It's the end of an era!

What’s up, Hive? I’m at a local Yemeni coffee shop with @guthrie. He’s doing homework on his iPad. This had become a necessity as I’ve been seeing his grades slip if I allow him to get through his assignments on his own. It’s a good routine for us, though. They have a tea called Aidaroos which I’ve fallen in love with it so I wait all day to enjoy this during the evening while he sits across from me. I have some photo editing to get to and some pre-production for an upcoming video project for the Palestine movement. I decided to work on a Hive post now so that I’m not up too late. After ten days on the east coast, I need to detox from the stress and food so I’m trying to commit to eating better, drinking a ton of water and getting more sleep.

I have some new photography to share. I’m in a new chapter of my life. I’m not doing pinup photography anymore. It’s a longer conversation but I’m not longer aligned with it. Not to say that I won’t be posted new edits of old work. I most likely will. I just don’t want to do dark pinup as a career anymore. I’ve always looked forward to revisiting my old shoots one day when my life slowed down to a pace that wasn’t a complete blur. I think I’m finally in that chapter of my life. There have been some recent milestones that have alleviated me of the monthly grind I used to be under. Working in reverse order, this is my most recent and last dark pinup shoot from November of 2023 with a long time friend named Emilee.

I’ve been shooting with Emilee for a decade. She lives out of state but every year around her birthday she’d fly in to Minnesota for a shoot. We missed a few years there during COVID, of course, but other than that, we’ve been very consistent. This shoot, we were even able to get the same hair and make-up artist as our first shoot; she’s one of the best in the Twin Cities. We shot at The W Hotel in downtown. We were able to make our way from the lobby to the restaurant/bar on the top floor. We wrapped at the hotel room and for the first time in almost a year, I shot some of my low light specialty. To best honest, I wasn’t into the shoot for personal reasons. I wasn’t feeling the creativity like I used to, but the good news is, the Emilee loved them.

This shoot was a turning point for me. It was bitter sweet, but truthfully, I was ready to make this change in my life before my personal shit and the traumatic videos I’ve seen from Gaza. Dark pinup as a genre had expanded far, far beyond my work. I feel like I played things as well as I could. Buying the domain was a big opportunity. I had to wait years until it became available and managed to pick it up for $200 just months before the @facingsofficial NFT collection was released, and of course the book. The work itself had become a job, unfortunately, not a passion like it once was. I’m much happier with what I’m shooting now. Food, weddings, engagements, political campaigns and interviews. It’s a challenge. It’s new and its brought life back to photography for me.