365/18 Catch the Wave

"My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky."

William Faulkner

Ah, the Leatherman Wave. A tool that I rarely, if ever, leave home without. Much like the camera, really. Neither are ever more than a stone's throw from my hand really.

You can tell a well-loved tool by the marks upon it. You can see that it's been used and not babied. No, tools don't require tender, loving care. Quite the opposite. You need to be rough on them. You need to put them through their paces as often as possible, as quickly as possible, with fervor and glee. A good tool doesn't buckle under that load. No, it perseveres.

A common gripe about tools of today is, "they don't make 'em like they used to." That's quite true. There's a certain attention to detail that today's toolmakers seem to lack. Well, I don't necessarily blame the toolmakers themselves. Tools today are drop forged or hard punched from steel and ribbon. They're not zealously made by a craftsman who has jealously guarded his techniques that were passed to him via age old rituals only whispered in the dead of night. No, tools today are made by hook or by crook. Whatever gets it done on time, under budget, packed, stacked, racked, and sold to the lowest bidder.

I was at my dad's shop today. He does furniture restoration, amongst other things. He enjoys taking a broken and busted piece of furniture, knocking the rough spots off, and making it a workhorse of society again. He has a baby crib in the shop. Nothing overly expansive, just a simple and Quaker-ish. But, this wooden spindle-laden box on a rocker was over a century old. About as old has him and I put together. Talk about an everlasting gobstopper of toddler proportions! It wobbled a bit when it got to him, but he fixed it right up. It's an heirloom with a purpose now, not a dust collecting pile of tinder.

And that's what I want to see in tools today. I want to know that I can pick something up and without realizing that it's 40 years later, have something good and useable in my hand. The Wave might get there. I've had this one for about 8 years I guess. This is my second. I lost the first. It was a crushing defeat. You never want to leave a man behind ... or a tool. Especially a dependable one. But, as I recall, Leatherman makes their tools to last. This one has a 25 year warranty on it. That's staying power. The first Leatherman I ever had, I gifted to my father when the Wave came out. He used that one for three or four years. Accidentally cracked the blade off when working on a piece of furniture. Not a bloody easy task, I'll have you know. But, a galloping trip back to the manufacturer and it was fixed up without a question.

That's what I like to see. Especially in this throw away society.

Now, I don't know if I'll have my D300 twenty years from now. Or even ten. Digital just doesn't have the physical staying power of our grandfather's film cameras. But for now, it's my workhorse. It does what I ask it, no questions asked. Sure, the battery might whine a bit when it's low and over-abused. It might get a little wet now and then. But, pay that no mind. It's going to work until it no longer doesn't.

This idea of tools reminds me of a Johnny Cash song. Yeah. Me? Johnny Cash lover? Who knew? The song is The Legend of John Henry. A line about his hammer, in particular, is what comes to mind.

learn to hoist a jack,
learn to lay a track,
learn to pick and shovel too,
and take my hammer,
it'll do anything you tell it to.

And now, me and my camera are gonna go suck some wind. Let's see what waves we can catch.

365/17 Into the light

"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."

Edith Wharton

I love flash. I love flash in the same way that someone enjoys a good Tawny Port. Port is nothing you down in a single swallow. You have to let it sit and breathe. You must let it work it's magic on you, wrap you in it's warmth and subdue you. Flash does the same for me.

The problem with flash, like any other source of light, is that you have to control it or it spreads everywhere like a bad infection, going places you absolutely don't want it, lingering where it's not needed, and invading where it absolutely shouldn't be. Herein lies the need for light control. Now, there's a bazillion different tools out there that you can use to control light. Softboxes, umbrellas, tape, dead bodies, gobos, snoots. Whatever you have handy, really. I've seen light shaping tools made from bed sheets and isopropyl alcohol bottles. Empty, of course.

