Catching up

I haven't posted for a couple of months, but meanwhile am edging ever closer to finishing my PhD and have done a few more shoots as well. I did two separate shoots with circus performers, another shoot with Neville Marcinkowsky, some landscapes, the first Streetball Masters game of the season in Amsterdam, and a portrait shoot with a former student, Martijn.

The first of these was the shoot with Martijn, and at first I almost called it off because of a technical problem. About thirty minutes into the shoot, the shutter on my DF+ failed, making it impossible to continue shooting with that camera. I didn't have a backup because by then I'd been using it quite a while and had never had any problems with it. I did bring backups originally, but then as I continued to not use them, they became excess weight and I decided to leave them home. With Martijn, I decided to go back home, retrieve my D800, and finish the shoot, which I did. I'm glad I did because I really like the portrait I ended up with, shot using a Zeiss 15mm distagon lens:

Because the DF+ was out of commission, I had to send it to Denmark to be repaired. The 5 year uptime guarantee from Phase One is great though, because they sent me a replacement within 24 hours, to use while I waited for my camera to be returned.

My next shoot was with Christiaan, a juggler from CodArts in Rotterdam. I had considered shooting him at the CodArts facility in Rotterdam, but his act--unlike others--did not require the apparatus at the school. For that reason, we agreed that his session would take place in a smaller town, at a large modern plaza that is almost always devoid of people. The first problem was that the trains weren't running that day due to construction, something neither one of us knew until he arrived at the station in Rotterdam and I arrived at the station in Breda to pick him up. The second problem was that we had decided to meet at the piano at the Breda station, but when I got there, I saw that the piano was gone--removed because of vandalism. Christiaan wound up taking a bus and arrived right on time, then found me quite easily.

We then got in a cab to get to the location, but when we arrived, the entire plaza was blocked off for construction due to a local festival going up that weekend. We sat there for a few minutes as I ran through mental maps of the area, trying to think of an alternate. Then I remembered a little park that has an artificial lake with an elbow shaped walkway extending to the middle of the water. We decided to shoot there and off we went. The elbow in the planking allowed me to shoot him from an angle that a straight walkway wouldn't have allowed, but my favorite shot was made straight on anyway. Our main concern here was that he didn't want to drop his juggling clubs in the water and I didn't want my lights falling in. One of my lights was actually in the water, sunk as deep in the mud as I thought was needed to hold it in place despite the current and wind.

Christiaan did lose a club, but twenty or thirty minutes later, it drifted close enough to the deck that I could retrieve it. After the water shots, I went to take a headshot and it was there, on dry ground, that the wind knocked over my light stand and shattered the back of one of my lights. Luckily it still worked, but it looked a mess and the LCD panel was only partially readable (it has since been fixed, good as new).

Ronja is a tightrope walker and not incidentally a very nice person. I shot her at the CodArts facility in Rotterdam. While she was showing me what she could do, I kept wanting to get highly specific, static poses from her. It took quite a while to get these exactly as I wanted, and then she happened to be stretching when I grabbed a shot that is one of my favorites from the session--though she isn't even on the rope.

I did a more complicated wide angle shot of her balancing on one leg, and another where she spins on the rope (actually a steel cable). Both of these were tough to get, meaning they ate up a lot of time. For this reason, I'll be going back to Rotterdam again to do a more active shoot with her, where she is continuously in motion.

After Ronja, I did another shoot with stylist Neville Marcinkowsky--who is turning into a real creative partner on these. We spent a couple of weeks coming up with a story to be illustrated in pictures, and then he created the costume, found the props and overall added quite a lot to the shots. Meanwhile I did color comp sketches for each shot so that we would know what we wanted to get at each location. Speaking of location, we spent three days scouting different places until we found Loonse Duinen--a huge sand dune right in the middle of the Netherlands. Because we had a lot of props and it wasn't going to be easy to be carrying a steel desk and other props out into the middle these huge piles of sand, I hired a student Loek Gijbertse to assist on the shoot. The first shot was scheduled for before dawn, so Loek met me and Neville at the location at 04:45 in the morning. It was supposed to be earlier, but Neville and I were late (Loek was on time--04:30).

The story for the shoot is that an adventurer is sitting down to write a memoir. It focuses on a time when he is stranded in an inhospitable desert and must make do with whatever he can find. The first shot is of him sitting at his desk at home as he begins to write, but his surroundings are of this other foreign place as it enters his mind while writing. Below is my sketch and below that the final image. Neville, by the way, does not smoke. And yet, in both of the shoots we've done so far, he has added something to smoke to add to the character of the shots. The first time I could barely breathe while he smoked a cigar, but this time I shot with a long 150mm lens and we were outside, so I barely noticed and it does add to the shot.

The next shot 'Scavenger', is of Neville taking stock of some wreckage, then arranging to tie it to his body to carry it away. I didn't know what kind of props Neville was going to find, so I just made generic shapes in my sketch. Then when we did the actual shoot, the composition changed quite a lot.

 The third shot in the 'Memoir' group was 'Trek'. For this shot, Neville is dragging a big heavy propeller through the sand. Like the desk shot, this one looks very similar to my sketch, though I had thought his costume would be white. I'm not sure why I thought this, but it is the only major difference between the sketch and the photo.

The last 'story' shot of the day has Neville sitting under a tree in the desert after he's made it into a kind of shelter. The composition for this is quite different from the sketch for two reasons. The first is that Neville hadn't had time to finish making the red mask he was working on and 2) the sun was on the wrong side of the tree, so I shot it from the other side, looking down instead of up. For that I put our ladder on the highest point and got all the way to the top of it. I wanted to get higher, but there was no way to do it in that location.To make up for the missing red mask, Neville brought a red cloth so that we would have red against white--something that I wanted in this shot. Despite the sun, I used off-camera lighting for all of these shots. In this case, so that Neville's figure didn't become a dark silhouette under the tree. To be sure they lights didn't fall over in the wind, Neville brought long metal stakes that we used to anchor the light stands to the ground.

 I did a couple of close-up head shots of Neville, but this is my favorite.

After the shoot was over, I noticed that all of my equipment had sand in it. Sand literally poured out of the vents of my tethered MacBook pro. I hadn't worried about this possibility because I had shot in wet conditions without any difficulty. Sand, I now realized, was worse than water. I was able to clean most of my equipment, but to be sure I sent my DF+ to the factory to be cleaned. So now I had three important lessons from these shoots:

1. Always bring a backup camera
2. Anchor light stands firmly when shooting in wind
3. Protect camera and other gear from sand

Added to that is something I learned in Thailand:

1. Avoid stepping backwards off of docks while carrying a camera!

The last shoot for this abnormally long post is the first Streetball Masters shoot of this year, held in Amsterdam. I don't like shooting there because the colors at the stadium don't work well (in my opinion) with the garish red and blue mats laid out on the ground as outdoor courts. I much prefer the venues in Rotterdam and Den Haag for this reason. Here are a couple of shots from that session:

And last, I bought some new Lee filters for landscape use. Here are a couple of tests done with those: