… but this time in color. I caught the sunrise reflecting on the windows of the houses at the top of my alley, and tinting the sky.
That inspired me to set back up at twilight and take this version, with the sky gone deep blue but not yet black.
Just so you know, to take these photos I had to set up my tripod in the bathtub and then stand on the rim of the bathtub to be able to compose these shots. The things I do for my readers 😀
Nemours was the home of Mr. Alfred I. Dupont, one of the wealthiest men in America in the early 20th century. When stripped of his directorship at Dupont, he sought out new business opportunities including investing in Florida real estate. Spending a significant amount of time in Florida, he needed a car, and kept this Buick rumble-seat coupe at his property there. The car, unlike the others garaged at Nemours, is in original, survivor condition, complete with faded paint and dulled chrome. What makes it all the more remarkable is that the car survives without major damage (or blood on the bumpers!) as Mr. Dupont was by the time he owned the car deaf in both ears and blind in one eye.
His third wife, the true love of his life, outlived him by nearly 40 years. Her last car was this 1960 Rolls Royce Phantom V. According to the docents, this Phantom V is the #2 production car of that year, with #1 being in possession of Her Royal Britannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II.
This headlamp belongs to the second Rolls Royce in the Dupont stable, a 1950 model if memory serves.
From the A.I. Dupont estate, Nemours, outside Wilmington, Delaware. A.I. Dupont, director of the Dupont chemical company, built the house as a gift to his second wife in an attempt to grow her affections for him. The 40,000 square foot house was built in 18 months. The interior features an elevator that runs from the basement to the third floor, a billiard room, bowling alley, an ice factory (the house was built before electric refrigeration, so they needed to be able to produce their own ice to keep the ice boxes cold), and a central vacuum system. The laundry was put in a separate building perhaps 30 yards from the main house so they could say they sent their laundry out.
This is a view down the lawn from the mansion front, looking to the colonnade (which crowns a massive fountain on the other side). The garden urns have been prepared for winter with their canvas covers and their fountains drained. Even today, the estate totals some 300 acres, down from the original 3000.
I was at Nemours between Christmas and New Years to see it for the last open weekend of the year (it closes at New Years and re-opens in May). The house interior is decorated as the Duponts would have decorated for the holidays. No photos of the interior are allowed, so I do not have any pictures from inside the house. Photography on the grounds is acceptable, however, so I took these pictures of some of the details outside. In the spring, when garden tours are offered, I’ll have to go back and shoot the gardens in greater detail.
Here is a sphinx, one of a matched pair, guarding the front porch of the house. I loved the way her white marble glowed in the late afternoon winter sun.
We had a snowstorm a couple weeks ago. I know, bad me for taking so long to getting around to developing the pictures. And I have another roll from the snowstorm to go, as part of a batch. In any case, I decided I wanted to take pictures during the snowfall, so I bundled myself up and got out and about with the Rollei. This, and rain, are perhaps the two things the Rollei is less than ideal for, because the waist-level finder does nothing to prevent snow (or rain) from falling on the focusing screen. Unless of course it’s blowing sideways, at which point you have bigger problems.
I took the camera and my Induro carbon-fiber tripod out for a short walk up the street on my way to get dinner. It’s proof of the adage about finding interesting things to photograph in your own backyard. You just have to be willing to see them.
The bikeshare is a great source of material, especially if you like repeating shapes and patterns. The bike seats both break and reinforce the pattern as they are all set to slightly different heights.
The Wonderland Ballroom is a neighborhood bar and grill. Until 2004, it was the Nob Hill, DC’s oldest continuously operating gay bar (opened in 1954), catering to a primarily African-American (and in the end, elderly) clientele. Now it serves a young, ethnically and sexually diverse crowd of urban hipsters. Plus ca change, as the French say – a side-effect of gentrification.
In a long time exposure (somewhere in the region of 30 seconds) I caught the lights of a passing city bus, under the flare of a street lamp. The awesome and dramatic flare from the street lamp is a combination of the lens on my particular camera, which is prone to strange flare artifacts when you put a light source directly in the scene pointed at the lens (due in part to some loss of coating on the front element of the lens) and the specular reflections from the falling snow. In some cases I’d find lens flare like this to be highly objectionable and would consider the shot ruined. In this case, though, I think it makes the image.