In this particular case, I wanted something more directional than an umbrella. I recently picked up a Lastolite Ezybox to have something in my gear box that could contain the light in one direction. I sort of like it. I'm still mixed on it. I think, for the locations I shoot, it tends to be too big still, even at 15" on a side. The closer I can get the light to my subject, the less power I need to light it. And therefore, the less bleed into the rest of the environment I'll get. There's still just a bit too much spread of light for my tastes with this box, but I suspect I'll get used to it once I shoot more with it.

Anyway.

I've been playing with two light setups recently. Main light from my softbox and a secondary snooted light to provide some key detail. I didn't use it in this particular photo because I'm finding that the light quality coming from the snooted flash just doesn't match my expectations when applied to skin. It's too harsh, which means I'm not softening it up enough. There's a lack of evenness to it that I get with the softbox. The first time I tried this earlier in the week, I thought it was caused by the regular aluminum foil I used to make the snoot. Very reflective. So, this time, I tried with black wrap and still got the same sort of light (only, minimally more subdued).

So, I guess I still get to play with this and figure out where I'm going wrong. I'm sure that once it clicks, I'll be much more willing to play with it and see where it leads me.

This photo must really be seen in a larger format to take in all the detail from the light as it wraps around my model and the rope. Please check it out on black in a larger size. I don't normally shot the lighting equipment in with the model, but for this one, I really liked the contrast of the stark white light source with the shape and texture of the rest of the scene.

Fewer Shots? Why yes, I think I will.

Today, I was catching up on tweets from the photo world and this blog post from Scott Bourne happened to come up.

Become a Better Photographer by Taking Fewer Shots « Photofocus:

"‘Okay, I’m done.’

‘That’s it? You’ve only been shooting for ten minutes!’

‘Yep, got about 50 shots, I should have 4-6 proofs for you from that bunch.’

‘So we’re done?’

‘Pretty much…I mean I can keep shooting, but there’s really no point, it’ll just be duplicates of the same stuff.’"

Every Thursday night at a local coffee joint called Spiderhouse, burners from around the area filter out into the night to meet up, catch up, burn up, and live up the evening. Some nights you'll only find one or two people there. And still other nights, the crowd will be thick and awed by these people knowingly dancing with spark and flame, mixed in a combustible hydrocarbon cocktail. Spinners, young and old, greenhorns and gurus alike come out to play.

I was out this Thursday.

Man, Thursday night was cold. Not bitter cold like we've seen in the last few weeks, but cold enough that I should have remembered my recently acquired +5 gloves of comfort. Not a good thing when you're trying to photograph someone outdoors, at night, with a bit of wind at your back. Exposed fingers become icicles in mere moments. The last thing you want is to have a finger freeze to your camera trigger and break off at the decisive moment. Nothing good would come of that.

So, like I was saying. I was out this Thursday and happened to be at Spiderhouse. Out back amongst the cobblestones and picnic benches, in fact. Lisa, one of the regulars, and a new guy, Wesley, were out by the stage prepping for a burn, so I walked over and watched. No. It's not so much that I watched. I was drawn in. Captivated and hypnotized by this new guy's fluidity with the poi. He was very good, to put it mildly.

And herein, I decided I need to grab the camera and take some photos. Lisa and Wesley were gracious enough to allow me some time to play. I wanted to try something new, so out came the Ezybox. Now, I've done a fair bit of photography in the local burner community, so I'm always interested in trying out new ideas here. In fact, the cover of Joe McNally's Hot Shoe Diaries is very inspiring for me; I want to do a shoot like that with one of the local burners.

This night would be a step in that direction.

But, before I go on, what does this all have to do with the quote from Scott's blog? Having spent quite a bit of time photographing fire spinners, the one thing I've found is: there's only so many moves you can do with each type of fire spinning prop. Poi, staff, meteors, swords: they all have limits to their showmanship, so there's only so many ways you can experiment with photographing them. After you take a few hundred shots of someone spinning something in a circle, all you have is a few hundred shots of flaming ring photographs. It looks all the same.

And knowing this, I've been trying to cut down the number of photographs I take of people playing with fire.

