Athletes to Irises

Blogs make me super uncomfortable, for the record... haha I never know what to write... But I figured I'll give some sort of background on my photo journey, and it may give some structure/basis to my more recent work once it is up... Hmm... Wonder if that made any sense...

Anyway, the majority of my college career was spent in a darkroom and sleep deprived with tiny brushes trying to keep my hand steady while spot toning...

I began by shooting athletes - first mainly action shots, and later moved onto portraits as well... Below are a few scans of some of the best ones.. I believe these were taken in the winter/spring of 2005...







As you can see, swimmers were the most available subjects for me to shoot, since I was on the swim team throughout college... I also shot the boy's lacrosse team during their home games, but I am yet to finish developing all my rolls (ha! yes, from 5 years ago), and haven't had the chance to scan the ones that have been finished... So, for sports this is all you get for now...

It wasn't until the summer of '06 that I finally made the switch to digital and began trying to embrace the world of color... Trying to branch away from my jock photographer status, my first digital project was, for lack of a better title, an eye study...



Jessica Clements


Stewart Clements


Brett Baker


Cassandra Crawford


Kelley Crawford

I pulled off this photo experiment in a pretty awesomely make-shift way... Using my lovely new Canon 5D, I had to TAPE two "close-up" filters on top of each other onto my 50mm lens, in order to get the zoom that I invisioned without a macro lens... I sat my subjects on a couch with a large soft box, and shot at a high speed to catch the eye inbetween blinks... My very patient and now half blind subjects did a great job humoring me with different expressions and many shots. It was a real cool experience of constructing a photo shoot with seemingly inadequate equipment... Each final photo has been pretty closely cropped and enlarged to keep the focus on the eye rather than the face, and the high resolution of my awesome 5D made this possible.

Interestingly enough, the project turned into a very different study of the eye than I had expected going into it... I began just trying to find a way to photograph the unique and intricate patterns of multiple people's irises, eye lashes, and pupils... It was just a coincidence that I shot a brother and sister, and my two parents along with myself... It was especially interesting to see the strange similarities between the people sharing bloodlines, and yet see how each one held onto their own unique characteristics...

In the future, I would like to expand this project and shoot families in a much more extensive manner... I think it would be amazing to be able to show a full family tree of iris patterns and eyebrow shapes from babies to parents, aunts and uncles to grandparents and great grandparents... I can only imagine the subtle, intricate patterns a grandchild might share with their great grandparent... Whenever I do find the time to continue with this project, I imagine them being printed on a very large scale as well... not sure how big, but big.