A Great Birthday!

I'm starting French class again tomorrow, so I have to get back to studying, but I couldn't let too much time go by without posting a couple of amazing images from my birthday shoot with Morgan. Once again, she was stunning. So many great images to choose from, but this will be a taste.

Clothes from our favorite store, G'bani. Black jumpsuit and dress, Italian designer Patrizia Pepe and shoes DSQUARED2.

After a great shoot, Morgan and her lovely sister Ryan took me to one of my favorite Italian restaurants in my neighborhood. I love where I live and I love that so many amazing places to eat are just a short walk away. We had a great time and then came back to my place and had birthday cake that Trevian from G'bani had bought me earlier in the day. She had an amazing spread all ready for us when we came in to shop that morning and we spent hours there trying on beautiful clothes.

And I even decided to upgrade my wardrobe with two pairs of stunning Italian shoes. Great fun.

So it may have been the perfect birthday. Great shopping, another wonderful photoshoot with the beautiful Morgan, and dinner with two people who really mean so much to me. Thank you!

City of Light Casts a Long Shadow in Chicago

Just before turning in for the night, I turned off the lights and was startled to see a familiar shadow cast on my front door from a streetlight outside one of my windows.



I actually felt my heart jump in surprise. How did... what is...

Le Tour Eiffel est impatient pour mon retour.















It's actually my camera tripod standing in the middle of my studio casting the shadow, but it really took me about 10 seconds to recover from the shock and realize it wasn't really something impossible casting that shadow.

Billy's Home for Wayward Girls

My friend Jill from California has this uncanny knack for remembering birthdays even though she lives two thousand miles away and it's been years since I've seen her. And every year, like clockwork, something arrives in the mail a few days before mine. Always funny and always incredibly delightfully home-made.

Years ago, she used to call my old apartment "Billy's Home for Wayward Girls" because I always seem to be housing some traveling model or perhaps a compromised woman in need of a place to stay.

Here's this year's card.

"April 29th was always a red letter day at Billy's Home for Wayward Girls. Once a year on this day, Billy took in one more girl to celebrate his birthday. His plan was to eventually have one girl for each year of his age. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), he couldn't remember how old he was."




And the inside...
















Ah, Jill. Why yes, I certainly will, thank you!

The Fattest Guy in Paris

This blog may have very little to do with photography. But it has everything to do with me. And it's a good story.

I don't really worry about numbers so much. Someone asked me old I was the other day and I wasn't entirely sure. I guess I could probably get it within a year or two, but I'd probably have to do a little math to get it exactly right. And I'm not saying that to make myself feel younger. I just really don't pay attention. I'm certainly not doing the things that a guy "my age" is supposed to do or is supposed to have done. I'm living my life in my own way. No one's pre-fab mold seems to fit.

Another number I haven't been paying too close attention to is my weight loss. I find that jumping on a scale every day is a little unnatural and it's better to get on once a month and see a change rather than every day and see not much of anything. Yesterday a woman I work with came up to me and said she was talking to some of her colleagues and they noticed as I passed them the other day, I didn't even look like me from the back. It's true. Every once in a while I look down and notice there is less of me. It's good.

I've had to buy new clothes recently because the clothes I was wearing at this time look ridiculously huge on me now.

So what's all this "The fattest guy in Paris" stuff all about? Well people always ask me how much weight I've lost and I always had a rough idea of somewhere around 50 pounds in less than a year. It was easier to measure inches lost because i keep having to cut new holes in my belts. I told someone yesterday it was about eight or nine inches, but I cut another hole in my belt this morning and it's actually eleven inches now.

Somewhere over the winter I noticed my digital scale stopped working. It was old. So I bought a new analog one with the old fashioned dial. But when I stepped on it, it didn't match what my digital scale was telling me... by about 15 or 20 pounds... and it wasn't even in my favor. Okay, no matter, I thought. I'm still cutting holes in my belts, I just must have started off heavier than I thought.

I left it at that.

