Today’s scrapbook page is sourced from a few books from high school.  Thomas Hardey’s Mayor of Casterbridge, Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace, and artist’s reference my father gave me when I was a kid.

The Mayor of Casterbridge was one of those books I hated to read when I was in high school.  My 10th grade english teacher liked to remind us that he had graduated with a doctorate in english from harvard university by assigning us books which were neither relevant to being a 16 year old and also extremely challenging to decipher.  It details the life and death of a surly man named Michael Henchard who becomes mayor of a town called Casterbridge  in England during the late 19th century.  Or at least, that’s what I gleaned from the cover. The book itself seemed impenetrable and no one else in the class was in the least bit interested in discussing its meaning.  Our teacher couldn’t control the class so I spent most of the period talking to a girl I was seeing that sat in front of me.  I didn’t even bother to write the term paper.

But years later I found an early edition of this book in a used book store and for some inexplicable reason I picked it up and read it cover to cover.  And now I understand why my teacher thought it was worth reading.  It’s about the things we leave behind and how they come back to us in the end.  It’s a book about the yin and yang of strength and weakness within Henchard. His spirit drives him to excel and then to fail.  His heart is lifted by love, then driven to madness by it, he moves on, but his decisions follow him.  I am very happy that I found this book again.  I feel like I missed a lot of opportunities to learn and grow when I was that age and reading this book represents to me that I’m still able to rediscover these things I missed.

Hyperspace by Michio Kaku is kind of like Quantum Physics for Dummies.  Kaku became famous in the nineties doing a radio show where he explained theoretical physics concepts in layman’s terms (Even today Kaku continues to be an active voice in the world of science and physics.  He was there explaining the nuclear reactor meltdown at Fukashima and my studio just finished working on some really cool footage of him that I can’t talk about but will be released later this year.)

I was fourteen and very interested in science and science fiction so my mother bought this book for me.  Kaku talks about how space and time can be thought of as dimensions like length and width and by extending this metaphor, he shows all of the bizarre and amazing possibilities a higher dimensional object being might be able to perform.  (I now understand that Kaku actually borrowed a lot of this from a much earlier book called Flatland which was improbably published the same year as The Mayor of Casterbridge.)

You can see in these diagrams he’s showing how a human being, if they only existed in two dimensions, could be flipped inside out by a three dimensional being.  Similarly he speculates that to a fourth or fifth dimensional person inverting us inside out would be as simple task, like flipping a piece of paper.  It’s notions like that that got me where I am today in my career.

Also check out the mixed up paragraphs from Kaku’s book on this page. They outline a story of a man who travels into a parallel universe, falls in love with his parallel-dimensional wife, and then is put back in his own time and desperately seeks her out because he believes she is his soul mate and the ensuing drama that it creates.  It reminds me a little bit of the Michael Henchard and his estranged wife actually.  Hmm…

Mr. Cheeseman, if you’re reading this, be prepared to receive and grade my term paper in the mail.  It will be entitled “Michael Henchard’s Love Hyper-Triangle: Estrangement across the English Countryside and Inter-Dimensional Rifts of Space-Time”  Please do not mark me lower for the tardiness.  I need those extra points on my report card so I don’t have to mow the lawn this summer.

Did you get that?  See what I did there?

Anyway, a few bits of news to mention.  First of all, I’ll be shooting in Ohio on May 20th so if you’re a model and shoot for one of the sites or even if you’ve just been thinking about applying hit me up for an interview.  Secondly, I have joined the ranks of Twitter @dylanborgman.  You may  have noticed there are buttons on my site where there were no buttons before. Thanks go to my awesome web designer who has been incorporating the social media into my site.

Another opportunity to work with me is my new photo project.  This one is more open ended than my previous.  No nudity is required, no tattoos or piercings necessary.  This would be separate of the sites I normally contribute to.  The concept is women taking off their jeans.

Question:

Have you ever been with someone, it was getting sexy and you were taking off your clothes and then you got to your pants and all of the sexiness left the room? They won’t come off, you’re tugging at them, rolling around, it’s the most unsexy thing in the world? The concept of my series is to prove that jeans are sexy.  To create a series of images of women taking off their jeans in the hottest and most creative ways they can. I’m calling it Girls sans Denim.

This is not even remotely my work.  I’m blatantly stealing it from MET-ARTs but I don’t have my own work yet to show so this gives you an idea. Copyright gods, forgive me.

So that’s the pitch. If you’re interested in participating, write me here or go to my modelmayhem casting call.

