And More Dance
November 18th, 2008
Lighting, of course, is key to successful dance performance photos. And particularly when working with student productions I never know what I’m going to encounter. The Ohio University School of Dance has an excellent lighting designer on the faculty who teaches lighting design. When he lights a piece I know I’m going to be getting good photos. His students also do a good job when they do the lighting, but there are sometimes surprises for me as they learn the exacting craft of lighting design.
Most often what I encounter that provides a challenge for photos is a lot of range in the intensity of the light. Since built-in exposure meters are useless in this lighting situation I have to shoot with the camera on manual and adjust by eye as the light changes. That’s one reason I like to attend the lighting rehearsals. I take test exposures and make notes. When I’m shooting I’ll have a notepad open beside me with the lighting adjustments for each dance noted. I also do quick “chimping” to check the histogram now and then to make sure I’m not too far off.
This piece was one of those curve balls for photography. Yes, that’s right, the piece is lit by flashlights carried by the dancers. There were parts of the piece where that was the only source of light. Thankfully most of the dance also had some, not much, but some, light thrown in from the stage lights.
My exposures ranged from 1/15 to 1/100 of a second at f/1.4 at 1600 ISO. My goal was to capture the feel of the light and the piece while still getting an occasional somewhat sharp photo. I think it worked out pretty well.
Dance, Dance, Dance
November 15th, 2008
I’ve spent the past week immersed in dance. Three days of watching lighting rehearsals so I could be familiar with each of the 19 dances. Then one evening of shooting two concerts in technical rehearsal, one after the other. Then back home to spend three days downloading, sorting, editing and uploading the photos. I shot a little less than 2,000 photos. That’s not really all that much when you consider that most of the dances were run twice at the tech rehearsal…so roughly 50 shots for each run of a dance. That was edited down to somewhere between 20 and 60 photos for each dance that made it to the web site.
Here’s the site where they are all available, in case you want to see more: http://public.fotki.com/DaveL51
I may post a few more of my favorites here too.
It’s always a pleasure to return to my alma mater and watch these wonderful young people performing their own art. Their energy, enthusiasm and creativity is a joy to see. There are some mysteries, though. For instance, I couldn’t possibly have been as young as these students are when I was a student. I was all grown up then.
Stealing Souls
November 12th, 2008
This post is a response to a post that Lin made on her blog: http://www.fluffytek.com/blog/2008/11/photography-agressive-sport.html so you’ll probably better understand what I’m talking about if you go there first and read what Lin had to say.
First I need to say that I hold Lin in the highest regard. She is a beautiful model, has a brilliant mind and is a very talented writer. I look forward to reading every one of her posts. But this time she has it completely wrong. It takes a brilliant mind to come up with ideas this far off the mark. Sorry Lin.
The basic thrust of her post is the idea that a photographer attempting to “capture” a deeper, more revealing photo of a model, a photo that reveals the “real” person, is somehow violating the model involved. Well, all I can say is bullshit…ok…I can say a lot more and I’m afraid I’m going to.
Here’s a clue for all you models out there. Pay attention. When a photographer tries to get a photo of you that reveals the “real” person you are, guess what…he’s doing HIS JOB. That’s what good photographers do. And, second clue, when you announced yourself as a model you announced that you were going to help him do that job. That’s right…if you are a model it is YOUR JOB to be there…really be there…in front of the camera and help, yes HELP, the photographer capture that photo of who you really are.
Saying you are a model but you don’t want to reveal yourself to the camera is like saying you are a brain surgeon, but you “don’t want to be involved in any of that messy cutting or drilling or sawing…that’s gross…don’t want any of that…it could traumatize me…how dare you expect me to take part in something so disgusting…just hire me to do your brain surgery and we’ll just not bother with any of that stuff.”
OK…yes, it’s more complicated than that. And most good models don’t really reveal their true selves to the camera. They are actually just excellent actors and they have a practiced, professional “model-self” that they turn on for the camera. The better they are, the more genuine that model-self seems. As Sam Goldwyn famously said, “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you learn how to fake that you’ve got it made.”
