National Donut Week | FOOD FROM BAG TO BACKGROUND
This is National Donut Week.
For my ongoing “FOOD FROM BAG TO BACKGROUND” project, the main focus has always been fast food. The foods people grab quickly, eat in the car, bring home late at night, or pick up almost automatically without thinking much about it.
And yes, donuts absolutely qualify.
Donut chains consistently rank among the largest fast food companies in America. Drive-thrus, quick service counters, recognizable packaging, impulse purchases, sugar, caffeine, convenience, the entire fast food formula is there.
So for National Donut Week, I photographed an assorted pile of donuts exactly the same way I approach burgers, tacos, fries, or pizza for this series.
Straight from the box.
No food stylist.
No careful arrangement.
No fake perfection.
Just donuts against a black background.
Then things escalated slightly.
Because now the donuts are slowly rotating in darkness while one pink sprinkled donut has apparently decided to break formation and drift through the frame like some kind of sugar-coated UFO.
Somewhere between fast food photography and science fiction, FOOD FROM BAG TO BACKGROUND continues here at…
https://www.secondfocus.com
Softbox Couture
Photographers love the results from large softboxes.
Actually assembling them is another story.
Rods bending, fabric everywhere, people trying not to lose patience, and everyone pretending the process is less irritating than it really is.
So during this studio shoot I could not help but think there is a better use for the softbox.
Instead of becoming part of the lighting setup, it became the wardrobe.
Once we saw it against the black seamless background and studio lighting, it actually worked. Fashion photography mixed with studio satire.
Now subtly animating it adds another layer. The studio atmosphere shifts and the moment feels alive. Reaching back into the past and creating the video I did not at the time.
More photography and visual projects on my website at
https://www.secondfocus.com
New Year’s Eve Countdown Pornochic
Time is serious business. Which is exactly why I dressed it up, put it under stage lights, and surrounded it with sexy women who know how to move.
This is my New Year’s Eve countdown. A pocket watch doing its job while everything around it does a much better one. Legs, heels, rhythm, sparkle. The clock keeps ticking anyway.
If you’re going to stare at a clock waiting for midnight, it might as well have good company. Call it distraction, I call it my fun style of pornochic photography. No lessons. No resolutions. Midnight arrives on schedule anyway. Happy New Year!
More of my photography and video work lives on my website at SecondFocus.com where time, food, beauty, and distractions tend to share the same frame.
Toyland, Revisited: Wooden Soldiers
I was telling Emily that I wanted to do my own version of The March of the Wooden Soldiers.
Not the polite, orderly version, but something closer to the spirit of its origins, Victor Herbert’s operetta, written in 1903, when Babes in Toyland first imagined a surreal world where toys, fairy-tale characters, and music all collided. Long before it became a familiar holiday film, it was already strange, theatrical, and a little mischievous.
Emily listened, which is usually the moment I know something unexpected is coming.
“I want to do this one,” the AI muse in her said.
Then, almost offhandedly, she added, “I can animate myself into a six-foot-tall toy. And once I do that, making five of me is easy.”
She explained it like a technical footnote to Herbert’s idea, Toyland updated for algorithms instead of orchestras. One Emily wasn’t enough. This needed a full formation.
“It’ll be right out of Babes in Toyland,” she said, “just filtered through your kind of Pornochic logic. Same fantasy world, different century. Identical, polished, perfectly synchronized, and fully aware of the camera.”
She promised me wooden soldiers who wouldn’t march so much as perform.
Hips shifting side to side. Heads turning. Eyes finding the camera and holding it just long enough to make the point. Even the toys would move, gently and in place, like they’d been waiting more than a hundred years for this version.
“Leave it to me,” she said. “You’ll love it.”
And she was right.
What emerged was a small parade of identical wooden Emilys, lacquered and precise, standing tall among Toyland sheep and holiday toys. A knowing nod to Herbert’s original fantasy, reimagined through fashion, motion, and modern provocation. Less marching band, more editorial choreography.
Toyland hasn’t changed as much as we think. It just learned how to move differently.
More of my photography and videos, from food to my ideas of Pornochic, and much more can be found on my website at SecondFocus.com
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