When the Only Model You Have is You

 

Flash 137, 2013

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Regular readers will wince at the thought that I’m going to once again mention the photography workshop I took in New York in August. Yes, it stretched my comfort zone. Yes, it made it hard for me to “see” photo opportunities that seemed limitless before. And yes, now I can’t seem to see a photograph of a person—almost any kind of existing light portrait, really—that couldn’t be improved by a little supplemental artificial light.

So I’m either ruined or off on yet another tangent. Rather than admit defeat, I’m choosing to interpret this as “skill exploration.”  Last year’s workshop sent me off photographing anyone who’d stand still long enough. This year it’s all about supplementing environmental portraits with artificial light.

The thing about doing environmental portraits—and by this I refer to any photographic portrait that’s done not in a studio, but rather in some sort of situ—is that you need someone to photograph. My New York friends can find models all over the place. Here’s anice one from Adam Buteux. I mean, it’s as if there are people just walking the streets of the city waiting to be asked to be photographed with, say, an Irish wolfhound, a Fendi bag or a lush Oscar de la Renta ball gown.

There are no super models wandering my local streets. No Fendi bags, Irish wolfhounds or de la Renta ball gowns. No, I’m left with the only model who’ll agree to sit for me, and that would be me, graying hair, wrinkles and all.

This is probably not a bad thing. There’s a lot I’ve yet to learn about lighting before I turn my camera loose on real people. Shooting with supplemental light requires a lot more thinking and planning than I’m used to doing. There are a lot more variables, which is great once you’re confident is flexing them.

Before I can do that, though, I have to learn a basic checklist for doing basic things with lights. When I get that “muscle memory” firmly implanted in my mind, I’ll be able to stretch some and play with the variables.

Using artificial light for the first time is like using Photoshop for the first time in that it’s a matter of subtlety. At first you over-do it. Then you learn how to tone things back so if you need such software to further process your images they don’t look so over-processed.

As the series of photos below shows, I’ve a lot to learn. The one above is the most recent, and I think the best so far. I may be slow, but I’m getting there.

 

Flash 015, 2013

Flash 113, 2013

Fez Season

 MASA 065, 2013

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It being September, that means it’s Shriner season in Virginia Beach.

I’ve written about the Shriners several times in the past and even published a book of photographs from their parades. One, and sometimes two, of their regional conventions are held in Virginia Beach each September. At the end of the week they put on a parade on Atlantic Avenue in the oceanfront resort area. I’ve been photographing their parades long enough to know just about all of their floats and long enough for a surprising number of the Shriners to recognize and remember me.

This year it was only the Mid-Atlantic Shrine Association that came to Virginia Beach. So the parade was a little shorter, which was good because I was unable to stay for the actual parade. But I was able to wander among them as they assembled in all of their glitz and flourish before the parade.

 

MASA 059, 2013

 

MASA 141, 2013

MASA 046, 2013

Humility Along the Gowanus

Gowanus 027, 2013

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There’s nothing that’ll put you in your place faster that seeing someone else publishing photographs of something you thought only you’d been prescient enough to photograph.

During my recent stop along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn my eye was drawn more to things above ground that in the canal itself. There’s a bridge and all sorts of interesting trestle steel for an elevated subway bridge and station.

The Gowanus Canal is famous for its polluted waters. Even though great effort is being given to cleaning up the canal and even though it may look pretty decent from a distance, it’s still pretty bad off.

But being the thorough kind of guy I am when I’m determine to mine every bit of photographic potential from a place, even the mundane parking lot of a Lowe’s home improvement store in Brooklyn, I did eventually turn my eyes to the canal itself.

What I saw was fascinating, even if it wasn’t something into which you’d necessarily want to dip your toes. Looking down into the canal was like looking into an abstract mural on which Marc Chagall and Claude Monet might have collaborated. Really, the colors you see in the photograph above are the colors of the…well, I don’t know if really qualifies as water. But whatever you call the fluid in the canal, it does look like this.

Now, here’s where the humility comes in.

I didn’t take many pictures of this petroleum-infused waterscape. I shot a few frames and them moved on. I figured that once you’ve seen one shot of the Gowanus waterscape, you’ve seen them all.

So it was with more than a little irony and humility that I opened my e-mail one afternoon a few weeks later and found a link at the aCurator site to photographer Bill Miller’s take on the Gowanus.