But this is the game that is played between the photographer and the model. If you don’t want to play, then don’t call yourself a model.
Those of you who are familiar with my more recent work may now be saying to yourselves, “But he doesn’t show any model’s soul in his photo…heck he even says the models are just objects in his compositions.” True enough for much of my recent work. But I’ve been doing this for a few more years than most models out there have been alive. I’ve done a lot of different kinds of work and expect to do different work in the future. I like to think that the soul revealed in my “figure in nature” work is primarily my own. But the models bring their own selves to even that work and make an important contribution, one that can’t be overestimated.
Having been doing this for more than 40 years I’ve seen things change a lot. The past 10 years or so have brought a major change with the internet bringing many new “models” and “photographers” onto the scene. I guess a lot of those “models” don’t feel the need to bring their soul to a photo shoot. I’m not so sure some of them have one to bring. But that’s ok because I see a lot of photographers whose primary message in their photos seems to be: “Look…look here…see…she’s NAKED…and, and, and…LOOK…she has HUGE TITS!” I guess that’s a message…maybe it will touch the soul of a lot of 13 year-old boys with jars of Vaseline. But that’s not exactly what I’m going for with my work.
If all I wanted to do was lighting exercises with a female figure I could get along just fine with some used store manikins. But, you know, I’m out there hunting for souls. And when I find them I want to shoot them and capture them so everyone else can see them. Because that’s the most important thing that photography can do. Show us each other. Show us who we are…who that other is…and maybe reduce that desperate gap between each and every one of us.
Of course, one of the basic problems of photography is that it cannot succeed in bridging that gap. It is limited to showing just the surface. No human is so simple as to be summed up in a photograph of their surface. But we can probe. We can look for the hints of what is in there. And when we show a hint of that we have succeeded…and maybe we have made that existential gap just a fraction smaller.
I started out as a photojournalist. I photographed floods and fires, fatal traffic accidents, riots and tornados. I intruded into other people’s suffering. After a time I couldn’t do it any more. Journalism is just the same things happening to different people every day. I also used to do street photography. That also got to feel too intrusive, as I realized that taking a photograph did indeed take a little piece of the subject’s soul. So I stopped doing that too. Eventually I ended up doing the work I do now with models precisely because it is an agreed-upon situation where the subject is a willing volunteer to the taking of that little piece of her soul.
There is much more to be said here, but this is already a very long post, so I’m going to stop…but first just a note about “aggressive male language.” That’s insulting. It’s very aggressive, in fact. Language arguments like that always remind me of my favorite candidate for a non-sexist pronoun: she-he-it. Best pronounced with a slow Texas drawl.
Now, a bit about the photos I’ve posted here. They are old…from the 1970s. I think there may be a bit of soul peeking out from behind those surfaces. Barb up at the top was an actress…so I really don’t know if that’s her soul or the soul of a character she made up. But I think there is something there. Below is Lisa and her soul was a dancer. For the photographers out there who care, both photos were taken with Leicas. Either an M2 or an M3…I carried both most of the time back then. Usually the M2 had a 35mm f/2 Canon (there’s that aggressive language again) lens and the M3 had a 90mm f/4 Elmar. Barb’s photo was made (is that better?) with the 90…Lisa’s with the 35. Tri-X developed in D-76 1:1. These are scans from prints made back in the 70s. Barb’s print was made on Agfa Portrega Rapid paper, selenium toned and hand bound into a book of prints for that project. Lisa’s print was most likely made on Kodak Polycontrast Rapid paper.
And, Lin, again, I’m sorry to have to so totally disagree with you. I hope you don’t find what I’ve said to be disagreeable…and I hope one day when I finally get over to England that you’ll give me a shot at capturing a little piece of your oh-so-deep soul.
In The Circle
November 10th, 2008
It’s a busy time at my place. We have a friend visiting from Finland. She leaves tomorrow early in the morning. And, meanwhile, I’ve been photographing a dance concert, actually two concerts, at Ohio University. That has involved spending this weekend in Athens watching the dances while they are being lit. I’ll be doing more of that this evening. Then tomorrow evening the tech rehearsal will run for both concerts, one after the other, and I’ll do my photos.