Too often you only see models with that vacant, fashion-model stare, or the “I’m trying to seduce you” gaze. I think it’s important to show a range of emotions in a portfolio, so potential clients can see you giving different moods.
Bo is a pretty serious guy, but he does know how to relax and laugh (but you have to catch him between official shots – otherwise he reverts back to staring directly at the camera).
A few more from the underwear series – he looks really good in red.
Another from the plaid shirt set. Actually, he looks good in anything! I suspect you could put him in a Soviet potato sack and he’d make it rock (although good luck trying to get him to do that – he wasn’t crazy about trying on my ex-Soviet Army surplus winter hat with the red star insignia on it).
Here are some more candidates for the headshot –
On this one, especially because it’s a horizontal shot, I wanted to emphasize the face, so I selected it in Photoshop and masked it out, then applied a little bit of blur to the rest, so the face pops out more, like I had used a much wider aperture (my lights are actually at times TOO powerful and it’s hard to not stop down too much).
I really like this last one because it gives great shape and definition to his face – his previous head shot, although it was square on, was basically lit flat from directly in front, and had no contouring, so it made him look like an Asian chipmunk. He actually has a very shapely face, and I think this does him justice.
This is what happens when you shoot two days in a row, then go work at the office for a full day, then come home and edit photos until 11pm. Your judgment gets a bit off. I posted the original version of this headshot with the studio background intact (well, minus a broom handle I cloned out). Looking at it again in the clarity of new morning light, I realized that the background stuff, while cool, was a serious distraction from the goal of the photo – getting you to focus on the model’s face. So I got rid of the background altogether in a remake – What do you think? Much better, no?
Sunday was my shoot with Bo. Bo is also a trainer and a bartender. I know he works VERY hard to keep the body he has but I still get jealous. Bo already had a bit of a portfolio so we were expanding his look. He needed new head shots first and foremost, so I concentrated on getting good full face images in each of the looks we did.
These are the prime candidates for head shots so far.
See what I mean about a body to be jealous of? It’s like there’s not an ounce of fat anywhere to be found.
Here’s body movement for you – Bo is quite good at shaping his body to give it natural visual dynamic.
Several from the underwear series we shot.
What I was thinking when I put Bo against a black backdrop I’ll never know, as he has jet black hair that wants to disappear into the black velvet. Keeping the hair light on the top of his head to pick it out from the background was a constant fight. But I think we got some very useable shots out of it in the end.
For the first hundred or so shots we did, there was an issue with his forehead being much darker than the rest of his face in the photos. He’s got naturally very even skin tone but for some reason, the forehead was photographing darker than his face, which made it look like he had a sunburn, or he was wearing big ski goggles while outside that kept his eyes lighter. But as the shoot progressed, the problem went away.
For the fashion look, we did a bit of a rock-n-roll styling with a leather jacket, jeans, unlaced boots and a belt with a spinner in the buckle.
Yes, that belt buckle actually spins.
We did another casual look with a red checkered shirt – I do have more of these but I haven’t edited through all of them yet – this was just one that popped out for the pose as well as the splash of color.
I thought I’d play around with turning a couple of the underwear shots black-and-white. I’m not terribly fond of digital black-and-white conversions – if I’m shooting personal work, and I want black-and-white, there’s no substitute for real film. Here is the one I’m happiest with so far.
In this case, I think the black-and-white conversion does add something to the sensuality, and it could be a nice touch to diversify his portfolio. I have even more images to edit through from this shoot – I think the grand total was 489 in three hours. This is the time you do thank god for digital.
Among the many things I do photographically, I shoot model portfolios. I did back-to-back shoots on Saturday and Sunday this weekend. This is one where you do shoot digital because of the volume of shots required, the usual turnaround time, and the delivery methods. It would be beyond a pain in the ass to have to get the film back from the lab, edit the shots, then scan, then edit again, then do post-production clean-up. So I brought out the Canon 5D and shot away. All images were made with either the Canon 50mm f1.4 or the Canon 135 f2 L lens. While zooms have their convenience, when you’re working in a small studio, there’s little call for something very telephoto, and you can always take a couple steps back or forward if you need.
