You executed the shoot fully analog, no photoshop. What all went behind some of these shots that frankly look as good as photoshop? What is it like to look back on these techniques 20 years later?

OH the film days!! I miss film. I study traditional photography, not only techniques in the camera but also techniques in darkroom. The complete photographer in my days was the one that developed his or her pictures. Taking your pictures to the lab, to me, was amateurish. This is my opinion. Printing your work was something that no one could do better than you. I relied on lab techniques like, burning, dodging, Cross Processing and Color CMY dials on the Enlarger. I could ad in the darkroom my final touches. Nothing I ever shot was normal so I couldn’t just send my work to a LAB, I had to print it myself. Most photo labs would always try to color correct my work, I didn’t want my work white balanced. I would crank up blue, or red, or the contrast on the film by dumping the film in the wrong chemicals (Cross Processing) and experimenting that way. I was the Instagram Filter before Instagram… lol… but it wasn’t just pressing a filter button, it took a lot of work to get a stylized artistic picture without Photoshop, you needed to understand ALL THE ELEMENTS OF PHOTOGRAPHY.

On the studio, I challenged myself even further. If you look at the blue pics I did of Em, You will see some graphic texture in front and behind him. I hired an artist to freestyle some graphic work in the the background to add some texture then I had him do the same to a 5 x 5 clear plexiglass. I placed Em in between the glass and the background. You don’t understand how hard is to shoot a subject behind a glass. I had to black out the entire studio, create a box around the plexiglass so that I didn’t get any reflections, all of this while testing images with polaroids. At the end of the shoot, you never really knew what you had in the film canister. You couldn’t see it for 2 to 3 days. That was the magic of film, the latent image. Latent Image is Dead.