This is regarding the studio shoot I talked about earlier.
I think I spent the first hour doing nothing than experimenting with the lights and kept improving the lighting almost till the end of the shooting. As a total newbie I was apparently challenged - don't expect anything close to perfection. It's so different from street photography which I always compare to hunting. You walk a lot around, you explore, and you also need to be lucky. In the studio everything is set up and there is no parameter the photographer can not adjust. Very powerful, very commercial, very not so exciting.
I got an email from Jeanne Flemming today. Since I'm receiving a press pass for the Parade (I wrote about it earlier), I got press information, too. Let me use this to put you a bit more into Halloween mood. But first my German readers need to learn some uncommon vocabulary. At least this is what I had to look up. You cannot get into Halloween mood when searching a dictionary, you learn this first! :-)
ember - gluehende kohle
hearth - feuerstelle
rekindle - wiederaufleben
gourds - kuerbisflasche
This year's theme is:
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The Village Hearth
In Celtic times, folks celebrated the last night of Autumn by gathering around a communal fire and then carrying home embers from that fire to rekindle each hearth in the village. Villagers carried the glowing embers in hollowed gourds. From this rite of renewal was born the enduring symbol of Halloween, the Jack-O-Lantern.
Today, the Villagers of the Halloween Parade still take their coals from its communal fire, The Parade, to rekindle its spirit in their own hearths throughout the year. Each improbable story, each other-worldly mask, costume, and each spontaneous step of the dance is an ember, a piece of the collective made personal.
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The Official Village Halloween Parade Puppeteers--Superior Concept Monsters- have created a Giant Cauldron attended by Jack-o-Lantern Giant Puppets and hundreds of smaller Lanterns to enact this ritual of the communal made personal.
Another picture from last year.
Yesterday I got a call from Donna L'Oren. I will put my foot into a photo studio for the first time this Sunday. The mission is to shoot pictures which will be used for the packaging of their products. I'm very happy about this opportunity. Even I read a lot about it and considered already getting some lighting equipment myself, my practical studio experience equals zero. I'm sure afterwards I will have a better understanding of things. This will also help me to decide what lighting equipment to get for myself.
Another retro color experiment.
I'm very happy about having my last name as a domain. But even I'm proud owner of fluck.de, I kept an eye on fluck.com which was (if I got it right) something like a stud farm in the Netherlands. So on very rare occasions I checked this site out to see if it's still around. Guess what, I was very lucky that I went on this site right after it was expired. The previous owner didn't renew his contract and snapnames.com was ready to start an auction in case more than one person would be interested in getting it. Naive as I am, I was silently hoping that nobody noticed that fluck.com became available so I could get it for just 60 bucks from SnapNames *sneaky sneaky*. An auction lasts three days and right after it started I saw a list of 35 people participating the auction. The price went up to $410 after the first hour. The whole thing turned out to be a battle between two parties and none of them was me. The fact that the auction time gets extended for another five minutes whenever a new bit comes in, made it quite entertaining to watch. I don't know yet what you will see when visiting fluck.com in the future, but I can tell you already that the owner paid a thousand dollars for it.
The Princeton Photo Club opened an exhibition at the Princeton Alliance Church last Friday. We have 68 pieces hanging there right now and most of the work is available for purchase. Everybody is welcome to stop by and browse through the photographs and biographies of the exhibitors.
You already know the story of this new series of pictures. I have nothing to add about it except that this obviously is a very urban style which luckily hit the designers nerve. What I would love to do next is shooting beautiful women in the latest winter fashion in a snow covered Central Park - something more fairy-tale like. Sounds kitschy, huh? Anyway, let it snow!!
Recently I was wondering what my answer would be if a designer would ask me: "Where and when can you take pictures for me?" My hypothetical answer was pretty clear to me: "Meet me at the Brooklyn Bridge at 7am right after sunrise." What I didn't expect was, that this would actually happen. I also didn't expect that people would be excited to do that. Neither did I expect that this would turn out to be so much fun. And the thing I would have expected the least are police officers who would hang out with us having a good time.
Things I expected were very good morning light, a freezing model, whistling workers, curious pedestrians, and cell phone cameras everywhere. That's pretty much what happened. I think I will bring music next time and we will have a little party :-) Thank you guys, this was a great morning! Or to say it in our models words: Fuckin A!
Contemporary Issues In Photography was the topic of the club meeting yesterday night. Speaker was Joel Smith, curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum. I was pulled back in time looking at a variety of famous work and unconventional techniques. A thing I found interesting was a question during the Q&A session afterwards. It went something like this:
Q: Where do you think photography is going in times where people take millions of random pictures every day even with their cell phones; sending them around the world in seconds?
A: I guess people asked themselves similar questions when the first Leica came out. I don't know.:-)
More or less in the last minute I realized that a model invited me to come over for a Donna Loren fashion show in New York City last night. I jumped in my car and managed to be early - I even had enough time for dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant :-)
The show took place in the Cain in Chelsea, which is a stylish Africa themed club. At the location I got to know the designers, hairstylists and makeup artists who contributed to this show. Very nice people who all mentioned their interest in doing some more things together in the future. I guess I wouldn't deny that.
I had a pretty exact idea of how to shoot this, but as usual in practice things look different. For what I had in mind the available light during the show was not enough and people constantly ran into my field of view. However, it was pleasure to be there and it might be your pleasure to browse through the latest Donna Loren lingerie. So here is a link.
From time to time I see pictures that seem like weird snapshots in a retro color look. Those things catch my eyes these days and make my mind come up with thoughts. Don't be surprised when you see more of such things here in the future.
The new series is the result of some Photoshop experiments. Of course I photograph every animal whenever I have a good chance to approach one. These ones are taken in the Bronx Zoo and Brooklyn Zoo. Except the mean looking gull which I crossed way with in Santa Barbara. Credits for this Photoshop technique and textures go to Anita Schneider. You can get her tutorial by ordering this issue of DigitalPhoto. I actually don't think I used her method very gracefully, but I liked to put the animals into the limelight this way.
