in development

The journal of Dennison Bertram. An American fashion photographer in the Czech Republic. Happy, sad, and everything in between.

Thursday, August 25, 2005

changes



Just to let you know, some big changes are comming to the website. I'll probably have to ditch the interactive stuff. Maybe even this blog. It's difficult to keep up a website that also at the same time is supposed to serve as your professional contact. None of my professional stuff is up here. I use this more as a chit-chat place to reflect on the photography. Most of my professional stuff these days is retouched by photoshop wunderkind's somewhere else and I never get it back. I'm not complaning, just explaining where it all goes. That said, I don't have time to retouch my own stuff anymore and hence I'm unlikely to show you guys anything. But I'm trying to break with that tradition- so heres some more. Anyway, in the next few weeks this will probably become some slick-interface professional website. I'll try to keep the blog. But all the links to the less than perfect photographs: gotta go. Save them while you can!

Beauty

cover

I got the cover of MGZN. Link

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

other


My head hurts, and despite trying to get to be on time I sleep alone these days and it's hard to get used to. I'm also working myself to death. To celebrate I think I'm going to go to japan in two weeks. Don't hold me to that. Today I assisted my friend on a magazine shoot with a famous model turned succesfull singer/songwriter. Great girl. The two of us and the makeup artist spent most of the time trying to teach ourselves how to do that earsplitting whistle to cat call tourist girls across the street. Really the girl was fantastic though. Iva is her name- Iva. Anyway she just married some czech singer ten or fifteen days ago so she's come back to prague to live.

The shoot wore me out though. Really. I went to watch Mean Girls at my makeup artists house, talk shit and then take a cab home. I swear I've never been driven that fast in real city streets before. It took five minutes to cross the entire city.

Other than that I feel dead on the inside. I wake up, move, move, move, go to sleep. I'm in a current quest at the moment for the perfect beauty light without spending a trillion dollars. I've got a broken Broncolor strobe at the moment that I'm hopeing might pan out into something nice. Yeah, and I haven't put a stitch of anything new up on this site in ages so I know you don't have any idea what I'm doing these days.

It's really commercial.

Beauty stuff though-

Saturday, August 13, 2005

and

You know what you never realize about this? Before you start, you never consider the fact that it will also never end. You'll never have all the photos, and there will be an angle of beauty out there that you will just simple never catch. But by the time you realize this, it's too late. When I was younger the first girl I loved who used to tell me about how she longed to become self actualized. She used to say that if you tried hard enough, that if you could force it hard enough, by sheer willpower alone you could become self actualized. Back then, self actualization was like something of a jet-stream of abition, desire, and success that streamed down from the north over the heads of us normal people. It was like this place where your dreams reached down from the stars and lifted you out of the dilapidated rust belt cities you grew up in. Back then, she made it sound like it was all that you could have wanted. I remeber I would lie in her bed on wednesday evenings after school listening to her stories of how the future might look like. We used to sneak over to her father house when he wasn't home to make-out and breath the future in. All it was then was dreams, sand and blue skies.

All you could have ever wanted.

But you'll never go back.

Just like I'll never sneak back with her again to her fathers house, I'll never just be that boy again looking up at some invisible river of destiney.

No, I'm here. Alone in this hotel room. And sure it will change, there will be different models, different shoots, different girls, clothes, televisions, cameras, computers. But not really. Really it ill never change. And I'll never leave. All that I could have wanted. And there just might be nothing more.

Premonition

So I haven't been writing much, lately I've been shooting a lot. I'm on a every other day schedule at the moment. It's great practice but it's also tiring. To make my life easier I've gotten into the habit of just renting luxury hotel rooms to shoot in. It's expensive, but a necessary evil. The catch is that right now my girlfriend is upset at me, and the models and stylist have all left so I'm here just by myself.

You know what I think? I think this will get lonely. Not today, not tonight, but one of these days. I've got all the creature comforts you could possibly think of in this place from heated floors to plasma TV's but I think it's pretty obvious what years of this can do to a person.

Here are a few polaroids-



It's funny because in some ways it's just like an all day party, and in other ways it's like an all day brink-of-catastrophe.

Anyway, tomorrow I'm modeling for a large public service campaign to raise money for homeless children, (a big problem out here). I'm doing it for free, I guess a little something to give back.