patrick roddie photography

Burning Man 2007 was intense; so good they burned him twice. Not being a night shooter I don’t have any pictures from the first burn, but there was plenty more to see by dawn, day and dusk.

Stats:- 131 rolls of Fujichome Velvia, one Nikon F100 with 50mm f1.4 lens, 60lbs of dry ice, 2,782 scans, 1,949 images in gallery.

I’m still selling signed copies of the hips book direct from this site. If you buy one, you’ll help offset my hefty costs of film, proccessing and whatnot.

It seems I always have to apologise for my backlog of galleries - now hovering around the 50 mark - but I thought I’d better get something out for the holidays.

I’ll start off with a Christmas party at a local nightclub, Rouge. You’ll notice that you’re now able to order prints and run slideshows from this and some other galleries; just some thing I’m integrating with the site.

I street cast my models and once every three to six months, I come across someone as astonishingly beautiful as Anna, and fortunately she was kind enough to do a shoot with me.

Burning Man’s San Francisco after party, Decompression, was as fun as ever.

There really is a place called Treasure Island in San Francisco bay, and I shot Vero and Chris’s Mexican/American wedding there last weekend. Good times, and knee deep in adorable kids.

Anapaula was one of the most pregnant women I’ve met, let alone photographed and I hope to do another shoot as soon after her and John’s son makes his appearance any day now.

Rebecca and Justin are yet more friends of Linda and Jeff whose wedding I’ve covered. (Chris was at their Yosemite wedding last year.) A relaxed, fun day with lots of beautiful people made my work a joy.

Baby Loves Disco is a wildly successful phenomenon where parents bring their babies and toddlers to nightclubs all over the country for an afternoon of fun. You can almost hear foreheads being slapped across the world as people realise they should have thought of it first. It’s also absurdly easy to photograph happy kids.

Although it’s not as big as the Berlin original, San Francisco’s Love Parade is getting bigger and better each year.

Finally, I’ve photographed one of my favorite models at least five times, so I updated Rocio’s gallery tonight. Besides, I’m shooting her sister’s wedding in Mexico in a couple of days. Stay tuned . . .

It’s taken me longer than ever, but at last my Burning Man 2006 galleries are up.

I usually make a half-hearted attempt to even out the male:female ratio of my subjects, but not this year. As you can see from the rest of the site, I almost exclusively shoot women, so this year’s Burning Man is entirely in character. If you’d like to see more photos of male burners, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Sorry.

My biggest categories this year were torsos, faces and of course hips. Speaking of which, I’m now selling signed copies of the hips book direct from this site. If you buy one, you’re helping offset my eyewatering costs of film, proccessing, dry ice and whatnot.

You can now order a signed copy of my first book “Hips” from this site.

Hips is a collection of 250 different hips photographed at Burning Man which I hope gives people at least some sense of the almost impossible to describe festival. Mark Morford from sfgate.com wrote the afterword. You can see my hips collection here.

It was published by Chronicle Books last summer and is sold at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walmart and now here. It even got a mention in the October 2006 Penthouse Forum (page seven, if you’re interested).

You can buy it for $15 (plus $3 shipping to anywhere in the USA) by clicking this link.

Different people get different things from Burning Man; for me, I get to immerse myself in photography for a whole week and get to see how my work’s progressed (or not) at descrete yearly intervals. Oh, and have more fun in a week than I do in the other 51 combined. The weather was perfect, the playa was firm and it was my favorite year bar one (2002 was hard to beat).

Anyway, my Burning Man 2005 galleries are up. One trusty Nikon and fixed 50mm lens, 111 rolls of film, 1,540 scans, 27 categories and one exhausted photographer. My biggest series this year was faces, a potential follow up book to Hips. Or maybe I’ll go for a more general Burning Man book. We’ll see.