Last week in our Wedding One module at CDIA we shot a mock wedding, and it was an excellent, albeit chaotic experience. 9 photographers, two fashion models as our bride and groom, and our teacher, the amazing Jennifer Hudson, were packed into a studio loft apartment above the school, where we shot like crazy. We each played second (9th?) shooter most of the time, and first shooter for a very scary 3 minutes per model and 3 minutes as a couple. Giving posing directions in such a short time was daunting, especially with everyone watching, critiquing, and shooting rapid fire. I'm always surprised by the quality of photographs you can make when you pay attention to the quality of available light. This shot was about a stop and a half purposely over-exposed to get that almost blown-out, soft window light. I wouldn't have shot it like that if I had just been nulling the meter like usual and let the camera do the thinking, and it would have been a much less interesting shot. Shot at 1/50th, F3.2, ISO 250, 75mm with my 5D.

On the Hunt


On Friday I got a last-minute job from my friend and fellow photographer Paulo Pacheco, shooting a Boston-area Brazilian DJ that had decided to pack it in and move back to Brazil. He wanted a couple of photographers to shadow him and document his last night at Underbar, a local club for wealthy twenty-somethings. Arriving at the club around 11, we had no idea what we were in for, but the line of mini-skirted patrons both men and women gave us a clue. The club was wall to wall packed with people, and pitch-black. The fit bartender chick in leather shorts told me that this wasn't my local pub, and I was a bit hesitant at first to pull my my 5D, but as soon as I did I started to realize what a passport the camera was. Normally I didn't really belong in that kind upscale club with all the beautiful well to do, but with my camera I had them fighting for my attention. That wasn't why we were there, however. We met the DJ, a very like-able guy with a nondescript spiky haircut, and we were off on the hunt. All he really wanted was us to to follow him and take high-quality snapshots of him and his friends, and to document the ambiance, if that is the word for throngs of drunk women grinding and gyrating while men ogled and drank. I'd just finished my speed-light class at CDIA, and I wanted to put what I'd learned to good use. I put my flash up with a sto-fen on it, set the camera to AV with 2 stops under exposure compensation, f2.8, iso 3200, and took off into the club following the DJ. He twisted and turned through the club like a bullfighter, occasionally turning to motion to us to follow. Usually then he was gone again, and we spent our time scanning the dance floor for Brazilian men with spiky hair. It was a safari of sorts, with our quarry the one paying for us to hunt him, and it was a pretty exciting affair. After a few hours it was over, and my fellow photographers were tired, sweaty, and felt a little seedy but exhilirated. We had gone and photographed where only paparazzi usually dared to tread





Our Elusive and suprisingly lithe quarry with friends-F2.8 1/15th, iso 3200

Here's another night shot, this one from a few weeks ago. It's not perfect or the most stunning shot ever, but I like it. I think that the color on the water creates a definite mood, and unlike the legs in my earlier night shot, I was aware of the plane in the sky, and wanted to make it part of the shot. I needed to make a lot of bad shots like the one below in order to get to this shot. Once you know how, night shots are nothing difficult, but even the most difficult shots aren't that difficult once you know how. Shots that I'm struggling with now, will hopefully be as easy as this shot was in a year or so. Progress, improvement, Nice!

I put this photo on not because I think it's a good photo; I'm well-aware that it's pretty awful.That's actually why I like it. I put this photo on because it was the first photo that I ever pre-visioned and then actually took. I thought about what I wanted, loaded up my flimsy aluminum tripod and 2 megapixel olympus on my bike, grabbed a beer or two, and peddled to downtown Okayama. I used the timer, experimented with different shutter speeds, and fired away until I got something I liked. The ghostly legs in the picture were completely unplanned and I probably didn't even realized that they were there until I printed it out. I was pretty proud of it, and I printed a large copy and hung it on my classroom wall, where students told me it was great even though I'm sure many of them knew it wasn't. This photo, while really really bad, gives me a lot of hope. I've gotten a lot better since I took this shot in 2001, but I think like most students of any creative endeavor I feel that I haven't improved nearly enough. Revisiting these old shots packed away in an digital shoebox of old photos, makes me feel like improvement is an actual tangible thing that I am capable of doing.

If you're reading this, and I seriously doubt that you are, welcome to my blog. I realize that the web doesn't really need another self-absorbed, navel-gazing photography blog, but I'm going to publish one anyway. Why, you might ask? Before I became an aspiring photographer, I was an aspiring writer. Again, not too unique, I know. In this blog, I'd like to explore the connection between the two. It seems that a lot of photographers dabble in writing, and a lot of writers dabble in photography.I believe that there is a connection somewhere deep, and I'd like to mine it. I think that writing can improve my photography and vice-versa.The key to doing both well is practice, plain and simple. If one can feed the other, then I might move one step closer to a kind of creative perpetual-motion in which I no longer need to prod myself to action.

About connections, since I'm being self-absorbed, I might as well go deeper and explain a little more. My grandfather was a photographer all his life. He was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1890. He moved to Indiana in the 1920's and set up a studio which he ran, first with his brother, then with my father, for a good 3 quarters of the 20th century until he passed away.I was never interested in photography, but in writing, and that's what I studied when I was younger. It wasn't until I moved to Japan that I took up a camera. I was inspired there, both by the beautiful country and by it's people and their work ethic. Photography allowed me to document it's mysterious temples, craggy shorelines, it's innumerable pubs and quirks. There many people are dedicated to self-improvement, pushing themselves in their hobbies and careers in ways that many Americans probably think extreme.This was not and is not now, me, but it certainly made me think. Examine. Pontificate. Navel-gaze. What did I care about enough to try and push myself to do? The answer was photography. It had replaced writing as my medium of choice for whatever I wanted to say. I looked at schools in Japan and the U.S., and Massachusetts kept popping back up. I'd never been there, never even thought about going there before, but it seemed like most of the schools I was interested in were all there, in and around Boston, and all only a few miles away from where my Grandfather studied photography about a 100 years earlier. Of course I was aware of this connection, but it hit home in a visceral way while I was standing on a street corner in Belmont, MA, with my camera and tripod at six in the morning. Belmont is a small city on the outskirts of Boston, and it has a hometown,USA feeling that is many years removed from the strip malls and beaches of Florida where I grew up. My Grandfather earned his living with portraits, but it was his street photography that he clearly loved, and somehow I had wound up doing the same thing about a century later. In the blood? Subconscious suggestions from my childhood? No idea.

I put up the picture I took that morning up (with some help from CS4) as the first photograph on my blog, not because I think it's good, but because for me it represents that connection. It illustrates my point. On this blog I may put up photos that I'm proud of, but I suspect I'll be putting up many failures as well. You learn more from failure than from success, right? I have a lot more learning to do. Writing came easy to me but I was always very lazy about the whole process. Photography has come slowly to me, with thousands of photos of shite behind the few photos that I actually like. If you've taken the time to read this far then take a little more time to make a comment.Tell me you like something, tell me you think I suck, either is fine, but be sure to tell me why. To complete my pomposity, a quote from Hemingway: "Now it is necessary to get to the grindstone again."