ISSUE NO3 is a continuation of my summer shoots and includes the second part of my session with former Marine, ginger-headed Jeremy from ISSUE NO2.

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Enjoy!

The second issue of MANofAUSTIN  | Texas Male Photography is now online at Issue.com.  NO2 features work from my summer shoots plus the work of Houston photographer David Lewis.  There is also a no-holds-barred FIVE QUESTIONS W/// John Paul Wilson – one of Austin’s hottest new photographers.  NSFW – Enjoy!

Gil was a bartender in San Antonio when I first met him.  I don’t really remember how we met but I photographed him for a jewelry ad and told him that he ever had any ideas to give me a call day or night.  And he took me up on that offer.

Late one Friday night (around 10pm I think) my phone rang and it was Gil.  He had come into Austin with a friend to do some partying downtown.  He said he had just come up with a great idea for photos and wanted to know if I could come over to their hotel room.  I packed my gear and headed over.

He had asked the hotel’s bartender for their empty bottles of liquor and wanted to do the whole ‘rock star trashes hotel room’ type of thing.  I got out my flash – he got out his handcuffs and we started shooting.  We shot everything in less than an hour.  The results are pretty tame but Gil’s sultry look and tight build really notched up the appeal.  As with my all of my early shoots where I was known as AustinLens – it was a fascinating learning experience.  Shortly after Gil moved to California where he is now an actor.

Rusty is who I consider as the ‘first really hot guy’ that I ever photographed.  I had just shot my first cover for TWiT Magazine in 2009  and was keeping an eye out for more cover potential when I met Rusty in a Houston club where he was dancing.  He is as sweet as he is sexy; super friendly so he agreed and we set a date.

Two weeks later I came back to Houston to shoot in the apartment of two friends of mine.  He walked in with a huge duffle bag and that Oklahoma smile (yeah, he’s an OK guy).

This shoot almost didn’t happen. 

My one and only light blew its bulb.  My novice-ass didn’t have a backup so my buddy took off to the nearest store to find something that would work.  An hour later he came back with a hanging garage light – you know the kind that has a round aluminum bowl around it – costs around ten bucks.  I was completely embarrassed and it didn’t help that Rusty’s good looks were making me nervous.  You gotta remember I was new to working with guys of this caliber.

What was funny about the shoot was that big duffle bag Rusty hauled in.  I figured it was packed with shirts and jeans…nope, thongs, jockstraps, underwear.  Dozens of them.  LOL  After all he is a dancer but even so, he was a little shy in the beginning – going back and forth into the bathroom to try on different things for us.  We popped open a bottle of wine and an hour later both his shyness and my nervousness were no where to be found.

What started out as a simple 3-dress change shoot for TWiT turned into a full nude photo session.  There are plenty more images of Rusty in my archives; hopefully you’ll vote him in again and I bring back more of him.

The quality of my equipment was definitely lacking then and so were my photoshop skills so I wasn’t too happy with the results, on my part.  Now 3 years later I’m glad you voted for Rusty.  It gave me a chance to go through the raw images again and really do some better work on them.  Not that he needed any real Photoshop magic.  Rusty is probably one of the few guys who, except for a few blemishes, didn’t need one ‘touchup’ at all.  Not one.