Harlean Carpenter (who is a fiction) and I have entered photos in a couple of contests this month. One is based on popular votes, while the other… might be, but it’s hard to tell.

First, the Photobucket contest. It’s a Valentine’s sort of thing, featuring happy couples. It’s hard to tell who that shaggy guy is that’s with her, but they sure do make a cute couple. We’ve moved up smartly to 263rd place as of this writing. VOTE NOW! Voting ends tomorrow… unless it doesn’t.

Next, the Pinup Lifestyle contest. The theme this month is “on the phone” and the contest has more entries than ever — some are good, others not-so, but there’s only so many permutations of the same damn pose you can do. I’m happy to say that in this cluttered field my shot of Harlean shines like a beacon of creativity and humor in an otherwise homogeneous field.

You can vote for up to five images in that contest, and there are some others that are pretty good, if variations on the same theme. Depending on where you work, you might want to wait until you get home to look through the entries.

From an execution standpoint, our primitive lights made things particularly challenging for the technicians in the lab on this shoot. Our intrepid editor did an excellent job pulling the photo from the noise, as it were, but soon all this will be changing. Yep, we’re buying gear. Just tonight I got the shipping confirmation on a pair of pretty darn good studio strobes, stands, and those crazy umbrella-things. Light boxes will be following shortly.

I’ve been looking at a lot of professional photography lately, and an amazing amount of it seems pretty damn boring. That’s the great thing about a model like Harlean. As a fiction created to create fiction, she knows the value of a good story. I hope I can master the new equipment and harness it to help her tell her tales.

One thing for sure, I won’t be able to blame the lights anymore.

This month’s photo contest at Pinup Lifestyle includes an entry shot by yours truly once again.

The theme this month is “In the Bathtub”, and we did a location shoot where there is a bathroom large enough to maneuver in. Happily, the bathroom was also very bright, giving me more latitude with shots than I’m used to having, without incurring ridiculous exposure times. Plentiful mirrors improved the light even more, but provided all sorts of challenges when it came to avoiding inadvertent self-portraits. Here’s one of my favorites from the shoot:

That is not the one entered in the contest, however! You’ll have to go visit the contest to see that one. Oh, and hey, while you’re there, go ahead and toss us a vote, why don’t you? There are lots of good entries, so take some time to look around and spend your other four votes. It seems like month-to-month the quality of the entries is steadily rising. I think the quality of my shots is steadily improving, too. Hooray!