Brooke in the hay
August 13th, 2008
Here’s another shot of Brooke on the stack of hay bales we saw along the way to the Badlands. We saw a lot of these stacks of large bales and I knew there were some photos there if we found the right one. We were lucky that when we found a stack that we could use, it was old bales with this darker color, which worked very well as a background for Brooke’s skin tones. It was also far enough from the road, yet still accessible and oriented in the right way so that we could shoot there without causing wrecks on the highway. And the light was working the way I wanted it as well. All the pieces just fell into place.
Of course, Brooke did her usual fantastic job of posing, working her pose to be a perfect counterpoint to her surroundings. The tones, the textures, the colors…it all just came together here just as I wanted it. Sometimes things work out.
R|J in Red
August 11th, 2008
I’m finally getting a little caught up on things since getting back from the trip. So now I’m starting to go back through all the photos I shot along the way. This was by far the most successful photo trip I’ve ever taken. Everything just seemed to work out extremely well with wonderful models and great locations (Carhenge being the exception that proves the rule).
So here’s another from the first stop on the trip with beautiful and fun RJ at a cabin on her family’s farm.
There are so many successful photos from this trip that I really don’t know what I’m going to do with all of them. I may create a new section on my web site to post more of them. Lots of editing to do first. You’ll see some of them here as I work my way through.
More from Carhenge
August 8th, 2008
We shot more than just the nighttime photo while we were at Carhenge. We got there before it got dark to look the place over. Shooting was difficult because it is now so exposed and there were people around, including the clerk in the gift shop.
Carhenge at night
August 6th, 2008
I went to Carhenge on this past trip specifically to take this photo that I had been wanting to shoot since I first saw the place more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out as I had planned it. I’m not completely happy with the result, but I’m sharing it so I can tell you about how it was made and the pitfalls I fell into along the way.
The basic idea, which has been done with this subject by many other photographers, is to shoot it at night using a hand-held strobe to light each car individually. My twist, of course, was to have Brooke pose beside the cars, moving from one to another as I fired the flash. I still think it could make a fine photo, but I did not succeed in getting that photo this time, entirely because of my own technical problems. Since I don’t plan to return to Carhenge because of the way it has been ruined, maybe someone else will pick up this idea and do a better job.
I planned to shoot both film and digital. For film I brought along my old reliable Nikon F. It has a shutter setting that most modern cameras lack: “T” which is perfect for this situation. On the Nikon F when set at “T” you push the shutter button and the shutter stays open until you wind the film to close it. Very simple. No need to worry about locking cable releases or other stuff to keep the time exposure going. And there’s no battery in the Nikon F…it’s a simple, reliable, mechanical camera, so no worry about battery failure during a long time exposure.
The photo you see here was shot on film with the Nikon F. One long time exposure in the dark night with me and Brooke walking around, her posing and me firing the Vivitar 283 to light up each pose. I also cheated a bit and used photoshop to add bits from another frame that had some better poses and exposures of the cars. If you look close you’ll probably be able to figure out where I did that, since my skills at that sort of thing in photoshop are rudimentary at best.
There are problems with this approach. The main one is ghosting where the flash overlaps with a previous firing and creates a double exposure, so that Brooke appears to be partially transparent, with the background showing through her body. I had hoped to overcome that problem by doing digital exposures at the same time as the film exposures.
In order to make that work with my D200 I needed a remote triggering system. So, just for this photo, I plunked down almost $1,000 for three Pocket Wizards and a ridiculously overpriced camera cord to let them trigger my D200. I’ll never buy anything from Cord Camera in Columbus again since I discovered they charged me almost exactly double the normal price for that cord…but they were the only place that had one, since they were on backorder everywhere else, even the major dealers in NYC.
