My studio is located within @thefort614, which is a 130 year old warehouse on the south side of Columbus. It used to be the home of the Seagrave Company, which used the space to manufacture fire engines and other rescue vehicles, for over 60 years. Every square inch of the building has a glorious patina that can’t be faked. The cracked plaster, distressed flooring, and sun-faded glass is something especially rare in this fast growing city, populated with new builds.

I say all this to express my gratitude to have a space in such an iconic building. After being here for six years, I still regularly walk the halls and photograph the textures and light that surround me.

This session is an homage to the space. To create these images I gave @roarie_yum and @derdrache a tour of the building, and I took photos of the textures as we walked. I used these images to make in-camera multiple exposures, when we got back to my suite. The only post work done in these images is color grading in Lightroom.

For the second part of my shoot I went the other way, conceptually. I wanted colorful, organic images as the base layer in my multiple exposure portraits, so before Roarie arrived I photographed a pile of fake flowers, which I lit at a low angle with hard light so that there were areas with deep shadow. Once Roarie arrived I lit them with a Westcott FJ80II, modified with an Optical Spot, to create a spotlight, and I used an FJ200 to blow out the background. Then I selected a flower image from my memory card, which was overlaid in the viewfinder of my Canon EOS R, allowing me to carefully compose each multiple exposure portrait.

What I always tell my students is that shadows are placeholders for light. Yin Yang, etc.