Back in January I was in New York for this big charity event I help run every year and I needed to rent a minivan for it. I was only gonna be in Brooklyn for one night before heading to New Jersey for the event (and my friend’s 40th birthday party which he held at an NJ mall for some insane reason). I don’t have any models to photograph in North Carolina for some reason, so I hit up a few people in NYC to see if they wanted to shoot. My pal Brynn Michaels was down but had dinner plans. My flight was delayed and by the time I would get back to my place it was going to be too dark, but I had an idea. I would drive directly to her from the rental car place, and we would shoot in the minivan.
If you are a long time reader of this blog you might notice that I don’t use studio lighting and I don’t use flash very often for my portrait work, so when I got to Brynn’s and turned on just the car lights I was deeply concerned at how dark it was in the van. I knew I could take some flash photos, but it was too dark to do anything else. Fortunately Brynn had a little mini video light and we shot the whole thing with that. It turned out it was absolutely perfect for the job. I have nearly the same light and I normally bring it with me as a backup for exact situations like this but I didn’t think I was going to have time to photograph anyone since I only had that night. Luckily it all worked out.
I ended up really loving these photos and glad I could get Brynn some photos she likes as well. This is the third time we have worked together and the second time I managed to delete the photos off my memory card before backing them up. That is literally the only time I have ever done that in the 24 years that I have owned a digital camera. So I owed her some good photos… I should mention, just as a quick aside, that Brynn was still healing from a breast augmentation so she’s got some red scars that are healed now. I don’t edit scars and blemishes because I like to think of myself as a documentary photographer, even when I am shooting nudes in the back of a minivan. Luckily Brynn respects my dumb vision and is letting me post all the photos unedited so shout out to her for that. Personally scars and blemishes just make photos feel more real/raw to me and I think that’s what a lot of you guy appreciate about my work too.
Anyway, while I was photographing Brynn I heard back from another one of the models I had hit up. I had mentioned the minivan to my friend Gia as well and she was down. She met up with me at my Brooklyn space right as I was parking. I knew it was going to be too dark in the van and I didn’t have a light for this shoot. We took a few photos at my spot but honestly the lighting there sucks so much I don’t even want to post those photos. We tried to shoot in the van after that and it really was too dark, but we tried. At the end I just used my iPhone light and those came out okay so I probably should have done more than that. After brightening them as much as I could in Lightroom, I ended up with 14 decent photos in the minvian that I uploaded as a little bonus.
So, as we move forward with this new site, all the NSFW images are going to be exclusively on Girls Of Driven By Boredom. This site is just going to have previews of shoots and then you can pay a few bucks a month to see the other shots. Fortunately Girls of DBB has tens of thousands of images on there. Everything that has been deleted from this site is still there, behind a paywall. Sorry, but blame the US government for the FOSTA/SESTA bill.
So click over to Girls of DBB for 55 minivan photos of Brynn, 14 minvan photos of Gia. They each have another full shoot on there as well. In the meantime you can check out this preview gallery below…
PS. I there’s also a 2 minute long video I shot of Brynn in the minivan. You can buy that alacarte without signing up Girls of DBB, but it’s free for members.