When I first undertook to photograph fire spinners, I always saw it as a race against time. Get as many photos of the flames before the wicks flamed out or grew too lacking of fuel to get the rich oranges and yellows of blaze. When I started seeing the blackness of the wick itself, I knew it was coming to a close. The camera sounded like a slow-motion machine gun as the shutter clicked open, waited a second or two, and then clicked closed. And then again. Again. And again. And ... again. Until I filled up a card and was forced to swap to the next.

One of the things that fire has begun to show me is that this can be so. unberably. repetitive. Boring almost. Of the few thousand photos I have now, I can point at maybe a hundred that have become artistically interesting for one reason another. And many of those have been caused by something different that happened during the burn. Maybe it was someone I'd never seen before. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it was me trying something I'd not played with before. But, whatever happened in the photo, it was different. Unusual. Something to be remembered.

And knowing that, I've begun looking at what I'm doing in my other photographic interests and trying to apply the same aesthetic. I don't want it to be repetitive and I believe that this often causes the mental blocks I've so frequently been encountering with my camera. Because, if you're shooting the same thing over and over, where is the art? Where is the fun? Where is the blade of unusuality that takes ahold your interest and leads you into the photo?

Gone. It's just gone.

So I'm forcing myself to look anew at what I'm doing and try to evaluate what should be different. What should be played with. Like Thursday: I don't normally add flash to my fire photos. I've always found it difficult to balance and clumsy to work with when you're playing with longer shutter speeds in order to capture the arc of fire.

But here's what I learned: it's still no different than other flash photography. You can easily over power it. You've got the control there you need. Now, rightly control it. In many of my photos from that evening, I let the flash over power the scene. Why? Because the chimper in me kept seeing the scene as too dark on the back of that god forsaken camera LCD. And second? What I want to do is fire within a portrait. I want to go for that McNally photo and make it my own. And doing so is going to make me think differently about what I'm trying to achieve with the local fire spinners, moving from a passive documenter, to an active photographer and engaging them in the photo, so they can engage you in the photo.

I ended the night with about 50 photos. Three came out good. I think that's a fair haul for 20 minutes of shooting filled with experimentation, don't you?

The photos above are of Wesley and Lisa. Both were photographed using a 15" Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe with an SB-900 at 1/2 power and a full CTO to balance the color of the flash to that of the flames.

New toys!

Well, I finally went and did it. I got even MORE camera gear. I've been looking at new lenses recently because I've noticed my current 18-55 kit lens is not as sharp as I'd like it for doing portraits. Plus, it makes it extremely hard to get good separation of the subject and background when I'm on the long end; it drops down to f5.6. Great if you want a somewhat deep depth of field. Not so much when you're shooting someone's portrait.

I spent several weeks looking back and forth between the Nikon 24-70 f2.8 and the new Sigma 24-70 f2.8 HSM. Man, was it a toss up. On one hand, I wanted to stay with as much Nikon gear as possible. On the other hand, I'm a cheap bastard at times and was looking to maximize the amount of stuff I could get with the budget I had. $1800 for the Nikon lens wasn't going to cut it, no matter how much I lusted after the lens.

I played a bit with the non-HSM version of the Sigma and concluded that the zoom ring was entirely too stiff. Plus, I wouldn't be able to use it on my d40 if I chose to use that as a backup with this lens. Reports on the web showed that Sigma corrected some of the problems in the new HSM lens, so I bit the bullet and went with that.

I'm entirely pleased with my choice.

The one downside is that the lens is huge. heavy. beastly. It's like the eye of cyclops staring you down and peering into your head while you scream for an escape.

I love the bokeh on this lens too. I haven't yet been able to do a full out shoot with it, but I've certainly played with it taking photos of random stuff (like squirrels).

In other toybag bits, I also got the new Nikon SB-900 and more portable light kit for it. That brings my overall light kit to three flashes so I can do more stuff outside of the studio.

Anyway, it's two more bits of stuff for my kit. Yay!