Cars as a public space

Driving a car is surprisingly private. Because you concentrate on the road, and because you're insulated from both the road and the inhabitants of other cars, you're letting yourself go a little bit more than, say, if you're taking the metro back from work. Really good way to peek into someone's life - legally. Assumptions of privacy are out the window - you're still on the street, so photography is fair game (plus, getting a dude in another car snapping your mug shot is probably a lot less unpleasant than a red light camera doing it). However, people do tend to be a lot more private in their cars, and thus, a lot more interesting.

Anatomy of a Shot - Fresh Eggs and Bourbon

The concept. I shot this for Utata's Iron Photographer 107. These little challenges often put together unlikely elements - and I have fun trying to make a picture using them. For IP107, the elements were lens flare, eggs and alcohol. Right. I have a long term project on unorthodox still life images, so I figured, something with these elements will fit right in.
The process. I didn't previsualize this - just started with the lighting. I wanted to get a nice wrap around light for both the egg and the alcohol (found a neat shot glass lying around). So I placed a studio strobe behind a white sheet for some backlighting. A piece of black cardboard in front of that was my background. The subjects were to be placed on a glass top coffee table. I fired a few test shots with the egg, and then with the shot of bourbon. I figured the backlight plus some fill light from the front will be all I need.
 So far so good. The challenge now was to come up with some sort of lens flare that did not ruin the shot, and furthermore, added to it. Direct lens flare was out of the question - since the premise of this shot was a high contrast scene against a black background. So I looked through a set of filters I got wholesale at a garage sale. Among other useless stuff (red and blue filters, 'soft' filters) I also got this cheesy star-burst filter. I figured this can give me just the right amount of flare off the highlights. After firing a few shots - the problem became apparent - I just didn't have enough highlights to get my flare. I needed to get another source of light. The best solution would be a concentrated source of light (so I don't interfere with the existing lighting). Out came an SB-28 with a home made snout / grid combo. I sat it on the floor under the glass table, pointed up straight under the shot glass. Now there's flare, and as a nice bonus, the bottom of the egg sitting on top of the glass got a nice, amber color.
After getting the composition done (tried with one egg, two and then three), I placed my fill light behind me and fired another couple of shots. One additional problem arose: since the eggs were fresh off the fridge, they started to form condensation. While I liked the fresh 'look', I did not like the unsightly reflection from my fill light. To fix this, I moved the fill off the camera left, and put a reflector camera right. Making my best contortionist impression - holding the reflector in place with my left hand on the right hand side and bending to the ensemble's level, holding the camera with my right hand, I took the shot.

Lightwelder.com launched

Over the last few weeks, I've been working at getting my photography site together. I'm still adding representative samples of my work as well as trying to keep up with new assignments and events, so it's still work in progress. However, I'm pretty satisfied with how it looks for now.

Check it out:

http://www.lightwelder.com

Do not record, create

One can contrast conceptual work with recording type of photography - where as long as one records the right moment in a technically proficient way, the common idea of beauty takes care of the rest (well, not quite). Why? Because the underlying subject is beautiful (or aesthetically different), and the photographer's job is to capture that beauty optimally.
In my opinion - conceptual work requires a paradigm shift. You don't record inherent beauty, because there is none. There is no beauty at all. The aesthetic qualities of conceptual images come from them conveying the idea effectively. And you do so by looking at what would shock your audience into thinking rather than emoting (which is the natural response to a two dimensional image). Conceptual images have to be either weird or ugly or visually banal (by conventional, recording photography standards) to make the viewer think. How much 'steering' towards a certain idea the photographer should do is a matter of creative decision. Countless abstract images (not necessarily photographs) will give you no steering. Others will be very heavy handed and border on commercial obviousness. Yet others will be devilishly normal at first, with a delayed penchant for the absurd. Yet others will fake technical or aesthetical ineptitude to get you to look beyond the descriptive or ‘transparent’ qualities of the image.
Is it worth it? I don't know. The creative process is just as rewarding as with 'recording' types of photography, if not more. The recognition part - not so much, because you don't borrow from the beauty of what you're photographing.

Anatomy of a Shot: Soap Bubbles, Pebble and a Square

This is the anatomy of the process of creating an image for Utata's Iron Photographer 91 project. The elements to be included were:
1 - soap
2 - stone(s)
3 - square format
I tried to challenge myself to create something that would be outside the realm of obvious compositions - e.g. using pebbles and round bars of soap in some visually appealing composition with soft light. I first decided to get away with the soap bar entirely - and instead to use soap bubbles. No particular reason other than the fact that I had one of those soap bubble producing gizmos around my house. Still fits the theme and it allows me to do something weightless. From weightless, the concept evolved to suspended - I'm going to suspend a pebble (also laying around my house from a previous trip to the beach)- kind of like a stony fish in an aetherial square of bubbles.
Having the concept nailed, I started thinking about the execution. First - I needed the appropriate background. Black was the obvious choice - I wanted the pebble to stand out. So I set up my black muslin background, lit the suspended pebble from both sides with SB-28s and produced a few test shots. The strobes were snooted to prevent spill on the background and lens flare. The pebble had a nice translucence to it - so I wanted the expose it to make that visible. With my D700 on a tripod and outfitted with a cable release, I started blowing the bubbles. The first few shots revealed a disturbing fact: while the pebble was properly exposed, the bubbles were just not showing very well against the black background. They were just catching the reflections from the two strobes - and they looked like eyes of creatures lurking in the dark.
To solve the bubbles problem - I needed some white to be reflected off their edges for definition. So I needed some white just outside the frame - easily accomplished by changing the background muslin from black to white. I still needed the background for the shot to be black, so I placed a sliver of black fabric on top of the white, just for the portion visible through the viewfinder. With the new background arrangement in place, I also needed to change the lighting scheme. To get even edge illumination - I decided to place one of the strobes behind the background - to create that wraparound effect often used to illuminate wine glasses and the like.
After some fine-tuning, the remaining work was to fire enough frames to get a composition I was happy with. I could not control the flight path of the bubbles - although after enough trials I became quite proficient at shooting most of them in focus and close to the pebble.
The post production involved just minor retouching (sharpening, increasing contrast) and of course, the square crop.