Photographing a Best Selling Author…

Well I’m not into romance novels but I was lucky enough to photograph New York Times best-selling romance author Lisa Kleypas. I shot these in 2007 originally for St. Martin’s Press for her first book with them, Sugar Daddy.

Lisa has written over 20 books in her career. The funny thing is when she first called me, I didn’t know at the time where she lived and I had insisted we first meet face-to-face before any photos would be taken as I always want to meet my clients/subjects at least a few days before a shoot. This is how you start to build rapport and learn about the inner-beauty of your subject. The outer-beauty is a always there. She agreed and I met with her and her husband.

What I didn’t know, her house, at the time, was only about 45-minutes up the road from mine. One of her biggest concerns was that she wanted to connect to her readers, mostly women and that she didn’t want anything too sexy, but at the same time something that still portrayed her beauty at her age (let’s just say very early 40’s), mother of two children and wife to a husband of many years.
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Grown Men Can Cry, Reflecting Back…

I think it’s healthy to cry, Lord knows I’ve shed a few tears overtime. Though most of the time as men we see it coming, then there are times when something triggers it and we don’t see it coming. If there is one song that will always make my eyes water, it’s TAPS, especially since I’ve attended many military funeral services over my lifetime and as a former active-duty Staff Sgt. in the U.S. Army, it drives home.

While I’ve been out of the military service for some time, yesterday, after launching PhotoTherapy.org, memories of some of those days came back when an old friend, former barracks roommate and military buddy, James Campos, registered as a PhotoTherapy.org community member.

I thought about the days we served together during the drug war (Operation Support Justice) while on active-duty for the U.S. Army in the early 1990’s. James was there before I arrived. In fact he had gone through the whole Noriega conflict. I had arrived afterwards from Germany, via Desert Storm.

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The Deer Hunter

It’s that time of year where the guns are cleaned and oiled , the war paint is applied, the long johns are pulled-up, the battery-powered socks are turned on as deer hunters flock to their leases in search of that prize-point buck. Coming from Texas and spending part of my life on my grandfather’s ranches, I’m very familiar with this time of year though I was always lucky, as back in my youth, hunting permits where cheap as “landowners and their families” enjoyed “exempt” status and were even issued “doe permits,”—no deer lease required for our family, just some salt and peppered, pan-fried “backstrap.”

Today with a technology consumed busy life I find myself with no time to hunt but enjoy reminiscing about the days of hunting deer, rattlesnake, javelinas (wild South Texas hog), cotton tails, jack rabbits and even cubbies of quail. Though I must admit, when I see today’s hunter I think about how my grandfather would quip and snipe at how hunters have evolved from trackers to stalkers as they sit in their deer blinds quietly waiting for that buck they’ve been fattening with feed corn for the past few months. Hunting has become as commercialized as Christmas to the point that today’s hunter is better termed a techno hunter, much like fisherman with their sonar detectors for the school of fish.
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Chicago Mansion