Ten thousand reasons
Ward Melenich, my jujutsu instructor, is fond of saying that there 10,000 reasons not to go to class, and all of them are good. There just as many bad reasons, also known as excuses. But good reasons or not, they have the same effect of stifling your development. You don’t progress if you don’t put in the work. Which brings me to now: Photography in a pandemic.
Shane Cleminson, an Indiana photographer, got a lot of news coverage for a personal project of making portraits of people on their front porches. Adorama and V-Flat World have a running series in New York City called Street Studio. A series of top-notch photographers have done outstanding work shooting passersby for a quick portrait or headshot. My favorite in the series featured the work of Lindsay Adler. These folks didn’t get good by staying in bed waiting for the light to improve, the rain to stop, or the pandemic to subside. When going outside was too dangerous they continued working in their studio, their home or their yards.
Which brings me to my latest self-assignment: Shoot a Christmas still life. I did not have a tree when I started, so I looked around my basement and found a wooden Christmas carousel that my sister Diana Wright gave me many years ago. It’s powered by the heat of six candles. I needed more props so I dug out an old nutcracker that my sister Patti Maffei gave me years ago, and a straw reindeer whose provenance I no longer recall. I also added some tiny Christmas lights that I picked up for a portrait last year. My first run at this still life was only partly successful. I got the lighting correct. I was able to show movement in the carousel. But I couldn’t do both satisfactorily. I posted my best shot on FaceBook and moved on. But it ate me.
I realized that I needed sufficient ambient light and a long shutter speed to show movement. The strobes, I knew, would both light the scene and freeze the movement. I used second-curtain flash so the blur would occur before the freezing of the subject. This is the technique automobile photographers use to blur car headlights before they freeze the car with the strobes. The problem I had was that my ambient lighting in the room sucked. So I looked into buying Dedolight “hotlights” as recommended by Daniel Norton, a photography educator who works closely with Adorama in New York. The Dedolights were too pricey for me. I looked around and bought a Wuben T045R flashlight, a 1,000 lumen light that claims it’s good for photography. And it was!
I used the flashlight as a key light on the carousel. I used a Profoto B10 with a grid and CTO (orange) gel to illuminate the nutcracker. I used a B10 with a 10-degree grid and an orange gel to add a rim light on the reindeer. And I used a Profoto A1X speedlight with a 10-degree grid and orange gel to add a rim light to the nutcracker. I experimented relentlessly on the shutter speed and aperture before settling on 1/6 of a second to get the right amount of movement blur. I used a Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 lens at f/3.5 to get sufficient sharpness while allowing the tiny Christmas lights in the background to provide lens blur.
All of this took about six hours of work over two separate days. Was it worth it? Absolutely. The photo itself is nothing special. But I learned a great deal about making due with what I can afford, about balancing light colors, about motion blur and gaussian blur, and about the value of persistence.
If you hire me, you can expect the same work ethic and drive to excellence. Together we will make memories, not excuses.
Contact me so we can get to work.
