Dangerpants Photography will be selling prints, both framed and unframed, at Passiflora Market this coming Saturday, December 1st, at Annex Theatre. Proceeds will go to Annex Theatre, or will be split between Annex and the model, for solo photos. We will have digital and film cameras (including the Korona 5×7 camera) and lights set up for booth portraits.
Headshot sessions are still only $150, but that too-good-to-be-true deal ends and becomes actually too-good-to-be-true on January 1st, 2014! If you book now (by sending an email to, for instance, ian at dangerpants dot com), the price is still $150 through December 31st. On the 1st, it goes up to $200 for a session, which is still emminently reasonable, but who is gonna sneeze at fifty bucks?
So drop me an email, or call 206 596 7142 to set up a session.
Also, just between you and me, there are some changes coming for 2014, which I think will be pretty cool.
Jason and Jayson posing before the ceremony
Some time in August, I was approached by my friend Jason: would I be interested in taking photos at his upcoming wedding to long-time boyfriend Jayson? Would I! I said yes as soon as I’d confirmed that I didn’t have the date promised to anyone else.
Jason is an actor, and he and Jayson both have a good sense of the theatrical. In fact, the wedding would take place in a banquet-hall-like space called the Bullitt Cabaret at Seattle’s ACT Theatre. I learned later that our mutual friend Rachel would be the officiant, which is beautiful in its own right: Jason and Rachel and I all worked on a series of shows together, in which Jason played a super-strong superhero called The Cap’n, and Rachel played a fiendishly intelligent villain named Chaos Theory, who thwarted his team at every opportunity. We couldn’t resist calling back to our shared past for one shot.
Chaos Theory is back to wreak more… chaos
As the ceremony proceeded, after we had taken the formal shots on the gorgeous stairs (including shots with the almost hopelessly romantic 5×7 camera — there is nothing like having your photographer disappear under a dark cloth behind the 1910-era wooden camera and calling out “Say Cheese!” before the flashes ignite), a titter rippled through the audience as we realized we were in for more of a show than anyone had reckoned on.
Rachel is well known around town as a puppetteer, and is even running her own puppet business, Vox Fabuli Puppets. There was a suspiciously shaped box at her feet as she brought Jason and Jayson up to the landing where she’d be performing the ceremony. Tittering turned into full laughter (and not a few shocked gasps, I suspect) as she pulled out her new puppet, the Right Honorable Ruth Monster Ginsberg. Chaos indeed. Ruth Monster Ginsberg officiated the whole wedding, although she had to be checked at one point when it became clear that her ABCs of good relationships would have taken up the whole alphabet, if given free reign.
Ruth Monster Ginsberg officiating. She doesn’t see what’s so funny.
The ceremony was endless fun, and indeed turned into a proper show, with acts on stage, singing and dancing, the whole nine yards. We also took advantage of a fantastically baroque chesterfield in the upper balcony to create another photo booth for anyone who wanted to be part of the drama.
Chesterfield + theater people = delicious drama
On top of having a fantastically good time taking pictures at a good friend’s wedding, I was also told yesterday that one or more of my photos from the night may be published in a magazine early next year. More news on that if it becomes real, but even the possibility is pretty exciting.
The Camera Fundamentals class I’m offering is coming up fast: this Sunday, June 30th, at 1 pm! Find the details and a ticket pre-purchase link on the Classes page.
Due to popular demand, I will be offering this class again, but I haven’t set the date yet. Look for an announcement here, and expect it to be in the early fall.
So, there’s this theater event, see? It’s called 14/48. The basic idea is that you call in a bunch of actors, seven directors, seven playwrights, designers, and musicians. Then you sit them down in a room of a Thursday night, and say, “Here’s what’s happening, and here’s the theme. GO!” The writers get their theme, and have to turn in a 10 minute script by 8 am the next morning. At 9 am the next morning, the directors gather and randomly select an unmarked manila envelope. The designers pore over the scripts to figure out what they’ll need to come up with that day. Directors and writers discuss the scripts that have randomly paired them. At 10, the actors are randomly drawn, and directors head off with their casts to rehearse, block, memorize and make amazing this script that was finished mere hours ago.
