THIS Rhett Butler Will Never Die

just want to spout a few comments and ideas about what is going on now. no new breakthroughs about life's purpose or dreams for the future, but i am feeling refreshed here in the Chicago area. the excitement i felt last year and the year before has diminished, as now, i feel more established here, more like a regular. although i still raised eyebrows yesterday because of the shirt i was wearing. got into a discussion about death metal with a christian lady as a result. today i am going to a cemetery i have not visited before to photograph a model i have not met before. she is very familiar with this cemetery (Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside) and is a very striking redhead. i am quite excited as she is my primary model for this tour. i almost thought i lost her too as communication started to break down over the past month. the one other model i had scheduled for this visit DID flake out on me. still waiting for some sort of explanation from her. anyway, i feel more rooted in this...

My photo shoot with Niki was much earlier this year, in March. She was the first model that I had found and made contact with at Model Mayhem . She lives in Stockton and at the time we first started talking about doing a shoot together, Stockton didn't seem that far away. I think it was actually February when we first made contact. She had made a comment on one of my photos. We had planned on doing a shoot on pretty short notice, like in March... but as some of you loyal readers will remember I fell into a pretty black depression during March and April. I contacted her again in early May and we had our shoot scheduled by the end of the month. It was a sunny day, temp in the low 80's and I was doing a dog walking job at the time. I remember that the timing was a bit critical in that I could only leave the dog alone in its house in San Ramon for 4-5 hours. I had to jet out to Stockton, do the shoot and then be back in San Ramon in time to take the dog for another walk. ANYWAY.....

I became fascinated by Wynd the first time I looked at her portfolio on Model Mayhem . Mind you, I don't really have an interest in shooting nudes and that is the way Wynd prefers to model. We never discussed it as I guess my portfolio speaks for itself. No, what intrigued me about Wynd was her eyes and her hair. Later, as we communicated more, I became fascinated about her lifestyle too. Anyway, Wynd is a professional model and no longer does shoots in which she trades her time for a cd or prints (TF-CD/P). I came upon her at a time when I was sort of able to talk her into a trade with me though. I gave her a condition, that if she were able to get a paying gig on the day of our shoot it would be ok to cancel on me. I also told her that I would give her a "gratuity" of $20 so that she could buy some dinner after our shoot (or do whatever she wanted to with the money). We started this conversation in March and she said that if she was going to do a shoot with me it wou...

I met Maenad (Mae, for short) through the online modeling community ModelMayhem a little over a month ago. I wrote to her and described the photo project that I was working on; "Cemetery Girls" and she responded saying that she was interested. We communicated for several weeks, getting to know each other. Basically, I wanted to explain to her what the concept of my project was, that it was tied to the literary project that I was working on and that the girls I was photographing were attempts at helping me better find my novel's character. Mae is a student of psychology at UC Santa Cruz, but as we wrote more to each other I found out that she is many more things than just a psych student. My point in telling you these details is to be able to describe what my experience of working with her was like. I drove form San Ramon to Santa Cruz to pick her up on campus after her last class of the day, which was around 3pm on a Friday. We then drove to her home so that she could ...