Here’s one from a recent shoot with hip-hop artist Ice the Villain. The shoot was a collaboration with a stylist friend, Sunshine Harding, that we submitted to the music and fashion blog Style & Hip-Hop. For the shoot we found a great graffiti wall in the Crenshaw neighborhood that provided countless backgrounds and textures to work with. Check out more here.
Nana in Yellow 1
Red, White & Blue 1
Last week I had another amazing shoot with my friend Nana Agyapong, a Venice-based artist, model and actress. My first shoot with her was strictly portrait and confined to the studio, so this time we headed off in another direction. Nana has proven to be one of my favorite people to work with, because in addition to being stunning in front of the camera, she brings an amazing level of energy and creativity to the process. Shooting with her is truly a collaborative effort! In addition, she’s an amazing trooper, as it was quite chilly out there! Check out several more shots after the jump!
VJ Jesse Nikette
Two weeks ago I had a great time photographing Los Angeles-based VJ and video artist Jesse Nikette. I first met Jesse as he was standing in a dark doorway on Market Street, wearing hot pink glasses reminiscent of Star Trek’s Geordi LaForge (I had to look that up) and jamming on a silent piano guitar that, rather than play music, controlled video projections being thrown on the wall across the street. Photos from that encounter, which happened while he was participating in the Venice Art Crawl, are a few posts back. After that night I invited him over to shoot some portraits that incorporated his video creations. I wanted to shoot him because I thought his work was interesting and I have a few ideas about a series of portraits on local artists. On the night of the shoot he brought over his gear, which included a laptop, a high-quality video projector and a few components I’ll, for lack of a better term, call thingamajigs, and we spent a good hour or two throwing up different projections and figuring out ways to incorporate him into the patterns. Most of his work was actually very colorful, and we even used a smoke machine at one point to cut across the light rays, but this one stood out the most to me for its graphic quality as well as his stance. It’s always fun shooting portraits just for the sake of doing it. It’s fun having the freedom to create without any guidelines and I’m almost always happy with the results. If you want to see more of Jesse’s work and learn a lot about video art and projection mapping in general, definitely check out his site, www.jessenikette.com!
Fashion shoot in front of The Brig, Venice, Calif.
I’ve been doing a few portfolio shoots lately, teaming up with models, stylists and makeup artists and just seeing what we can come up with. This is from a recent collaboration with model Keira Kitagawa and makeup artist Dee (last name to follow). After doing a number of shots in the studio we went out around Venice to find interesting locations. We ended in the parking lot of The Brig, a popular bar and landmark along Abbot Kinney Blvd. I had noticed the lights before while scouting for locations and thought this would make a great place to shoot. Our timing wasn’t great though. We finally made our way to this location just as the attendant was starting to charge for parking and cars were starting to pull in. He tried to charge us to park, but I told him we were looking for places to shoot my friend and asked if we could quickly take a shot and move on. He agreed, but was probably surprised when I pulled a big light out of the trunk. Dee helped Keira get ready in the car and we literally shot for less than 5 minutes, popping frames between crossing cars and pedestrians. Hard to get a clean shot! Finally it all came together and as an added bonus, a car that was turning in to park provided a nice edge light on her legs, giving it something the other frames were lacking. Overall it turned out pretty well I think. Nothing like working on the fly and under the gun! Thanks Keira and Dee for a successful collaboration!
I’m excited to announce that the second issue of SoCal Scene magazine was just released and features a fashion spread shot by yours truly. We had a great team and a great time putting this shoot together and we’re happy with the results! The magazine is online at socal-scene.com and should be on magazine racks around L.A. next week. In order to pull this off we put together a great team of people and put in a full-day’s work and then some. The shoot took place north of Los Angeles in and around the town of Piru. I’ll follow up later with some behind the scenes photos I took for Erika Stanley’s SNOB Style site.
Credits:
Photography by David Zentz
Styling by Erika Stanley
Clothing by Black Label by Planet Blue & Planet Blue Boutique
Hair by Kyle Mathis
Makeup by Robyn Fisher
Photography assistant – Matt Levitch
Please continue after the jump to see the rest of the series!
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Fashion Week L.A. at the Petersen Automotive Museaum
Backstage during Fashion Week L.A. at the Petersen Automotive Museaum
Last week was quite fashion-heavy, with Thursday spent doing an all-day editorial fashion shoot up in Simi Valley and Friday night spent shooting the final night of Fashion Week L.A. at the Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Blvd. Both were done in collaboration with my friend Erika Stanley for her fashion website, SNOBStyle.tv, and will appear there soon. I’ll be sure to add links when they do. Although the editorial shoot came first I’m posting the Fashion Week images now, as it may be awhile before the first shoot publishes. We’re also hoping to publish it in a new upstart magazine, SoCal-Scene, with which Erika has recently become affiliated. More on that later.
For this event I stayed away from shooting the standard, down-the-runway shots in favor of shooting more of a behind-the-scenes piece. It was the second of two nights of Gen Art’s Fresh Faces in Fashion show and featured a variety of designers I’m not personally familiar with. I was really just curious to check out the scene. Fortunately, Erika was able to get me a backstage pass to facilitate this and I came away with some decent images. I surely outshot Ashton Kutcher at least.
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I recently produced a few slideshows for a popular LA fashion blog called SNOB Style. The blog is the passion project of Erika Stanley, pictured at top and bottom right, who writes and shoots videos about all things fashion. For this project she was demonstrating, with the help of makeup artist Robyn Fisher, three different looks for summer makeup. Definitely one of my tougher assignments! What with the wine and cheese and Robyn’s studio, which is at her Studio City home on a high hill overlooking the valley. The full project can be seen here.
I spent a fun Saturday afternoon photographing Aussie-via-London, pop-rock duo Lovers Electric (David Turley and Eden Boucher) in my “studio” apartment. Erinn and I met the husband and wife collaboration between catchy sets at an event at Venice’s Equator Books the night before. I’m always looking for fun people to photograph, and I liked their vibe. So with a bit of encouragement (3 parts Erinn and 1 part Shiraz), I approached David and asked if the two would mind meeting up sometime during their visit to L.A. to do some photos. They both turned out to be great sports and agreed to come over the next day when they had some free time. And here are the results. The two were in town signing a new record deal and will be coming out with a new CD sometime in May, I believe. More on that can be learned by clicking on their band name above to check out their site. They’re also on Myspace at http://www.myspace.com/loverselectric.
