Karina Treance - 2021

June 01, 2021

Holy shit, is it really June 1st before I’m posting some new content on this blog? Did you miss me? Did you think I was gone forever? Nah…I’ve just been extremely busy getting the next page in the UNEXPhotography journey written.

I’m still not ready to share everything yet, but these images were the first ones that were taken in my NEW STUDIO! Finally after all of these years I have a place where I can keep gear set up and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Everything is still getting buttoned up, but once that happens I’ll give everyone a tour through a State of the Union update. But for now–

Something, something, rose. Something, something, name. Something, something.

The keen eye’d among you may recognize Karina, however this is the first time she has appeared on this blog in her current form. I was so happy to invite her into the new studio space to give some new equipment a try.

I learned a few things along the way:

Maybe my almost 10 year old computer needs replacing a little sooner than I originally thought.
Perhaps shooting uncompressed 60mp RAW files didn’t help with point 1.
A 3200 J power pack WILL kill your roommate’s computer when the capacitors energize themselves.

I’m happy that Karina was willing to make the trek to the new studio and trust me with making some images that she will be sharing through her own channels. I’ve posted a teaser of some of the more “interesting” content at the links below.

See more of Karina over on the newly reinstated NSFW blog and be sure to like, follow, and subscribe to Karina’s Only Fans account to see more!

Top 5(ish) Photos of 2020 - (As If We Needed to Be Reminded).

December 28, 2020

You know…it’s almost as if there was something that happened this year that just sucked all of the joy and energy out of the air, but I just can’t put my finger on it.

Normally I’m pretty excited about these roundup posts. I typically like going back and remembering all of the fun times on set, and reviewing old images that had been delivered, and picking out the forgotten gems that didn’t make the original cut. But this year I have struggled with making this roundup and have put it off about as long as I could possibly justify.

I still think that there were some great memories this year, even if I have to force myself to find the positivity in the process.

The year started off with an immediate trip to Europe. I had just started a new job and spent the first weeks of the year training and getting into the swing of what my days would be filled with.

Having worked for an EU based company for the last several years, I’m no stranger to flying for business. However Copenhagen was its own experience all together. I am so not used to the idea of a Nordic winter where things start to get dark around 3pm and by the time you are done for the day there is almost no daylight left.

I think this was one of the first times I got to get out and really use the Sony A7RIV I bought at the end of 2019. Shooting at extremely high resolution at night is not as easy as you would think! But I still was able to capture some of my “traditional” images of Europe’s various bikes and street art.

When it came time to start shooting portraits again, I had the end of 2019 fresh in my mind and wanted to continue a trend of very minimalist photos that I had been working on.

On my birthday I had the chance to work again with the wonderful Nina La Voix during a trip to New York City. I had planned on being in NY a lot this year (Ha), but even if that didn’t happen I always enjoy my time with Nina and hope to be able to work with her and her circle again soon.

My “home studio” also got a good bit of work at the beginning of the year when I had sessions with Ruby Marx, Gideon Hodge, Jack Calico, and Magenta Marie in what felt like back to back to back bookings

And then, “IT” happened. We had heard rumblings of some sort of illness that was circulating abroad, but it never seemed to be THAT bad. I personally didn’t know what to think or believe until I was in the Atlanta airport and saw the breaking news that the US/Canada border was closed until further notice.

To be honest I think I was more frustrated that my trip to Canada the next week would need to be rescheduled, but then I noticed how empty the Atlanta airport was, and thats when things got a little scary.

I’ve made the joke several times this year, but I’ll say it again. It’s very hard to be a portrait photographer when it’s not a responsible choice to be around other people. So I quickly found out I needed to buckle down and find other ways to get my creativity into the world, and take the time to add some new tools to my photographer’s tool kit.

I hope that in 2021 I’ll be able to actually show the many hours of work that went into this project. But until then enjoy these recreations of some comic book logos.

Additionally I did some work creating some other vector art pieces for myself and for friends of the blog The Fandom Nerdlesque.

(Psssst, If you want to see the photos we originally created for this show you can find them here).

Additionally to learning vector art, I wanted to get into some other arts as well. I managed to snatch up a decent microphone setup before COVID made them almost impossible to purchase:

In this episode your host learns the hard way that podcasting isn't as easy as it looks while trying to explain why we are all here spending this time together. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.

Blake sits down virtually with Comedian and Podcast Host, Rivers Langley to talk Headshots, Comedy, Podcasting, and some experiments with long gone Polaroid film. To see the photos talked about in this episode, make sure to visit the blog at: UNEXphotography.com/news/2020/7/19/rivers-langely-2020.

