VJ Kapur

Last week I got to do portraits with D.C. singer/song writer VJ Kapur. We had met at a friend, Jacob Gemmell's show. After a long time of talking about hooking up to do pictures we finally got it done. The first image was shot near John's Hopkins University on a trail I used to run on when I lived nearby. The second image was shot in the  Hampden area of Baltimore. 

Both locations epitomize the grittiness of Baltimore which I've really come to love. There's something so real and tactile about places around town. I think Baltimore gets a bad rap, with most people only thinking of the Inner Harbor, The Wire and murders when Baltimore is mentioned. To me though it's been a wonderful city to start a career in. It's a place full of realness and little pretentiousness. There are beautiful old places all around the city. And to me, a photographer, even the dilapidated and abandoned places are like gardens of photographic opportunity each hidden with unnoticed or forgotten treasures. 

It was fun to explore some of the little hideaways of Baltimore with VJ and then to se how well they translated to photos when we were done. 

I guess this is my man crush on Baltimore entry. And looking at it now I think I made VJ into an Indian Springsteen. There are worse things. 

So birthday cookie cake taught me a valuable lesson...I have no dessert self control. If it's in my place it will die a gruesome death.

 Behold, three days with birthday cake. 

 I will never weigh 175 lbs ever again.

When Children Attack

Occasionally, I come up with photo ideas that I can't quite explain in a way that makes them seem sane. Fortunately, society seems to give a little wiggle room to an artist in the sane department. How's that for an intro for one of my latest shoots. 

I think my thought process started with this shoot after seeing a little kid eating some candy or jam or something. Their hands and all around there mouth was stained red. It made me think how if you saw an adult with red liquid oozing down their face you would think something totally different. Red stains on a kid is Kool Aid and cute, on an adult it's Hannibal Lecter and disturbing. 

This led me to think of my family dog Luna. My parents love to buy her stuffed animal squeaker toys. Luna then will not rest until she has totally destroyed the animal, ripped out all it's stuffing and gotten to it's squeaker and killed it with a righteous and holy vengeance. She's always so proud of herself after this act, parading the stuffed animal carcass around the house and plopping it on your lap in an attempt to get you to play tug-of-war with it. 

Blend all this together in my sort of sane mind and this is what you get. 

Often photo ideas take on a life of their own. Sometimes what you are left with is quite a bit different than what you originally dreamed up. In this case, what I dreamed up came to life almost too well. I got a white teddy-bear at a Goodwill and then bought some red syrup for the blood. But, as soon as I started pouring the blood on the decapitated bear I realized wow...this looks really realistic. Perhaps TOO realistic. Perhaps years of therapy after this trauma realistic. 

I cut back a bit on the original carnage that I had planned for ole teddy. Still when I brought in the little girl she refused to look at the bear, much less touch it. My original idea had her holding part of it. That was not happening. In fact she didn't even want anything to do with the syrup. Eventually, with her mom bribing her with M&Ms and her sister and babysitter dancing behind me to distract her and make her laugh I got what I needed and compromised by letting the bear stay on the floor. 

The girl's mom told me later that her older sister who is four told her after watching the shoot that there "Mommy there was something REALLY wrong with that bear!" Boy the fun I'll have when I have kids...poor kids. 

Made My Day

As if Red Emma's wasn't enough good vibes for a day, when I got home from there I had a package on my doorstep. I thought maybe it was some shorts that I had left at my grandparents that they had sent back. I took it upstairs and opened it up. There was a bunch of packaging. I slowly pulled it all away, thinking this is kind of ridiculous for a pair of shorts. And then low and behold I pulled out this: 

A birthday cake from my homiesieta Nunz's mommy and daddy!! How sweet was that? Well, I'll tell you how sweet, super sweet, cause it was the best tasting thing I can remember putting in my mouth for sometime. It's a good thing I'm not a diabetic...yet...because this would be like a one way ticket to a diabetic coma it's so good.

Because it looked so good, I decided to take another picture of it posing on my couch as well.

I would suggest everyone go make friends with Martha and Rudy and then have yourself a birthday!

Project Coffee; Red Emma's

Part four of Project Coffee (I still need to put up part one, for anyone who is counting) was most excellent! Met up with partner in coffee crime Sean Scheidt at Red Emma's a place on St. Paul in the Mount Vernon neighborhood. It's actually an archaist group owned collective, and although I asked I won't even pretend to try to explain how that works. 

Sean and I both got a chai latte which tasted faintly of some sort of spice cookie my mom used to make a lot. Whatever it was, it was good. 

The great food and drink was hardly the best part of the place though, the atmosphere put it all to shame. I don't know if we went there on a good day or what, but it was one of those places I imagined used to exist before "The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry." (Anyone know what that quote is from? huh huh huh??)