Last night I went to visit one of my friends at the bar she works at. It's a sports bar and full of things that don't interest me, but we were talking earlier in the day and she said it would be slow and boring, so I told her I'd stop by and keep her company for an hour. I ordered a light beer and a salad. The salad was actually pretty good for a sports bar. We talked and I noticed someone walk by with an absolutely beautiful huge pizza that looked delicious. Just the kind I used to love.

We talked some more and I left to go home with the pizza still in my head. I've been doing really well lately. Watching what I eat, but not making myself crazy by depriving myself of little things here and there. But this one was a struggle for some reason. I arrived home and immediately threw some water in my steamer and brought it to a boil and put some corn and carrots in there. They were very good.

And I read for a while and went to bed.

I got up this morning very proud of myself for fighting off that strange moment of weakness. And I decided to get on the scale. Another five pounds lighter. Nice. So I decided to do some math and try to really figure out how much I had lost. 40 pounds? 50? I remember what I weighed the last time I got on the old digital scale and the difference when I got on the new one. Using the difference i recalculated what I must have originally weighed and then how much I had really lost in the last year.

Not 40. Not 50. But somewhere between 75 and 80 pounds! Wow.

I guess that makes sense considering the inches we're talking about.

I still have a very long way to go. If I lose another 80 I'll be as thin as I've ever been in my adult life. And I'll still have a bit more to go after that to be a truly healthy man. But I know I can do it. It took me a couple of decades to get to be where I was a year ago, and I really am motivated to erase that damage in as little time as is healthy for me. So in addition to walking four or five miles a day, there's also a morning workout that even though it's in it's beginning stages seems to be going well.

Last September, Morgan and I went to Paris and we both had life changing experiences. Even though I had begun to lose weight, I half jokingly said that I was the fattest man in Paris. Not a distinction I enjoyed.

We're returning to that beautiful city this summer to create amazing photographs. But this time when I step onto the tarmac, I won't be that man. Still bigger than I want to be, but much thinner than I was when I battled to climb the 300 steps to the top of Sacre Coeur.

So I can cross off the phrase The Fattest Man in Paris from my vocabulary forever.

I love my life and I'm thrilled that every day I'm going to be around a little longer to enjoy it... for years and years to come.

Monday Musings

I was running late this morning and even though I really love to walk downtown every day, I jumped in a cab. The cabbie was an older Indian man and we had a delightful conversation. He didn't have a divider between the front and back seats, which I prefer. We talked about drivers and road rage and the dangers of being robbed when driving a taxi.

He had a very pleasant way about him. Very calming. He told me a story of three young guys getting in his taxi and directing him to an address on the west side. He said they were drinking and smoking, which he let them do. They told him to put on the radio so they could groove to the music and he did. At one point one of the guys asked him how much money he had in the cab because they were going to rob him. Rather than try to prevent them from taking his money, or telling them he didn't have any, he asked them how much they wanted. They told him they wanted $200. He had $250 and gave it to them. Amazingly, he gave them his phone number and told them to call in case they needed a cab again.

As they were approaching their destination, the old cabbie said one of the guys, he said you could tell he was a good kid, he started to have second thoughts about robbing him. The kid was telling the other guys they should give the money back. And amazingly... they did. In fact they gave him $40 for the ride on top of giving the money back.

The old cabbie said we can all avoid danger if we respond in a way that does not escalate the situation. By not only not fighting the idea of being robbed, but offering them kindness he completely diffused what could have been a deadly situation.

It made me think about our world, our country, our government and how much different things might be if the old man who was driving me was President of the United States. We'll never know.

It made me think.

It's been a great couple of days. I had another amazing shoot with my beautiful friend Morgan. We took advantage of the Chicago spring weather and went out to a nice sunny space on the side of my buidling and then up to the roof to catch the light of the setting sun. Lovely.

I also am working with a new light that I've been saving for her. It's a classic fashion ring light and it creates a very specific look. Perfect on Morgan's skin which is very white and creamy. We'll be using that more in the future. She looks gorgeous in that light. This is an image from our first pictures with it.

