a few months ago, Kari joined forces with Bhumi to assist in development and release of this new line of makeup brushes called Bhumi. The brushes are made out of synthetic bio-strand fibers and are incredibly soft. And best of all, because they are not made from animal hair, Bhumi brushes are hypoallergenic, resist bacteria, and assist in maintaining a clear complexion.

Here are some images that we have shot out on location and in the studio. It has been pretty fun and a little challenging doing product photography on location. Here are a few of the images…

Here are a few more images from the shoot. Click on them to make them big…

After the images were selected, my client wanted to see what they would look like in their meeting area. I shot a quick picture of their empty wall and lobby space and then took some measurements. I was able to do a mock up in photoshop to see what the images would look like on the wall. These two images represent the images that were printed on 40 X 30 inch pieces of acrylic.

Here are a few other images from the shoot. The photos are very straight forward. I just liked how the medical instruments looked…

RTD Denver Timelapse from Paul Wedlake on Vimeo.

Timelapse photography shot of the public transportation network in Denver, Colorado.

Two and a half days -

34 attorneys – 2 environmental portraits each (one indoor, one outdoor)  plus one head shot

10 more staff and paralegal portraits with environmentals and head shots.

112 bad jokes to good smiles

This was a pretty fast pace shoot.  The hardest parts were finding so many unique locations within the office space.  Tons of running around.  The other big challenge was shooting such panoramic portraits.  I love the way they turned out.  The website just launched last week – Otten Johnson

Here are all the environmentals in no particular order…

Quick plot synopsis – Husband kills a couple guys while robbing the bank.  He hides the money and is later hung.  A serial killer preacher marries the wife in hopes of finding the fortune.  He kills the wife and then chases her kids once he realizes they have the stash.

Great stuff to work with.  What made this a really fun photo assignment was that I worked side by side with my good friend Patrick Loehr on the assignment.  He did all the post production and there was a lot to do.   After several production meetings, reading the book and watching the movie; we casted my kids as the kids on the run.  They worked for Legos.   My neighbor Bob played the fisherman, Calvin Weatherall was the Preacher and his wife, Christy Weatherall played the protector.  She applied her own stage makeup.

The book cover

The kids are getting a bad feeling.  Could it be the doll?

Uncle Birdie finds the Mom.  This was a series of four shots.  I built the Model T as about a six inch model.  We shot it in a lake and the girl in a swimming pool.

I jumped on board to do a collaboration project with the Lowry Gallery about a month ago.  They paired 12 artists with 12 writers and called the show Poetic Synthesis.  I was assigned the only short story in the lot and I was the only photographer who participated.  It was a great project and I had a lot of fun deciding what to shoot and how to pull it off.  In the end, I decide to make two images about the loss of a young women’s hair.  The challenge was finding a location that looked like it might be a cross between a vacant lot and a trash dump.  I was driving down the road and I noticed that they drained Berkley Lake along I70.  There were a lot of treasure hunters out there tilling up the sand and the sludge trying to whatever they were looking for.  I’ll attach a few photos from my scout.  Upon seeing the landscape, I knew this was the place.

I shot the main image at dusk using two Canon speed lights.  One had a diffuser on it and was laying in the sand.  I needed a light that would mimic the fire.  I had another speedlight/umbrealla set up off to the right to light the family.  I was very lucky with having a great sunset and rim light.

Here are a few scouting photos, extra items that I shopped into the final image and the great story that I worked with…

Lviv, Ukraine 1999 by Rhonda Hattar

The apartment building is a perfect rectangle of concrete with grim old-fashioned windows.  Ours is five stories tall, the Soviet legal limit before an elevator was required.  We, of course, live on the fifth floor.  Each apartment has at least one balcony, but these are not for patio tables and barbeques.  Like most objects of Soviet design, they too are concrete boxes with utilitarian function.  Strings stretched across a balcony are for clothes drying, regardless of the season.  A corner of the balcony holds giant sackcloth bags of cabbage and potatoes

Hot water only runs for 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening.  I imagine a huge water heater somewhere under the city and lament the moment when a blue coverall clad worker turns a rusty valve that ends the warm water at 8 o’clock precisely.

Then, one day, there is simply no running water.  The first day, I am simply bemused, but as the days pass, I become forlorn and downright disturbed.  What is most frightening is the quiet acceptance of my hosts and neighbors.  Why aren’t there protests on the streets, why aren’t we marching to city hall?  Is there even a city hall?

Instead of outrage, we fill two buckets a day with water at a communal faucet on the street and haul them five stories up the stairs.  One bucket is for the kitchen, the other for the bathroom where we pour water from the bucket to “flush” it.  I am learning about plumbing, at least, though I hope I will never need this information again.

I have taken up the task of hauling the buckets, though my host mother tells me not to, to wait for the men.  She refers to some mysterious “female parts” that may be permanently strained by the labor.  But I am not so immune to the lack of water as they are, so I haul extra buckets to make up for my pathetic attempts to wash myself in the tub.

Despite my best efforts, by the second week my extravagant mass of dark curls is a tangled, greasy mess.  My host mother and sister have cropped hair that seems unfazed by the drought.  Under these desperate circumstances, they convince me to let their stylist cut my hair.

“Don’t worry, we make you superstar,” Lyudmila tells me in her awkward English that often includes obscure references to American pop culture.

I want to back out as soon as the “stylist” arrives at their apartment with his personal pair of scissors.  He is a grizzled old man, well into his 70s with a shock of full white hair.  Back home, stylists are perky girls with blue highlights, and even though they didn’t like it, they left my long tresses relatively intact after a haircut.  This guy seemed more like the cruel warden who shaves your head and douses you with lice powder on your first day in prison.  But in the confusion of language, how can I explain that there is more than a haircut at stake? This is the memory of salty strands wet and clinging to my back at the beach or the weight of a bun at the nape of my neck, where escaping tendrils invite imagined kisses.  This is about identity, maybe even about home.

He cuts it anyway.  My shorn hair touches my shoulders and a long coil lies at my feet, released.  I can’t look in the mirror.  I am worried that I too will be released, lost and unable to find my way back.

We sweep up the hair and carry it down to the collective trash heap out in a field.  We make a pile of dark hair and light a match.  The sulfurous smell burns our noses as the red-eyed pigeons pick through potato peels beside us.

“You have to burn your hair so that it will grow back and so that no one can find it and use it for bad magic,” Lyudmila explains to me.  Despite the stench and the rotting vegetables, we stay until there are only ashes.  The next day, the water turns on again, rushing through pipes suddenly and with no explanation.