Cape Fear, Bricks & Minifigs

June 19, 2026June 19, 2026

When I left NYC two years ago, part of that decision making was that I mostly traveled for work, so I didn’t need to be paying all my income in rent, but I think I underestimated how much I would miss shooting in New York. Post pandemic didn’t work a ton in NYC but I was always there for the big moments even if I was just shooting stuff for myself. For example, I would be at the Knicks parade right now taking photos instead of updating my website. Since moving to Wilmington, NC I have taken plenty of photos, but they obviously aren’t as exciting as the stuff I was shooting locally in New York, so other than a photo here and there on social media, I don’t often share that work. Today I figured I would change that.

Recently I did three quick photoshoots for Wilmington Biz Magazine which is, believe it or not, a local business magazine. Two of the photo shoots were for an article about the Cape Fear River, yes the one from the movies, and one of them was just a quick one page story at the front of the issue.

The one page story was about a new Lego resale store called Bricks & Minifigs that had just opened up in a building right across the way from my old apartment. For decades it was a frame shop that I have frequented several times. (I was just recently at their new location getting the original 1962 blueprints to my home framed.) We moved before the Lego store opened but I watched them set up the shop over the last few months I lived there so I was excited to check it out. I loved Lego as a kid and I have built a few of the botanical sets over the last few years. Anyway, when I went there I met the owner and looked around and took a few photos and didn’t think much of it, but between then and now a huge controversy surrounding the franchise has taken place. It is way too complicated to explain fully, but basically Bricks & Minifigs corporate took over a franchise in Oregon and in the process stole a bunch of Lego sets that they were supposed to be consigning from someone. A YouTuber made a video about it and the whole thing went super viral and instead of making it right, the company just doubled down and made one bad PR decision after another, sued everyone and got the YouTuber arrested. This video has a pretty good breakdown of where the situation is now if you want to know more. All that being said, none of this has anything to do with the local Bricks & Minifigs and I went in there the other day and it was packed, so glad to see they are doing well despite the negative PR.

The other two shoots were for a larger story about a day on the life of the Cape Fear River. Despite being a small city, Wilmington is famous for a surprising amount of stuff. We are the home of Michael Jordan, the only place in the world with native Venus fly traps and home to a once thriving film industry. Dawson’s Creek, Blue Velvet and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were all filmed here. Kenny Powers mounted his comeback and Brandon Lee died filming The Crow here. But you know what wasn’t filmed here? Either of the Cape Fear movies, despite them taking place in Southeast NC. Sorry, these photos aren’t my normal level of exciting, so you get some tangents.

Anyway, the first shoot I did was to take photos of a tugboat company called McAllister Towing. I was particularly psyched about this because in my mind I was going to take photos of a grizzly tugboat captain, but I ended up photographing a young guy who was a fourth generation tugboatist. I am positive that isn’t a word, but it should be. Three notes about the shoot: 1) While photographing the tugboatist, I kept thinking it felt like I was shooting band photos, and when I went home and googled him, he is actually a drummer. 2) While I was climbing between two boats I dropped my point and shoot 35mm camera out of my bag, and when I bent over the rail to grab it, I dropped my other two film cameras. In the process I: a) broke the flash on the point and shoot, b) chipped the lens on my Nikon and c) badly damaged my Lecia M6, which reminds me I need to file an insurance claim. 3) My mother’s middle name is McAlister so I was psyched to show her the photos.

Lastly I photographed a Riverkeeper, which is a job I didn’t know existed. He’s part of an organization that works to protect the water quality in the Cape Fear River basin. The Cape Fear has an enormous amount of PFAS in it because DuPont basically poisoned the water source for hundreds of thousands of people and instead of paying for a cleanup, just created a separate company to keep them protected and everything is tied up in massive litigation, meanwhile everyone I know who grew up here has some sort of autoimmune disease and Trump’s FDA has rolled back Biden era clean water protections so that’s fun. Anyway, it was real cool to briefly talk to Kemp about his incredibly interesting job and I loved taking photos of him canoeing in some beautiful nature, despite how many bug bites I got in the process.

