I had some good press in the Austin Statesman newspaper in Texas last week on my veterans photoshoot tour. Now I'm off to Los Angeles and then San Diego for three of my show openings. 

I photographed 85 veterans ranging from World War II to the Vietnam war this week all over Texas. In this photograph a World War II veteran holds a letter he wrote to his mom as a POW under the Nazis.

I had a photo shoot with MMA Fighter JJ Ambrose yesterday. I was telling JJ how hard it is when I travel on photo shoots to eat a healthy meal (for example when I was in Atlanta, GA last year, I could not pass up deep fried chicken pot pie) and he said he faces the same challenges. He told me when he traveled to India for a fight, each day he only ate a whole chicken and a cup of coffee in order to stay healthy. I wish I had that kind of obedience when it comes to food especially now that I am a new dad and need to work on my "Dad Bod." 

This is a portrait I took of UFC Fighter George St. Pierre for Black Belt Magazine. After applying my new WWII veteran style of adding images from the past into the portrait, I realized I love applying multiple layers and textures to my portraits telling a more complex story either in post production or with my lighting. Adding layers to my photographs challenges me in new ways and creates infinite possibilities to tell a more emotional story.

I have an article in RangeFinder Magazine this month on my WW2 Veteran series. My grandfather took a famous portrait of Ernest Hemingway in 1952 and the portrait was on the cover of Rangefinder in the nineties. I love sharing this connection with my grandpa. 

My latest WWII Veteran portrait series consists of layering historical imagery into the photograph to tell a deeper story to the viewer. I want to push the layering style in my younger model photo shoots but rely on a layering more "in camera" and less in post production. Here is body builder Ryder Gordon I photographed recently with a layering of a star I created with my strobe lights. I have to find the right 35MM camera slide or print a slide on clear paper and then add put the slide into my strobe to create the shape or image. In these photographs I projected a very simple yet powerful star to create a moody and slightly mysterious setting of an athlete. 

When I met and photographed filmmaker Ken Burns

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I photographed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns backstage on the San Jose State campus in the Silicon Valley. I was told by his PR person I had a time limit of minutes to meet Ken Burns and photograph him. I was pretty excited to meet him as we both focus on American sub cultures, blending the past with the present, and we both have books published on the subject of WWII. 

I have photographed a lot of celebrities for magazines in my career and in most cases the celebrities typically gives me a short window of time to photograph them as they are very busy. It is a challenge to create a photograph that evokes emotion to the viewer when time is limited.

I decided to photograph Ken Burns on a black backdrop and then add vintage photographs raining down all around him in post-production. The idea is that the films Ken Burns creates are filled with hundreds of old photographs to tell the greater story of the subject of his film. Ken Burns and his team sifts through thousands and thousands of photographs for his films. I wanted the photograph to look a little mysterious as history is a mystery and we have to put the pieces together to figure out the truth. I have a feeling Ken Burns and my path will cross again in the future and I look forward to chatting with him again.