The Kings of DRU HILL

Well my Dru Hill shoot has finally run so thought I'd let you see some photos. You can see the article here at Baltimore Magazine's website. It was quite the fun shoot, the guys were actually a lot of fun to work with. I had been expecting the worse and was very pleasantly surprised and got nearly 5 hours from them. 

Lot's of props go out to Nunz, Jonathan Hanson, Kristin Putchinski and Michelle Johnson for all the help! Also to Wrightway Studios for being so kind to let us shoot at your beautiful facility! 

We shot this shot in Wrightway Studios here in Baltimore. From left to right we have Tao (who I unfortunately kept pronouncing like Tao of Buddhism, but is actually pronounced "tay-o"...I think I never felt confident on that) Nokio, Jazz and Sisqo. 

I think this has become my favorite shot, I just love the studio and I think the lighting turned out really well thanks to Johnny H on the lights.  

Shot this at an abandon row house right down from Druid Hill Park in the neighborhood that most of the guy grew up in. Nokio gave one of my favorite quotes, "Just give me a paper bag and I'd feel right at home here, don't even need to have booze...just the bag."

I didn't notice it until editing but I love the sign in the top left of the picture here. 

This was shot in Druid Hill park, the namesake of the band. Sisqo told me this was the first time the band had ever been photographed in the park. He said they did however film the Thong Song Remix video here...I appreciated that little factoid. 

The magazine used this as you can see from above as the features cover shot. 

We shot in Frederick Douglass High School where Jazz and Nokio went to school and first started performing and started forming the group. Dru Hill was actually a very organically started group...so Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, 98 Degree and all the rest of you can suck it. 

It was really fun to shoot a group of guys who were so comfortable in front of the camera. Told them I needed photos that looked like they were telling stories about high school and that's what I got! 

The Crew

This photo of me also doubles as my application for whitest man alive. 

K'Naan

This weekend I got dragged along to a concert featuring a D.C. rapper Wale. Got to admit I wasn't that into Wale, but I ended up really loving his opening act K'Naan. K'Naan is from Canada...that great bastion of hip hop and rap music. Originally though he is from Somolia, coming over with his mother and two siblings when he was 13 on what turned out to be the last commercial flight ever out of Mogadishu. 

He was really great in live and I bought his CD Troubadour on LaLa and am really digging it. A lot of his lyrics reference how being gangster over here is just ridiculous when compared to growing up in what is considered about the most dangerous place on earth. And you got to admit there isn't much you can say to that, especially when your country has basically no functional government, or police and is the go to destination if you want to be a pirate. 

You can check out more of his story and music in a piece on NPR here. 

Romania

In my search for musicians to shoot I came across The Oranges Band.  One of the members of the Baltimore band is Roman Kuebler who has started his own solo project Romania. As one of his ventures he started the Romania website where you can subscribe for 12 dollars a year and each month you get some sort media from Roman. Pretty cool concept. 

Shot Roman in my house and he brought the all white outfit that he had been kind of playing around for a performance piece. I really like how it kind of worked with both a look and the concept of insanity. You can see in the last picture how the concept kind of evolved. 

It was fun talking with Roman. I learned a lot more about  the Baltimore music scene which Roman has been involved with for over a decade. Then got the chance to check out his concert later in the week at the Ottobar. 

Dru Hill

Last weekend got to shoot the Baltimore original Dru Hill. This was from our first location at a school that two of the members went to. The suits went from little, Sisqo, to big, Jazz. All of us on the crew when we saw this had to take a picture for some reason. 

The shoot was for Baltimore Magazine, and in the end we got some really sweet images. Not to mention, Sisqo told me no one had ever shot the group in Druid Hill Park, what they are named after. So on some level I was breaking new ground. And to prove it we shot in the park next to the Christopher Columbus statue. 

Look for the pictures from the shoot in a few weeks! 

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. 

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. 

Ellen Cherry

One of the first people I met in Baltimore was Kristin. We met in the way most people meet...on a Chinatown bus smelling of urine and that strange industrial blue liquid that is supposed to make us think it doesn't smell like urine. She was coming back from doing a show in NYC and I was coming back from wandering the streets of York by day and sleeping on an old girlfriend's studio basement apartment by night. A studio apartment she lived in with her current boyfriend by the way. You got to love starting out being poor! 

Turned out Kristin was a singer/songwriter who went by the stage name of ellen cherry. We talked all the way back and then her and man gave me a ride back to my place. As they say, the rest is history. Now who "they" be that says that, and why they were to lazy to actually tell anymore of the story I don't know. 

Kristin has since become one of my close friends and also a quality test model often humoring me while I try out new lighting or ideas. These photos are from one such "just kind of messing around" shoot from almost exactly a year ago. We also collaborated on her newest ellen cherry cd (New) Years, doing the album art. Check out the music and cd at her site here or at iTunes. 

Oh, and ellen cherry also landed the local FOX news theme song. So half a dozen times a day I can turn on the TV and think, "I knew her when..."

Army of Me

Got the chance to shoot portraits with Vince from Army of Me. Eventually the photos we shot turned into the album cover and art for his latest acoustic ep Make Yourself Naked. Which is a very good album. I even bought a copy myself...which is saying something. But, when one of his songs is a response to a Bob Dylan song I couldn't help myself. It's a great raw album, very much stripped down from the normal electric work Vince normally does with the band. 

For this shoot Vince and I wandered around Fells Point in Baltimore on a Sunday morning. As usual I made sure I got my personal concert out of it. In this case it was even better because there was a bunch of random people around thinking we were crazy. At one point we were shooting in a tunnel and Vince was singing me Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2 and he forget the words. Two women were out walking and coming through the tunnel and one picked up where he forgot the words and started singing and she was actually REALLY good! I love when stuff like that happens. 

We hit up a diner for some breakfast and headed over to North Ave section of Baltimore and shot in this really cool alley that has been set up so people can do graffiti art. Finished up the last of my personal concert and then went and helped Vince's brother move. All in a day's work of shooting. 

Be sure to check out Army of Me's music either at there website by clicking here or going to iTunes.