Can I tell you that when I started writing this I thought it was going to be three short paragraphs? Here we are nearly 1000 words in and I am still going. I need to write more, and maybe use less run on sentences when I do. I just gotta stop abusing commas. There will be zero commas in this paragraph — I swear.

Okay, this was fun and I hope you dig looking at something different from me. I still got a bunch of NSFW stuff to get up, and I need to start getting up more Vintage DBB stuff, as promised, but I also think I might have to share with you guys some of my wildlife photography. I don’t really know what I am doing but I got all sorts of wildlife in my backyard so I bought a long lens and it’s been a lot of fun, so maybe you guys will get to see that soon. In the meantime, enjoy this quick gallery with ten photos from each shoot. And shout out to my friend Suzi, the art director who hired me for this, it was fun, let’s do it again.

Emma Starseed & Olivia Wildin

June 11, 2026

I cannot believe I am finally getting these photos up. I shot these photos (and many more) back in January at the AVN Awards and these were supposed to have gone up in February. The first gallery I posted was of Maya Rue, because I did three shoots with her and I wanted to spread them out. Shortly after those went up my website got hacked. By mid April I thought it had been fixed, but the malware was just laying dormant. I was about to post these photos of Emma Starseed and Olivia Wildin at that time but when I went through them I realized that the digital ones weren’t enough and I wanted to publish the 35mm photos at the same time. I had just sent off the film to my lab in NYC so I figured I would get up these photos of Connie Perignon and then the Emma & Olivia photos would go up a week or two later… but then the hack was back. Finally months later all the malware is gone and my site is functional again and I am now paying someone to keep it that way going forward. It was a whole ordeal and you can read more about the hack here, but in the meantime, let’s get to some photos!

I met Emma through my friend Goldie Fawn (who has her own shoot waiting to be published) because they are both cam girls over on MyFreeCams. I honestly cannot tell you how many MFC models I have photographed, but it’s a lot and shout out to Goldie who keeps telling cam babes about me. Anyway, when I met Emma on the floor of the AVN Expo she told me had been following me for a while and was psyched to take photos with me. I pitched her on doing some sort of BTS thing that I love to do so I went and took some photos of her on the last day of AVN week while she was getting her hair and makeup done for the Awards that night. I took a handful of photos of her there and the plan was to shoot after that, but they told me it would take over an hour so I went down to the floor and then the chaos of the week got in the way and I didn’t meet up with her until much later.

When I finally met up with Emma she was with a crew of people in one of her fans hotel suites, including her cam partner Olivia Wildin. It was a great place to shoot but I honestly hate shooting portraits when a bunch of people are around. I think my strength as a photographer is making people comfortable and trying to find moments that feel real, and that’s hard to do when a lot is happening. That being said, I love that environment as documentary photographer so for the first 30 minutes or so I was there I was mostly a fly on the wall shooting whatever they were up to, getting ready, making content, hanging out, etc.

Eventually I photographed just Emma and Olivia in the sort of bedroom area in their AVN dresses. They couldn’t really get out of their dresses easily so it wasn’t my normal traditional nude shoot, but that didn’t stop these photos from being very NSFW. The two of them are very cute together and we also shot some pretty photos of the two of them with another MFC model named Aspen Eden. In the end we got some very nice shots, but I also wanted to get the 35mm stuff in there because some of my favorite photos were the more behind the scenes stuff. Oh and we also shot some stuff in the hallway I liked a lot!

Anyway, I am glad we got to do this shoot, and so glad these photos are finally going up, but I really hope I get to photograph them again in the future with a little less chaos and a little more time because they were great to photograph. Perhaps maybe one day on Emma’s farm. Did I mention Emma has a farm? What a life.