On a slightly different note, since I'm using more digital technology than film these days, I'm relying a lot more heavily on computers than traditional darkroom equipment. But I'll never stop shooting film. Film has a quality about it that I still miss when I shoot digital. It might have something to do with the fact that a digital image always starts out in color even though I may be imagining the image that I'm creating in B&W.

It’s hard to explain, but when I'm photographing an image that is specifically a B&W art photograph, I compose it differently. Color has as much to do with composition as anything else in the photograph. If I'm shooting in B&W, I look to shapes and brightness and darkness when composing. If I shoot an image and see it in color first before I change it to B&W, it takes a while to get used to the color intermediate stage.

Morgan and I were having dinner the other night and talked a lot about my art and what I've been doing the last few years It really was important to talk about because I've been trying to grow as a photographer. She's been working fairly closely with me on several projects and she had a very interesting perspective on what a "Billy Sheahan" photograph is. I may have to think about it a little more before I can write about it. I have a lot to think about. One of the things I value most about working with Morgan is her perspective on my work as well as the work we create together. It was a great conversation and I appreciate her words and wisdom as well as her beauty in front of my camera.

Back to the technology. In the last few months I've having some issues with my computers. So much trouble in fact that several of my major hard drives have been failing and only because I'm meticulous about backing up my work, I haven't yet lost any of my images. But I've had a few close calls. I have thousands of images that were created as digital files. There is no negative to go back to if the drive crashes and there is no backup. The digital file is the negative.

During Morgan's shoot on Saturday I managed to get my computer back up basically only enough to copy images from my camera memory cards to my hard drives, but even that was dicey. So on Sunday I took the whole system down. Unplugged everything. I have four terabytes of storage for my photography including the backup drives. I mounted the drives one by one, updated the firmware on all of them, ran diagnostics and reordered and redesigned how they are connected to my system. As I was running the test software I kept getting a message that there was an unknown firewire device still hooked up to my computer. Hmmm. All my drives were disconnected.

The iSight camera. Ah yes. Those little cameras, while incredibly easy to use to video chat with friends near and far, they do have a reputation for causing gremlin-like havoc with other firewire devices, such as hard drives. I had forgotten about that. Maybe all I had to do was unplug that little bugger. But my system is probably healthier because of a day of maintenance. It will pay off in the future.

You see, there was a time when I was fascinated by technology. I was a nerd. I still have a reputation for being a go-to guy when you're having trouble with your Mac. But it seems like I am not really interested in keeping up with the technology at the level that I did only a few years ago. It's not that I don't want to know how my tools work, but I don't think I'm as willing to spend as many hours a week, reading and researching and testing that I once did. I have too much I want to accomplish and being a nerd is getting squeezed out by the fact that I want to experience my art and my life and my time with people I care about.

Maybe it's because it's my birthday this week and I'm in a reflective mood, but I have a lot to do yet in my life. Too many things I want to experience and accomplish. I'm happy to pass my pocket protector to the next guy.

I want to make beautiful things. It doesn't matter what tools I'm using to that end.

And in the spirit of my birthweek, I want to say thank you to some important people in my life who I will thank personally in private this week. They are the ones that have helped me grow this year more than I have in many recent years. I will be around to have many more happy and healthy birthdays in the future because of their encouragement and support and love.

Thank you. And happy birthday to me!

Happily Exhausted

This has really been a great week. I just finished the fifth shoot I've had in the last seven days. I'm having another tomorrow which means I'll have had six in the last eight days. I think that's a new record for me. That's good though. I'm happiest when I'm shooting. So I've been a very happy man lately.

Jillian Ann left this week after a bit of a marathon shooting stretch for both of us. As always we came up with some very creative and different kinds of images. I never know what to expect, but I'm always amazed with what we create. I'll post a few more here today.