OK…so I got all this stuff together and hauled it along on this trip…and I tested it in the studio before leaving to make sure it all worked. Then I get to the location and set the two cameras up on tripods side by side and start trying to make the photo. The Nikon F is set on “T” so it is recording each flash on film. The D200 is hooked up to a Pocket Wizard. The 283 is hooked to a Pocket Wizard. And I’m using the third PW to fire a sequence. The way this is supposed to work is that I push the button on one PW which fires the camera. The PW on the camera then waits for a synch pulse from the D200 and when it gets it the camera PW transmits to the PW on the 283, firing it in synch with the shutter on the D200. My plan was to do an exposure using the D200’s multi-exposure mode to capture 10 flashes on one file, then to do another exposure, or rather series of exposures, capturing each firing of the flash on a separate file. That way I could assemble all those individual files as layers in photoshop to produce the final photo with, hopefully, no ghosting.
All sounds good…but it didn’t work. The PWs weren’t firing the flash. I’d sometimes get one flash, then they wouldn’t work on the second exposure. I did a lot of running back and forth to the camera to try to figure out what was wrong. Finally I realized that the D200 was turning itself off before I was ready to make the exposure. I had the wrong cord. There’s a different cord that has a feature that keeps the camera from powering down. That cord wasn’t available at all when I was putting the kit together.
So, all I got was the film. And I’ve had 8×12 prints made and have scanned those prints to produce the photo above. I’m not real happy with the quality of the result and I’m not sure if it is a problem with the quality of the prints or the scans, or if the negatives are just not all that good. I’ll play with them some more, but meanwhile I thought I’d share the result so far with you.
Back Home
August 2nd, 2008
I’m home again. Got here Wednesday night after two very long 12-hour days of driving. Other than being tiring, the drive home was uneventful after leaving Alliance and Carhenge. Now I’m just trying to catch up on all the things that went undone while I was away.
It was a fantastic trip, the best photo trip I’ve ever taken. Most of the credit for that goes to Brooke, who was a great model and comfortable companion for all those days. She’s a really fine person in addition to being beautiful and very talented and dedicated as a model. If you are a photographer who works with models you should work with Brooke. Seriously. She’s the best.
Of course thanks also go to RJ Berry, Blue Sheba and Kimothy who also made great contributions to the photos on this trip. They didn’t have to put up with driving for hours and hours with me in my little pickup truck, but the did do wonderful modeling work that produced some great photos.
There are many, many more photos to be edited out of this trip. I’ll most likely concentrate on that over the coming week, now that I’m getting caught up on other things.
This photo is from a spot we found while driving from Yellowstone National Park to Aspen. It’s just a place along the road. We pulled over because the sky was the “Magritte Sky” that I had been looking for. Yes, I brought a couple derby hats along on the trip looking for just this sort of situation to use one. Brooke did a great job, as always. There are lots more from this stop, so many that I may put together a small portfolio of them.
Carhenge is ruined
July 28th, 2008
One of the major goals of this trip I’m on was to finally shoot some figure photos at Carhenge. I’ve been a big fan of Carhenge since it was created in the early 1980s. I visited it shortly after it was built. Back then the creator was fighting off locals who wanted it torn down, calling it a “junkyard too close to the road” among other less polite things. It was a wonderful creation back then, eerie and mystical, sitting in a cornfield in Nebraska.
I was quoted in a national magazine calling it the most significant work of art created in America in the decade. I still believe that. What could be more American than to take an ancient mystical monument from England and recreate it in a cornfield using junk cars. It’s who we are.
A few years after my first visit I returned and found a Carhenge banner hanging from every streetlamp in Alliance. The people there had finally realized that for the first time there was a reason for people to visit their town. There are now a bunch of new motels and other businesses…most likely directly a result of Carhenge.
But soon the dilution of the original creation began. First there was an uproar about one of the most clever parts of Carhenge. Carhenge is aligned to the sun, just as Stonehenge is. As originally created, on the summer solstice the sun would rise directly below a Honda Civic. But some people were upset that there was a foreign car in Carhenge. Soon the creator removed the Civic and replaced it with an American car.
Next other artists wanted to add their own creations to the site. While I appreciate the art that has been added, each piece added has distracted from the mystical feeling of the original. Now the place is cluttered with other sculptures. The original purity of Carhenge has been lost to that clutter.