It was one of those places where everyone was sort of in on the conversation. You heard a lot of, "I couldn't help, but overhear what you said." Which was code for let us partake in discussion. Not exactly what happens in Starbucks where the only discussion usually seems to be could you please move, shut up, or stop doing that. 

Not exactly sure what anarchists got going down, but it seemed like good stuff. There was a chess game going on between and old white dude and a young black dude behind us. We got to watch Bohemian Rhapsody done by the Muppets on the cashiers computer while listening to it over the cafe's speakers. And our server who's name was Sine ended up being a really cool girl who is two bands, Mr. Moccasin and has just started a solo project called Bean, which I took a listen of and is really good. She's the one below with the mustache tattoo on her finger. You got to respect a tattoo that is only for comedic purposes.                          

Sean and I agreed Red Emma's was by far the best place we'd hit up so far. But, really how can you go wrong with a place that stands behind a Stolen Sharpie Revolution? You can't! That's how. 

The Sorted Lives of AK Slaughter

In an attempt to try something new I have started trying to do a little more story telling with my shoots. So when I got the chance to shoot with the rap duo AK Slaughter and they told me they were up for anything I figured I should take advantage of this little situation (Thanks to The Jersey Shore I can't say the word "situation" without thinking of THE Situation). 

After talking a little I found out two things:

1.  Aran was into a sort of retro kick with his wardrobe. 

2.  Emily and Aran are constantly getting asked if they are a couple, which they are not. 

So I figured let's shoot them as a retro couple! When Aran showed up to the shoot first I told him my plan. He liked the idea, but had me look at their previous album AK Slaughter a personal matter. For their album art they had done a sort of 50/60s theme of a couple apparently in love.

This gave me an even better idea though...shoot them as a 70s couple with all kinds of dysfunction. A couple where Emily is still madly in love and trying to win Aran's heart. Unfortunately, Aran is a jerk to say the least and Emily's advances are ignored at best and despised at worst. 

A lovely story right? 

Well, perhaps depressing, but thanks to some great acting by both Emily and Aran it was hilarious. They really nailed the emotions I wanted and my retro decorated house worked as a perfect set for their disharmony. 

Hello World!!!

It's finally happened, I own America! I was messing around on my Google analytics and saw that I have finally had my photo website www.danielbedell.com visited by every state in America. Wyoming I believe was the final state to bow to me. 

I still have a way to go with world domination, but I'm about a quarter of the way there. I do have some pretty crazy ones like Uganda and Kyrgyzstan. Honestly, how many people knew Kyrgyzstan was even a country? 

The countries I still really want are Kazakhstan, Greenland and the Vatican. Also I'd like to collect all the communist countries. I've already got China so I need North Korea, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. Gotta collect 'em all! 

Project Coffee; City Cafe

Project Coffee continues. Friday Sean Scheidt and I met up at City Cafe  in the Mt. Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore. It is quite the chic place. Half of the space is set up as as a coffee house and the other half is a restaurant. Turned out Sean was friends with the head chef Chad Gauss and had even shot his wedding a while back. We met Chad who was very nice and was telling us how he's really pushed to buy a lot more locally grown vegetables and now meats to serve. Apparently, hitting up the local farmer's markets is a large part of his job. I think I might see if I can tag along sometime and do a little documentary on some food from start to finish. 

I've decided on Project Coffee missions I am going to order based on the barista's favorite thing or the most popular. The barista this time said she just liked coffee, so I went with what she said was most popular. Apparently, City Cafe isn't the most macho hang cause I ended up getting a Blueberry Hazelnut Mocha...it pretty much tasted like blueberry pancakes in liquid form. Apparently, the I am making a slow, slow transition to "actual" coffee. 

Sean ended up getting an omelet with sweat potato fries that was delightful way to clog one's arteries. I'd recommend it if you're into all that clogging biz. 

Unfortunately, there were no couches for me to leave my ass groove in. I know the world is a sadder place now. 

Recycling 17.5 Peanuts

A few years ago I had a weekly column in a couple newspapers. Originally, I started in sports writing and column writing before getting into photography. Anyway, I thought I would revise and recycle some of the columns I have written on here. Perhaps, eventually I will even write some new ones. Although I warn you, without an editor the fact that I am a horrible speller and have the grammar skills of a 12 year old may become painfully obvious.

This goes out to everyone looking to waste some time at work!

I HATE AIR TRAVEL! Can I get a witness?!

A few weeks ago saw kid who was wearing a T-shirt that said "Friends don't let friends fly Southwest." I had just flown Southwest about two days earlier and I couldn't have agreed more. In fairness though, it isn't just Southwest, it is all the airlines. You don't get anything anymore. Food for instance. You don't get meals, you get snacks. Which even as snacks go are a joke.

