Downtown O-town

      This last week, the Casey Anthony trial made downtown Orlando a bit more of a focal point than it usually is. The amount of media and bystanders this last week has made navigating downtown a pretty big pain in the butt!

   Downtown Orlando, bless it's heart, is pretty small. I do like doing shoots in urban areas and I have done the best I can with Orlando. Here are some shots that I have managed in this small area in the last year and a half or so:

Vintage Tiffany in the Window

   I hadn't looked at, or even thought about, this picture in a while but ran into it the other day and got a little sentimental.

   I shot this last summer I think after a bit of cajoling on my part to talk Tiffany into a photo-shoot. At the time, if memory serves, she was dating a redneck guy in Auburndale, Florida whose family ran an auction house. Judging from the eclectic content of Tiffany's then-boyfriend's double-wide, he had a hard time throwing things away. It was an absolute wreck, but since I kind of like visual clutter anyway, it worked out well.

   During the actual shoot in the stuffed trailer, the boyfriend kept inventing reasons to come back to the trailer to "look for things". I thought about saying to him that I was not there to hit on his girl but simply to do some pics, but I was enjoying a perverse pleasure in watching him watching us.

   This picture of Tiffany was a re-created spontaneous moment. We were in their bedroom (a study in post-modern gypsy carnival design as far as I could tell), Tiffany was shrugging her shoulders forward in a slightly uneasy manner, and I said, "Wait! That actually looks kind of cool. Do that again."

   She did and I think the resulting picture has a feel to it of both confidence and insecurity.

   If memory serves, the vintage pic that I photoshopped her into was either from shorpy.com or from the Library of Congresses online photo archive. Once I placed Tiff behind the window in black and white, I picked colors from the original picture and painted the original colors back onto her.

   Also, I think I had a certain amount of lighting and contrast tweaking to make it blend a bit better as well as a scratched texture on top to make it a bit more coherent. 

   Anyway, I had forgotten about this and had a bit of a moment. :)