I’d had it in my head to do an era specific photo shoot for some time.  I settled on the 1940s for practical reasons; I was able to secure cars and wardrobe for that time period a lot more easily than had I gone for the 1920s or earlier.  Living in Riverside, I felt certain that some area near the village’s downtown area would fill in well for the 1940s.  It was close by and looked perfect.  The only problem was that I couldn’t get any sort of official okay for the downtown area.

After several months of trying, I finally gave up and decided to do the shoot in unincorporated Riverside (Riverside Lawn).  As I often joke, it’s international waters in Riverside Lawn; cock-fighting and murder are fully legal there… it’s unincorporated!  And there I shot.  I brought in three cars from the 1940s, more than thirty pieces of wardrobe, six models, four stylists and with them came more hangers-on that I could count.

This shoot was, by far, the most time intensive and difficult shoot to put together that I’ve ever worked on.  Just locking down all the moving pieces made it a beast.  When the shoot ended and I started looking through the images, my heart dropped.  Every single one of them looked bad.  I couldn’t figure it out.  Not one of them looked good.  I was disgusted that I’d spent all the time, money and energy I had to put the shoot together and, for the first time in my photography career, didn’t look to have any photos I could use from the shoot.

After a couple of days passed, I took a second look at the images from my 1940s shoot and realized the problem: all of them were in color.  Super intense color.  There were bright reds and greens and yellows everywhere.  (See for yourself, this is the original version of this photo).  Or, in other words, not one of the photos looked like something from the 1940s.  I started desaturating the images and adding some sepia to them and, all of a sudden, there were loads and loads of photos that looked fantastic.  And this is my favorite image of the bunch.