On one flight I counted the peanuts I was given as my snack. My package contained seventeen and a half peanuts. From Chicago to Reno I was supposed to subsist on SEVENTEEN AND A HALF PEANUTS!

It doesn't stop just at the food, airlines no longer provide movies, TV reruns, music, or space. That would be bad enough right? But noooo, airlines are missing the charming intangibles of old and have replaced charm with the following:

1. Virtually, no hot stewardesses (I would even settle for stewardesses who don’t hit me with the drink cart, bash me in the head with a seat buckle while demonstrating to people the subtle nuances of those rare locking devices, jam their asses in my face while adjusting things in overhead bins, or apologize for ANY of the following),

2. Cushions that give me horrible butt-ache.

3. Anxiety attacks from wondering if you will be unpatriotic by going to the forward lavatory at the same time as someone else therefore engaging in illegal congregating activities.

Am I wrong here or is it un-American for us to now be charged a minimum of twenty-five dollars to super-size our luggage? Hell, you have to pay just to have luggage most of the time. My mom used to pack luggage that require pallbearers to carry. If she did that now it would require pallbearers to carry off my dad off after he got billed. Over all, flying just seems to have lost any charm it may have once had.

Maybe I was just young and stupid, but it used to be exciting. Now it has morphed into bus travel gone wild, minus any nudity or beads. Though, I don't think nudity would help the experience, I have sat next to very few people I would ever want to see in any form of nude.

ONE TIME have I got a seat next to a really hot girl. I have flown probably close to a hundred times and all I get is one time out of a hundred?! Lucky for me, that hot girl sat next to her boyfriend and the two of them proceeded to make out the whole flight. Can't say the flight wasn't memorable, just not for the reasons that I had hoped for when I spotted her in my row as I was walked down the isle.

Several times lately I have had the distinct feeling in an airport that I am livestock. You get herded in and out of lines, through gates and prodded with metal detecting wands in your rear and crotch. Besides being shot in the head No Country For Old Men style and being turned into an Omaha Steak once you get to the plane what is missing? 

Of course the people running the cattle drive are rarely friendly. I was running late for a flight recently after getting stuck in traffic and I went to a airline employee and asked if there was any way I could get rushed through so I could be sure to make my flight. She looked at me like I had asked for a back rub and said, "Yeah. You can rush on to the back of the line!"

I hate those moments because I am always surprised by them. When I am surprised I never have a good comeback. So for the next half hour while I wait in line I think of all the clever things I should have said. "Oh yeah well your jobs sucks more than mine! And I don't even have a job!" Or, "I bet all your friends really aren't your friends...they uhh...only like you because you are so pathetic you make them feel better about themselves!" Yeah…so take that…I am full of a lot of snappy comebacks like that, maybe even better ones…maybe.

I guess in some ways it isn't fair get angry at the airlines. They are just trying to find ways to appease our demand for lower prices. They basically said here are your low prices, hope you enjoy your butt-ache and seventeen and a half peanuts losers!

The real people we should blame are scientists. Why haven't they invented personal, affordable, safe teleporting. I mean even the OLD Star-Trek had it! And that was like fifty years ago! What's the deal? Didn't we get telegraph and phone close to a hundred and fifty years ago? You are telling me that the best we can do in a hundred and fifty years is give me a phone without wires that plays movies the size of a postage stamp?

Shoot, if we spent as much time and money figuring out how to teleport as we do on how to wage wars and kill people we could be faxing me to Yemen right now. And how much more peace would there be in the world if no one had to fly Southwest?

Then again what would happen to that feeling of excitement you get as a young single man boarding a plane with the hope that you will get to sit next to an attractive member of the opposite sex...who of course is making out with her boyfriend for five nonstop hours, uninterrupted by movies, TV reruns, food or music.

Excuse me while I go see what happens when you congregate next to the forward lavatory.

Publishing Genius

I shot a job for Baltimore Magazine on Adam Robinson. He turned out to be a pretty cool guy with some unique interests. One of his interests was poetry. Robinson is basically a poetry outlaw who goes around cities and puts his poems up on lamp posts, signs and other random places he thinks they will get noticed. The idea has caught on in other cities now and taken on a life of it's own as other people now have turned urban areas into notebooks. He even has a book of pictures of the poems hung gorilla style around cities. You can see them here at IsReads

Adam also started a publishing company, Publishing Genius  and has published the works of nearly a dozen authors. Even cooler the first novel his company ever publish, Light Boxes by Shane Jones was bought for republication by Penguin, sold out and then the film rights were bought for it by Spike Jonze. 

You can also read Adams blog here. 