But, it gets worse. Originally Carhenge was screened from the highway by a nice little growth of trees. I once camped there overnight while my best friend, Ken, did photos throughout the night. Now all those trees are gone, replaced by a large parking lot. There is nothing screening the site from the road. A problem for figure work.
And, horror of horrors, there is now a building on the site, housing a large gift shop. Oh my. I knew that the ownership of Carhenge had passed from the creator to a foundation, but didn’t realize how harmful to the art work that had become. Also, there is now a sign saying the place is closed and trespassing is forbidden after 10 pm. Ahh, bureaucracy, rules, cheap junk sales…the death of art…the antithesis of the spirit that created Carhenge in the first place.
Well, Brooke and I went ahead and tried to make our own anti-establishment art in spite of the hindrances…it was less than totally successful, entirely due to the photographer…Brooke was great as always and working hard in a difficult and somewhat less than secure situation. I was struggling with technical difficulties. As a result there are fewer successful photos than there should be. But there are a few, and one of them is with this post. There may be more to come. But I doubt that I’ll ever return to Carhenge again. It ain’t what it used to be.
The photo part of the trip is over. Tomorrow I’ll drive Brooke back to her home and the next day I’ll drive on to my home. It’s been a great trip. It’s been the most productive photo trip I’ve ever taken. We went to some great locations, but the major part of the credit for the success goes to Brooke…a great model. Thanks Brooke.
Beartooth Pass
July 27th, 2008
I’m having a quiet day in Glenwood Springs today. A much needed rest and recharge day. Kimothy called this morning to say that she wasn’t feeling up to doing a second shoot today. All the posing and stretching had left her with some soreness that needed rest. And with the pace I’ve been keeping on this trip I welcomed the chance to just take it easy for a day.
Tonight Brooke is going to work with Joel. Then early in the morning we take off headed toward home. We’ll stop to do a shoot at Carhenge, then the trip will be over. I hope to have something pretty unusual to show from the Carhenge stop…but what I have in mind is a bit tricky, so I can only hope that it will work out. If it does, you’ll be seeing it here soon.
But for now here are a couple photos from earlier in the trip. These were taken at a lake up on the Beartooth Pass. That really is an amazingly beautiful road. That’s Brooke being beautiful in the top photo and the lovely Sheba in the one at the end of this post. You’ll need to click on this last photo to really appreciate it.
Aspen Independence
July 26th, 2008
Independence Pass that is.
This morning Brooke and I got up very early and drove to Aspen where we picked up Kimothy and then we all went up to the top of Independence Pass to do a few photos.
That’s Kimothy at the top beside an alpine lake near the top of the pass. I last worked with Kimothy in 2002 at the Wave on the Utah/Arizona border. She is a fantastic model and I’ve been trying to find a time and place to work with her again ever since that first shoot. Today it finally happened. I’ll be working with her again tomorrow. 
Brooke was modeling today too, of course, and did her usual fantastic job, as you can see in the second photo today.
Tonight we’ll all be meeting with Joel and his wife, Lili, in Carbondale for dinner. Tomorrow Brooke will be working with Joel while I work with Kimothy. No doubt there will be more to show you soon.
Red Rock
July 25th, 2008
Brooke had been saying on this trip that she wanted to shoot on some red rock. Well, she remembered a place…Red Rocks Park in Denver…so we went there at dawn this morning. There were a lot of people there, even that early in the morning. This place is really in Denver…or at least right on the outskirts. There had been a movie in the park last night and there were people out gathering up the trash left behind from that. Tonight there is supposed to be a concert by Abba, I think, and it looked like some of the concert crew were already at work.
But we found a place with no one around and did a few quick shots. I think it worked out pretty well, and Brooke now has some photos of herself on red rocks.
Tonight and for the weekend we are enjoying the hospitality of Joel Belmont in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. At dawn tomorrow Brooke and I will drive to Aspen to pick up an old friend and model for a day of shooting in the mountains. On Sunday Brooke will be working with Joel and I’ll work again with my old friend. Then on Monday we will take off for our next destination.
Washed Up
July 24th, 2008
Here’s Brooke doing some back bending modeling work in front of a waterfall at Silvergate:
