coming home

Over the next few weeks I'm going to be posting images from the Next Step workshop that I've just finished in Savannah. There are a couple posted already. In some small part, I'm going to try and explain the things I learned or found out upon the workshop. As Paul mentioned in an earlier comment, it was an amazing and very challenging workshop. I'm not sure I can do justice to the whole thing and some of it is kept under wraps to keep it special for the next round of participants. But then I happened across this quote:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Sounds about right.

jim

A new good friend of mine, Jim. All natural light, in a square in Savannah. The squares are surrounded by buildings that bounce lovely currents of light through the space. Just finding the right spot makes a person glow. I found some quiet shade by a tree that was getting a lot of reflected light and asked Jim to let me take his picture. I had him crouch down by the tree so I could shoot from a slightly higher angle, that tends to flatter most people's faces and also lets you focus on the eyes with a lot of fall-off across the rest of the face. Jim has great eyes so that's exactly where I want the focus to be. Because we were in quiet light, Jim can also be looking up towards the clear, blue sky without being dazzled by the glare. The blue sky acts as a huge catchlight in his eyes, with my silhouette breaking things up. Jim is a successful film producer and director and it was a real privilege for me to be able to pick his brain about how he sees the world and light. He was really generous with his time and ideas. The amazing thing was that all his images also had a cinematic quality of light and composition. Inspiring.

next step

wow. What a workshop experience. Emotional rollercoaster of a time. Such a great, talented, creative and inspirational group of photographers and Savannah is such a beautiful place too. I'll write more about the workshop when I get home but wanted to share one of many portraits I've taken out here. Such a great week. Meet Harold. I was initially drawn to his bright red hat. We chatted a bit about Jazz and his love of B. B. King. Luckily enough he was happy to let me take his picture. I asked him to step over to just in front of this green awning, in the full sunlight. The quite harsh, direct light really makes the colours pop and his skin glow. I shot a few more as we talked then tried a couple with a similar background in open shade - the colours and mood of the shot in shade just don't work for me as well.

the next step

I'm not a great believer in horoscopes. It seems unlikely in the extreme that a particular paragraph is going to apply to 1/12th of the population, just because the stars said so. However, I do still read them on occasion.

I'm in Savannah, Georgia this week, attending the Radiant Vista 'Next Step' photo workshop. We don't really get started until tonight but I'm here a day early to enjoy some vacation time and see some of Savannah. I picked up a copy of connectSavannah and found this horoscope for Pisces, which did seem quite appropriate.

Hopefully I'll find my mojo this week. I'm excited to find out what we'll be doing! Part of the appeal of the workshop is that I don't really know what challenges Craig is going to throw our way. Savannah is a beautiful city, the people have been really friendly and it seems like a great place to spend some time.

forsyth park, savannah, georgia

from my camera phone

Austin triathlon

Dragged myself out of bed to go and shoot the Austin Triathlon this morning. Didn't get a whole lot of sleep the night before but pushed myself to go and start taking some more photos of the people I train with in T3. This shot of Jane above made it all worthwhile. She spent the whole race grinning happily and I happened to be in the right place at the right time for when she was getting soaked. Ended up having a lot of fun, lying in gutters to get good low angle shots of the bikes, dodging kids with squirt guns who were soaking the athletes and occasionally me. I was trying to go a bit beyond the safe, event style of shooting that usually gets done at these events. I'm not being paid for the photos so took more risks and had a lot less keepers than normal. Though also meant there are a few that worked better. Also found that a camera bag can make for a good impromptu tripod to lean the camera on if you are lying flat out in the road. Getting down really low with a longer lens can really work out well, as in the shot to the right, where the road starts to provide a bit of out of focus foreground. I was lucky with some mist in the air too that fades out the capitol building in the background. I found some great busy, colourful backdrops in south Austin, using the painted store fronts as backgrounds for the images. Panning tends to reduce the contrast a bit and in general mixes the colours up, as you can see in the shot below, so while the background is busy, the slow shutter speed and moving camera blends that background and makes it less confusing and helps the subject pop. I was shooting at about 1/50s at around 100mm focal length, so I have a lot of blurry, failed images. But there are a few that work that gives me hope if I just practice some more!

Was a good day to go and shoot in the end, too. Not too sunny, lots of bright, even light from the clouds. I did decide to leave my flash at home, which I'm not entirely sure was a good idea. There were a few times where it might have been useful, but you do tend to get a lot of reflective clothes that glow in odd ways with triathlon gear and bikes. Also decided to cut some weight and only take a 70-200 lens (with a 1.4x tele). I wish in the end I'd taken the 17-40 along too. A lesson in being too lazy I think. I walked about 5 miles up and down Congress Avenue shooting the bikes then caught the tail end of the run course. Getting a bit further away from the start area meant I had more space to shoot and not so many people to avoid in the backgrounds. The rest of the shots from the day are over on flickr.

