below the property. It now only flows in the summer, I have completely landscaped it to look like a creek. I have beautiful old willow in the back with enormous trunks that look like giant hand emerging from the ground with a bank of cottonwoods beyond them. Raiding everyone’s garden I know last spring I transplanted an entire area of the hillside with about 2000 Lilly of the Valley pips. They took me three days to plant. They did nothing last year, but this year I anticipate that part of the hill be spectacular. I have begun to build cedar fences around the yard and did a great job of keeping the deer out. Last year I began to build low beds of stonewalls to contain the contour of the north side of the building, and nourished and nurtured the Virginia Creeper I transplanted there 15 years ago. It became a massive wall of green completely isolating the yard from my neighbors. I also found a tin of variegated red to white cosmos seeds that I saved from previous years and threw them into the beds creating bursts of color within the green vines. I also managed to expand the irrigation system to the hillside so most everything becomes self-watering. Then in the later part of the summer we excavated where the patio will eventually go and laid a bed of crushed gravel. Of course I have to do everything by hand because it is too narrow to get back there with any kind of equipment. Now you can see why I didn’t have much time to blog. The garden has a restorative power of me. It nurtures me as much as I nurture it.
I see now this project is very much like my garden. As I am beginning to work on it again, I see so much of myself within every element of it. Initially I thought it was about investment, but now I as I look back I realize it’s about something more, my creation. It is more the story of myself, the sharing of my life, and the celebration of my creative existence. I can’t seem to let it go and keep digging at it, as if I were weeding it somehow.
This is an image of Grant looking out the studio window into the garden and the garden as I was beginning to dig the patio.
