The Big Kat

In my last posting, I wrote about and included some photos of my trip out to Utah to photograph the model Tamara. Today it’s my turn to write about my photo shoot near San Francisco with Kat Love. I last worked with Kat back in 2004 at Joshua Tree National Park and it was good to see her and work with her again. Kat’s a big girl – six foot two – and now that she has some hair on her head (which she didn’t have before), I guess we can add a little more to that height.

I didn’t rent a car in San Francisco, so Kat was good enough to pick me up at my hotel and drive me to the locations at which we photographed. (I did pay her for the cost of gas and tolls.) We had chosen to go to two spots in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge north from San Francisco.

Our first destination was the Muir Woods, a very beautiful place with huge redwood trees. I’d wanted to visit this spot before but never made it, so this was a good opportunity to finally get there. As we were doing this on a Saturday, when there would likely be a great deal of visitors (it is a popular place, and justifiably so), we chose to go here first.

Kat picked me up at my hotel at 6 a.m. so we were able to get there before 7:00, at which time we didn’t really see anybody else around. I pretty much worked with one eye on Kat and my other eye on the lookout for other people, but fortunately, we were able to work relatively undisturbed for about an hour and a half. I had thought that we might have to go off of the main trail (which people are asked not to do) to have some privacy, but that really wasn’t necessary. All of our photo spots were right next to the trail.

Eventually, inevitably, more people kept arriving, so the time finally came to pack things up and head back to the car. On the way back, I passed a very interesting set of wooden stairs built into the hillside and would have loved to have photographed Kat on them, but there were just too many people around to do so. I made some photos of the stairs with my big camera all the same, but hopefully if I make it back I’ll make some photos there early on while I still can!

Next, we drove up Highway 1 to work at a small, rocky beach near Stinson Beach. I think Kat said this beach is called Red Rock Beach, but I gave it the name “Mussel Beach,” as there’s a sign by the path down asking people not to disturb the mussels that are growing there. Kat said that this is understood to be a nudist beach, but most of the people we saw were rock climbers, I think. (Sounds like a good place for Tamara, who I wrote about last time – she can combine naturism with rock climbing.)

The weather, as it had been at the Woods, was a nice overcast, which yielded beautiful soft light, and I think it helped me to make some good images with Kat. (You can see some of the snapshots I made with my pocket digital camera in both locations here.) Sadly, just as we began the long, high climb back up the parking lot, the sun came out and began to heat things up! Just another hazard of being a photographer, I guess.

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In other news, I’m continuing to develop film. I’ve decided to alternate my figure work with the photos from my trip to Asia, so I’ve taken care of six rolls from Laos, along with three rolls each from my photo sessions with Tamara, Carly Champagne and Maria Eriksson. Three more from Laos should be coming up next.

Earlier today, I also decided to replace my photo editing program, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, with a newer version, Photoshop Element 4.0. I’ve had the new program for a while now (I think it came with my new scanner), but I was reticent to make the change as I feared I might not be able to figure out how to use the new version. Today, though, I gave it a try, as I read that the new edition is a major upgrade over the older one, and I figured that Adobe would no doubt make it very simple for users of the older program to understand the new one. Right?

Well, as it turned out, wrong!!! I uninstalled the old version and installed the new one. The first thing I noticed was that I could not see two or more images together on the work screen at the same time – making it difficult to compare images side by side. I also tried to overlay one image onto another using the Layers function, but again, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Certainly, it didn’t work doing it the way I did it before – as this way requires both images to be up at the same time, which the new version doesn’t allow.

So, after trying several times to get it to work (I use this function to add the black border around my images), I decided to throw in the towel and gave up. I uninstalled 4.0 and re-installed 2.0. While the new version may do more things, I really don’t need all of that stuff. All I need is a basic image editing program that will allow me to crop, adjust for contrast, dodge and burn, etc. These are the kinds of things that I can do in a darkroom, and I’m not really interested in fancy ways of digitally doctoring things up.

Most importantly, I need a program that I know how to use, and right now, I haven’t got the time to figure out how to use a new one when I understand the old one and it works just fine.

Tamara

Well, I’m back home here in Brooklyn, having returned to New York on Sunday afternoon. The flight into JFK on Delta actually landed about 15 minutes early. That was the good news. The bad was that once we touched down, we had to wait an hour and ten minutes to get to the arrival gate! (Seems that the little tug truck that pulls the planes around was broken.)

Making things worse was the fact that the kid behind me was screaming almost the whole time on the ground (not to mention during the flight) and his parents did little to try to quiet him. I told the flight attendant before I left the plane that every aircraft should be equipped with a brick to deal with such situations. The fact that I had gotten absolutely no sleep the night before didn’t help. Why no sleep?

