Every now and then, I like to reflect on the work I’ve done over the past years. These are images that were DELIVERED to clients in early 2003. This was when I first went digital and didn’t really understand digital.

Melissa was one of the first I shot with the digi rebel. Shot all outdoors. It’s not that it’s a terribly bad image, I should look for the images and clean them up. These were delivered, signed, sealed and paid for by the model. Woooow huh?

In the photography world, I always seem to find myself in trouble! I seem to have people hate me. I’m very opinionated and live by the philosophy “I’ll talk about you behind your back..in front of your face, so you’ll know what I’m saying” I met this guy who I wanted to shoot with. At the time, he had “good” work to me. His work really wasn’t good, he was very, very orange heavy in his pp, but felt that was natural skin tones. Either way, I decided to not work with him after he used very degrading words towards one of the models we were going to shoot. He and I had a beef since. Well, he did, I didn’t care. Up till about four years ago, he’d send me messages telling me how many showcase images he had vs mine. At the end of that year, I got more than him so I sent him an email back, haven’t heard from him since.

This model’s name is Trish. She’s in MN and a great model. She contacted me to do a tfcd shoot, so I did. I was proud of the images..at the time LOL. Really Jay, what’s up with the tree hugging?

Jessica: UMD student that I had paid to shoot. I was starting to really work on my photography, but didn’t want to deliver the type of photos that I had in the previous two image collages, so I started paying college kids some money to test on. I thought these were “better” but still not where they should be. Wooow these suck ASS!!

Why do I like to put these up and out there? Simple, I have people tell me that they want to give up cause they’ll never be as good as some of the guys out there now that have big names. My point to them is “KEEP SHOOTING!!” I will show some of these and they’ll cringe. I explain that I was where they were at one point and that if they keep at it, keep dedicated and shooting, they can pass me and get to that great photographer level. If you’re not having fun, you shouldn’t be doing this.

Now, I’m going to go off myself for posting these images in public. And don’t you worry your pretty little heads, I have a TON more haha.