Shooting objects close up.

My son was playing/working at the kitchen table the other rainy afternoon, and when he migrated elsewhere in the house (ok…the FLAT), my very independent daughter got a snack and sat down to read.  This freed up the objects that an 8 year old boy gathers and combines, and I was motivated enough visually to go grab my camera.  I am enthralled with little biographical snippets of life.  I am also having fun with things up close.  But the strange thing is that the minute I start photographing one of the objects, I am excited by the look, and at the same time, am hearing loud internal voices that are denigrating the images.  They are not polished enough…they are silly little record shots, if I put them up on my website people will think I am a hack without an ounce of self-knowledge, they’ve been done before, what is the point and so on and so forth.  Wow.

I immediately went from the fun of the moment, and the pretty result, to some place far down a road which practically puts out the fire.  I think this is one of those major struggles for me.  The bar for success is set so high, that I cannot explore

Peg game up close

by doing because the doing is interrupted so quickly.  It is not enough to explore.  It has to be ready for the gallery wall.  I think that pretty much dooms any chances of getting on the gallery wall.

I think this is one of the dilemmas for those of us with busy lives that don’t allow for enough shooting.  There is ALWAYS something that SHOULD be done, and I forget to use that camera.  I don’t carry it, I don’t set up enough shoots (digital is free…what is stopping me?), and I just don’t take enough photos.  Leaving the 8×10 sitting on the shelf is understandable at the moment (although I do love it, but probably for a bunch of the wrong reasons).  But this pressure (all from inside) to be “special” all the time, is quite destructive.  The most fun I have when shooting is when I play.  And the pictures are better when I play.  And play is fun.  So why not play more?

Good question.

The Era of the Digital Collage

Cyan and Scott Banister of Zivity

Well, here is the result of the first digital capture and assembly collage done by your’s truly for a client.  I used to do these ALL the time in the film world on editorial shoots just for kicks.  They were a great investment: you got a totally different look, you could shoot with fast color neg, you could shoot wide open, you could have the angle of view of a fisheye without using one, and then you had the extreme pleasure of assembling it.  There was just something about touching the prints (or cut up contact sheets) and moving them around until you were pleased.  after a bit, I learned a few rules that almost guaranteed a reasonable result.  But friends, I am here to report that I have gone over to the digital side.   Almost a year ago, I got an assignment from a client to actually shoot a collage!  My old website had a whole section devoted to them.  Well, I figured that I would try it digitally.  And other than my missing shooting them square with my favorite MF camera, I have seen the light.  I am one of those people who is still pretty sure I could do most of my work on film and be fine.  I know film pretty well, and a bunch of my work does not need much post.  Especially the editorial portraits.  But as far as collages go, I am blown away at the flexibility and quality of digital collages.  Wow.  I will not elaborate here, because most of my massive readership could not care less about why it is better, but it is.  Trust me.  It is not necessarily EASIER, but it is surely more powerful, and if you follow a few rules, I reckon the success rate is significantly higher than in the film days.  Anyone who wants my rules, drop me a line. I will save you a bit of grief.

Desperation Leads to a Semi-Retired Trick: Painting with Light!

Big Cool Machine in Small Lab

I apologize for not posting for a while. I have been inundated with requests for my pithy and nutritional thoughts, but my world travels and the demands of producing images for clients and my own art have kept me away from this specific spotlight.

And SPEAKING OF SPOTLIGHTS, I got backed into a corner (both lit and fig) last week, and this is the result. At one point, I was much enamored of light painting with people and objects (mostly people with objects, since I AM a portrait person). It was a fun technique to pull out of the bag of tricks, and the randomness and surprise at the finished result was quite an encouragement. I feel the same way about collages, which I have pretty much stopped doing too.

Today’s creative climate seems to balk at the technique heavy photos many of us were doing right before digital became dominant. And I think there is some wisdom in that change, although at times the emphasis on “lifestyle” photography has dumbed down certain things.

There are people who do beautiful and compelling work that seems very random and unlit, and then there are a bunch of people who have grabbed onto the LACK of everything that used to concern us (lighting, composition, color, gesture, information) and they have made THAT their technique. There are a bunch of buyers of photography (none that I work for, luckily) who don’t seem to notice that he emperor has no clothes.

You say “get over it, Richard!” You are so right.

On with my happy tale of re-discovery.

This object is in a room two sizes too small, and is full of metal, white ceilings and white flooring. I spend literally two hours trying the natural light (overhead fl), setting up hard lights, soft lights, ring light (closest to something good) and not being happy with anything.

Early on, I ask the king of the machine if we can turn off the lights, and we can. But I wait until that dark moment when I am sure that this will be my last assignment for a good long-term client (they have even sent me first class to a good Mexican food town on Southwest Airlines….you do the math) before turning off the lights, putting the camera on the tripod, getting out the cable release and instructing my assistant on my intent.

Luckily, she is about the last person under 27 who has the old school training (plus she is SMART), so it is easy. I use the modeling light of one of my Dynalite heads, paint away in the dark, and even throw in a bit of defocus on some of them (not too ideal as the lens was too wide and focused too much in the middle of its distance range). It is the right approach, as it keeps the light soft, but not too even, and does away with a bunch of pesky shadows and highlights. I am gratified, and filled with photographic nutrition. I even did it without all the old school preparations (full black Ninja gear, foil to prevent light leaks etc). Is it genius? Not really. But it is a very nice and timely solution to a problem (after all, what are we but problem solvers?). And this is a straight image…no dodge and burn, baby, burn.

