FORMICA AND NICOTINE; LETS GET DARK...brown.

Been noticing dark brown tones a lot the past year. Billboards and editorials. Lots of pictures of beauties playing cowboys. It resonates with me as one of the last real pretend cowboys around. It pleases my eye. ...and so does Kate French - photographed here in November of 2015

Kate in my now infamous Kitchen. That wall served me well.

If you watch enough indie films, you get plenty of time to look at it (talking about color now - not Kate - but both things are true). In those scenes where our star-crossed late-twenty-somethings spend a long stretch of quiet stillness deciding they have nothing further to say to one another. It gives you time to really feel the message of emptiness. And notice the black input point.

It reminds me of my childhood.

The chestnut carpet in the kitchen. Why was there carpet in the kitchen? Why?! Why do it?

To match the orange formica. Why else?

Between that and the spilled SpaghettiOs, you start to understand a certain kind of American color theory. Then there was my grandfather: his suit that matched his lizard boots. Saddles and holsters in the periphery of the world like normal household objects. Leather, brass, dust, wheat. And that deep brown that’s meant to look expensive, even when it isn’t.

More paneling, please.

My favorite light source is still a single strobe with a 3" round grid.

You grow up inside a palette. You paint your memories with it and then, at some point, Target uses it to sell you a drawer organizer.

So this trend, if it is a trend, suits my hybrid style of photography. I like elegant images. But I like them with a pulse and a nudge and a wink. Polish, but not disinfectant. Composition and chaos. Nicotine, not spray-on tan.

My friend Sean Gunn, not just my opinion — one of the best actors in Los Angeles — once described my images as: “Bob Guccione does Old Hollywood.”

Still warms my heart.

Dig this old headshot I took of Sean in 2013 - graded with the same brown as Kate - but with Nikon's cooler skin tone.

I’m always chasing a taste of tension in the fame: classic structure with a little misbehavior. Beauty with dirty fingernails. Dreams dragged through real life. Playboys and Polaroids. Not meant to be shared. Left for “safekeeping” in the middle of a wheat field.

That’s a thing. Ask your country friends.

Syrie Moskowitz (a fine artist and a muse to many) in 2013 (for a little book we did together). Same brown grade.

A dirty fantasy magazine, probably sun-bleached alongside the corn husks. That rolled-in-the-hay space between polish and dirt. Between what we pretended we were and what we actually were.

I'm long over Instagram's color preset offerings, and I don’t miss Hipstamatic. But I do appreciate that we all seem to want images that feel older than today. We’re trying to understand what beauty means to us now. It’s good to look at something with grainy mid-tones and let the blemishes be blemishes. All the want in all the world gets too shiny to look at for very long and I find it all easier to understand in black and white. But this particular nostalgia — this dark-brown pull — really does it for me.

Kate and I did a film together called Sutures, where we were young foolish lovers staying in a castle somewhere in the woods… until we were absconded with and murdered for our body parts. Hers, most certainly, fetching a higher price than mine.

She’s a marvelous creature. A terrific actress. A wonderful mother. And the wife of a very accomplished photographer: jonwjohnson.com. Look him up. See anything she does.

If you want this preset - it's built around Canon's red bias - but should give you a good base no matter. Here you go.