Celeste Byers - Behind the Scene

This job was assigned to me by an old friend – colleague I suppose of sorts, Seth Combs. I met Seth back around 2005ish when he was working at Riviera magazine. I used to shoot editorials and events for Riviera quite often when they first were launched in San Diego. Then Seth moved on to the San Diego City Beat where he was the music editor. I did a cover shot of San Diego’s Finest ‘Tim Pyles” for their music issue under Seth’s suggestion. I just Googled and found this Tim Pyles YouTube Video of the low budget – American Apparel inspired photo shoot (click here) OMgoodness. That was some good times. I have heard that the Tim Pyles cover shot is many peoples favorite cover shot to date – awesome…. Back to Seth, he has since left City Beat and moved on to Pacific San Diego magazine. Seth contacted me to shoot Celeste Byers for their Oct 1^st 2010 issue.

Arriving to Celeste’s home in Ocean Beach I found a talkative, goofy, intelligent and beautiful young woman who just back from Southeast Asia from a solo mission where she said she went to relax and find inspiration for her artwork. We talked about her trip and her adventures as we loosely defined what we would shoot. So we set up some lights and went for it.

Celeste showed me her artwork and I was utterly amazed. I assumed she was decent, but I was overly impressed by her quality of work for her age. I’ve been around a lot of artists in my day and this by far blew my mind, absolutely gorgeous works.

It felt freeing to be able to capture the essence of the artist for an editorial. I loved it. We probably shot for about an hour, maybe longer than we should of, but we were laughing and having a good time, getting great shots and that’s what being a photographer is all about.

Overall a successful shoot for Pacific San Diego Magazine. Looking forward to doing more.

Keep your eye out for Celeste Byers. I assume her to do very well in the art world.