Looking Back at 2025—Part 1: The Last Quiet Shoot on Planet Erf

There wasn’t a shot list.

No brief.

No checklist taped to the inside of my brain.

Just a camera, a fantastic musician/human being I’ve worked with for years, and the kind of open time that only exists when trust is already in the room.

By that point, the year felt steady. Busy in the familiar way. A normal mix of shoots, subjects, and deadlines that matched my usual rhythm. Events, portraits, performances, and projects spaced out just enough to keep everything moving without feeling rushed. Nothing about the calendar hinted that things were about to change.

Then came the shoot with Chase Barron.

This wasn’t our first time working together. Far from it. I’ve photographed band promo shoots for his old band Chase and the Barons, their album release parties…hell, I even photographed his wedding (Hi, Liv!). Every time we work together, the same thing happens. The pressure disappears. The expectations fall away. There’s room to try things, miss things, and follow ideas without worrying about where they’re supposed to land.

That’s what always makes shooting with Chase different in the absolute best way.

We showed up without a plan and chose to keep it that way. Chase was in the middle of shaping new music for his erf project, still exploring tone and direction rather than locking anything down. I wasn’t there to execute a look. I was there to explore alongside him. Maybe even provide a little visual inspiration that he could take back to infuse in the final mixes. It felt less like a photo session and more like two artists leaning into curiosity and seeing what surfaced.

And lean we did. We leaned HARD into the intentionally unexpected.

Fisheye lenses that shifted perspective just enough to make you go “wait…what?” Yoga poses that introduced balance instead of polish. Shirts hung on a fence, becoming texture rather than wardrobe.

You get the picture.

If something didn’t work, we moved on. If something surprised us, we stayed with it. That kind of freedom doesn’t come from planning. It comes from history, trust, and mutual respect.

Chase was testing ideas in sound. I was doing the same with imagery. My camera, much like his 1986 Yamaha PSS-170 keyboard, was just a part of the conversation. I wasn’t thinking about deliverables or where the images would live later. I was listening, reacting, and letting instinct lead.

That same spirit runs through his music. The erf project lives comfortably in that space between certainty and discovery, and you can hear that in the work he’s been releasing. If you haven’t spent time with it yet, it’s definitely worth a listen. Maybe even head over there and hit play while you finish reading this story...

When we wrapped, there was no sense of "project complete." Just the quiet satisfaction of having pushed into unfamiliar territory and come back with something honest.

What I didn’t know then was that this shoot would quietly close a chapter on 2025 for me. It was the last photo shoot I had before everything just stopped. A couple of months with no work on the calendar. No emails. No momentum. Just space.

Then the work flared back in all at once, and man was it ever turned up to 11...

Standing there with a camera and a fence full of shirts, there was no way to know that was coming.

But that’s a different story.

If you've got a second, check out the gallery while you're here.

p.s. Hey Chase, you’re not wasting time, and it’s definitely not all in your head…however, it is possible that you are in bed.

p.s.s. Hey everyone else reading this, if you don’t understand that, maybe you just don’t like turtles.