Just have a few photos here that I’d like to post before they get too stale, so to speak. I frequently shoot Starnes & Shah whenever I see one of their shows. (I try to make it to most of their shows. They’re good people!) I’m mostly posting these because 1) I wasn’t able to shoot their fantastic show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken this week 2) I’ve had them sitting around for a while, meaning to post them 3) Keep this blog alive!
So enjoy these few shots for the weekend. I probably won’t post shots from further live shows here too often, but S&S will usually have them posted on their website with my name attached if I took ‘em. However, we might have a portrait session sometime soon, so keep an eye out for that.
Update: I just saw via their Facebook page that they’ve been featured on Brooklyn Vegan! Congrats to them! They’ll also be playing a radio show on WDFH tonight at 8pm EST, if you want to tune in.
I’ve got a shoot tomorrow afternoon with friend and interior designer extraordinaire Tina Ramchandani, though not a shoot of the sort I’m used to. We’ll be taking some photos of an apartment she made over. I’m pretty excited to get the chance to light an interior — particularly challenging in the notoriously small space of a New York apartment, but I bet I can pull it off pretty well.
34th Street - Herald Square Subway Station, NYCRecently, I posted on Twitter that I was looking to buy an old film camera, if anyone had one they were willing to part with. It’s turned out far better than I could have hoped.
Turns out I didn’t have to look very far — my girlfriend’s father had an old Konica Autoreflex TC that he was willing to part with — for free, even! (I wish I had a photo of it handy that I’ve taken myself, but I’ve just been too busy — for another time, then.) When I thanked him for it, he told me all about the camera: He bought it new in 1976 for $250, at a time when he was earning $100 per week. He’d learned all about how to use a camera, and later I saw some of the photos he’d taken with it.
I’ve shot film before, but my old Sigma body (it was my first SLR) is buried somewhere deep in my parents’ house. Besides, this thing is a classic. Allow me to outline its completely awesome feature set:
- Only weighs about one and a half pounds
- Does not require any batteries — fully mechanical!
- Shutter speeds from 1/8 to 1/1000 in full-stop increments (plus Bulb)
- Single-shot mode only (You have to wind the film after each exposure.)
- I only have one lens, a manual focus 50mm f/1.7
- Since I have no batteries in it, it has no functioning meter
- You can’t view your pictures until you or someone else develops your film
A gearhead who’s only concerned with how the bokeh looks on Canon’s $1,300 EF 70-300 f/4-5.6 DO IS USM would think I’m insane. But the thing is, every one of these things is something I desperately wanted in a camera.
Of course, I wouldn’t use this on a professional job, but I do consider it a tool for professional development. It’s light — I can take it anywhere. It only needs film, and there’s usually a Duane Reade around. I consider the technical limitations, including the single lens and especially the lack of a meter, to be tests of my skill. Over-reliance on chimping leads people to forget, or even never to learn, how to properly expose a photograph. I’ll have to trust my better judgment until I develop the film — a subject for a later post. Since I’m in control of every element, I can’t blame a bad photo on a crappy autofocus system, or a wonky image stabilizer, or an inaccurate meter. Every shot is deliberate in every sense of the word.
I learned how to shoot on a film camera, and I believe that if you really want to learn photography, you have to shoot film sooner or later. I figured it was time to get back to basics.
This is a photo that I felt lucky to shoot.
I received a box of Omaha steaks on Wednesday night (thanks Mom!), and that, of course, meant dry ice. Now, I’m not a man to let dry ice go to waste, so when my friend Josh stopped by to watch Lost and shoot the breeze, I pressed him in to service as a model, as well. (Something I’ve done before with the good man.)
I had had the shot running through my head for an hour before he arrived, and with a little arts and crafts time while watching TV, it didn’t take an awful lot of time to get him in front of the camera and snap away.
The thing was, I had convinced myself that it would be a great idea to light the highly reflective metal bowl. This would’ve been possible, but I was rushing myself and didn’t really dedicate the time or the thought to doing it properly. (It would’ve required something really large, really white, and bendable enough that I could light and have reflected in the bowl — I just didn’t have anything that fit the bill on such short notice.)
Thankfully, I got a few without that bottom light, and I think it’s better for it anyway. A “happy accident,” as Bob Ross would’ve said. I’m pleased with the image; the only thing that truly irks me about it is the really hot highlight on the top of his head. If I were to take this shot again, I might throw a really small purple background light up behind his head, or if I had a beauty dish, I might have even kept that rimlight in the shot to make it look a little more like a lab.
