365/50 Don't worry, it only seems kinky at first.

"The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."

Ayn Rand

He looked at the hatchet as if it were an alien extension of his arm. It didn't move right. It didn't feel right. It was balanced wrong. It moved too slow. It over swung. It under cut. It did everything it wasn't supposed to do. Had it been sharper, it would have split my head in two.

Luckily, it missed.

He decided to bleach his hair this evening and give it some pink tint. We're talking locks of blonde and hello kitty pink. Shockingly pink. I'm afraid to go see what the shower looks like after that short foray into modern hair care toning.

He hasn't had a good photo taken of him in quite some time, so we figured, hey ... what the hell? I still had the equipment set up and I still needed a photo for the day. But, what prop would we use? There was a sword, but that seemed to vapid. There was a guitar, but that seemed too cliché. We toyed with the idea of him screaming into the camera, rockstar-style (he found it impossible to keep a straight face). We tried a few manly poses, and while they worked, they were not what I wanted (although, he was very delighted with them).

In the end, I handed him a hatchet and we started to play. The first thing we found? We didn't have enough room to really play with a hatchet. Everything was too close for comfort: the lights, the background, ... me. So we ended up with just a simple shot of him holding the hatchet while we tried to figure out what to do next. It was very much an off-the-cuff shot, something to keep the rhythm going.

What caught my eye was the shirt. My Sherlock Holmes wasn't on the ball, so it took me a bit to notice what it had said: "Don't worry, it only seems kinky at first." When it finally clicked, I had a good laugh. There he was, playing with this damned hatchet and THAT on his shirt. What a serendipitous moment!

The hatchet was taken away soon after. Safety third, and all.

I've noticed how much more difficult it is to work with this 54" wide roll of seamless as compared to a 108" wide roll. You certainly have to restrict your movement left and right, as well as front to back. There's really only a small zone of acceptable photography when posing before one of these narrower rolls. Very easy to veer left and right and catch what's beyond the paper. Same with coming too far away from it; your framing needs to be on the edge of seeing the crap behind the paper. It doesn't help that my shooting area is shared space for the family, so there's stuff pilled up and around to make room for me. That makes light placement difficult.

The things we suffer through to fixate on our art. Go figure.

And as a special bonus: another photo from this evening, taken shortly after our friendly hatchet-weilding friendly left the room. Roughly the same light setup as before: one light, one 15" softbox, no more than 4 feet away from the model. Easypeasy.