We took these pictures in Baltimore City at Patterson Park on the South East side of town. The building behind Adam in the first shot is the Pagoda. For some reason there are cannons and statue of kids surrounding an asian style building in the middle of Baltimore. Yeah, I don't totally get city planning. Of course I had the idea to basically defile the statue of children with some poetry. Adam was game, so away we went. 

The last picture I believe is the one that ended up running for the article, POETRY MAN (man man man man)!! I like it. Nothing like a hipster professor by day and English language super hero by night. Fighting against the evils of bad punctuation, spelling and dull prose! 

 

Madness!

College basketball is officially heating up and two guys that I got shoot last year for SLAM Magazine are right in the middle of it. Mouphtaou Yarou and Isaiah Armwood, shown in that order below, now play for the tenth ranked Villanova Wildcats. 

Both guys attended Montrose Christian School which is just North of D.C. and has produced several NBA players most notably Kevin Durant. 

Isaiah, who is originally from Baltimore grabbed a bit of highlight time early on by getting a number one play of the day on ESPN with a dunk over 7 guys at a contest you can see here. We tried to recreate it with Mouphtaou, but as you can see below it didn't quite work. After doing it like two times Isaiah kind of pulled up lame with his leg. I of course immediately put an end to that shot idea, the last thing I needed was to end some kids career over a photo shoot! 

So as a second idea I had Isaiah dunk while Mouphtaou threw the ball off the backboard, spun around in the air with the ball over his head like he was looking to pass down the court while still in the air. Yeah...sometimes the ideas you get in your head probably need to be run by a czar of common sense. In the end I think we actually got a decent shot, you can see it in the last set of pictures. 

That being said trying to time two people jumping in the air is fairly hard. Trying to time two people jumping in the air doing different things is harder. Trying to time two people doing two different basketball skills in the air at the same time is really hard. Trying to time two people doing two different basketball skills in the air (one of those skills being the rebound outlet pass combo being pretty hard) and not have some weird face or shorts bunching up or an elbow covering up there face is just STUPID HARD! But sometimes you just got to figure out the hard way that what's in your head is not the easiest thing to recreate. In the meantime you still might get some sweet images. 

Mouphtaou, who goes by Mouph is actually from Benin, Africa. He came to the U.S. in 2007 after only playing basketball since 2004. Apparently being 6'10" and 250 lbs translates well to basketball. Of course before basketball his thing was soccer...I think he made the right choice. And to just make you feel a little more humbled Mouph speaks five languages. 

In a cool move, after both playing at Montrose where I shot them, the two decided to both go to the save college. It's always exciting for me to turn on ESPN and catch a Nova game and see them. They were both very nice to work with and it's harder to imagine a nicer Goliath than Mouph. Oh and before I left they introduced me to a teammate of theirs who was also from Benin. He was seven feet tall and in the tenth grade. I got the shaft being born in Avon Park, Florida for sure! 

All the best to the guys in the tournament! I'm sure they'll be thinking of me every time they have to simultaneously dunk a ball and rebound another basketball, spin around in the air and look to make an outlet pass down court. 

A Guide To Getting FAT!

Kiddy Crack. HBO rejected a follow up series to The Wire that was based around the confectionary trade between a gang of 5 year olds and their Mennonites suppliers.

What about lemonade milk? If life gives you sour milk make it into milk lemonade. 

This is marketed to Amish wives looking to throw a wild cocktail party, but just don't have the time to make 15 different kinds cubed cheese and cheese dip. The Real Housewives of Lancaster Pennsylvania. 

Contains your daily value of Red Dye #40

Just by reading this caption your BMI rose 2%....sorry. 

I didn't actually order a NEW chicken and swiss log, but this is what I kind of imagined the finished product should look like. Did I mention I was a vegetarian for 17 years before now? My meat imagination is pretty wild. 

When Grandma does drugs. 

So many jokes....so inappropriate.

My family came to visit me last week and we decided to go to the Pennsylvania Dutch Market in Hunt Valley. It had been a while since I had been to a place such as this where I could feel my heart slowly clogging just from visual stimuli. I was strong though! I only ate samples...and a milkshake my mom bought...and a pretzel my sister bought...and a bison burger I bought...and the strawberry rhubarb pie my dad bought...and the carmel apple walnut pie my dad bought for me...and the cranberry glazed bread my family bought as a family. THAT WAS IT!!

To save myself from type 2 diabetes I instead got my nerdy photographer thing on and busted out my iPhone and the ShakeItPhoto app and started snapping away. The one great thing that I wasn't able to capture well that really deserved to be captured well was Awesome Albert the three foot high, $100 dollar chocolate Easter Bunny. We will meet again Awesome Albert...we will meet again.