Late as usual, but I haven’t failed yet! I have officially embarked on my artificial lighting journey.
OK, fine. I got detail on the fur of a black cat inside late at night. I guess I understand the appeal of artificial lighting now.
March: 1 shot a week with lighting (not just available light)
April: CAT A DAY! (Does your cat need a portrait? I might need to visit other cats to keep it interesting.)
Stay tuned to see what I end up making. Or, you know, just to snigger at my failure!
This is a Weekly Shot that I took weeks ago, but here it is now. The goal here was to show ownership, that is, ownership of the dog. It didn’t turn out quite that way.
Mr Bun is so tired of my lame excuses, but I have been taking pictures, I swear. I am suffering from two problems: not doing the processing and not doing the writing about what I learned. Also, not doing the planning for the next shot. OK, three problems.
I’ll be doing some traveling from the end of next week, and I’m a little frantic while I get ready. I’ll still do shots there, though – in fact, maybe particularly good ones (we’ll see), because I’ll be seeing my brother, and he’s much more creative than I am.
In the meantime, I’ll be the object of plenty of eye rolling and weary yawns from the little emperor.
This week was a bit of a cop out, but I wanted to show some discipline and produce something anyway. So I baked some cookies and took pictures of those. I was not very organized when I went ingredients shopping, though, so the icing is white instead of yellow. Sorry.
I did try to do something more elaborate, and in fact I spent a couple of hours trying to set up a self-portrait. The results were terrible. I’m a terrible subject, for one thing, and I didn’t really have a pose thought through. I tried to get my cat involved, and he was having absolutely none of it. And I don’t have a wide-enough angle lens to get any really fun shots of him leaping out of the frame.
I had been meaning to do some baking, and I figured that taking pictures of food I’d made would qualify for a deliberately posed shot in which I’d given some thought to props. I’m glad I did this, because it reminded me of some simple things that I forget in observational photography but that are key when trying to control the contents of the frame.
One is the way light bounces, picking up color on the way. Compare the overall color of the ducks on the plate to that of the plate full of stars. The temperature is actually higher on the duck photo, but it still looks cooler just because of the blue background with the very different density of warm-colored cookies. This is something I “know” but didn’t think about until I looked at the EXIF data on these shots. It’s something I’d rather incorporate deliberately than fret over when color-correcting. Another is that it makes a huge difference if you wait a half hour or 45 minutes between shots when you are using natural light. Again, this is something I know and would rather use actively than “remember” when I’m selecting shots I’ve just pulled of a CF card.
Also, if I’m serious about doing some nice, clean shots for this project, I really have to get an iron.
This week I was having trouble deciding between a hot dog and donuts for lunch one day. I know, this is a pretty momentous problem, and I bet you all wish you could have been there for me in that time of need. But I’m not just someone who complains about things I make no effort to change. What if, I thought to myself, what if I didn’t have to choose?
Normally a person would just have them consecutively. Go get a dog, and then have a donut on the way back, or maybe find that a donut makes a lovely appetizer. With the help of Audrey, an eminent wiener wrangler, I didn’t even have to make that decision.
First order of business was to establish that Chorizo, a mischievous dachshund was in the mood to share the stage with donuts. We did this proof of concept with dog treats. But how would he do with succulent donuts, still warm from Trish’s Mini Donuts, down the street at Fisherman’s Wharf?
Wow! But we couldn’t help wondering, how far could we take this?
Three, ladies and gentleman. Three donuts, and three cheers for Chorizo!
And yet no shot list. I’ve made some progress on my shot list, though, and some patterns are emerging. I want to use people other than myself. (I was thinking last weekend that I’ll have to do a series of self-portraits in order to minimize the hassle factor, but the idea of setting up self-portraits engages me less and less the more I think about it.) I want to use animals. And I’m going to need some space.
The purpose of this exercise is to get images in my head out of my head where other people can see them. This is pretty much the opposite of what I’ve been doing up until now, which has been recording things that anyone could see but other people didn’t notice.
One of the areas of resistance I’ve had to “making” photographs (as opposed to “taking” them) is lighting. There is so much to learn, and the equipment can be expensive or at least require a lot of construction. I like making things, but when I think about lighting, I realize I like making things qua things. That’s going to have to change in a lot of ways if I am to go forward with this, because I’m going to need to make props, too.
Part of the motivation here is to get a break from the frustration – so common in outdoor observational photography – of missing a shot. I realize that some days I’ll be replacing it with the frustration of not getting the result I want, but learning to close that gap is part of the exercise.
The majority of my photography is urban and nature observation. Over the last couple of years, I’ve occasionally set up shots, and in the last year or so, I’ve started to get – even become preoccupied by – ideas about photos I’d like to build, piece by piece, even a series or several.
My first posed subject was my friend Amy. She’s an actor, and she was happy to give over a whole day to me one winter. I think I took something like 400 shots that day. It was a wonderful experience for me, because it gave me a chance to slow down and try a lot of different things – angles, locations, and processing approaches.
Shortly after that, I participated in a project to create cinematic shots. For almost all the shots, I just kept an eye open for cinematic situations around me and tried to capture them. For one shot, I went out to the piers at night with a friend, and we walked around and looked for good locations, finally making this shot. Again, we had no concrete plan, just a general idea of where we wanted to go, and then seeing how the spirit moved us when we got there.
This year I’ve wanted to step up my game, and I’ve made – or at least designed and styled – a couple of shots I am truly happy with. Now it’s time for me to do more, and it has been for a while. I’m going to need help in the form of external pressure, though, because I haven’t been taking the further steps I need to on my own. So this is an announcement of my new project: One deliberately styled and directed shot per week, at least 12, until I finish a coherent series or at least figure out what I want to do next.
Do you have a suggestion or request? I can’t promise to honor it, but I’d love to hear it!