This wasn’t for anything in particular, other than that my housemate Perish was getting all dolled up to go out on the town and ForrestBlack and I felt that needed to be immortalized. I’ve been a little bit obsessed with holiday decorations and costumes this year. No idea why, but it has resulted in some entertaining images.
Here is a sexy new shot featuring the glorious Roxy Contin, lensed by yours truly and Forrest Black, with a tree courtesy of Perish. We hope it puts a festive smile on your face 🙂 Full series coming to BlueBlood.com soon!
Love, Amelia
So I’m thinking about posting parts of my shooting schedule in public. Like on the Blue Blood MySpace, using the calendar function.
I usually keep my shoot schedule shrouded in secrecy because there are certain pathetic individuals and companies which follow me around like their own personal cool hunter. Heck, if I say I’m going to my favorite nightclub, they want to hang signage there. So, if I say I’m excited about shooting someone, I have to deal with professional stalkers trying their hardest to shoot the model right when I am working with them or trying to fill them with booze or cocaine the night before.
Only it is easier for me to schedule people if we can both review what I’m already shooting. If I am coordinating with anyone else for a special location, then it is more convenient to have a public schedule. And it is probably interesting for people who are into Blue Blood to be able to see more of what we have going on.
I might have had to deal with more extreme cases of copycatitus than most, but I’m sure other people have had to deal with this too. I know some of you post public shooting calendars and some of you do not. I would love to hear what other people see as some of the pros and cons of doing this. Thanks!
Forrest Black and I have shot members of more than one hundred bands, from The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Backyard Babies to Korn and Cradle of Filth to the Genitorturers and GWAR to Cinema Strange and Gitane Demone to My Ruin and Jack Off Jill. This is your month to join their ranks because we are running a super holiday sale special on band shoots!
The awesome deal: For only $600, you get a band promo shoot (usually $1,200) including high res final images of your band as a group and an individual shot of each member up to five band members. Processing and retouching are included in this package. You also get the benefit of Forrest Black’s and my art direction and vision. These images are guaranteed high enough resolution for magazine pages and CD art! Usually album art license is an additional $3,000, but that additional usage is 100% free with liner note credits with this special sale deal. Merch usage, such as T-shirts or buttons, is usually negotiated as an additional fee plus a percentage of sales, but it is totally free with this special sale as well. We will shoot images great for you to use for, not only magazine press, CD art, and merch, but also ideal for flyers and newspaper ads for gigs, online promotion, MySpace, iTunes, and design for your web site.
The killer rockstar images and amazing art we will make together: All of the example images below were shot by yours truly and Forrest Black with the exact style of lighting and setup we will be using to photograph you.
Eric Griffin shot in location studio we set up in a living room
Andy LaPlegua shot in location studio we set up in a living room
Godhead shot in location studio we set up at Marilyn Manson’s office
Tim Skold shot in location studio we set up in my hotel room
Diva Destruction shot in location studio we set up in a living room
Element shot in location studio we set up in a living room
Zeromancer shot in location studio we set up in a living room
The fine print: In order to secure this special rate, you must schedule a date in December or January and pay 50% of the base fee by December 15. The remainder is to be paid on the day of the shoot. We accept checks, money orders, PayPal, ePassporte, and good old-fashioned cash. If you have any special requirements for the shoot or timeline of how fast you need pictures, please let us know what they are when booking. We will attempt to accommodate anything you want. You will essentially be getting a $5,000 value for $600. In order to give you the best price possible, this is a no frills shoot. You will be photographed in a location studio set up in a living room, like the example shots above. We will not have people on hand to serve cappucino to your publicist. Each publicist, manager, or label person who wants to hang out incurs an additional $200 fee, unless either Forrest or I knows them well enough personally to have had dinner or a night on the town with them, on purpose, at least once. In our extensive experience, having gratuitous businesspeople on set just makes it much harder for the band to look comfortable in pictures and harder for us to create art. Same policies apply for girlfriends who want to shout suggestions. You are welcome to bring your own makeup or hair people. There is of course no charge if you bring your own makeup or hair folks. If you want us to supply makeup or hair, additional pricing will be based on what those individuals charge. You will be photographed against a basic clean background, white or light colored. We encourage unusual background color requests, but they may be an additional $120 to cover our costs, depending on the specifics. Additional band members, above five, are $100. Additional images with the same setup and outfits and makeup are $20 each if available without significant post-production.
