Brandon Studio Shoot

Sunday Movies

More Scott

One thing is certain so far in my work in photography: the energy comes and goes. When it is nowhere to be found, I do other things. When it rises like the sap in denuded sugar maple trees in February, I catch as much of it as I can and make syrup.  The memory of the sweet goes when the energy goes but come spring it is all there, back in its generous benevolence.
These are from the third studio shoot I did with Scott, the last one I did with him and his friend, Arron. To my knowledge I have not processed these images before. I focused on the outdoor images we took at the pool. By the time we came back to the studio I had spent the energy gallivanting outside in the sweet sunshine of early summer. Where did the rest of summer go?

This was the first shoot we did when I suggested the guys wear the clothes I had. We had been shooting them in their A&F and Hollister drags. I wanted to see them in more grown-up apparel. I was into GQ and Detail then. Now I am not sure these are images that would sell just by themselves but I like the eloquence, even elegance of these photos. It is like seeing these nineteen-year-old kids all grown up, men of the world.
I am preparing to resume shooting models again. I have these persistent images in my head of shooting them on a posing deck so I can get on the same level as they are, sitting or lying down. On the floor I can only crouch down so far. I want to be able to shoot from below or at eye level. But these poses would work more for art studies that show off the lines of a naked torso. I love the lines of an undressed human body, the shoulder sloping from the neck, the gentle or acute curve of biceps or quads, the long slope of the back from the winged shoulders to the concavity just above the hipbones.
Have I grown as an artist in these last fallow months when all I've done is process old shoots? I am finally growing my own personal aesthetics, something that is keenly mine, a vision that can inform all the work I do? 

I've learned a little from using Photoshop and I want to do more with digital post-production. But post can only do so much. The vital ingredient is the initial capture on camera. The model is such an essential part of the equation. After the shoot I can do a lot of digital manipulation, try out out-of-this world crops and hues, but the initial image is like the eggs, butter, and good-quality flour one needs to create heavenly cookies!

I love post-production. I can do this on my own, in the silence of cold, snowy mornings, a steaming cup of herbal tea at my elbow. Shooting requires a different energy. Energy at a shoot is more out there. It is interactive energy, the energy of relationships, of taking risks because I am working with someone else's energy, too, and the mix can be combustive. I like that, I like the danger. Art is so ho-hum sometimes. I like pyrotechnics and then periods of quiet contemplation, working an more subtle, gentle energy.

All this reminds me of Mozart's piano sonatas, how the legato arpeggios suddenly turn staccato then replaced by hypnotic Alberti bass. I like how quarter notes suddenly become a shower of triplets or runs of sixteenth notes that race up and down the keyboard to alight softly into just a dozen notes clustered around middle C. Loud and soft, slow and fast, busy activity and adagios that draw out the plangent flexibility of the piano keys, caressed rather than struck, touches softer than a feather, lighter even than air.

Revisiting Scott

I've been away long enough from the photo shoots I did earlier this year that I can see the images I took as though they were new again. A great number of the photos I didn't even look at long enough to be truly critical of the work I did. I am realizing how burnt out I was with the rapidity of my exposure (no pun intended here) to model photography.
With the prospect of shooting models again, I've been thinking how my way of looking at models in particular and photography in general has changed in the last seven months. That I have changed there is no question. My work processing images with Photoshop has developed my photographic eye in a way I didn't plan. Stumbling along in the dark I had no clue how to proceed. These last months have demonstrated the strength of my interest in the media. Taking photos and processing a few of them each day is not the quickest way to learn the trade but this has made the learning process more of an organic one.
I've processed some of these photos with Aperture back in May. The resulting images however are way different. If anything I've made the colors pop out even more. They now appear more three-dimensional rather than just highly colored.

Aside from from working with my own photos I've continued to view the work of other photographers and filed away in my head what I liked and what I'd like to adopt in my own images. I have not gone artistic yet. There is so much I'd like to do in post-production but my focus so far has been quite conventional. I do want to split off from the herd but the direction to take has not appeared clearly enough yet to pursue.