witnessing war

I just recently listened to an arresting, harrowing interview with Paul Watson. He is a photo-journalist that won a Pulitzer prize for a photograph he took in Mogadishu of a dead American soldier's body being desecrated by a mob. His description of the effects of war photography on his life and the guilt he has over those prize winning images is hard to listen to but harder to ignore. You can hear the interview on NPR's Fresh Air at this link

In particular, the guilt he seems to carry that he is somehow to blame for the lack of American intervention in the Rwandan genocide shows some of the power and impact photography can have, both for good or ill. Powerful stuff. I was also struck how much he sounds like James Natchwey when speaking. The same very matter of fact, emotionless delivery, striped of all empathy, or as he describes, trust. A hard life and a hard way to live. The documentary, War Photographer, about Natchwey has a generally similar horrific but unmissable quality. Paul Watson has a new book coming out about his experiences, called 'Where War Lives'

Me time and the fireflies

I've noticed a tight relationship between when I exercise and when I photograph. There are periods in my life when I've been spending a lot of my free time working out, training for a race or trying to reach some sort of far out goal. In those times I also seem to take a lot more pictures. Even though I might be spending 10 or 20 hours a week exercising, I somehow seem to have more energy and time to fit in photography.

I took 3 months off from exercising and almost completely stopped taking pictures at the same time. I must have had more free time, I read more, I spent more time with my wife, we went out more, but my camera gathered dust.

Then again I picked things up a month ago, got back into a rhythm with exercise and suddenly I was taking pictures again too. Weird. I had an hour and a half to think about this earlier this week while on a long, hot and sweaty run and came to some realisations. Partly it is having all that time alone with my thoughts. An hour and a half of time to think, let my mind drift, come up with ideas and aspirations for photographs, work out what's important to me and make the decisions that will let me take some pictures. Running, looking at the light, free associating concepts that might later become pictures or just thinking about photography makes me want to pick up my camera.

When I'm not working out, I don't think I spend enough time listening to the voices in my head to make me go and shoot. That creative energy and ideas gets blocked or ignored in the day to day things that fill up our lives.

The other part of it is that during almost every long work out I do, I find something inspiring that makes me want to share my view of the world with other people. I don't write that well so I try to do that sharing through my photographs. The events that happen just reinforce my desire to that. It could be the horses pacing along side me while riding my bike, or the buzzards sunning their huge wings on the side of the road on a cold, sunny morning. Or it could be like Tuesday night as the sun set and I found myself running along through hundreds of fireflies, flashing on and off and lighting the trail. This is only the third time in my life I've seen fireflies - just magical. I wish I could show you...

Do you want fries with that ?

Here's something you aren't likely to see any time soon. This was an attempt at an image for a recent themed contest at dpchallenge. Tried to think up something as unlikely as I could to get some visual irony going and the juxtaposition of broccoli with McDonalds seemed to fit the bill. It seems to be a good technique for making interesting and arresting concept images - pick themes that don't normally work together and then make it work. electricity and water, McDonalds and healthy food. I also went with the broccoli to get a good green/red contrast with the McDonalds fries box. I wanted to pick a similarly contrasty background that would really highlight the fries box but wouldn't wash out the broccoli. That was going to be a bit trickier as an evenly light green background made everything seem flat. I tried to build some depth in to the shot by going with chiaroscuro lighting - where the background goes from light to dark in opposition to the lighting on the foreground. You can see this in how the background fades from bottom left to top right yet the foreground is lit opposite to this from top left to bottom right. I think this adds a lot of dimensionality to the shot - making it pop off the page much more than even lighting would. The lighting was with two remote strobes. An SB-28 to the upper left, fired through a 6 inch diffuser and just above/ in front of the broccoli. There was a small bounce panel infront and to the bottom right to throw some light back into the fries box - you can see the edge of that reflected through the M on the front of the packaging. The background was lit with a single strobe focused on the lower right corner of the background. This was at a quite low power and close to the background so that it would fall off across the frame, giving the darker corner. The final tricky part of this shot was getting the whole scene to float. I bought a 3 foot metal bolt from Home Depot (about $1.50) and some washers and bolts. This was attached to a tripod with ball bungee cords and poked through the background green paper. The fries packet had a hole punched in the back and was bolted to the rod, which was also pushed into the back of the broccoli to hold it all in place. A few additional pieces of broccoli were squeezed in to fill in any gaps. You can see more of the setup from a slightly crazy angle, on the right.

Puzzling it out

The latest Strobist lighting102 assignment is to play with using the specular highlight as a background element, while lighting the foreground subject. You can see one of my early attempts here, with a strobe in a silver umbrella to the camera right and high up. I think this has worked out reasonably well, even with my confused look. The only real issue I can see is th shadow my bonce is casting into the specular highlight on the wood behind me. Next time I'll need to be a bit further from the background or change the flash angle slightly. This was relatively easy to set up - you can see the highlight through the lens if you trigger the flash while looking through the viewfinder, so it is possible to line things up pretty quickly, even if you are going to be the subject in the photo.