Oh — and then there’s the perhaps more obvious issue that there’s quite visibly a bowl that contains not insignificant amounts of water, a block of solid carbon dioxide that’s at about -100º Fahrenheit, and a rather pricey flash. All I’ll say on that one is that a plastic bag and a lot of hope were involved.
No setup shot for this one, since it was all a bit quick-and-dirty, from conception to cleanup. All in all, prep work took about an hour, and we were only shooting and fiddling with lights for 15 or 20 minutes.
This was a shot that had been kicking around in my head for the past week or two, and I only just got around to shooting it tonight. (If you spend much time online, I’m guessing you already know what it’s referencing.) I knew it had been a few days since I had shot anything particularly creative, and while I have some shoots coming up that I’m looking forward to, you can’t always find a model on short notice.
(By the way: 99% of the time, my posts will include photographs of people. (See tagline in upper-left.) This post is an exception.)
So I set this one up in my apartment. I ran in to several challenges, but I’m really pleased with the end result. The following is just nerd junk, complete with setup shot.
I don’t know if this photo looks deceptively simple, all I know is that I spent about two hours more than I expected to get this shot. But I learned some good stuff even from such a spur-of-the-moment execution.
I knew what I wanted the end result to look like: The most literal representation of Apple and Flash. That meant, easily enough, an apple and a flash. Since strobes don’t turn brown when you bite into them, that’s where I began setting up this shot. And if you’re going to have a strobe as one of your two subjects anyway, you might as well have it light the other while you’re at it.
Unfortunately, that meant I couldn’t use my Vivitar flash — while I consider it more photogenic than a 580ex due to its retro-cool look, it only powers down to 1/16. Since I was going to have the apple pressed right up against that flash, I had to use something that went down much further; in this case, I had it set all the way down to 1/128.
I knew I’d have a tough time lighting the flash. With only two lights to work with tonight and no backdrop to light, I’d have to light a black subject against a black background. I went for a kind of rim-light effect, and while I’m pleased with how that turned out, it took an awfully long time to get it right.
Part of the difficulty was aiming the second light. First I tried with a snoot, but that was too narrow (or my aim was too poor). Then I tried, just for kicks, using an umbrella to see if the soft look was anything nice. It kind of was, but I was spilling light all over the place — and in my tiny apartment, a little light will bounce all over the place. In the end, I used a ripped-up cereal box as a gobo and that worked perfectly. Check the setup shot at the right to get a better look. (Click for bigger.)
Immediately apparent, too, is that both of my lights are on the right, and I’ve got an entire left side of the image to light. As mentioned before, the flash that’s in the frame does a fine job of lighting one side of the apple. Yeah, it’s at 1/128 power, but the apple’s only six inches away. To properly expose the apple at full power, I’d have to stop down to about f/320!
Sidenote: I ended up having to work in the neighborhood of f/11 – f/16, which is a good bit smaller than I’m accustomed to working with. I rarely go above f/5.6, and f/8 is almost an “upper limit” in my mind. Tonight I became reacquainted with poor color saturation and really saw just how much dust is living on my sensor.
Anyway, back to that apple. The right side was exposed just fine, maybe a little overexposed, even. But I didn’t want the left edge to fade off into the darkness. (And with the flash that close, light would have fallen off really fast.) I took a quick glance around and I found a perfectly sized envelope of junk mail, or maybe it was my retirement benefits, or something. Regardless, I found it to be way more useful as a bounce card, and you can see that it was pretty effective.
The strobe, though lit well on the topside, was lacking definition on the bottom that it sorely needed to be recognizable as anything at all, let alone a professional flash unit. I found a super-reflective bit of cardboard that had come with some chocolate, or maybe some take-out or something. I have a habit of hanging on to this kind of thing, and tonight, I felt justified in doing so. It gave just the right amount of definition on the bottom of the flash when I could angle it correctly.
Oh, and that apple. Mounting it was a bit of a challenge in itself. It’s easy enough to slap a strobe on top of a lightstand, but there are no apple-stands. This was just about the last thing I did for the shot, and I was kind of stymied. I guess I could have lowered the lightstand to make this whole task easier, but I ended up skewering the apple with a pickle fork (yes, that’s a real thing) which was taped to the inside of a cardboard paper towel tube which was taped to a stool (you can see it near the bottom of the setup shot) which was set on top of a chair.
Yeah, maybe I should’ve just lowered the lightstand.
I was disappointed that I needed to remove the slightest bit of pickle fork and tape from the bottom of the photo in Photoshop, but I got over it. In a perfect world, I would have mounted the apple using something attached to its back (like David Hobby did in this photo illustration of a CFL bulb), but I thought of that too late.
And that, friends, is a blog post far too long for a simple photograph!
