How it all began...

Hey Gregory, this one's for you :) The following was written on March 29th, 2009, the day I retired from male modeling. I don't know what I was thinking! I had my whole career ahead of me! And I was SUPER hot. What can I say, I wanted to go out on top... oh well. :)

What goes through my head during a Charles Yeh shoot? Let me take you through the bullet points:

What’s the main focus of the shoot? Seriousness/humor for this one.

What’s effect am I going for? Edgy. Hard lighting on the face (snooted SB-800 flash). But we need to make the subject stand out from the background (rim lighting from the subject’s back)

What about the background? Black it out. The subject is the primary focus. Let minimal light spill into the background. Only enough to identify the setting.

What are the details of the subject? It has to be believable. The shorts? Hike them up as far as possible. The headband, necessary for the added effect. By the way, the headband is actually the “belt” of a white robe. It’s about 45” long and needed to be kept out of sight behind my head. The racquet, absolutely necessary.

The colors need to be bright and vibrant. The shoes added color, the shirt stood out like a sore thumb. And the red shorts? Priceless.
The posture of the subject needs to convey realism. Think nerd. Think geek. The hunched shoulders, the shoulder width stance, the facial expression “Can you handle this?”

So, I flew in a model that I know will work for peanuts. He’s easy to work with and doesn’t mind long shoots with hundreds of exposures.

It's funny to reread this 10 months from this picture. I was so inspired and so easily inspired. Now I'm more mad than I am inspired. I'm viciously determined you could say and a lot less naive. Do I still ask myself all the questions above? Not in the same way. I consider things a lot more subtly now and if I do, they are definitely not on the forefront of my conscience but latently being considered... like background tasks on your computer.

To answer your question Gregory, I started with me and an inspiration (strobist.com) and some time on my hands (I just left my corporate position). I had a few strobes (one SB-800 and one SB-26), a remote trigger, and a bag full of questions that I wanted answered...

Actually Gregory you did me a tremendous favor. Asking me how I started reminded me where I came from. Humbly. I came to blogger in June. Yet I started this journey in February and should have imported my blog posts from my previous blog that I abandoned in order to focus on strictly photography...

But if you're curious, knock yourself out on my walk down memory lane :)