Palm Springs Photo Festival - Portraits

Back in late April, early May (around the same time I stopped making blog posts, coincidentally) I went out to the desert of Palm Springs for the third consecutive year. What's in Palm Springs you ask?  Ok, I'll tell you. Palm Springs hosts the Palm Springs Photo Festival and has done so for the past ten years. My jaunts to this wonderfully sweltering place usually involve very little sleep, a healthy consumption of photography and an infinite pool of inspiration and motivation from my peers and legendary photographers.

This year, I worked with festival favorite Frank Ockenfels 3. If you take a look at his work, he has probably shot a lot of stuff that you've seen but had no idea who shot it. Over the course of three days, Ockenfels' pupils made portraits of their classmates and models using wacky sources of lights. The final day, we trekked out to Indio, California to a place called Tropics Motor Hotel where another festival favorite named Frank welcomed you at the front desk. The other Frank is an incredibly nice guy who has lived long on this earth and takes smoke breaks that you could set your watch to. He also has no problem sitting or standing in front of the camera if you ask, as many of us did. 

Here are a few portraits I shot of Frank and two of the models (Melat and Spencer). Shout out to the desert city a couple of hours east of Los Angeles. I kind of love that place.