Emma

Emma

My idea of shooting Amanda from Baba Yaga at a lonely bus stop (an homage to Salty Dave's acrylic painting "Waiting for a Bus That Ain't Coming") did not fly with The Phoenix. Whatever. We ended up using a model from ModelMayhem land, Emma, who was a trooper because it was freezing outside at the Cambridge Common. That's a curve in LAB mode in Photoshop but the image was produced very flatly via another curve in Capture One (I wish there was a LAB mode or a way to add multiple curves in Capture One, I also wish somebody who wasn't blind and hated photographers redesigned the UI). There are two pocketwizard'd 580EX flashes providing cross fill in that shot as well as a small reflector.

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posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Monday, March 26, 2007, , links to this post




The Good Fight


The customer is always right but I don't have to freaking like it. I don't have to take a photo I don't want to take. I know it is a banal observation but it is powerful and liberating. A friend recently quipped on an email:
"I get the feeling that a lot of people want a lot of really bad, really cheesy concept photography. Because there is tons of it and I think you have to try hard to make your pictures that lame"

I seem to find myself in the middle of fighting "the cheesy concept" fairly often. It's a hard battle and it takes its toll. I'm fairly aggravated with a client right now. Marina Warner when writing about the simplicity of Jean Vigo's L'Atalante writes "For it is often poverty of imagination that spins a great foam of dramatic incident in which to hide; richness that allows the banal its beauty."

I ran into Mike Slack's work recently when I read his interview in Andrew Long's fotolog.com (via 2point8). Afterwards, I found another interview with him at flashfilm.com that yielded an interesting tidbit:

"Instead of a favorite subject, I keep a long mental list of things that I try (and often fail) to avoid shooting. That list includes: funny-looking bushes; chain link fences; street signs; arrows of any kind; empty parking lots; painted brick walls; weeds; stairs; shadows; doors; rain gutters; tools; words; hats; the backs of people's heads; trash; trash cans; empty roads; plush toys; food; loading docks; telephones; cracked sidewalks; shopping carts; manhole covers; water towers; inanimate objects that resemble sex organs; airplanes; shoes; telephone wires; water puddles; clouds; stray dogs; ugly office buildings; brightly colored flowers; the ocean; empty hotel rooms; long hotel corridors; birds; air conditioners; fire hydrants; curtains; framed paintings; crashed cars; cell phone transmitters; and sofa cushions."

This list is obviously personal to him (and the "often fail" clause is a very important part of the power of such list) but it was very cathartic to write mine. But I'm not posting that list yet.



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posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Thursday, March 15, 2007,




who did this to my photo and why do they hate me?




Printed version:

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posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Friday, January 26, 2007, , links to this post




getting your hair done at the library

Janice's fashion piece on the Phoenix was published this week. It's cheeky and well written, read it. I liked the tone and the writing a lot more than the photo they picked for it. I have no one to blame, I sent it. But I liked this one better.

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posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Wednesday, December 13, 2006, , links to this post