My first model is Bucky. He’s a professional trainer at a high-end gym here in DC. The goal was to get him a decent headshot and a couple different looks to flesh out his portfolio and modeling card. I’ve got a couple prime candidates for his headshot:
This could also be a head shot, but in a horizontal composition, for something a bit different.
Which one do you like best? Don’t worry, I shot around 350 images of him, so there’s plenty more to choose from if these don’t cut the mustard.
Then comes the formal look. The shoot stylist pulled together a suit and tie look for him from the studio’s stock wardrobe. That was a hoot because someone had mismatched the pants with the jacket and at first, there was a size 36 waist with a 38 short jacket (that should have had a 30 inch waist pant to go with it). We were afraid he’d have to wear the pants pinned up with binder clips and gaffers’ tape, but shortly the proper pants were found and we were off to the races.
I snagged a candid of the stylist adjusting his shirt for a series of somewhat more casual shots.
These two are showing winter styling with a sexy twist. The first shot shows off his ability to shape his body, as well as the shape his body is in.
This one is about giving a different mood to the same outfit.
We also shot the obligatory underwear shoot. The underwear shots are as much about showing off a model’s ability to move and sculpt their body in poses as they are about underwear – after all, there isn’t very much to underwear itself, is there?
You want to make sure a model looks as good out of clothes as in them because it’s about their ability to SELL whatever it is they’re wearing.
And last but not least is a bit of a crossover – we paired a tuxedo shirt with red underwear to add a different kind of sexy to the shot.
Another panorama taken from a 4×5 Fujicrhome transparency shot on my trip to the eastern Sierra. This view is from the north, looking down at the lake from the top of that volcanic upthrust where the fissures are that I mentioned in the previous post.
Mono Lake is like the Great Salt Lake in Utah or the Dead Sea in Israel – it has no natural drainage, so over time, the waters have become super alkaline with all the minerals that leach out of the rocks and soil around it. I wouldn’t drink it, and although you can swim in it if you’re so inclined, it’s not a pleasant feeling. The mineral content makes it such that it is easy to float on the surface – the ducks and other aquatic birds seem to float on top of the water, instead of in it. I have a few photos of the tufa formations for which the lake is famous that I’ll scan and post later. The tufas are formed when pure freshwater from underground springs enters the lake, causing the minerals in the water around it to sediment out and form hollow columns in fantastic shapes.
A few scenes from the high desert around Mono Lake. You’ll forgive my ignorance of desert flora and not naming the plants properly, but I’m an east coast city boy at heart, so I’m lucky I can tell an oak tree from a blade of grass. Well, not entirely true, but you get the point – a horticulturalist I’m not.
Thinking of horticulture, that reminds me of an old joke about Dorothy Parker – she was invited to speak at a meeting of the Ladies Auxiliary of the New York Botanical Gardens. Knowing of her penchant for a quick wit, one of the more naive members of the group asked her to use “horticulture” in a sentence. Her response? “You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think”. For repeating the joke in this context, the quip is probably about me, but I have a good sense of humor about such things. More scrub brush on the top of the plateau:
These are taken in the scrublands atop the volcanic uplift plateau on the north edge of Mono Lake. For geology buffs, the plateau was uplifted perhaps 10 to 15,000 years ago in an event so rapid and violent it created fissures resembling miniature slot canyons. I went out in search of said fissures and hiked around on top of this plateau for perhaps two hours, looking for them, not finding any, all the while wary that I would miss one and inadvertently plummet down into one and get stuck. As it turns out, they’re on and near the leading edge of the plateau, and had I stuck to the edge, I would have found them perhaps fifteen minutes after ascending to the top of the plateau. But I had a lovely time all to my self, communing with the great open spaces, and I saw these scenes, so no great regrets.
I think I goofed the movements on the camera with this one, as there is some out of focus in the foreground that in retrospect really shouldn’t be there, but I’ll blame it on the altitude getting to me – I was fat and out of shape, and hiking at nearly 9000 feet of elevation with 30+ lbs of camera gear on my back.
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