Bennett
A friend of mine from high school is visiting Northern Michigan during the Independence Day holiday. She lives in Atlanta and doesn’t find her way up here very often, and this was to be her two year old son’s first venture this far north. Ami (my high school friend) hired me to more or less document the trip. I’m not quite done shooting yet, but this photograph is the creme of crop thus far…at least to my mind.
Ami & her husband Eric asked me to join them in Harbor Springs and shoot some photographs along the waterfront. This one was taken on one of the piers directly behind the Pointer Room (hoighty toighty fine dinning. Well worth the bucks, just make sure you bring enough of them). They walked up and down the pier enjoying the scenery whilst I created photographs. Bennett, being just two years of age, has yet to grasp the notion of private property, and was pretty insistent that he be permitted to board each vessel moored. Much to his chagrin, no acts of piracy took place.
A couple more wedding shots…
I spent three days straight getting the proofs ready. My eyes nearly went crossed from staring at my monitor for such a long time. Here are a couple more images from the Dobias/Myhren wedding. I tend to have a pretty dim view on marriage, but I wish these kids the best of luck, they really are the nicest people you could meet.
Non Traditional Family Portrait
A couple months before I moved back to Northern Michigan (during my last semester of college) I began making regular trips up north. It was during these trips that I decided that “I missed it up here,” and began looking for a place to make a nest. I had been beckoned back up by a former high school classmate that wanted me to come up and shoot a set of family portraits. Word spread and soon I was making a trip north every other week and was dragging my entire studio set up from home to home creating portraits for friends, and then it spread to the friends of friends, then to strangers.
This photograph was created during that first trip last October. This brood is the Cleven Family. Kenda & Brian did not want traditional family portraits. I thought about it a bit and remembered an assignment given my photography professor (Ryan Flathau).
In class had previously discussed Henri Bresson’s idea of the Decisive Moment, that exact moment where everything within the camera’s frame was perfect. It was a fleeting moment that, if not captured in that instant, was gone forever. Being a studio photographer (and an infinite control freak) Bresson’s notion garnered little interest with me. But, I’ve learned that even in the studio, there are those moments that slip away and cannot be recreated, especially with children. The assignment Flathau gave to his students was called the Indecisive Moment, or a greater collection of several decisive moments.
As soon as the idea popped into my head, the refinements and changes flowed like a river and I had every shot planned well prior to my arrival. The set up was pretty simple. I placed the camera on a tripod, set up my lights as desired and took an overall photograph of the empty room. Then I proceeded to take another sixty three photographs of that room with the occupants doing various things. The idea was to combine the best images to tell a story and show the passage of time with a single frame. Brian & Kenda appear only once in the image, but each of their two children appear five times each for a total of ten children doing nothing that they are supposed to be doing.
The photograph is still an untitled piece, but I still enjoy it. Kenda has a print of this image that gets paraded about whenever someone new comes around that has not seen it. That is really all a photographer can ask for.
I’m not a sellout, dammit.
No photograph with this post, just me running my soup cooler. I was thinking about my post a few days ago when I was lamenting not being able to photograph my own vision, and the more I think about it, the more I think that simply isn’t true. My vision goes into every photograph I create. It doesn’t matter is someone else asked me to create the photograph for them. People come to me to create their photographs because of my vision.
I remember my college professor once saying that professional photographers, those who create photographs as a means of putting food on the table have to be willing to compromise from time to time and be willing to “sell their soul just a little.” I suppose there is some truth in that, but as in everything, black and white are not critical absolutes in life. A certainty in one situation is not a guarantee of a direct translation or application to another situation no matter how similar.
My studio has been open for six months now, and if I honestly believed I was a sell out, I would close shop, get a job at a gas station and take pictures on the weekends for free. But, I just spent the last four hours sorting through the photographs that I have taken since I opened up in January (because my website is in dire need of an update), and I am finding myself having a good measure of trouble picking which photographs to include in the update.
Between January 4th and June 6th, I have taken over thirteen thousand photographs with my digital camera alone. Granted, not all of them are winners, and about half of them are culled from the herd before I even show them to the client. But, after my sort this afternoon, I still have close to 300 of what I would call “winners,” photographs that I am happy to show to anyone. Perhaps 100 or more of them I would cheerfully enter into an exhibition…5 of them I already have plans to do exactly that.
So, I may very well be a portrait photographer for hire, squeezing friends and strangers for their hard earned dollars, but I am still quite satisfied that I am just as much an artist as when I was in college. My vision is in every photograph I create because it takes my vision to create it. My subject matter may have changed between then and now, but I still treat every subject with the same eye.
I still like photographing women sans clothes, but weddings, children, and puppies present the same opportunities for the exploration of light, line, and beauty.
Skipping Stones
This is my 15 year old son, Scott skipping stones into Lake Michigan on North Manitou Island. We were losing light, and trying to get back to camp before dark. I was doing my best to keep the group moving as we were still about a mile south of the camp site, but I couldn’t resist letting them skip stones while I took advantage of the late afternoon light.
Nuke Plant.
