short flirt with dating headshots

though I was aware of dating sites and people posting pictures on their profiles, I never thought about it in terms of how it related to the photography business. a few years back, somebody contacted me for pictures that he wanted for a dating profile but it was a one-off. fast forward to 2008 when I saw an ad from dating headshots website looking for professional photographers in washington dc to expand their network. it was a process to get approved. once approved you needed to go to their website and fill out a photographer's profile allowing prospects to view your work and schedule a shoot if they chose to work with you. a few months passed. by the time I got to georgetown I got a frantic call from a client that dating headshots referred who was trying to schedule a shoot. we missed each other for a while. it was only after I left georgetown that we finally connected to do the shoot. the shoot is pretty straightforward. 30 mn and you take 100 pictures that you upload to their servers with no touch up.  fairly easy uh! wait until you have to rename all the files to the customer id. at the time, I didn't have a bulk rename software. not even sure any existed at the time. that tedious process alone deserved the money that they paid you. I got the check about 2 weeks later. for someone who was used to get paid on the spot, that was quite a long wait. you can see more dating headshots and personal portraits here.

photo restoration

I finished a shoot for a hair expo project. I shot the project using negative film. after I got the processed film, I needed to scan some images so I could  do some photo editing and optimize some images for print. I placed the negatives on a flatbed scanner but the film slid to the side of the scanner. with the moving part it got partially destroyed, ruining one image that was my favorite. armed with patience and a good supply of tea I sat at the computer and with the help of photoshop set out to restore the image. it took me a while of industrious effort to clean up the scratches, clone some part of the image and using various tools in photoshop reconstitute part of the image that was unrecognizable. the end result is not perfect but it was a good exercise to test the limits of what I could achieve in photoshop.

sharpfocus photo-genesis

how did I come up with the concept of 'sharpfocus'? I had a contax fitted with zeiss lenses.  one particularly a 85mm at f1.4 extremely sharp that I used mainly for what it was designed for: portrait photography. I fell in love with it. even at full aperture, the lens was so sharp that you would see the pores in the forehead. one woman told me she didn't like it. it reveals all your flaws. can't you make it a little softer? she asked. at the time, I was just a photographer. no name. except myself. life's tortuous paths took me to several directions until I even forgot that I was once a photographer. when I was in columbus, I would take pictures once in a while but that was merely to document my fashions. fast forward. dc. I worked in a photolab but didn't really like it because I was confined to production in the lab, loading film, processing, drying and things like that. I've always seen myself as an artist. so the practice of photography devoid of any creativity didn't really appeal to me that much. after a stint in graphic design, I started designing website. autoreverse was born from the ashes of souleye which was an umbrella website for all my endeavors. in 2001, my web designing efforts were not taking me anywhere. I dusted off my aging contax, and thought well, I have experience in fashion, experience in photography. and I like women. so I chose to start as a model photographer. domain name. I thought sharp focus would be cool. sharpfocus (no space) cute? that's how sharpfocus photography was born.