If you live in LV or the surrounding areas, you are significantly tattooed, and you aren’t too incredibly camera shy, I’d like to talk to you.

http://blog.artripoli.com/ask

I know this topic for photos is kind of beat to death, but heavily tattooed people make interesting subjects for me and my personal work. Working in the tattoo industry for a few years I really developed a passion for shooting tattooed portraits, although I didn’t really realize it. It wasn’t till I was featured on a few different blogs for my tattoo portraiture work that I realized I had developed a portfolio that was heavily built around shooting photos of people with tattoos. When you are starting out, you shoot your friends, and it just so happened most of my friends were tattooers, or in hardcore and punk bands, which is a pretty heavily tattooed culture itself.

Now this part is going to sound sort of rude and pretty biased, but I am not trying to shoot photos of people covered in terrible tattoos. I know for some people they think what they have is gold, but trust me, it is not. So for safety’s sake, if the majority of your tattoos were done in your friend’s cousin’s kitchen, or you got them from a shop that also sold bongs and condoms, Iprobablydon’t want to take pictures of you for this project. I am sorry. I prefer traditional American, neo-traditional American (not curvy, bubbly, weird new school), Japanese, Mexicano black and grey (good black and grey, look up Freddy Negrete for a good balance of talent but staying true to that LA gang banger style). You don’t have to just be covered in tattoos that falls into one of those categories, because I think any style of tattoo, if done correctly, can look good. Now on the flip side of this, I have a lot of friends who are covered head to toe in tattoos and they think their tattoos are shit because they got them when they were young from less experienced guys, but I still think their tattoos look cool, so if you have any sort of hesitation it never hurts to just send a pic of your tattoos if you are curious. I won’t be a dick, but I won’t beat around the bush either; if I don’t like your work I will just tell you and we could maybe work together on something else in the future. No hard feelings, different people have different tastes.

And finally, I like to shoot environmental portraits/lifestyle, meaning this won’t be you coming to a studio and getting some photos taken. More likely we’d meet up, discuss some ideas for locations one time and the next time go shoot some cool stuff in some cool places.

If this sounds interesting to you and you are on tumblr, use this link to get a hold of me from your account: http://blog.artripoli.com/ask

If you aren’t on tumblr, you can always email me at artripoli@gmail.com

If you know anyone who might be interested in helping me out with this project, please pass this along or reblog this so they might have a chance to see it.

Thanks!