I attended the annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival for two nights, and the late movie on Saturday night ended around 12:15 a.m. I hurried out of the theater and made the 12:30 streetcar from the Castro area back to Fisherman’s Wharf, a few blocks from my hotel. With a 6:30 a.m. flight, I figured that the restaurants at the airport might be closed that early, so I went to a 24 hour IHOP in the Radisson Hotel and had a big stack of buttermilk pancakes with hash browns between 1:00 and 1:30.

I got back to my hotel room at the San Remo around 1:40 a.m., then spent the next hour-plus packing my bags and getting ready to leave. I pretty much finished that around 3:00, so for the next half hour I rested atop the bed without closing my eyes – fearful that I might doze off and miss my 4:10 shuttle bus pickup for the airport. The bus was on time and things went fairly smoothly except for the screaming kid and his almost equally loud older brother. That put an end to any thoughts of sleeping on the plane, so I watched some episodes of Doctor Who and Space:1999 on my portable DVD player (though I did doze off numerous times).

Still, I did get home safely, which is the most important thing. I guess the pilot ordered the plane to be filled with enough fuel, after all.
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As for photography on my trip, I photographed models on two days – first a day trip from Las Vegas to Utah to work with Tamara, then a morning spend with Kat in Marin County, north of San Francisco. I’ll write about Kat another time, so I’ll concentrate on my session with Tamara now.

I had never been to Utah before, so I was excited at the chance to photograph around Zion National Park, which I’d heard is quite beautiful. Before getting to Utah, I had to drive through the Nevada desert, much of it cruising around 80 mph in the 75 speed limit zone – something I’m definitely not used to doing here in the east. When I made the turnoff from the main highway in Utah to head out to Zion, there was a sign naming number of restaurants nearby, most of them with American sounding names like Rancho Canyon Grill or some such thing. Among those names, however, I noticed the one for Hunan Chinese Buffet. “Yes,” I thought to myself. “No place can call itself truly American without a Chinese restaurant there.”

Actually, I was nearly late meeting Tamara. We had agreed the day before to meet at 3 p.m., so I figured that with an estimated two and a half hour drive, I’d leave Las Vegas around 12 noon or so. Later that evening, though, I realized that I’d forgotten to ask her one thing: are Nevada and Utah in the same time zone? I didn’t want to be an hour late, but I didn’t want to be an hour early, either. I couldn’t get in touch with Tamara the next morning, so I called the Las Vegas AAA office and I was told that Utah is indeed one hour ahead. I wound up leaving around 11:20 a.m. and arrived in Tamara’s town just a few minutes before 3.

As for the photo session, I first had lunch with Tamara and her boyfriend Matt. Both are avid rock climbers and they lead me to a great spot just outside Zion National Park that they’d found on one of their climbing adventures. I shot eight rolls of 220 BW film and I think the images I got made the long drive worthwhile. You can see some of my digital snapshots of Tamara here now. It was fairly late when we started, so the sun was below the horizon by the time we finished, though thankfully there was enough light to navigate the dirt road that connected up with the main roads. We had dinner afterwards but I didn’t start heading back until around 11:00 p.m. I finally got back to Vegas around 1:00.

As for the film I shot, you’re probably wondering when (or if) I’ll ever get around to developing them. Well, as Gomer Pyle would say, “Surprise! Surprise!” I actually developed three rolls from this session last night. I normally develop film in the order in which it’s shot, but as I’m planning to put together a somewhat lengthy slide show for the Community Zoe get-together in September and I want to include new work, I’ve decided to develop some of this year’s nude images along with my photos from Laos and Cambodia (the first in line) right now. So far, the negatives look good, but I’ll have to find a lot of time to scan them.

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Finally, the day is now past July 11, which means that two of my photos should now be on display in the Artful Nude exhibition at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado. The show runs until August 9. You can see the images selected for the exhibition by clicking here. (My photos are all the way at the bottom, for some reason.) The reception for the show is the evening of August 1. I’m planning to be there.

By The Bay

I thought I'd take a few minutes to make a relatively quick posting today. I haven't written anything recently as I haven't had access to the internet until now. I've spent the past six days in Las Vegas visiting family and today I arrived here in the City by the Bay - San Francisco. I was last here nine years ago and it's good to be back.

After arrival I finally got to speak again with Kat Love. We had scheduled a photo shoot for a few days from now and at last we were able to talk to finalize arrangements. I'll also be attending several screenings at the annual Silent Film Festival here this weekend, which I am really looking forward to attending. I've been a fan of silent films for some time, but I've never seen one (or as the present case is, three) in such grand circumstances.

