I wanted to get out to the San Diego Gay Pride Parade this year because I’d missed it the past few years, and really wanted to meet people and make portraits of them. There’s a bit of a challenge with approaching complete strangers and asking to take their photo, but after a bit of practice it gets easier. Sometimes I get denied, and I respect that, but most of the time I’m able to achieve what I’m aiming for.

I learned from a documentary by Louis Theroux documentary on Hypnosis where he learns from a hypnosis teacher on how to pick up women (sounds weird, but stay with me) by using a simple formula called CIQ. What CIQ stands for is Compliment, Introduce, Question. The way that I’ve translated this in terms of photographing strangers is if I see someone who has style I approach them and compliment something they’re wearing followed with introducing myself and telling them about the portrait project that I am working on, and then I ask if they’d be interested in having their portrait taken.

I made these photographs with a Canon AE-1P on Portra 400 film. To see the rest of the set click here.

I photographed San Diego musician Mimi Zulu the other night at her home in San Diego. Mimi and I have worked on a few music videos together in the past and she’s wonderful to work with because she is open to all ideas and has great style.

My approach with this shoot was to photograph Mimi with a simple setup of two lights with one umbrella. I haven’t done much work like this lately, so it was nice working with Mimi to get it out of my system and fine tune my ideas. I had been shooting a lot of film for the past few months and enjoy the delayed satisfaction of seeing the print of the images made, however I began to crave the instant satisfaction of digital photography again.

The shoot took around two hours, and I feel with every shoot like this that I do I realize the importance of planning. I typically have a few ideas in my head, but writing them down and having sample images to show the subject before making the photos always helps.

I created this video with Jon Talbott of Talbott & Sons based in San Diego, California.

“Our heritage comes from an era that celebrated American creativity and craft. In the late 1960s Jerry Talbott finished his tour in the Vietnam War and traded in his dress blues for a shop apron. In 1974 he founded Talbott & Sons; a company proudly dedicated to making superior quality, luxury leather goods.

One generation and nearly five decades later, we’re still doing things the old fashioned way. Every product is made by our own hands to meet the high standards we set. It’s the only way of ensuring that true quality remains accessible to our customers. We wouldn’t brand our family’s name and history into each product if we didn’t believe in them ourselves.

Talbott & Sons leather goods are made in the USA with materials exclusively sourced across the nation. If you haven’t associated luxury with American made products before, you will now.”