Impulse

Alright! Enough intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing about cre­ative work. Here’s some actual work. I’ve posted a few pics from a photo shoot I did of my friend Max, him­self a fash­ion pho­tog­ra­pher who wanted to expe­ri­ence the model’s life in front of the lens. I more pics I’m work­ing on and will post them as I fin­ish them. In all, it was a really fun expe­ri­ence and I learned a lot.

The expe­ri­ence of doing a “fash­ion” shoot was com­pletely dif­fer­ent than any­thing I’d done before. Most of my work is doc­u­men­tary (like my Tuileries port­fo­lio) — I find sit­u­a­tions or peo­ple and respond directly to them, fram­ing them with what­ever there is and what­ever light­ing is avail­able. There is no pre­con­cep­tion of the image; it’s all about record­ing what­ever hap­pens to pass my way. If I didn’t get it; the image is lost. That’s life.
In the stu­dio, I am a con­juror. Instead of react­ing to a world I don’t con­trol, I con­trol every­thing. Of course, this means that if I don’t cre­ate the sit­u­a­tion, envi­ron­ment, light­ing, etc, then there’s noth­ing to pho­to­graph. I hadn’t real­ized how big a roll this plays.
I didn’t go into it unpre­pared. I had four looks planned in four set­tings with a gen­eral feel planned for each. The trou­ble comes when I don’t like the images I’m get­ting.
When a scene doesn’t work in street pho­tog­ra­phy, you just keep work­ing it: Try dif­fer­ent angles, dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives; wait a bit, maybe something’ll change. If it still doesn’t come together, you shrug and keep walk­ing. In the stu­dio, you can’t just move on — you’ve come intent to cre­ate a spe­cific thing. Waiting doesn’t help because noth­ing changes until I cange it. So, on the fly, I’ve got to fig­ure out why it’s not work­ing and mod­ify the envi­ron­ment until it does. Because I’m unused to it, this abil­ity to change the envi­ron­ment chal­lenged me a bit. I found I worked bet­ter in a sim­ple light­ing setup and envi­ron­ment and explor­ing from there. Baby steps.
As you can see in the gallery, I was very inter­ested in fram­ing Max’s face closely. I’m not sure why. Curiously, I later found these week-old pic­tures from my photo sketch­book. Apparently, I’m into tight close­ups. I’ll have to keep play­ing with this to fig­ure out why.
Anyway, enjoy the pics and as always, tell me what you think.