Back around the beginning of the year, a friend of mine introduced me to the Editor of Revista Amiga. Introduced in person, I should say… we all happened to be at the same nightclub that evening. Her and I had exchanged messages a few times previously about setting up a shoot for the magazine. A week and a half before my April trip to Hermosillo, we started chatting about setting up the shoot… and managed to figure out most of the details before I arrived in town.

The day, for me, started at 3am and a 5.5 hour drive from Tempe to Hermosillo. Once in town, I met up with Ana from Revista Amiga, and Alejandro Quintana, my assistant for the shoot. We headed over to Luz Maria Salon to join up with Alejandro Rodriguez of AR Agencia and our models for the shoot, Mayra Valerio and Michelle Montenegro, who were already in the middle of hair and makeup. A short stop at the boutique to select the clothing for the shoot and we were off to our shoot location, Blue Lounge, inside of Grill Station.

It was a long, hot, tiring day, but we all had a lot of fun and I enjoyed every minute of it. Plus, we got some killer photos. Check out the behind the scenes video from the shoot below. For more behind the scenes and updates, Become a Fan on Facebook!

During my trip to Hermosillo in February, I met up with model Alejandra Castillo Benavides for a shoot. We had been working on a concept for my January visit, though due to scheduling that never happened. This time though, we had an amazing location to work with, El Casino del Diablo, thanks to a suggestion by my friend Teresita.

We arrived on location and it was beyond my expectations. We initially had a bit of trouble actually getting past the gates, though once in, everything flowed quite smoothly. We walked the location, picking out our setups. Far in the back, up on top of the roof, I found my first setup. It was definitely my “IT” spot for this session and I knew it when I saw it. Up on the roof were these concrete benches that looked like they belonged at a bus stop rather than a rooftop, surrounded with debris and half dead shrubbery. We setup shop here and got things started.

Next up was the room pretty much directly below where we first setup. It was huge and empty with none of the windows intact and a ton of graffiti. I liked the way my test shots were turning out, using only the natural light to illuminate the room. I added a little pop of light for Alejandra and we were set.

The last setup of the day came together rather organically. Alejandra had one more outfit she wanted to shoot… and I had seen this square pattern from behind old tiles in a few rooms that I was liking. The rooms with the pattern I liked had so far been too small for what I wanted to shoot. We looked around the location a bit more and found another room with the pattern that was much larger and had some green graffiti that tied in well with her outfit.

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Back in April last year, I spent a weekend down in Puerto Penasco at Don Giannatti’s first workshop in Mexico. For me, it was less of a workshop and more of a weekend full of inspiring conversations pushing me to break out of the photography box I had placed myself in. Don was always carrying around a little Flip video camera, talking about all the video he’d been shooting. First thing I did after returning home was to go out and pick up my very own Flip. It was small, shot mediocre video and had a bare essentials interface. Pretty much a red button to start and stop the video recording.

Armed with my new video camera, I slipped the Flip into my camera bag, brought it to all my photo shoots and started putting together behind the scenes footage. As the photographer, you can only be holding the video camera up to that point you need to pick up your still camera. More realistically, if you want to be in any of your videos, you have to hand it to someone else more frequently. The Flip’s simple interface was the one feature I love about it. I could hand it to anyone and they could push the button and record what was happening. That’s about where the love affair stopped. I wanted more.

Shortly after purchasing the Flip, I picked up a Sony HD Handycam. I fell in love with it’s small form, HD video, image stabilization and they even had one that ran off a memory stick instead of a bulky hard drive. I only shoot an hour or two of small snippets, there was no need to record 60+ hours of video at a time. It had everything I wanted, fit in my camera bag, it was perfect. Or so I thought. With higher end gear comes complications. The image stabilization on video cameras like the one I purchased, works great, if you’re standing still. Put in the hands of any non-photographer on the set and you get zoom-crazy video. So essentially I was shooting most of my own video or ended up with zoom-crazy, shaky video with a few usable snippets here and there.

What to do? You have a couple options. If you plan to shoot behind the scenes video, you really need to think it through. Depending on the size of your operation you might have the opportunity to have someone on staff shoot your video. Chase Jarvis puts out great videos. He has a talented videographer with him all the time. Most of us aren’t so lucky. The other option is to bring some help to the shoot. That could be in the form of hired help, a friend without an itchy zoom finger or even a college film student. If you’re interested in creating videos, making friends with someone looking for experience or exposure is a great way to up the video quality.

After a bit of trial in working with HD video, last night I finally edited the video from my birthday photo shoot. It took ten months to get around to doing, but I’m happy with the results.

Vimeo doesn’t allow me to embed HD resolution, so to see the full-res version check it out here.

I’ve worked with Edgar once before on a shoot, he’s an excellent hair stylist, this was my first time working with him as a model. I decided to shoot the series in downtown Phoenix warehouse I’ve worked in before. The warehouse is operated by the 5th Avenue and Madison Event Center and is host to a lot of cool events. The photo shoot was purely for fun and the photos turned out way better than I expected for a visual style I don’t typically work with.

Check out a behind the scenes photo from this shoot.

Watch the Model Mayhem castings for the next night we put on. Until then, here are a few behind the scenes photos from the evening.