If the work I did today is an indication of a change in how I look at images I may be ready to take the process to the next step. At the gym today, walking round and round the catwalk above the workout floor, I meditated on how I'd like to shoot models in the future. I want to create not just images of models showing different facial expressions. I want to create atmospheric images, images that evoke an emotional reaction, hint at a story behind them. Because of my interest in films I want to create cinematic images. Since I don't have access yet to large physical sets cinematic images would mean drama in tiny spaces. One day I want to have a large studio so that space can dwarf the subject, the environment become a character in the images I create. Until that day comes I'll have to make do with what I have. I've largely done head shots and torso shots. I want to do more full-body shots. I love working in front of a white or black background but now I also want to utilize other spaces as well. I started doing this at my last shoot with Scott and Arron but didn't get far. After our work at the pool I was not able to sustain the creative tension. The day had its own purpose which I feel we achieved, leaving more now for me to aspire to.

Thanksgiving Experiments

DNG Events

My friend, Linda, came to celebrate our birthdays together yesterday evening. Again, despite using a tripod, many of the photos were blurry. I do best when I take the time to take the photos instead of doing them on the fly. I did get some nice photos. Serendipity rocks!

I still use Bridge and Photoshop from the CS3 suite and on my own learning the subtleties of using the programs. I didn't even know I could capture images from my camera memory card using Bridge until I used the CS4 version. DNG supposedly provides lossless compression. I can't tell the difference between the jpeg files I create from Canon's raw file and from Adobe's DNG.

My "ultimate" workflow is still a work in progress. I don't trust DNG to keep my files solely in that format so first download the Canon raw files then convert to DNG in Bridge. This doubles the storage space used for the capture. The good news is that I am deleting images from Bridge when I view the files. I like this feature although, of course, once deleted, the files are gone forever. But from the many images I capture I really only use a fraction of them. Most of the time I take several shoots of the same subject just so I'll have copies to choose from.
The shoot last night took all of two minutes. It reminded me how much fun shooting my friends can be. Long before I started shooting models I was intrigued by the photos of Nan Goldin and Terry Richardson. Goldin's oeuvre seems to largely consist of snapshots of her friends and lovers in colors I thought of and still think of as lurid. Richardson's photos are similar, loud, almost vulgar, certainly in-your-face images that redefined photographic art for me.

This morning, in the December/January issue of Men's Vogue, I gaped at a blow-up of Marianne Müller's photograph in the living room of architects Mark Lee and Sharon Johnston in LA. It is beautiful but again not your run-of-the-mill arty photo. What makes photographer's images sell for thousands of dollars? Marketing. Our personal canons of what is beautiful is something we learn through accretion through the years. We "hone" our aesthetics from seeing what other people consider as beautiful. Is there truly innate beauty in our world of sensory experience? Beauty is a cognitive product, not a product of direct seeing.
At this point, my take is this: photographs are simply one person's view of the ordinary events in his or her life that the photographer on some golden-hued day finds inexplicably appealing or emotionally moving. There is a kind of aura around the sensori-cognitive experience that seems to me more than the accretion of our life's experiences. Maybe Jung was right. Maybe there is a collective "unconscious" that we inherit through our genes (or karma if you will) from all the consciousnesses that have lived and experienced life thousands of years before us.

Instinct and Beyond

The fall/winter Taschen catalogue arrived yesterday. One of their new offerings, The Godfather Family Album, contains "never-before-seen" photos of the Coppola trilogy shoot. They must have timed this with the recent re-release of the new, digitally mastered DVD of all three films.

Steve Schapiro was a "special" photographer on the sets after he garnered an assignment for an exclusive cover story for Life magazine. He wrote how he shot Pacino during the filming of The Godfather: Part II in the Dominican Republic (apparently standing in for Cuba).

"One morning," Schapiro wrote, "I took Al Pacino around the corner of the balcony to do a portrait against a glass window. With some actors, I've had to jump up and down or even make bird sounds to get the appropriate look. Al, within half a roll, had given me anything I could ever ask for, and we were done."