Our shoot will be chill and fun and you will end up with beautiful publication-ready images like the examples above. To get your shoot date nailed down, just message the Blue Blood MySpace or email amelia@blueblood.net with the header subject HOLIDAY PHOTO SALE in all caps.
Possible bonus: and, if we have a good time working together and we like your stuff and how the shots turn out, we may run a feature about you on BlueBlood.net which is one of the most-visited taste-making sites on the web! Please make sure we have some of your music 🙂
Love, Amelia G
PS Please pass this along to friends in bands you like.
I know some people can’t help it, but it bugs me when people are overly familiar. Like when people who actually do know me make assumptions about me, based on some rumor they heard, or some guess they made. If there is something personal and I haven’t volunteered it to someone I know, then that means that either (a) it is not the case or (b) maybe I don’t want to be poked about it for whatever reason.
When they get whatever the thing is wrong or bring what the thing is up in an inconsiderate place or time, that is annoying. But the part that really annoys me is the name-dropping nature of it. Like they wouldn’t want to have an actual personal conversation with me, but they would want to drop my name to anyone who might be impressed that they know me.
Here is an example from a while back: There was someone who I now know dropped my name constantly, after after ForrestBlack and I’d shot her at an event and working with me one time — count it, once. And I guess she fleshed out a fictional backstory for me to show how well she knew me, but she was so deluded that she started to believe it herself. So she had a conversation with me about how I never graduated high school. Uhm. I don’t have quite as much post-graduate work as I’d once assumed I’d do and I did go to college when I was 16, but I had a high school diploma in hand, thanks. I guess maybe she came up with that based on her own status (which I admit I don’t know because I’m not that familiar with her) or maybe she figured punk rock meant uneducated, as opposed to philosophically different or disenfranchised. Whatever her defective rationale was, it bugged me that she would spread something so egregiously inaccurate in order to pretend to know me better than she did (or does.) I do not think my high school graduation status is something that anyone who knows me is obliged to know. But it is really overly familiar for someone to assume they know and then make commentary about something so delusional to show other people (and me!) how well they know me.
This happen to other people?
Ealier today I couldn’t make my On Demand service work. I think it is incompatible with my TiVo, although the various local cable companies which keep buying one another all swear it should work. I’ve watched all of Dexter, except for one episode. It made me kinda angry that I couldn’t watch that one episode because the On Demand does not perform as promised. The Time Warner chick on the phone was nice, but I suspect ill-informed. A tech is coming out next week. I was nice to her because she was nice to me, but I’m still kind of pissed off. Given that watching an episode of a TV show is pretty damn unimportant, I guess I’ve just got some free-floating anger today. Don’t really know why. Stuff is going well. Hectic enough to be stressful and my job is starting to involve managing more and more people (as opposed to just doing stuff myself, which I am more comfortable with), but I don’t think I should feel so generally angry.
(Click here for a site which expresses my current mood through interpretive dance.)
Sometimes I get really frustrated when I have to fix things. What do you get when you fix something? You get what you had to begin with. Nothing new. Nothing improved. No accomplishment other than back to square one.
Someone vandalized my car when I was going to shoot in what I guess was a sketchy neighborhood. This was ages ago now and I just can’t get around to fixing it.
Legal BS is the same thing. If someone infringes on my intellectual property rights, I have to pursue it, but, once it is fixed, I pretty much end up with what I started with, my property.
I had a very tasty brunch today.
Requiem for Tower Records
by Amelia G : November 22nd, 2006
Many years ago, I lived near a Tower Records with an amazing selection. This was after I stopped getting my music for free from air promotions for being a radio DJ and before I started getting my music for free from publicists for being a journalist. It was also after I was broke and living in a punk rock group house and before I stopped giving a fuck about most of it . . . Read More
Click here for punk rock misbehavior, interesting history, investigative journalism into the secrets behind the Tower closings, and a poignant photo gallery tribute to Tower on Sunset Boulevard.
More from this series on Blue Blood. If the image freaks you out in a subtle way, that means it is working.
I am the alpha female and yet I swear I start bleeding every time I get around other chicks. Heating pad, here I come. Ouchie.
Blue Blood sponsored a ton of cool events this Halloween season, but Xian’s Hex Hollywood is the one we personally attended and shot at. I wore a GIANT skirt. I kept knocking things over with my clothing. Forrest was a giant black cat. I can’t even estimate how many yards of clothing we had between us. It was AWESOME!