Sure enough, he’d done like I had. I’ll bet he even stood at the edge of the Lowe’s parking lot just like I did. And I’ll bet he, too, photographed the many other things there are to photograph around the Canal before he ever turned his eyes to the water.

But when he did look down to the water, he didn’t take the same casual attitude to it that I did. He stuck around for a while and captured a number of interesting views of whatever it is that pollutes the Gowanus Canal. If you didn’t catch the link to Miller’s Gowanus series in the paragraph above, here is it again.

A Brooklyn Point of View

 

 Manhattan Graphics 362, 2013

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People think New York’s an expensive place to visit. And it can be.

But like many internationally oriented cities, if you’re traveling on a budget there are still a lot of places you can go and things you can see for free. New York has something for everyone, no matter where your tastes lie on the highbrow/lowbrow spectrum. A four-block walk in any direction will expose most visitors to more interesting sights than you see at home, and if you’re willing to venture a little further afield there’s so much live entertainment on the street and in the subways that you could easily wonder anyone would pay to get in anyplace. 

New York’s a city of magnificent architecture. It’s ethnic enclaves offer the visitor a reminder than not everyone lives like you do. It’s also one of just a few American cities where the art of window display is still treated like a serious art form by retailers.

For outdoor views, there’s Central Park, of course. One of my favorites, though, is the Staten Island Ferry, which you can ride back and forth across New York Harbor and get tremendous views of the Statue of Liberty, Governor’s Island and lower Manhattan. I suspect the people who use the ferry to go to work take it for granted after a while. But I can’t imagine a more civilized commute than one that includes at least a boat ride each way.

One of my favorite vantage points is the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. The Promenade’s a narrow park that hangs out like a balcony over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, diverting traffic noise and offering one of the best views of lower Manhattan. Off to your right are the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Directly across the East River are the canyons of Wall Street. To your left is Governor’s Island. In the distance are the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Staten Island and the soaring Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (which is as high as I ever want to be without being in an airplane).  Really. You can stand in one place and see all of this and more.

Manhattan Graphics 577, 2013

The Promenade’s a most civilized place for a walk. There are gardens and fancy apartment buildings and townhouses on the east side. There’s plenty of seating if you just want to watch the passing parade on the East River.

A few weeks ago I had a chance to walk along the Promenade in the early morning. It was a wonderfully clear and crisp. I could have spent an hour taking picture just of the Promenade. But instead I used a long lens to make these pictures of some of the buildings on the Manhattan side of the river.

 

Brooklyn Heights Promenade 004, 2013

Skin in the Game

 It's All About the Tattoo Art, 2013

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I broke one of my rules for these pictures.
I’ll do a lot of things in the name of getting the picture I want. I’ll trespass. I’ll ask the subject to move into a better position. I’ll use Photoshop to clean up my mistakes.
But what I won’t do it pay someone on the street to let me take their picture.

This is a practical matter. Once you pay someone to sit for a street photograph, 1) everyone expects to be paid and 2) you become a target for every beggar and ragamuffin.

There are more than enough interesting looking people in the world to photograph. If someone insists on being paid for a street photograph, I politely decline and move on until I find a more willing subject.

Up until a week or so ago, this rule of not paying had extended to not paying exorbitant tariffs to get into places where I’d like to photograph people. I’ve paid, say, $5 or $10 to get into an event where there was photographic potential. But that was it.

Then my friend the eminent illustrator Walt Taylor insisted I go with him to a tattoo convention. Walt and I sometimes wander around the local scene on Saturdays, me looking for things to photograph and him looking for inspirations for illustrations.

I didn’t have anything against going to a tattoo convention. People with tattoos can be intimidating to some people. But they’re also among the easiest people to get to sit for photographs. I thought there might be some interesting people at a tattoo convention. Besides, Walt’s been threatening for several years to get a tattoo. I thought this might be the day.

 

In This Man's Navy, 2013

What I didn’t reckon on was that there’d be a $25 admission fee to get into the tattoo convention. But in the name of friendship and photography, and after making sure they’d allow photography, I went ahead and agreed to this inky excursion.

The convention center where the event was held was a sea of booths containing lots of tattoo art and chairs and tables where people could sit or lie down while a tattoo artist did his or her work.