These concerts are choreographed by the senior dance majors at OU. The dance program requires each dance major to choreograph and present in concert a group piece and a solo piece. They do these in concerts in the fall and spring. There are so many seniors this year that they ended up with 19 dances to be presented at this time. Way too many for one concert. And way too many for this old photographer to keep straight.
Usually when I photograph a concert I attend these rehearsals, make notes, and take test exposures, establishing the correct exposure for each dance while also learning, in a sense, the dances so I know what’s going to be happening and can plan when to take photos…which moments I particularly want to capture for each dance. But I’m overwhelmed with all these pieces and have just given up on keeping them all straight. I’ll do my best…and it will be better than if I had never seen them before and was just shooting them like a basketball game. I hope to have my editing mostly done by the end of this week and will post some samples here when I get them ready.
Meanwhile, another story goes with this photo of Mischief Vixen. While looking through my photos on Model Mayhem I started looking at what lists they had been added to. I found one of them on a list put together by Mischief of photographers she wanted to model for. So I sent her a message saying, essentially, “Well, ok, let’s shoot.” And this is one of the photos that resulted.
If you are a model and think you’d like to take part in the work that I’m doing, well, you have already met the basic requirements to work with me. So don’t just sit there, send me a message and let me know you are interested.
I don’t work with a lot of models. I don’t try to shoot with every model out there. I’m more interested in working with a few models who really understand what I’m doing and want to be in those photos. I don’t have a certain physical type that I require for models. I just like to work with models who I enjoy being around and who are committed to making art. It also helps if they are ok with getting cold and wet and dirty. If that sounds like you, let me know and we’ll make some art together.
Now I have to get back on the road to Athens for an evening of watching dance.
This Rocks
November 5th, 2008
I’m resisting doing another political post. I’ll just say that now that the promising, posturing and lying is over for a while it’s time to see if any of the promises will be kept. History tells us that it’s not likely. But I have hope, while remaining a skeptic.
That’s Phoenix Kelley posing while freezing her pretty ass off down in the Hocking Hills a couple weeks ago. I shot this before I rediscovered Anne Brigman and started researching her work. Now I find this photo looks so much like some of her work that it’s a bit strange. I think I’m doing some different things from what Anne did with her work…but I have to wonder what her work would look like if she were alive and working today. I’m certainly not into the heavy manipulation and deliberate fuzziness that was a big part of pictorialism. And I’m very interested in color and the effect of light on the color of our surroundings. But still…my interest in the relationship of the female figure to the forms we find beautiful in nature seems to be very much what Anne was working with.
A Famous Photographer
October 31st, 2008
And now something a little different.
I recently received a copy of the Taschen book, Camera Work, The Complete Photographs, as a birthday gift from my wife. It’s a great book. Every photographer should have a copy in their library. This book will show you the starting point for photography as art. And it’s a beautiful starting point.
Pictorialism has often been ridiculed in recent times because of its attempts to be like painting instead of following the inherent qualities of the medium of photography. But seen in the proper context of the times and the goal of establishing photography as a legitimate medium for creating art, pictorialism was necessary and proper. And I would argue that there is value in the pictorialist approach even today.
But I’ll let that argument wait for another day because I want to talk about one of the pioneers of photography as an art form. And I want to mention that one inspiration for this post is the wonderful blog, museworthy, which I read and enjoy regularly. Her posts about artists provided the pattern for what I’m about to tell you about a great photographer. I’m not going to be nearly as articulate and thorough as she always is in her posts, but I’ll give it a try.
Looking through the Camera Work photographs I kept coming across photos that were clearly taken by someone with similar photographic interests to mine. The photographer is Anne (or Annie) Brigman. I had seen one of her photographs along the way as I studied the history of photography, but had never investigated her body of work. The first photo in this post is the photo that is most often associated with her.