I hesitate to ask a non-model to model for me because I've had such luck shooting so far. Kaleb was a great introduction into the world of shooting in the studio. He was patient and can hold a pose as instructed. He was my first teacher. He was quick to follow the slightest suggestion or hint from me and had his own beautiful ideas for executing the image. Photography, I think, is a great part of it instinctive feeling. Shooting Kaleb opened my eyes and I was forever hooked.

The three shoots I did with Arron and Scott were my intensive training in shooting models. Lenny was wonderful, too, and had modeled some in his early twenties. His mother was a professional model. I wouldn't mind shooting him again. Not only does he have the looks and physique of a model but also has that instinctive feeling for what looks great in an image. Liking something is the first and essential step to doing anything well.

Schapiro described how he took another photo of Pacino when they were shooting in Palermo. The idea was to shoot the actor in a hallway with light streaming through the window behind him, the light reflected onto the floor. The movie shoot didn't finish until five that day and the beautiful light was gone. He shot Pacino using a strobe to illuminate the actor and did a four-second timed exposure to bring out the dim light from the window spilling onto the floor.

Images begin in our minds. We get a snapshot in our heads about what would look good and get about trying to achieve that effect in the real world. In the course sometimes of doing this we get other, better ideas and we try those, too but inspiration begins as inner vision.

Schapiro thought the cinematographer, Gordon Willis, "seemed to be going for an Oscar. Usually it was almost noon before he would feel his lighting was ready for the first shot of the day." For a scene with Lee Strasberg cutting a cake symbolizing Cuba with Al Pacino, the light just wasn't right for four days! "We remained there, doing the same scene over and over."

Photography, it seems, is much of it instinctive and a visionary element comes first but executing it is work, work, work. Is it naive of me to only realize this now? To get the photographs I want I'll need to work at setting them up not expect as I did when I took snapshots for serendipity to provide them. Luck plays a major role as it does in the rest of our lives but we need to play partners with it, too. We need to take the time to dance.

Cold, Rainy Day in Vienna

Vienna was the last stop of our 2004 European trip with Go Ahead. My sister and I had a huge, elegant room with marble floors. We took a bus to the city center and got off at Kartner Straßße near the Staatsoper, the Vienna State Opera. We basically walked along the Ringstraßße, visiting the sights and taking pictures of the royal palace and grounds, the statues of Vienna's illustrious one-time residents like Mozart and Goethe, and visiting the Sacher Hotel to check out the famous Sachertorte. 

Under the gray skies, Vienna looked old, its buildings impossibly ornate, the classical sculptures starkly reminding me of warm, sunny Athens and Rome instead of this cold, Teutonic city. That evening we went to a chamber music concert where my younger sister, April, and I danced a waltz to our friends' amazement. I was so giddy with delight we almost danced off the floor and out the window!

Prague Castle Hill 2004

Cactus & Salad

I installed the CS4 yesterday but today used Bridge CS4 with Photoshop CS3 to process these photos. Having the choice between CS3 and CS4 is a nice touch.

Yesterday's photos were unimpressive but they allowed me to shoot some more with the 50 mm lens on the D20, compare outputs with the zoom lens on the D5, and experiment with unusual adjustments on Ph CS3.

The first two images are straightforward narrow-aperture photos with the D5. I am still learning to use the contrast adjustment, something I am sure most photographers don't even consider. I'm a tyro at this. I like how the adjustment can sometimes make the image pop out.

The first Christmas cactus image was taken with the D5. I had to take it from a distance but didn't use flash for it. I reduced the exposure some more in Ph CS3 and increased contrast and black levels to darken the background and reveal the veins on the petals.

I took the last two images with the 50 mm lens, again without flash, again adjusting exposure and black levels to make the background darker. I had always admired close-ups of flowers against a dark background. I didn't know I could do this very simply in Photoshop.

To Be a Child Again

For years I took advantage of being able to stay with Ingrid and Michael on 14th Street and visited New York City once or twice a year. I took these photos 20 April 2006 when Central Park burgeoned with spring flowers and kids and their parents escaping from their apartments to enjoy a glorious spring day.