I told them to be “low key”. But I’m sure glad they weren’t.

Scuba equipment, fog machines, ladders, two-story-high monopods, vans full of lighting gear, nudity, homebrew, wardrobe, backdrops, projectors, models, strobes, tiny dinosaurs, and about $100,000 worth of photo and camera equipment.

CAN YOU BELIEVE WE WEREN’T KICKED OUT OF THE STATE PARK CAMPGROUND?

Which is not to say we didn’t come close. We definitely had a run-in with a very unamused park ranger. “You guys can’t be here. It’s past quiet hours and you’ve got all this crazy lighting equipment that I’m pretty damn sure you don’t have a permit for.” (We didn’t.) “We can see your camera flashes through the whole forest. You have to pack up and go back to your own campsite and go to sleep.”

This was not the first or last time Ryan Schude would have to charm an authority figure. “Oh! Is it after quiet hours? We thought it was right before. This isn’t a commercial shoot, it’s just a personal art project. Do you think we could just get one shot before we pack up? It’s all TOTALLY ready to go, and man, my back is KILLING me from dragging these lights over the hill.”

He said no. But then he said, “I’m not going to babysit you, just get back to your campsite ASAP.” Which was unanimously translated to “Oh why not, just get the damn shot.”

That’s not all. Earlier that day Dan Busta had taken over a room of the mini-museum at the historic China Camp fishing village ruins and snapped some amazing shots of a model in the midst of a cloud of artificial fog. And got away with it.

Even as we were just sitting around the campfire, drinking beer and toasting s’mores, there was a constant audible clicking of the camera shutter: time lapse this, flashlight portraits that. Steph Goralnick named the sound “phoot crickets”.

What can I say? I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of effort, enthusiasm, talent, and straight-up lunacy that this group brought to the table. And what I’ve seen on the back of camera LCD screens tells me that these images are way better than anything I had hoped for.

Check back the last week of October when we’ll be releasing the photos from the event along with bio info on each of the participants.