Back in Las Vegas I met my friend Terrell Neasley for breakfast one morning and as usual we talked about photography and models. I only photographed for one day but it was quite a day: a long day trip out to the vicinity of Zion National Park in Utah, where I photographed the model Tamara. She and her boyfriend are avid rock climbers and they took me to a fantastic location where I think I made some very good images. I'm even tempted to move these rolls of film to the beginning of the queue for the film awaiting development! Overall it was a very long day, as I think I drove about 400 miles all told.

Tonight I'll be having dinner with some people who live here in San Francisco who I met on my trip to Southeast Asia earlier this year. It'll be good to eat some San Francisco food once again!

Changing Plans

Today was one of those days when I had planned to get a lot of things done, including filing more of my negatives from Tibet, scanning a bunch of negatives, taking care of housework, finally writing another blog entry (it has been nearly a week since the last one), etc.

Sadly, I had to put most of that on hold. My uncle died yesterday morning and so I needed to attend the funeral today. As usual on such occasions, it’s said to have to see members of your family under such circumstances but at least you’re still happy to see them. It reminds me of what the secretary of my department at Yale used to say about the only times that the family gets together: for a match, a hatch or a dispatch. I hope the next time won’t be for a dispatch.

I’m also trying to get my own medical problems sorted out, and I’m going to have another test done tomorrow. Hopefully it will be the last one for quite some time.

On a positive note, I’m happy to report that I will be flying out to Colorado for the reception at the Artful Nude exhibit at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins. The exhibit actually runs from July 11 to August 9, but the reception is on Friday evening, August 1. (I think the Center’s website will post the photos on display on its website at that time, so I’ll post the link when it’s up.)

It seems rather odd that the gallery night will be only about a week before the show closes, but I’ve been told that this is to have the reception coincide with the monthly art gallery walk in Fort Collins, which is on the first Friday of the month. That’s also the weekend that the juror, Kim Weston, will be teaching a workshop there.

I really wasn’t certain if I’d be going due to the expense of the best airline flights I’d found, but after doing some more searching, I found a much, much cheaper deal by flying out of LaGuardia Airport rather than my preferred airport, JFK. Unfortunately, the flight departs at 6:00 in the morning and I should get to Fort Collins (via Denver) around 10:00, I figure – or about five hours before my hotel room will be ready. Still, at least it should get me there in plenty of time to attend the reception that night!

Overall, then, I didn’t get to do most of what I’d planned to do today – but at least I got the blog entry written and posted.

The photo, for those who are wondering, is one of Alison, made on my trip to Scotland in 2004.

Message from a Model

Well, folks, it’s summertime – the time when lots of people go out and do some traveling. I was in Southeast Asia in March and I had originally planned to go to Ladakh – the Himalayan part of India – this summer. For various reasons, though, I decided to change my plans and will instead stay here within the U.S. of A.

I try to do some photography when I travel, so with that in mind, I contacted a model who I’ve photographed more than once over the past few years. She encouraged me to pay a visit to the area where she now lives so we could do another photo shoot. When I told her that I was seriously considering doing so, she was very enthusiastic about working with me again.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I received this message from her:

“No Dave, that wasn't the deal. I did stay longer than I had agreed to because I was trying to be nice. Honestly, I am tired of trying to be nice to you. You're awful to work with and your pictures are mediocre at best. Please don't contact me anymore.”

Naturally, I was rather taken aback by this. (I mean, “Whoa!!!”) I’d thought that we worked together well and we had a friendly correspondence. Consider, if you will, this message which she’d sent me following our last photo session:

“Dave,

Thank you so much for your sweet words and silly pictures! You are a doll :)

Best,

-----------”

So what was it that turned her against me in such a manner? Why, the thing that has ended many a relationship in this world of ours. In a word: money.

Even though we agreed to arrange a photo session, we had not agreed on how much I’d pay her. As a means of starting off negotiations, I reminded her of how much I paid her previously and that our sessions were essentially full day bookings. That’s when she went ballistic on me.

To be honest, I hate negotiating over fees – especially with someone that I’ve worked with previously and that I like, as it’s more difficult to be impersonal about it. I feel a lot like the general manager of a pro sports team negotiating to re-sign a ball player. “We think you’re a terrific player and we’d love to have you play with us again – but we just can’t afford to pay you the kind of money that you’re asking for. Will you accept what we can give you?” (Or, perhaps, “We think you’re good – but not that good.")

