photogrammatical

A Christmas video message to my Marines in Afghanistan.

Last month my father, singer/song writer Bob Bennett, released his 9th album Christmastide.  Check it out on iTunes here.

Yours Truly did all the photography on this one.  (It’s about time, right?)

My siblings and I spend every Christmas Eve at our father’s house.  Even now as adults, Dad still plays and sings for us, reads aloud The Littlest Angel and tucks us in under the Christmas Tree.

He put the same care and tenderness into this album.  I hope you can hear it as plainly as I can.

"Then all the reindeer loved him..."

This was towards the end of the shoot for Mom’s Christmas card. We were just hitting the fourth verse of our own a cappella version of The California Raisins’ Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer.

You know, we aren’t that bad.  But I won’t be quitting my day job.

Madison Nease is kid sister to my buddy/housemate, Wes Nease.  She recently flew out from exotic Virginia for two weeks’ visit, here in the land of Damn Good Mexican Food and Legal Heroin.

She is a Lettuce Farmer by trade.  (That is to say, she works on a lettuce farm.)  During her stay she helped spruce up our vegetable garden, which seems to know no winter.  She also spearheaded the clean up of our “bomb shelter”, an open-air subterranean concrete room in the backyard. Once decorated with white twinkle lights, it became the dance floor at Colin/Kate’s Epic Joint Birthday/Maddy’s Going Home Party.

The following evening after the house had been picked up and the remaining guests had been wheelbarrowed to the curb.  We made a few images down on the dance floor while enduring weather in the low 50s, or what I like to call Southern California Freezing.

Thanks to Maddy for helping to straighten up our man cave, adding more vegetables to our bachelor’s diet, and for generally cheering up the joint.  Come back soon, the Goose misses you.

Madison and Wes Nease in The Bomb Shelter