But she did much more work, of course, and it was consistently, at least in her early work, concerned with the connection of the form of the female figure with the forms of nature. And the work is beautiful. Everyone shooting photos today of the nude in nature should be familiar with Brigman’s work because she was doing what we are trying to do and she did it extremely well. And she was possibly the first to work seriously with photography on this subject matter. And that was more than 100 years ago.
According to Wikipedia Brigman lived from 1869 to 1950. She died the year before I was born. She was born in Hawaii but spent much of her life in California. Her studio was in Oakland and was the center of art photography on the west coast at the time. She was published in Camera Work, was the only woman and only photographer living west of the Mississippi to be a member of the Photo-Secession.
From Wikipedia:
“Brigman’s deliberately counter-cultural images suggested bohemianism and female liberation. Her work challenged the establishment’s cultural norms and defied convention, instead embracing pagan antiquity. The raw emotional intensity and barbaric strength of her photos contrasted with the carefully calculated and composed images of Stieglitz and other modern photographers.”
Pretty amazing stuff for a woman at the beginning of the 20th Century.
Brigman was also an actress and a poet. She continued to photograph into the 1940s with her work becoming more modern as pictorialism fell out of favor. Her only book of her poetry illustrating her photographs was published in 1949 just before her death. It had been delayed for 8 years because of World War II.
The text accompanying a 1997 exhibit of Brigman’s work at the Oakland Museum of California says, “As a California photographer, she was revered by her West Coast colleagues, influencing a whole generation of prominent photographers that includes Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham.
“Brigman’s favorite subject,” that text continues, “was the female nude, often posed outdoors in dramatic landscapes to suggest an intimate, immensely powerful connection to the natural world.”
Is it any wonder I am drawn to her work?
Of course, now I find myself wondering why it took me so long to find her work. I studied the history of photography in college. I read and look at photo books all the time. Anne Brigman doesn’t come up. Is it because she was “isolated” out on the west coast a century ago? Or because pictorialism is so often disrespected by “modern” photographers?
But she was was a major figure in the photo world of her day. What does that say about those of us who are minor figures or less in the photo world of today? Is there any hope for our work to survive us and be seen in the future? Does that matter at all? 
I don’t know the answers to those questions…and that doesn’t matter. I do what I do because it is how I see the world. I guess if others in the future come across what I’ve done and enjoy it, that’s a nice thing…but it can’t be the motivation for what I do today.
Thank you, Anne Brigman, for doing beautiful work. I wish I could have met you. I think we might have had a pleasant conversation. I’m sorry that couldn’t happen, but I’m very pleased that you left your photos here for me to enjoy.
I hope you all enjoy the photos Anne left for us as much as I do. These are just a few examples. I’ll be looking for a museum where I can see some of her original prints as I travel around the country in the future.
All photographs in this post are by Anne Brigman.Trick And Treat
October 28th, 2008
It’s that time of year again. If you’ve been following this blog for a long time you know I have an old favorite Halloween photo that I’ve posted a couple times. I was thinking that I’d just post it again this year. But I was over at Athena’s last week and she showed me the pirate girl costume she had put together for this year. I talked her into bringing it in to the studio so I could do a proper photo of it. So this year you get something new…and quite a treat, if I do say so myself.
Then, after we finished shooting, Athena showed me some of her real super powers. After watching me fooling around with PhotoShop on these for a bit she jumped in and did the post-processing herself, with just a little input from me on what I was after. You see, Athena is not only a sensational model, but also a photographer and a graphic artist. She knows more about PhotoShop than I ever want to know. So she worked her magic on both of these photos. She’s available to do photo retouching and I can highly recommend her. She does great magic tricks with the computer and she is also quite a treat to know and photograph.
I Hate Politics
October 24th, 2008
Yes, I hate politics. I hate it in all forms at all levels. National level, local level, family or social politics. I hate it all. Really hate it, in the churning stomach, cringing, run away, run away now, way. I always have and expect that I always will. In my former job I had regular occasion to meet and work with many politicians at the national, state and local level. Usually just being in the same room with them made me sick. I often felt like I needed to shower after talking with them.