In this episode, Blake describes a new project that he is starting and sits down with some of the first friends he made after moving to Atlanta a decade ago to talk about one of the things he loves most in the world...cats.

I’ll be honest that this particular project didn’t exactly take off as much as I’d like for it to have, but I wouldn’t consider this to be dead just yet.

It wasn’t all bad though. I started a new project “The Cats Who Live with my Friends” where I bother my friends to let me take photos of their cats…

Church Bishop Nathan Sara 080220200070.jpg

I need to re-visit this project with some vigor next year and get some more entries lined up and in the can.

Ruby Marx asked me to photograph some non-traditional graduation photos of herself:

And my friends Cody and Tegan asked me to capture one of their most important days:

Devyn was recommended to me by her sister (and no stranger to this blog CharLee):

And now for some photos I’ve been holding on to specifically for this entry, the two sisters demanded that I took some photos of the two of them just being sisters and having a completely un-staged pillow fight. Really…this wasn’t staged at all…nope…not at all ;).

I also want to give a big shout out to Tom and Michelle from Apocalypse in Review for finding me interesting enough to have me on twice this year!

While all of the movies we've featured on our podcast have fetching titles in regards to the dumpster fire that is 2020, this one seems especially fitting. Doomsday (2008) is an action-packed hodgepodge of everything you'd want in an action movie: beautiful ass-kicking woman protagonist, great action sequences, gruesome deaths, and crazy cannibals.

We're so excited to have our friend and portrait photographer, Blake Griffin, back on our show! We watched Akira, the anime movie of all time. We discussed some trivia and Blake through out some cool facts about how Akira created a shift in action movies and became the movie that brought anime into Western culture.

Also please be on the lookout next year as Michelle and I are in the beginning phases of having some episodes of Let Me Take Your Picture where we discuss the art of portrait photography from both a beginner and professional POV.

I think it’s only fitting that I end this entry with a photo of a plague doctor. All things considered I guess I came out ok. I still have my health (mostly) and have been extremely fortunate to keep stable employment through this rollercoaster of a year. I can hope that next year will slowly begin to get more and more “normal” again and maybe by 2022 we will enter a new renaissance of the arts (a boy can dream anyway).

I’m trying not to get too ahead of myself because there is still a lot of bridges to cross, but I have some plans of what I’d like to accomplish in 2021. I want to do what I can to get some more content in the can before I launch it though. I hope to reconnect with some former regulars here on the blog, and continue to create content that is enjoyable (for both me and all of you) and back a little closer to my “roots”.

We’ll get the band back together in due time ;).

Until then, have a wonderful (and safe) new year. Wash your hands, Wear your mask, Get Vaccinated, and don’t gather in large crowds. We’ll get through this together. See you on the other side!

Gameboy Camera - 2020.

December 11, 2020

A little context after the fact:
This Saga has been something I have been working on for almost the entirety of 2020 so far, and I really don’t yet know if this blog will even be released before the end of the year.

Who would have thought that finding a method to offload photos from a little known 90’s toy camera would be so hard?

March or April something (I think):

With the COVID-19 Coronavirus still in full swing, I needed a project to keep myself busy and had plans to play with and experiment with a fun little toy camera from the past. My original plans pretty much fell through because I’m not that great at electronics and soldering parts together (and because the parts that needed soldering were really fucking tiny). But, after some trial and error (and an Etsy seller in the UK) I was able to get some workable images out of something I used to play with as a child.

But first, some backstory.

“The Game Boy Camera (GBC), released as Pocket Camera[a] in Japan, is a Nintendo accessory for the handheld Game Boy game console. It was released on February 21, 1998 in Japan, and manufacturing was ceased in late 2002. As a toy for user-generated content, it can be used to shoot grayscale photographs, edit them or create original drawings, and transfer images between GBC units or to the 64DD art game suite Mario Artist. Its images can be printed to thermal paper with the Game Boy Printer. The GBC’s cartridge contains minigames based on Nintendo’s early games such as the arcade video game Space Fever and the Game & Watch handheld game Ball, and a chiptune music sequencer. Guinness recognized it as the world’s smallest digital camera as of 1999, and photographers have embraced its technological limitations as artistic challenges.”

— Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Camera)

Sadly, my original camera and its companion printer have been lost to the ages, but thankfully a few years back (and by that I mean almost a decade now) a roommate gifted me working set for my birthday along with some very expired thermal paper. After playing around with scanning the entire Gameboy to get images saved (no joke) I eventually retired the whole lot to a box that I mostly forgot about until earlier this year (but we’ll get back to that in just a moment).

