Last week I collaborated with Hana Mendel (an amazing photographer, illustrator, guitarist, etc) and clothing designer Celeste Malvar-Stewart. In an effort to maintain social distance guidelines, Celeste dropped off her garments, giving us permission to style and shoot them as we saw fit. Hana showed up ready to shoot and I kept my distance, wearing a mask the whole time. Save for the addition of wearing a mask, the shoot wasn’t any different from my other personal shoots— I always work with a minimal or non-existent crew.

Though I didn’t have a specific agenda going into the shoot I knew that I wanted to play with long exposures. I had recently purchased some LEDs from B&H which have a range of light modes. My favorite mode is “disco”, which makes the lights quickly cycle through all the prismatic colors, which I knew would make for some fantastic long exposure shots.

I started off shooting on a tripod and had Hana do the moving throughout the 5-second exposure. Then I took the camera off the tripod and implement camera shake during the long exposure. For some shots I added coconut oil to a UV filter on my lens to get a hazy look. I mixed in strobes on the background for a set. We shot four outfits/setups in 90 minutes and made some of my favorite images to date. I’d been struggling with the insanity of the world lately, not feeling inspired, so it really felt good to make something beautiful.

Here’s a shot of how the LEDs work.