I’m starting on a new series that will be playing still life against human figure work. The human figure work will involve the objects used in the still life images as props, or at least relate to them in form and pose.
Here are a few examples of first images from the series.
Broken Ostrich EggBinding What Cuts – Antique Garden Shears Bound With Purple RibbonBroken Whisky BottleTwo Pair of Garden Shears, unbound
I’ve got a general theme going of things that are broken or things that can do the breaking. Upcoming images will involve things like a coffee mug, some unbroken Ostrich eggs, an orange juicer, and an antique brass candlestick phone. And yes, the one set of garden shears is very definitely what it looks like, but it isn’t, so nobody can really take offense at it unless they absolutely lack a sense of humor and they have a burning desire to be offended.
I had a photoshoot at the end of last year (sorry for the delay in getting these online, but life happens) with a fantastic model, Thomas Roblez. I found him on Instagram. He has a striking, somewhat androgynous look and just radiates sexy beauty. We did a session in my studio entirely with the big Century Master portrait camera and the Kodak 405 Portrait lens. It’s a soft focus lens with a very distinctive signature look, something not easy to replicate even with extensive Photoshop work.
These were an homage to Narcissus. I like the effect of the soft-focus lens on these because it gives them a dreamy, hazy look that you’re not quite sure if it’s real or if it’s something out of the imagination. Very appropriate for the mythological nature of the subject.
This one is a darker psychological exploration. A Plague Doctor emerging from the depths of your psyche – is he here to heal, or to terrify? As we emerge from the unreal nightmare of the three year pandemic, how do we remember those times? They feel like years that didn’t really happen, that went missing, and we’re not sure what to think of them or how to remember them, or even if we can really remember them at all.
Gen Z gonna Gen Z and be on their phone non-stop.
One of his (and my) favorite shots from the photo session. I just love the relaxed, languid pose – it reminds me of those 1920s advertisements.
Not all photos, especially nudes, need to be serious. It’s good to inject some whimsy and humor from time to time.
I’ve just been playing around more with my ultra-simple setup – an ostrich egg on a cardboard box. No distractions, no fancy backgrounds. The first image is just one light – a big fresnel.
This one is two lights (obvious from the highlights on the shell), both aimed to bounce off the backdrop and backlight the shell. I’m not fully satisfied with this one, I’ll try re-shooting it some other ways.
A third take on the theme, this time contrasting the shape and texture of the egg, the box and the fossil. I realize I missed the depth of field on the fossil a little, so the very leading edge is a little soft. Another one for the re-shoot pile.
Another series/theme in my still life project is glass and light – both reflected and transmitted.
Still Life- Trio Mexicano
Trio Mexicano is a very literal treatment of glass bottles. It’s about form and shape, and is easy to interpret. We know what we’re seeing.
Still Life- Shadows of Glass
Shadows of Glass is a first attempt at a concept- I want to project the shadows of glass bottles in varying arrangements onto seamless paper and then photograph the resulting projection. I’m working on building a suspension frame that will let me be more free in the arrangement and layering of the bottles. For now, I’m somewhat limited by having to support them on a table, so my compositions are constrained by how I can group and position them.
With this ongoing home confinement due to the pandemic, I’ve been taking a lot of looks at domestic objects, particularly cooking implements, since I’ve been doing more of that lately. This is just a few articles of stainless steel things I have that photograph well. The modern tea kettle got me started, really, as it is a very sculptural piece and made me think of a show of Bauhaus photos I saw at the Goethe Institut two years ago.
The colander is obviously NOT new any more, unlike the IKEA tea kettle, so it has plenty of battle scars from two decades worth of washing and scrubbing. The swirly marks on it add something, I think, as it makes it clear this is not an advertisement for a colander but rather a portrait of an object that has had a life.
The colander and the shadow it projects gave me inspiration to take a different look at my grater with all of its different size and texture perforations. It’s a very formal presentation of the object, But I like the way it becomes abstract and about repeating geometric patterns. It almost becomes architecture, like a series of Japanese gates in a garden.
This is all about using selective focus to emphasize a subject, and use of exaggerated perspective to draw the eye into and through the image. This is one of the things I like extreme wide-angles for – the exaggerated foreground-background relationships that happen when you put them very close to something give you a new non-eye-like point of view on your subject that really forces you to consider it formally, abstractly and within its context.
A street find while walking around with the LC-A 120. This is under the railroad tracks that cross the South Bank pier of London Bridge, just across the street from Southwark Cathedral.
Lee Brothers, Potato Merchants, Behind Borough Market
I happened to look down, and then saw this admonition to “Look Right ->”. I found it mildly amusing that traffic flow was considered so confusing that it was necessary to tell people which direction to look before crossing the street. And I love the crunchy texture of the pavement and sidewalk. This is at the corner of Finsbury Square where it abuts City Road in central London.
This is another image from the Lomo LC-A 120. The only real reason I ever mention the cameras I use nowadays is to prove a point about there being little to no correlation between the “quality” of camera you use and the quality of the images you make. I have very little control over the LC-A beyond what I point it at, when I choose to trip the shutter, the film I load in it, and the rough guesstimate of the distance between me and the subject. Everything else is really out of my control. But the decisions that are most important are the ones I do have control over – what to point it at and when to trip the shutter.
Knowing my camera and how it records images is also helpful to getting what I want out of the image, of course. But this image above would have not been any more successful if I shot it with a Hasselblad Superwide, a Rolleiflex TLR, or my Fuji XT-1, each of which offer far more control and precision than the LC-A.
I’m entranced by the range of things happening in this photo. The geometry of the space (especially the grid on the floor) leading your eye back toward a vanishing point, the contrast between the stark modernity of the room structure and the gnarled, organic forms of the ancient Greek temple, the static, permanent nature of the architecture (all the moreso thanks to the twenty-five hundred year old temple in the room) providing backdrop for the hustle-bustle of people circulating the room, and the movement around the people stopped stock still to contemplate the temple. This was probably another 1/2 second exposure, maybe 1/4, hand-held with the Lomo LC-A.
A moment of serendipity as I was photographing the red granite pharaoh’s head in the British Museum caught the face of a passer-by in the lower right corner breaking through a beam of light, an equally enigmatic expression on their face as on the Pharaoh’s. In the far background, a second Pharaoh looks on.
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