Return of The Nude Man Playing Tuba In A Tub

Yep. Ceiling leak. Seems somehow disastrously familiar.

From The Mailbox

Got a pleasant note from the folks at Olympia Film Festival tonight. It said:

Everyone had a ton of fun with Hoop Springs Eternal. Thanks for letting us show it!

Nice.

Good Work, New York

First, the subway stairwell handrail was broken, then a few days later it was repaired. Great.

See how easy that was? If someone knocks something over, consider putting the exact same thing back up in its place, and fast. Don't wait a decade, have meetings, politicize the process, and leave an open hole. Better yet: go ahead with putting up something significantly better -- but do it fast, like when the Pre-Parthenon was destroyed.

See? Art history has valuable lessons in it.

Change and Turnover

I haven't really paid attention to the many people who say the decade is ending. I tend to think that since we start counting with "one" and not "zero" the first year of the millennium was 2001. Meaning 2010 is part of the decade, not the start of the next one.

As 2000 approached, I kept telling people: "Nope. Not the start of the millennium. That will be 2001." I said it a lot. Then I won a photography contest, and the prize was a "Kodak Millennium 2000" camera.

New Friends Are Silver, Old Friends Are Phallic

I tend to snap away with the iPhone. Anything on the ground or wall is fair game. Sometimes, however, I'm not sure what to do with these images. Today, a pairing: an image in gold found on a Manhattan wall, an image in silver from The Bronx.

Soap Opera Ending

Above, an iPhone snapshot from The Bronx.

Advanced Seriously Fun Photography, Week 2

In last night's Advanced Seriously Fun Photography class our main goal was to really tune in and see light. We looked at the qualities of light, then tried to apply that to how the camera sees light. A few ideas became obvious right away: because the eye opens up when it looks at dark areas and closes down when it looks at bright areas, usually the camera records a more contrasty version of a scene than our eye sees. Dark tones become darker, falling into solid black, and light areas may burn out in a photograph even though our eye can preserve detail in the same scene.

We started our exploration by making a purposefully "bad" shot -- taking a person into tricky or unflattering light and trying a photograph there. We noticed where light falls on the human face, and it creates a shape (for better or worse). We then followed that up by trying to "repair" the light in that spot. We added a reflector to fill in shadow areas, or used fill flash to try to better light the subject.

Fill flash can be tough, and we struggled with it. That's not a problem: it's tough for photographers at every level. We again practiced methods of balancing ambient light and on-camera flash, and we looked at what happens when we're able to bounce light off a ceiling or wall. We also tried bouncing off a reflector or using a reflector as diffusion material.

We attempted to understand the qualities of light: hard light versus soft light, the directionality of light, the color of light, and then tried an experiment in seeing how we could "short" light a person's face. Our basic technique here was to put the subject in a position where they turned slightly to the right or left. We then looked at which cheek was "leading" (toward the camera) and experimented in giving that cheek more light or deemphasizing it by letting shadow fall on it. This clearly changed the shape of the face as read in the photograph.

We also looked a bit at how focal length effects the face: we compared the same framing of a face at medium and telephoto focal lengths and realizing that longer focal lengths appear to compress or flatten the features.

We also tried to put all these elements together for a casual portrait, trying to train our eyes to see the light, while still choosing a good framing, appropriate focal length and maintaining a relationship with our portrait subject.

In the end, however, our goal was to stop projecting our expectations of what we'd see and really see the light present. As well, this was a lead in to next week, when we will be using studio lighting and trying to really see and control light.

Our homework was to shoot one portrait of this type, using natural light or adding flash as needed.

Watch, Vote, Comment

Follow the above video to SnagFilms, if you're in the mood. You're votes and comments are appreciated.