As promised I would like to say a little bit about flash-blur...

The photograph above was taken during a photo shoot with the band called Bullet Daze. Before the photo shoot, I spoke with the lead musician in the band (I say lead musician because he basically orchestrates the whole thing and is not married to any particular instrument, although on stage he is often found behind the guitar or keyboard) who told me about some of his influences and explained to me what he thinks his music sounds like to him. He mentioned the term "fade" a lot and reverb and when thinking about what that meant to me visually I instantly thought of flash-blur. Flash-blur is something that people usually do on accident when taking pictures at night or in other low-light with their point and shoot. Its when the shutter is open on the camera long enough to pick up the ambient light and the image created by that, but also the flash fires and freezes the subject in the light it produces. For instance, in the image above the ambient light is what created some of the faded feet that are falling into the background, but you can see where the flash froze the image when the feet were closer to the camera (well, at least the feet on the left, the ones on the right were a little bit behind). The give away for when the flash fired is where on the woman's leg you can see the white of the strobe.

I'm a big fan of this technique for certain things. I use it a lot when I'm taking pictures of people dancing at weddings. I do this because, I don't know if you've noticed, but people can look really cool while they are dancing in front of you, but then when you take a picture of them that freezes their movement, they suddenly end up looking like a orangatang in mid-scream. With professional dancers who are so aware of their bodies this usually isn't a problem, but with a room full of normal people, it can get really ugly.

Well, first of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Alexis Evanoff and I am a photographer.

I'm on an adventure, just at a new beginning of it. I have just moved to San Diego, California from the Los Angeles area where I was born and have lived for most of my life. I had established myself up there with several regular clients, also doing contract work for a few studios. In my beginning years in photography, my convenient location in the world allowed me to cover a lot of the local music scene (which included a lot of well-known people) and since then I had established myself and become known for doing photography of the performing arts.

But now I'm in San Diego, where nobody knows my name.

So, this is the challenge, re-establishing my small business and starting all over again. Not to mention, this time, I'm doing it newly married.

The nice thing about this time around is that I have some experience with this behind me and I've built up a decent resumé and portfolio to show people. I actually am old enough to know what I'm doing, and still, young enough to have the energy to begin again.

So, we'll see what happens.

Incidentally, this is me on the left. Each of these are linked to my Flickr where you can see the original in a bigger size.

I apologize that I am not a very good or cooperative model, even with myself. In fact, just to get myself to loosen up, in the last two shots you can see that I'm singing out loud with the radio. I just felt it only right that the first entry have me in it so you can see me at least once, since I am usually never ever in my own images, you know, since I'm making them.

The thing I'm really getting into on a personal artistic level right now is textures. Photoshop brushes work very well for this and its fairly easy to make your own, but in this case I did not do that. To create the shadowy ghost-like effect, that is especially prominent in the second image down, I used one of my favorite techniques- The flash-blur. More on that later...