One question that I’m asked a lot is how I get my ideas for different photos.  The truth is incredibly boring.  So boring that I’ve actually tried making things up to make it sound more interesting, but it never works.  How did I come up with the idea to have a yoga instructor in the woods, meditating on top of this fallen tree?  Well, funny story, I was walking my dog through the woods and saw this exact yoga instructor meditating in this exact position on top of this exact fallen tree.

Another question that I’m asked a lot is how I get people to pose for different photos.  The truth here is also incredibly boring.  So boring that I’ve actually tried making things up to make it sound more interesting, but it never works.  How did I get Carissa to agree to pose for this photo?  I asked her.

I believe the exact phrasing of my question was, “Excuse me, would you be open to coming back to the woods alone after dark and doing a photo shoot with me?”  Somehow that did the trick.

What was funny was that my normal assistant couldn’t make it to this shoot so she sent her boyfriend, Matt, whom I’d only met the day before.  When Carissa showed up, one of the first questions she asked Matt was how long we’d been working together, Matt said that we’d met about 16 hours earlier.  She laughed and then a few minutes later asked me the same question.  I told her that I’d only met Matt the night before and her jaw dropped.  “Omigod, I thought he was joking,” she said.

On a different note, this fallen tree was exactly halfway into the woods.  No matter whether you came to it from the north or the south, it was the same (long) distance.  Since we were bringing an incredibly heavy marine battery for power, it wasn’t optimal.  Then I realized that the fallen tree was about 50 yards away from a street in Riverside Lawn… if you were willing to walk through a minefield of burrs and downed trees.  We chanced it and got burrs on absolutely everything.  They were on the light cases, they were on our clothes, our shoes, the camera cases and, most impressively on the lights themselves.  I had several on my underwear.  Believe it or not, knowing how heavy the battery was, I still think we made the right call on this.  That said, more than a year later, I continue to find burrs on equipment from this shoot.