Buying a house has so taken over my life that I completely forgot I had never shared with you guys all the outtakes from my shoot with an LA based musician named Riki for Creem Magazine. Way back in June I was in LA because I wanted to visit my brother and his family and I had some photos in a Superchief show so that seemed like the perfect excuse to get out there. LA is an expensive trip even when I am sleeping on my brother’s couch, so I reached out to some clients to see if I could find some work out there and one of those was Creem Magazine.
I have worked for Fred, my editor at Creem, for years back when he worked for Brooklyn Vegan and then later when he was working for Vice and Noisey and now that he’s at Creem we had been looking for a reason to work together but things kept falling through. He wanted me to shoot some photos for the “Creem Dreem” section because it’s about sexy musicians, and I am of course me. So I started reaching out to LA friends about musicians that might work and found two that Creem was interested in. I reached out to both of them and one was on tour and the other I never heard back from. I guess it wasn’t going to work out…
My friend Chad Alva gave me a bunch of great suggestions including Anastasiya who I ended up doing two photo shoots with while I was out there, one of which I still need to publish, but his suggestion they really loved was Riki. I only had her Instagram account and I saw she had never read my message so I reached out to him again to see if he would text her for me in case she hadn’t seen the IG message and it turned out she just doesn’t really mess with social media that much and hadn’t seen it. Unfortunately the day she finally got in touch with me was my last day in town and she was all the way out in San Pedro, about an hour from where I was on the eastside of LA. But fuck it, I was down and I jumped in the rental car and headed out there.
I probably would have had her meet me somewhere in the middle but she wasn’t quite ready and I knew a great place to shoot in San Pedro. My friend Aiden Ashley lived out there and we did an amazing shoot with Leda Elizabeth out there on an old military base. We shot in right before the pandemic and it’s one of my all time favorite shoots. (You can see the whole thing on Girls of DBB if you are interested in that kinda thing.) So I told Riki to meet me out there…
And of course when we got there it was closed to the public. Fortunately San Pedro is home to the Port of Los Angeles and there’s all sorts of cool stuff out there. Riki had a few outfit changes so we just walked around and took photos for an hour or so. We hit it off great and I think we took some really fun photos and honestly I can’t wait to take her photo again even if it’s not for something as cool as Creem Magazine. Seriously she is such good people and you should go listen to her music.
We took a ton of film and digital photos, but this edit is pretty small because it’s more or less the edit I sent to Creem and I think I am fine with just publishing the highlights. Some of the film photos were in my original 2025 35mm post, but there’s new stuff in here plus a bunch of digitals. I hope you dig the photos.
Now go look at Riki’s Creem Dreem feature and then come back to see all the outtakes below!