I'm honored to say one of my photographs will be the cover art for one of her upcoming CDs called Punk Meditations. It's an image we made last summer and one of her artists has created a beautifully organic looking piece of art from it. I'm quite excited to be a part of that.



And after almost three months, my exhibition at Echo Galleryis finally coming to a close on May 18th, but not before one final closing reception. This week, I got a call from Derek, one of the curators there, asking if I would attend one more party there to celebrate a most successful showing. I'm not sure of the exact date, but I'll pass it along here and on my Billy Sheahan Photography website as soon as I get that information. It's been a wonderful run and I'm enjoying every minute of it.

And if that weren't enough this week, I attended yet another fashion show. A good friend of mine managed to get me a bit of VIP access and as always I had a great time. Between Chicago Fashion Week a couple of weeks ago and now this, I've attended quite a few runway shows this spring and I intend to continue that trend. I'll post a photo here from the Custo Barcelona show. Ironically, my friend Melissa who was sitting next to me at this week's show, was wearing a Custo shirt that evening. I love the great fun, colors and designs of Custo.


Must get to sleep now. Another big shoot day tomorrow!

Creating and Stretching

Two days into our three day shoot, Jillian Ann and I have been trying to create images different from any we have done before. It's easy to fall back on what worked before, but we keep pushing each other. I like collaborations like that.

I love the light in my space. Yesterday was a particularly beautiful day in terms of light. Over the last year here I've learned how to manipulate it, push it, pull it, redirect it. But sometimes it's just a good idea to get out of the way and let it happen. This first image is just that. I pulled the sheers in over the window to soften it a bit and just started shooting.

The second one required quite the setup. Working in water is always interesting and although I used to shoot in my bathroom at my old place, this is the first time I have done it here. It's really quite a process to prevent reflections from the tiled walls and ceiling. I basically have to create a bit of a cave in there so there are no reflections by covering everything in black felt fabric the just absorbs light instead of reflecting it. I'll put up a picture of the setup another time. In the meantime, enjoy the one of the images from that set.

We're going to start shooting again in a few minutes, so I'll talk more about what else we did and how we did it a bit later.

So now I'm back... from outerspace...

Haven't written in a while. Needed to get out of the sun for a while and wash my face.

It's nice to be missed though. Who knew what a ruckus I would create by taking a time out? Certainly not me.

Thanks to everyone who encouraged me to come back as well as those who talked with me at great length about blogs and what ramifications they have on actual human to human contact. It's the in-person relationships that mean the most to me, but as long as we all agree that a blog entry is only second best when it comes to finding out how your friends are doing, then I think we'll all be okay.

With that out of the way....

Jillian Ann is staying with me for a few days while we work on more beautiful photographs. We plan to cover a lot of ground this weekend, so this will be short. But this morning we got a chance to shoot in a beautiful space in my building.

I love my building so much. The creative vibe here is just off the charts. Modeling agencies, photographers, musicians. It's really got so much artistic energy warming the bricks that it's hard not to make great art here.

One of my neighbors is Music in the Loft. It's a beautiful space created by two very generous people which provides young up and coming classical musicians with a place to perform in front of an intimate audience. I had never seen the space in person, but you can always tell when it's concert night because of all the shiny cars pulled up in front of the building with beautiful people stepping out.

One of the themes Jillian and I wanted to create during our time together this weekend were more images that focused on her piano performance. She's in the process of releasing a new CD of some of her acoustic piano work to add to her more electronic releases already available on iTunes and we wanted to make a few photographs that were a little less model-y and a little more about her as a musician.

I was having trouble finding a grand piano and a location for the shoot, so I about 3am one night I put a sign up in our mail room explaining my situation. 5 hours later I got a call from one of Music in the Loft people, a great guy, and we set a date and time. We shot about 500 images around a beautiful Steinway and this is one of my favorites when I told Jillian she had to smile in a few. She has a great smile and I don't photograph it as much as I should.

And then we chilled and talked about life and now we're going to dinner before we shoot some more today.