There’s a curious intersection of themes in the tattoo art world I hadn’t anticipated. The fifties-style pin-up girl look is big. So is anything steampunk. The real surprise, though, was the number of exhibitors that had taxidermied animals in their displays. Can someone explain this for me?

 

Framing the Art, 2013

In the end, I didn’t take as many pictures as I’d hoped and wasn’t very pleased with what I did take. Walt, by the way, didn’t get a tattoo, either. But he did buy a tattoo convention t-shirt. That might qualify you as hip in Norfolk. But from where I sit that doesn’t count as real skin in the game. 

 

Taxidermy and Tattoos, 2013

A Wrong Turn Turned Good

 

 Gowanus Canal, 2012

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I was leaving New York to return home to Virginia one morning recently and made a wrong turn. Actually, after reviewing the map I’ve determined that I didn’t make a wrong turn so much as fail to make the correct left turn when the route took me briefly off one expressway onto local streets so that I could get on another expressway.

But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that instead of getting an earlier start on the drive I found myself headed downhill toward Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. It was a gorgeous morning and barely 70F. In other words, excellent conditions for a quick walkabout.

The Gowanus Canal is probably second only to Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River in the notoriety of its environmental degradation. It’s been the dumping site for industrial and other wastes for more than a century. I’m told copious efforts have been made to end dumping, clean the Gowanus Canal and open the area up to more modern uses that allow people to get closer to and enjoy the waterfront. However, as the picture below demonstrates, I’d advise you to refrain from sticking your toe in the Gowanus Canal just yet. Even the birds seem leery of it.

 

Gowanus Waters, 2013

But that doesn’t matter either. I wasn’t going for a swim. And it turns out the area around the canal is ripe for the kind of graphic industrial photography I sometimes like to do.

 

Gowanus 017, 2013

 

Gowanus 022, 2013

Under the Lights and Stretching the Comfort Zone

Brittany, 2013

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I spent last week in New York participating in a workshop called “Environmental Portraiture” at the School of the International Center for Photography (ICP).  After last summer’s terrific “Photographing People” workshop at ICP with Harvey Stein, I thought I’d turned the corner and that it would be clear sailing from then on. Then I had one of those “Aw, s---t!” moments when I realized I had to give thought to what to do with people once they’d agreed to be photographed.

This isn’t rocket science. But still, if you want photos to be more than mindless snapshots, you do need to give some thought to how you portray people honestly, accurately and engagingly. And it’s not like I haven’t given this some thought already. Still, I thought it might be instructive to observe how another photographer works through this process.

This year’s class was taught by Shelby Lee Adams, who is probably best known for his arresting portraits of individuals and families who live in the “hollers” ofAppalachia.

From anyone else, this series of portraits could come across as exploitative. Shelby, however, grew up in Hazard, Kentucky. He understands and respects the culture and customs of that impoverished region. He doesn’t treat his subjects as caricatures, something an outsider would be easily tempted to do.

I enjoyed getting to know Shelby. But it didn’t take long to conclude that the course should have been called “Lighting for Outdoor Photographic Portraits.” There was very little talk about the intellectual process of environmental portraits and a whole lot of talk about lighting ratios.

Let me tell you, this is a lot harder than you might think. As someone who’s always favored natural light, learning to shoot in a formal portrait format, particularly outdoors, was a real test of my comfort zone elasticity.

What we had to do was reject natural light and instead learn how to create the light we wanted. We were approaching these portraits as a painter might, with all the creative flexibility that entails.

Artificial light isn’t a foreign concept to me. I’ve photographed in a studio before. It's intuitive to use strobes and other artificial lighting there. But on the street, where there’s lots of light and maybe even the interesting light that drew you to photograph someone in the first place?

This leads to the second obstacle. Normally, I’m anxious to photograph people in their own context. I go to where there are, whether that’s an artist in his studio or a pianist at the piano or just a pretty girl sitting in the soft light under a tree. You get the picture. That’s why they’re called “environmental” portraits.

But in this class we were learning not to go to the people, but rather to bring them to a place, or create a place, where we’d set up a series of artificial lights to turn an outdoor space into an indoor space.  To me, this makes about as much sense as spending a lot of money to manufacture rain on a sunny day just because you have a raincoat you want to wear.

Anyway, I spent a week stumbling through this change of paradigm. I shot hundreds of images of seven or eight different models. I don’t think I embarrassed myself too much. The photo above was taken in the arcade under the Bethesda Terrace in Central Park.