I had high hopes that the magazine would be able to run it big, but alas, space constraints prevented them from running this one. I shot it for a double truck, and it would have been really nice that way…so much information. Oh well.

My next post will talk about my resurrection of yet another old favorite of mine…the collage! I PROMISE it within a week….

Show of “Speed Week” work in Moab, Utah…FINALLY!

Yep…a nice show in Moab, Utah, thanks to Brian Parkin and Marian Boardley at Moab Art Works. I drove out from SF with a bunch of prints and mats, we hung them up, and they look great (REALLY GREAT!). They are all from film shot over several years out at the Bonneville Salt Flats, and I have not printed many of them this big before. Things look GREAT when they are big (especially if they looked pretty good to begin with). Perhaps the most fun are the panoramics from 6×17 negatives. I had them scanned at about 30 inches by 85 inches, but could only print them at 1/2 that size for the time being. Nice scans and file prep make all the difference (thanks to Steve and LeAnn at Digital Takeout in SF, and Lenny Eiger in Petaluma). Here is the poster done by Marian, with an incredible font that I THINK is actually called “Land Speed Record.” What are the chances of that?

When to say “We’ve got it. Thanks for your time!”

So a few weeks ago, I went to photograph Robert Reich for a good magazine client. I was working with an assistant who is quite a good photographer (can you say recent POY recognition among other awards?), and we finally settled upon one situation which required no lights, just a bit of careful setting up of the camera and removal of minor distractions in the background. The professor shows up, and is a bit distracted by the OTHER photographer who has set up in the same area to shoot student photos (more lights, cloth backdrop, high and public stress level, if you know what I mean). I introduce myself to the professor, show him what we are doing, and away we go. He gives REALLY good photo for 10 minutes, and I figure we have plenty. It is not going to get any better (at least not with me at the helm!).

I tell him we are done with this situation, and we have another that we need a few minutes to set up, and we will come and get him. No problem he says, but when we get him in the other situation, he doesn’t look right…I try for a while, getting nothing really good, and finally call it quits because he is itching to go, and nothing is getting better (the one shot that I thought was potentially the best, we could not do for various reasons of protocol).

Why am I posting this? Because it was about the first time in my memory that I KNEW we had it, and it couldn’t really get any better, but I soldiered on anyway. I got greedy. Now in the good old days, we used to get greedy for a reason (film!), but with these cute little autofocus digital thingies, when you have it, you can pretty much confirm it right then and there, and move on.

Of course, there are still CLIENTS, and we REALLY REALLY want them to get what they need. This means choices, of course. And this means FEAR. What if they do not get what they want? What if they don’t like me any more? What if they move on to the next person on the Rolodex (remember those, too?)? It is all too clear in my memory the times I do something that I really like, and upon seeing it, they ask if there is anything else, or they don’t get it. I think it goes back to some early parenting shit. We get trained to second guess ourselves against our own judgment.

So, to quit rambling, I wish that I had stopped after the first situation. Fast Forward to LA last week shooting for another good client, and the subject showed up and told me that he had a lunch meeting in 7 minutes, so could we be done? Well, due to my already discussed psychological profile, I aim to please, so I agreed that we would speed along. All this EVEN THOUGH I HAD ASKED IF HE HAD ANY TIME CONSTRAINTS THAT DAY. Whatever. So I shoot for 7 minutes, and he gives good smiley photo (this client likes smiley stuff for their covers), and I realize that it is not going to get any better. So I let him go to lunch. And of course we shoot another situation AFTER lunch and another appointment. No problem…everyone was very nice, and the second shot was a bit wacky, but pretty safe. This job I know that they need two situations (one for the cover and one for the inside feature photo).

This second situation takes until the very end to get something that I like that looks almost as good as it did with my assistant (another fabulous photographer…do you sense a pattern here?). Well the client picks only images from the SECOND situation! Wow. Talk about confusing this poor photographer. Perhaps the lessons are not black and white, but 8 bit grayscale! I quit the first situation because I knew that I had it (after conferring with my friend, Laptop), but the second was what they liked.

I’m not sure what any of this means, but you can bet that I am more likely with digital to move on sooner than with film. I’m still not in love with the small cameras and the shape, but there is a bit less stress leaving the shoots these days…much of the technical fear is gone…but that fear of not pleasing the client (and the subject, and the PR person, and everyone else in creation) still exists. Yeah, that’s my point.

Gray Card Images and Misfires

                                                     

I have become more and more enthralled with the throwaway photo in this digital age, the one that you have no intention of using.  Yes, I am talking about “The Gray Card Photo.”  Being of the old school, I am still amazed at how good the digital equipment is for getting nice color under an amazing range of light.  As a bonus it has spawned a whole new genre of photographs that are intended to be discarded, but upon further examination, present some interesting situations.  These range from subjects who are momentarily distracted and hiding behind the gray card, to bored assistants who would rather be somewhere else or at least shooting the photo the way it SHOULD be done (they are probably right). 

The second category that I am enjoying these days are the random shots when you pick up the camera and it goes off accidentally.  I am not much of a klutz, but you do tend to grab these expensive objects in a hurry, with the goal of not letting go.  And there seems to be no danger (usually) to them going off, and in fact, you get some really cool shots.  Random shots in very staged situations.  I am a bit of a control freak, and the decisive moment can often be more interesting when accidental.

                                                                                                               

It’s Alive!

Thanks to my friend Toni Schneider (pictured here),

I am finally joining the 21st Century!