I was able to obtain a copy of a Gameboy Camera’s ROM file (Please don’t sue me Nintendo, I swear I own a real GBC) and get it working on my laptop and on a spare Amazon tablet I had lying around (but only on the front selfie camera, and unfortunately not on any of my primary iOS devices).

With some tinkering, it was possible to take captured images, and after running them through Affinity photo to clean up and up-rez them get some working proof of concept files out of them.

But just having them available digitally wasn’t enough. I wanted a way to print these images as well.

Enter the GBPXL.

This kit popped up on my radar at the end of February, and after thinking it over I purchased it right before the coronavirus lockdown the following month.

It would take me almost 3 months to have it assembled, and unfortunately I never really was able to get it working. My electronics skills just aren’t up to par on this one. So I decided to cut my losses and abandon the idea of printing using this kit.

So if you are in the need for a restaurant thermal printer, let me know. I have one for sale.

While I was waiting for the GBPXL to ship from Czechia I started to look into what I could do with these thermal printouts and find a way to archive them for long term storage.

Since anything I printed would eventually fade into nothing (It is just a big receipt after all) if I didn’t either scan or Xerox them (and where’s the fun in that) I figured it would be best to find another way to get my fix.

So I went back to the drawing board. I did some more research and came across this nifty little device and spent way more money than I wanted to on one.

Screen Shot 2020-06-25 at 5.10.49 PM.png

…And after waiting “2-3 weeks” for shipping I got an email from the seller.

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…Rats…

I’m beginning to wonder if this whole project is actually going to come together or not.

I still have one more option. A company in Australia is making a similar device called the “El Snappo” which at the time of my writing this in July is completely sold out and unable to be back-ordered.

Screen Shot 2020-07-13 at 7.47.28 PM.png

I reached out to BennVenn through their Facebook page and asked when they would be made available again. While I didn’t get a concrete date, I was told to keep watching their social media pages and sign up for the mailing list for more info.

So once again…back to the drawing board, and back to waiting.

This was on June 20th.

October 20th - BennVenn announces that the new “Joey Jr 2.0” is available and has a special way to pull Gameboy Camera files…

Screen Shot 2020-10-20 at 9.00.01 AM.png

Hopefully this will be the option that finally works!

November 15th:

December 11th:

Which brings us to today. After almost 30 days the device is in my hands and I am finally able to pull off the files that were saved there.

Certainly one could argue that all of this is a colossal waste of time and effort, and in some ways I agree.

We live in a world where the phones in our pockets are better than even the most modern of point and shoot cameras (and yes, even the cameras in the earliest of flip-phones were better than the sensor in the GBC). But this is something different. This is a sense of nostalgia. I’m not expecting to print these photos the size of a house like I could do with my everyday camera. I’m barely expecting these to hold up on the web. But what I have instead achieved is another tool in my belt that I can learn how to master.

And I mean, I also have a few extra photos of a long passed cat-friend too before the internal battery of this cart died and they were gone forever, so that alone was worth all of the time and effort in the world.

Devyn - 2020.

November 18, 2020

I met Devyn a little over a year ago at a housewarming party thrown by her sister, Ryan. We chatted about Photography and and shared some back and forth about how I fit into the very different worlds that came together that night. A few weeks back I was approached to be the photographer to capture some intimate photos as a gift to her Husband I was pleasantly surprised that she remembered our chat and asked for me personally.

For a relative first timer, I’m so grateful that Devyn trusted me in my concepts and our shared vision. She did a wonderful job performing in front of the camera to get the shots we both wanted.

I’m so excited to share these photos with you, I think we were able to come up with some ideas that would make any man’s heart beat right out of his chest (Including a few that are too personal to be shown here).

Thanks again Devyn, I wish you and yours the best and hope to work with you again sooner than later!

Cody and Tegan - 2020.

November 15, 2020

I first met Cody during my tenure of being a regular at the short lived and much missed Atlanta bar, The Shelter.

When Cody and Tegan announced their engagement, I was ecstatic to hear that these two wonderful people would be tying the knot. I didn’t expect that I would get to be a part of their special day until one day out of the blue I received a message asking me to be the one to document it.

This wedding produced some unique challenges in how I would need to capture and edit certain aspects of it, but the absolutely non-traditional aspects of the entire affair made things so much fun.

For the time capsule, this wedding was held on Halloween 2020. The COVID-19 situation was in full effect, but the ceremony was relatively small and any inside events were appropriately socially distant. The whole ceremony and reception was shot with a telephoto lens and facial coverings were encouraged.