Now, I understand that politics is a basic part of the human condition. It’s nothing new and is probably not as bad today as it has been at many times in the past. But I still hate it. There have been some politicians who were exceptions to my general disgust with them. John Glenn stands out from the crowd. I had opportunities to interact with him one-to-one and found him to be a genuinely decent honest man. There were other exceptions, but they were few.
Only once in my life has there been a candidate for president of the US who I really wanted to win. That was John Kerry. Kerry served honorably in Vietnam and then came home to say “That is wrong!” and lead the anti-war movement that ultimately brought an end to that tragic, stupid waste of lives. Right there he had my vote. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the absurdity of the Republican attacks on Kerry’s honorable military service as he ran against a man who dodged service and couldn’t even manage to show up for his National Guard drills. I was drafted myself back in those days and served as ordered. I have respect for anyone who served and also for anyone who left the country or went to jail for refusing to serve. I don’t have much respect for those who worked the system to avoid their responsibility. Like our current president.
Those attacks on Kerry are a good example of the sort of politicking that disgusts me so much. The simple repeating of a lie deliberately, in the knowledge that if it is repeated enough it will take on the power of truth. That is wrong. That is an assault on the very foundations of a democratic society. And that is the program of the Republican party. Those Republicans who have been behind that sort of tactic would do well to remember the words of the greatest Republican president, Abe Lincoln, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people…” you know the rest.
I’ve never been a member of a political party. But as you may have guessed by now I’m supporting Barack Obama in this election. I’m not tremendously enthusiastic about Obama. I think he’ll be an ok president. I’m happy that a black will be president. That is a good thing. But I don’t really know if Obama is a politician who I would want to be in the same room with. And I’m pretty sure I’ll never really know.
But I’d support Attila the Hun if he were running against the Republican candidate in this election. I actually like and respect John McCain. At least I liked the John McCain who was there before this campaign got going. Can’t say much good about the way his campaign has been conducted. But that’s the problem I want to do something about. I want a Democrat in the White House because I don’t want any of those Republican assholes like Karl Rove who have been behind this administration’s dirty tricks and obscene distortion of the democratic process to have any access to the White House in the next administration. The only way to assure that is to put a Democrat in there. If McCain became president the same Republican henchmen who have done so much harm to our country in the past 8 years would continue to run things behind the scenes. And we just can’t afford to allow that to happen. Our democracy can not stand to have that happen.
So, there you have it. This isn’t a political blog and it won’t become one. I’ll be back to photography in the next post. Just wanted to let you know where I stand in this very important election.
More from Vermont
October 22nd, 2008
Here’s a little different view of Kathryn Ann in the cold and rainy mists of the Green Mountains in Vermont. She did a great job in some pretty unfriendly weather conditions. Thanks Kathryn for suffering for my art.
I did another fall colors shoot yesterday down in the Hocking Hills. It was a bit cold, but not wet. Of course with the drought we have going on here in Ohio that meant there was no water at all going over any of the waterfalls down there. But it’s still a very beautiful place. I’ve shot there a lot, but I found some new spots to work in this time. You’ll get to see some from that shoot in a few days when I get time to do some editing.
Meanwhile I have a couple other shoots coming up and I’m trying to get a lot of things done to send off to a variety of places that may be showing my work in 2009. Lots of deadlines to meet in the next few weeks.
2009 Calendars
October 17th, 2008
I’ve just finished publishing my calendars for 2009. They are now available for order here in my store at Lulu. If you click on one of the cover photos here it should take you directly to the page where you can order that calendar. You’ll note that there are two versions of each of the three calendars this year, for a total of six calendars. The larger calendars are 13 1/2″ x 19″ and are printed on heavy textured paper. They have a very nice look and feel and each photo could be framed when you finish the year. The smaller calendars are on 8 1/2″ x 11″ glossy paper. Still nice calendars if you don’t want to spring for the larger version. The large and small versions are not exactly the same because of the difference in format, but most photos are in both versions.