Check out the gallery below for some of the safe for work images, and then head over to Girls of Driven By Boredom for the nudes. There are 82 images in the full gallery between the film and digital, so you probably want to check that one out…

Connie Perignon

April 22, 2026

Okay it’s been a minute since my last proper update on this site. Unfortunately my website has been having some issues and honestly I don’t know what I am doing enough to fix it. Trying to figure that all out but for now I am just gonna try and do a better job of updating it while I can. As I mentioned in my NSFW last post, I shot eight galleries when I was in Vegas way back in January so I have a lot of content to get up. I also shot a ton of film that I am just finally getting around to getting developed. I kept thinking I was going to get to NYC this spring but flights got so expensive and I didn’t have a real reason to go back so I finally just mailed my rolls back to my old photo lab. You can keep me shooting film by sponsoring one of the rolls and in exchange you get to see all the photos from that roll and then you get to pick your favorite and I send you a signed print of it. You could even get a print of Connie Perignon.

This post is of course about the photo shoot I did in Vegas with Connie but I had to get all that out of the way before I talked about these photos. I met Connie way back in 2020 via Tinder of all places. She wasn’t a porn star back then and we never ended up hanging out but I followed her on socials and it was cool to see her absolutely blow up in the adult industry. We suddenly had a bunch of mutuals and I finally met her IRL at a party I shot for my old friend, the amazing photographer, Ellen Stagg. I ran into her again at AVN last year and when I was heading out there this year I hit her up again about taking some photos.

She was down to shoot and had some free time during the day because she decided not to sign at the convention. We made a plan to shoot at my hotel across the street but right then I had to help another model I photographed get a pass to the convention. She showed up late and I was scrambling to get her this pass while Connie was just sitting in the lobby of my hotel. I basically sprinted across the street and was in full panic mode because I hate being late, but she was just chilling and was not even slightly bothered I made her wait, which I really appreciated.

The light in my hotel room sucked but I used the one window in there to backlight her and we played with the curtains and all that stuff which was honestly a staple of my old AVN shoots. I haven’t done any shoots like that in a while and I kinda forgot how nice they look. It might not be my most original work but as you can see Connie is an absolute babe and I think they came out pretty well. I can’t wait to see the film we shot as well because it was one of only two daytime shoots I did at AVN and you know I prefer some natural light.

Anyway, if you want to see the full NSFW gallery of Connie Perignon, you should head over to Girls of Driven By Boredom, and in the meantime I have a little mini teaser gallery for you guys below…

Maya Rue

February 27, 2026

Last month when I was in Las Vegas covering the AVN Awards week I did six NSFW photo shoots and of course I decided I needed to spread them out because I don’t know any naked people in North Carolina so I gotta stack content and then give it to you guys every few weeks until I go on another trip (I should be back in LA fairly soon). That being said, I didn’t mean to wait this long to give you some photos from the trip… in fact, these photos of been up on Girls of Driven By Boredom for over a week. I was all ready to post them here but then Robert Duvall died and I wanted to write a post about my relationship with him but that post took a few days and then I was suddenly, inexplicably, locked out of my website for a few days and now here we are, finally back here, ready to share some fun pictures with you guys.

So meet Maya Rue. I met her at AVN two years ago totally randomly. I was at some insane party at some weed company’s Vegas mansion or something and I was photographing someone I just met topless on a basketball court when this cute porn star started peeing next to us. I jokingly pointed my camera at her and she told me to actually take the photo so I did and she gave me her IG account so I could send her the photo. That was pretty much our only interaction but her posts have appeared in my life over the last two years and I honestly just became a fan of her outspoken left wing political beliefs. She also happens to be really hot and makes music so what’s not to like?