Here is a better shot of the nuke plant. I stopped on the side of the road to get this one. This is in Ohio on the way to Port Clinton from Battle Creek. I wish the house on the right side of the frame came out a little brighter, it gets lost in the trees and fouls up the juxtaposition….the whole point of phootographing a nuke plant in a residential/agricultural area.
Not in my backyard…
I shot this one from a moving car so the quality isn’t what I would prefer, but I thought it was pretty interesting.
I can’t imagine that real estate prices in this neighborhood would be terribly high…what with a nuke plant literally in the backyard.
King of the Forest
So…Gary Fields’ Comedy Club is right down the street from my house, 3 blocks due south.
During the summer months, they have a bike night on Mondays (I’ve posted photos from that in the recent past) and local bands play on Thursday nights. There is usually a band on Monday nights as well. The noise travels right up the hill and right into my living room. The stage and my living room window face each other and the sound travels very well.
Most of the time I forget when and who is playing until I hear th music while I am sitting @ my computer. If they sound good, I’ll walk down the hill and get a better seat for listening. King of the Forest came through loud and clear last night, and frankly I could have stayed home and listened just fine.
I took my camera with me, but tripods are useless when photographing people in low light unless you can talk them into standing still, so I was an ISO pushing fool. Nearly everything I shot was at 1600 ISO, and I was using an f/2.8 70-200mm lens and an f/2.5 lens for the most part. I did grab a couple shots with my f/3.5 18mm lens, but foolishly I left the f/1.8 50mm lens at home. I would have come in handy. Even with those fast lenses and high ISO, I was still seeing relativly slow shutter speeds
I was pleased with the noise level, however. I was expecting a lot more color noise than I got. My little Rebel XTi did a pretty good job. I did filter one photo for noise, but the rest were left as is.
I fired off more than 300 images, and trashed over 100 in camera because of motion blur or camera shake. The upside is that I had a wide lot of images to sort through…the downside is that I had a wide lot of images to sort through. My biggest hurdle is whittling away the chaff to get to the wheat. I got it down to 30 images after an hour of sorting. Now I have to get it down to one, to post here. It ain’t fair, I tell ya.
Piss on it, I’ll post four.
This young lady had the most energy of anyone on the stage (and she was in the best light) so I got more photos of her than of anyone else.
Bike Nite
Monday night is Bike Nite at Gary Fields’ comedy club (wich is more of a bar when their isn’t a hack comedian telling yarns inside). The patio is covered with chaps wearing leather chaps and bikers of all sorts. There is usually a band on the stage outside as well.
This evening I was on my nightly walk and was actually headed to the Griffen (tonight is 50 cent taco night) for dinner, but wandered across the street for buffalo wings and a beer instead. I came away with a few decent motorcycle shots as well.
I’m such a wannabe. My father was a biker, but I never learned to ride. If I had the extra scratch, I’d buy a bike and learn to ride, but at this point, it would just scream mid life crisis.
Under the gun…
My friend Steve ownes and oprates a firearms training school (Michigan Defensive Firearms Institute) I’ve taken a few of his classes and found them to be worth while. The link provided is worth a click.
Steve is a retired Sheriff’s Deputy from Wayne County Michigan, and generally knows his poop. He is a large individual with all of the graces and subtlety of a 400 pound ballerina, and has about as much tact as a 3 year old, but there are few people on the face of the planet that can out shoot him.
He is pictured here bird dogging one of his students.
Alternative Process Wedding
Have I mentioned how much I love film?
Weddings aren’t my favorite thing to shoot, but hey, it puts food on the table, and most of the time, they are actually fun to shoot. They aren’t my favorite thing to shoot because you roll the dice each time you do and pray you don’t end up with Bridzilla.
Anyway…no Bridzilla for this shot. One of the things that makes me unique (at least around here anyway) is that, on request, I’ll shoot film for bridal portraits. No, shooting film isn’t special, but shooting large format film is.
This photograph is a copystand reproduction of one of the portraits that was commissioned during this wedding. The bride liked the look of the lith printing process, so here it is.
She was a little slow in placing her print order after the wedding (like 9 months slow) and I had made the lith print right after their wedding in anticipation of their order. So this print was riding in my portfolio binder for 9 months. Everyone to whom it was shown fell in love with the print, so when the bride finally placed her order, I was very nearly tempted to refund to her the price for the print and just keep the lith…
Rings…
This photograph is from a wedding I shot last year. Weddings aren’t my favorite thing to shoot. I always feel like a hypocrite…could stem from my own dim view on marriage, but I digress.
I like photos that deal with details. Although I don’t always think about details when I’m shooting. As such, I don’t always get the tiny minutia, and when I see it in other photographers’ work, I get jealous.
Memorial Day @ Fort Custer
I spent this past Memorial Day at Fort Custer National Cemetery. I go every year and take photographs. Being a disabled veteran, that day hold special significance to me. I have a fist full of photos from this year and years past, but this one in particular steps out to me.
This gentleman is a member of the Patriot Guard Riders. The PGA is not a government recognized veterans group like the VFW or the American Legion. They are just a group of men and women who care so deeply about the folks in uniform and their sarifices that they give their time over and over again hundreds of times each year, not just on Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day.
Check out the PGR, it will do your heart good…
Patriot Guard Riders <—click that.
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