Can I get a drum roll please?  This is something I've been excited about for a while, and I'm thrilled to be finally introducing it.  Hang on… this is going to be different.

    If you've been paying close attention to this blog, my Facebook posts, and / or especially my Twitter feed, you'll know by now that myself, and a friend of mine named Chris Hill, have been up to something.  Something awesome, if I may say so myself. 🙂  We've been working on a totally different kind of photography project; something that has pushed me both creatively and technically.  This project, once complete, will have taken a year to do, and like I said, it isn't going to be like anything you've seen me post before.  Some of you will get it, and hopefully love it… and others of you surely won't.  Not to worry though, if you find yourself in category 2, I'm okay with that… and I promise I'll continue posting the stuff you're used to.

   So what is it?  Well, the project is called "Picture Me, Loving You" and is a photo-narrative of sorts.  Frankly, I really don't know what else to call it.  The idea is that, through a series of 13 still images, we'll be telling a story… kind of like a movie, only through pictures instead of moving images.  Each image will be accompanied only by a title that will hopefully help the viewer understand the takeaway of the image, and a thank you to the people that assisted with the production of the photo (of which there have been many).  A new image will be released every 3 days until the story is complete.  Now, I must warn you, the story is a love story, albeit a very dark and tragic one, and is admittedly macabre (thanks for that word, Chris!) at times… thus representing the greatest departure from my normal work.

   By now you're likely asking yourself where in the world this all came from.  Well, all I can do is show you the picture that inspired the whole thing.

"Substance d" by James and Karla Murray Photography, posted here by permission

I stumbled on the image above many years ago on flickr and was immediately captured by it (it was the only image I favorited for the longest time, and remains only one of three).  I loved the darkness of it, the lighting, the decaying building, the oddness of someone dressed up in a rabbit suit for the photo; I loved everything about it. I had never seen anything like it, nor have I since.  I showed it to a friend of mine, William Brown, and he and I began a search for a rabbit suit so we could do something similar… but to no avail.  We couldn't find a rabbit suit that worked, and so I shelved the idea in the back of my mind… enter Chris Hill.  A photographer himself, I met Chris a while back and had followed him on Twitter since and one day he posts this picture of a mascot type costume outift he had made for someone.  Yes, he makes costumes — as a hobby — it's goofy, it's funny, and maybe a little weird… but we're cool with it.  Anyway, I bounce a photo idea off of him for one of his costumes and he jumps in with both feet.  On the way home from the shoot we start brainstorming about other photos we could do, and before long, the concept of a "movie through pictures" was born.  The rest, will soon be history.

   Alright, so when can you see the entire project?  Good question.  We're currently still in production, but plan to be done with the final 4 images in the Spring, and so the plan is to release this thing late Spring of this year.  So why are we talking about it now?  Well, just like the movies, we're hoping to generate a little buzz beforehand to get people interested.  In conjunction with this, I'm also releasing a "behind the scenes" blog, which will talk about some of the funny things that have happened along the way as we've made this project, and hopefully Chris will chime in as well.  Keep your eye out for that one.  At the end, I'll also release one final post, explaining the whole thing to those of you that just don't understand… and you may still not understand, but that's okay.

  I seriously can't wait to begin!

–Dan Thompson