Anyway, I ran into her in Vegas and I was like “hey I met you at that party two years ago and I took that photo of you peeing” and she was like “that photo is my Venmo photo!” which is honestly incredible. Anyway, we scheduled a shoot on the last day of the AVNs which I try never to do because people are flaky as hell when you are partying for four days straight so I try and get people to shoot as soon as possible. In fact, two other people flaked on me that same day. Fortunately for me, Maya did not flak even though she was super sick. I thought I had a good location but it fell through so we ended up walking back to my hotel. I had already done two shoots there so I wasn’t really sure what we were gonna do, but I knew I would make it work.

Not only did we make it work but we did three shoots! We shot on the couch, in a bathtub and on one of the bed. I think this one is my favorite of the three but they are all great. Turns out Maya is an incredible model and fun to shoot with even though she was super sick. I kinda feel like we killed it even though the lighting in the hotel room sucks. I can’t wait to see the 35mm stuff we shot with flash. I deeply want to shoot her again with natural light and fortunately she lives in NYC and I am there all the time so hopefully that will happen soon.

The first of the three shoots is up on Girls of DBB now, and it’s extra spicy because she wanted that kinda content for her OnlyFans and who am I to say no?

So yeah, click here to see all the NSFW photos or just check out the kinda safe for work preview gallery below and come back for a ton more photos from my trip to Vegas last month…

Roxy’s Playhouse – 10.15.09

February 3, 2026

Yesterday I was digging through my archives in the “2009” folder trying to find some classic party pictures to post for you guys. I have some stuff pulled already, but all of them seemed like a lot of work so I was looking for something that didn’t require a 1000 word essay, a bunch of googling and an hour of editing. I saw that in October, 2009 I had a bunch of folders for each day. I guess the CMJ music festival was right around this time. I opened one of two October 15th folder and found a bunch of really fun photos from a party that Pepsi through with my friend Roxy Cottontail and figured this would be the perfect thing to post today.

“The Pepsi DJ Collective at Roxy’s Playhouse” wasn’t part of CMJ and I don’t even know what the fuck the Pepsi DJ Collective was, but I do know they paid me to take photos and I think it was a pretty nice check, so I should probably add Pepsi as a client to my resume, if I had a resume. It’s weird to think of all the huge brands that have paid me to take drunken party pictures in sweaty night clubs… or in this case sweaty Williamsburg warehouses.

If you don’t know Roxy, she’s a legendary DJ who came up with Diplo and the Hollertonix crew out of Philly. By the time I moved to Brooklyn she was already NYC staple and we did a lot of parties together. These days she’s still doing here thing but she also hosts a podcast about those good old days of NYC nightlife. Wait, come to think of it, why haven’t I been on her podcast? In all seriousness, Roxy rules and I was psyched to get the invite to shoot this late night madness care of a corporate sponsor.

As for the event, the DJs were Roxy, Diplo, DJ Drama and Eli Escobar and there was a performance by Maluca who I always had such a big crush on. In fact in this gallery I have a photo of her and rapper Amanda Blank who was my other musical crush back in those days. It was cool to find those photos. Speaking of cool photos to find. I found one of my friends AK Murda and Ease Da Man, both of whom we sadly lost. Two other friends gone before their time, legendary bassist Andy Rorke and one of my favorite models Vicky, are in these galleries as well. It’s crazy how many people I knew back then are gone. I miss them all.

There are so many notable nightlife and music folk in these photos that I can’t begin to name them all but just take a look for yourself. If you were around back then you’ll see so many notable faces. I should mention that OG Major Lazer hype man Skerrit Bwoy was performing with Diplo as was Telli from Ninjasonik who had just dropped a remix of Major Lazer’s Hold the Line. In my original write up from that night I talked about how much fun that was.

Looking back on this it seems like this was a great time, but in my original write up I was so nonchalant about the whole thing because it was just another night back then. Any of those folders from 2009 could have opened up and been something just as legendary. What a time to be alive.

Okay that’s all I got. I spent too much time on this one already but it’s only 600 words so I didn’t get too carried away. Check out all the photos below from The Pepsi DJ Collective at Roxy’s Playhouse.