Then, at 3:30 pm, tech rehearsals start. Then, at 8 pm, performances. 24 hours and 30 minutes have passed between the moment these artists gathered in a room and the moment they step on stage with their new play. And it’s not a train-wreck anywhere near as often as you might think. In fact, I’ve never seen a train-wreck, although I’ve certainly seen some uninspiring plays.
So now, the Kamikaze part. 45 or so artists gather in a room, and the ultimate layer of randomness is laid over the proceedings: everyone picks their job at random. You don’t know at the beginning of the night whether you’re going to be an actor or a writer or a director, or in the band, or designing props and costumes. And, as proved by this past weekend, this isn’t a train-wreck either.
I missed the last Kamikaze event, last year, due to schedule conflicts. This year, as soon as I knew the dates, I cleared out my schedule and reserved the days. I took the Friday off from work. And I photographed the whole thing. I don’t yet have a gallery of photos up from the event (because I took just shy of 6700 photos over the course of the three days), but the lovely bloggers who covered the event in real time pulled primarily from my photos to illustrate the 14/48 blog. That’s a good first place to start.
Just like every 14/48 event I’ve ever photographed (three thus far, including this one), the experience was exhilarating, thought-provoking, wonderful, and exhausting in the extreme. I generated around 12 GB of photos. I made new friends. I got to experience the most elemental creation of theatrical art I’ve ever seen. And this time around, I got to witness the bug-eyed terror of actors writing their first plays, ever. I got to see the nervous glances of people who normally work behind the scenes, as they looked over their first acting scripts in far too long.
Far from presenting the world with seven disasters, 14/48 Kamikaze proved that people are more versatile than they think they are. We had seven shows each night which were in the best 14/48 tradition, without a stinker among them. That’s a pretty impressive feat.
For myself, I managed partial success in restraining my itchy trigger finger (the first 14/48 I shot, I recorded 8,448 photos, so the trend is good, even if the result isn’t as restrained as I might have hoped for). I got some wonderful pictures of friends and soon-to-be-friends doing this crazy thing they love. I got a combined 15 hours of sleep between Thursday night and Sunday morning (when I had foolishly scheduled a Shadow Series photo shoot which was worth it, but oh so tired). The sick thing is, I’m kind of ready to go do it all again.
I’m very pleased to offer my first class, Camera Fundamentals. In it, I will cover everything you need to know to take full advantage of your camera: how the manual controls work, what they do, what effect they have. It will also include an explanation of the various specs on your camera that you may not have understood before: focal length, sensor size, ISO, and so on. Take your own camera use beyond point-and-shoot, and take control of your photos.
Details can be found on the Classes page. At only $40 for a two-hour class, this is a stunningly good deal, and later classes will cost more. Email me via ian at dangerpants dot com to inquire about getting a place, and jump-starting your photography skills!
I’ve been taking pictures for literally zillions* of years now, and I decided it’s finally time to take the next step, and start charging lots of money offering my services to the community. If you’ve been paying any attention to theater reviews around town (obviously you’ve been reading them all ceaselessly), you’ve certainly seen my work through Annex Theatre, which is where I’ve really honed my skills over the last few years.
If you’re interested in getting some pictures taken, ping me on email (ian {at} dangerpants {dot} com), contact me/like my page on Facebook (all hail the almighty, all-powerful Facebook!), or you can try your luck at summoning me telepathically, not unlike Aquaman and the dolphins. Note that until August, 2013, I’m offering a headshot package for $150 — check it out on the Services page. That’s a lotta photographic awesomeness for $150!
* Note: zillions has not been strictly defined, so this is a true statement.