Check out this beautiful set I shot with Pandie in San Francisco.  It’s called Black Metal, its being featured on the front page of Zivity right now, It’s got 26 votes for the Metal Vixens prize. Ok, so it might not catch up to Attitude with it’s 328 votes and win the prize but I just know this set can break 50. So head on over and if you don’t have a membership yet hit me up and I’ll help you out.

I had so much fun shooting this set, not only for obvious reasons but also because of my lovely lighting assistant Quinne Suicide who I met while I was at the shootfest.  One of the all time greatest babes to grace the site and a sweet and charming woman.

Now this next set brings me back to my youth living in the midwest, crisp blue skies… hanging out in the back yard with the grill going and a guitar… Trace Adkins on the radio… a women doing a strip tease in a cowboy hat.  No wait that was last month when I worked with Issue_ on a new set for SuicideGirls.com.

“Dead or Alive” comes out on May 15th so mark your calendars or follow me on my Twitter feed and I’ll update you on the deets.

Ah, that’s some good nudity.

Onto my set with Kels0 this weekend.  I worked with Kels0 before on another set called Burn Out.  This is a little different direction for a set.  Burn out was industrial, rock and roll, cold, dirty.  This new set is elegant and naughty. I shot it in Los Feliz at a friend’s house… well, I should say a friend’s beautiful Tudor style mansion. It had a lot of wooden architecture which I love and reminds me a little bit of the executive office at the Cincinnati Union Terminal. I haven’t done a thing to these pictures yet but they already look amazing.  Here’s your morning coffee.

So that’s it for me today.  Now I gotta get back to work doing all that other crazy shit I do day in and day out.  Excelsior to you, traveler.

Wow it’s been such a crazy month I haven’t had much time to blog about it so instead of telling you about it, I’ll simply show you. Before I get into it though, two announcements – first off, if you haven’t already please check out Pandie’s new set Paperback Writer. Please vote for it because it’s the kind of stuff I’d like to see more of on this site.

Secondly, I’ll be shooting in Cincinnati, Ohio on Sunday May 20th so all you fellow Ohioans, hit me up if you want to know the details.

I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect shoot. Pandie was an awesome model and just an all around cool person to get to know. I was thrilled when she told me she’d be willing to shoot a set that has a little different look than others. She usually goes very dark but for this set we went a little more bookish. I dunno about you but I get all gushy for a woman in glasses. The location was fantastic and we had a great concept largely thanks to my pal who provided us with some killer props.

Also you may notice these filters I’m using for my pictures.  No it’s not instagram, it’s CameraBag 2.  It’s like instagram but without all the social networking stuff and with a whole lot more customizable features.  Plus it works on RAW images, which I LOVE because I can get high quality work out of it.  Anyway if you’re interested you can buy it for $18.99 at the Apple App Store.

I read a great article today in Lifehacker which I wanted to share.  The topic is retouching for realism.  The basic points they make are

1. don’t rush the retouching process
2. always make your edits undoable

Both extremely good ideas when retouching.  I try to do as much work as I can in Lightroom in part because I know that everything I do can be undone whenever I change my mind.  The rest I do in photoshop with adjustment layers and layer masks, both which can be undone as well.

As far as rushing is concerned, I agree that it should be a slow, deliberate process although I think as you get better over time you also speed up your retouching time without sacrificing quality.  This isn’t exactly rushing it as much as it is using your time more efficiently.

Photoshop is not a verb. It is a noun. It is the means to an end, not the end itself. – Vincent Versace

I would add a third point:  The more I retouch the more I learn that the key to success is doing as less as possible to a picture.  Once you get an idea of the basic problems your pictures are going to have (i.e. exposure, color tone, blemishes, etc.) and you have chosen your preferred methods of eliminating these issues, it’s important not to go out of your way to “enhance” them further.  It’s a constant temptation when you learn a new skill to apply it to every situation but that is exactly how you get pictures that look like this:

You may be tempted to take ten years off someone's face but remember, your subject may not have been born yet.

  I want to put a ding in the universe.                            - Steve Jobs

Happy new year!  I just spent a week traveling and I got to meet Sid and her husband.  It turns out both of them are former Apple employees like myself so we bonded over war stories of abused Macs and unruly customers.  Sid also showed me a great web site called Cinematic Titanic where you can get an audio commentary track to accompany many current movies done by the Mystery Science Theater crew.  I watched Indiana Jones 4 on the plane.  If not for the commentary it would be a completely unwatchable movie but with it was fantastic.

Sid’s set will be going up in the next few months at Suicide Girls.  Also check out Antigone’s set What I Got which will be released on the 16th.