When it comes to money, for me it’s a one way street. The money flows out of my pocket and little or none it flows back. As this is just an avocation for me (an important avocation, to be sure, but an avocation, nonetheless), I need to put limits on what I spend. Model fees are included in that just like things such as airfare and hotels.

As for what a proper model fee should be – well, I guess supply and demand applies here as it does to most other things economic. There are plenty of models I’ve tried to work with who have asked for more than I can pay. Some of them agree to work for less and I am grateful when they do so. Some don’t – and hey, if they can find a job that pays more than I can, more power to them. Even though I’d like the higher priced models to work with me, I always tell them that if they can get more from somebody else, they should go for it. I understand that models have bills to pay – but I have bills to pay, too, and overspending on something that brings no money in return will not improve my rating at the bank.

The one thing that should hold true is that anything that involves money is a business transaction, and that all people involved should act in professional, courteous, business-like manner. Clearly, the message that I received two weeks ago was unprofessional in the extreme – and if she doesn’t want to work with me again, then I have no desire to work with her. It’s unfortunate, though, and I hate to have to lower my opinion of someone for whom I’d had a lot of respect and admiration.

Of course, this message begs this question: were her earlier, happier messages to me genuine and then something just caused her to snap – or were they just a lot of bullshit designed to keep me coming back as a paying customer? Of course, if she thought that I was so awful to work with, why did she encourage me to work with her again? Was she simply so desperate for money that she’d be willing to work with anyone – even an “awful” person and “mediocre” photographer like me?

Regarding our earlier photo sessions, she never complained about what I paid her and the time she worked. Perhaps she really was trying to accommodate me (her “being nice” to me), but if she really felt that she was being underpaid, she could always have said “no.” I don’t hold a gun to a model’s head saying that I’ll pull the trigger if she doesn’t agree to my fee. I’ve been told “no” before and I dare say that I'll be told "no" again. Had she done that, I’d have either made a higher offer or I would have said “Sorry, but I can’t give you any more, so I guess the shoot is off.” I suppose that’s the chance people take when they ask for more.

As for my mediocre photography, today I sent out my two framed prints that were selected for inclusion in the Artful Nude exhibit at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado. Now I have to decide if I want to pay $500+ for airfare between New York and Denver to attend the reception for the event. I’d love to be there to see my photos on the wall and to meet the juror, Kim Weston. On the other hand, this photography thing is just an avocation – and as such I have only so much to spend.

Weekend at Woodstock

As I wrote in my last posting, I went up to Woodstock, New York, for a two-day photography workshop this past weekend. The Center for Photography at Woodstock is where I began to photograph art nudes and to take black & white photography seriously, way back in 1995, so it’s nice to go back there and meet other people interested in photography. It also makes a good getaway out of the city and into the fresh air of the country. For a number of years I attended two workshops each summer – one devoted to nudes, the other to something else such as landscape, architectural or aerial photography.

I learned the basics of art nude photography in my early days there, but now I’m at the stage where I can photograph nudes fairly well (or so some people tell me), so I’ve begun to think of how I can do things differently and perhaps more interestingly. This weekend’s workshop, though it had nude models on hand for photographing, was about photographic creativity rather than just nudes. The instructor, Josephine Sacabo from New Orleans, showed us some amazing images that she’d made by combining different negatives and using solarization.

I prefer to do my creativity in camera and not have to do too much in the darkroom, so I continued to work on my multiple exposure series. Josephine noted that a weeklong workshop is much better for giving feedback than a weekend workshop, and as I work with film rather than a digital camera, I wasn’t able to show her any of my images from our day shooting on Sunday. She did say that we could e-mail some of our images from the day to her for short critiques, so perhaps I may try to do that sometime once the film is developed – and take it from me, that won’t be any time soon!

At the urging of one of my fellow participants who I came to call “my agent,” I also showed my portfolio of nudes to the owner of a photo gallery in town. He said that they’re good but not what he’s looking for. Oh, well – you can’t expect success the first time out. I certainly wasn’t surprised, as most of the photos in the gallery were made through alternative printing processes or were in color. Little or no silver prints were to be seen, but that’s what I print.

On the other hand, he did suggest another gallery in town that displays and market the nude images made by its owners – so I guess that’s worth a try the next time I’m up there.
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I was saddened yesterday to read about the death of Cyd Charisse, the beautiful dancer and actress who appeared in films primarily in the 1940’s and ‘50’s. I had been a big fan of hers ever since seeing Singin’ in the Rain on television quite a number of years ago. That film is set in Hollywood during the transitional days from silent films to talkies and it got me interested in the films of the silent era.

It also got me interested in the films of Cyd Charisse. In one very colorful and fanciful segment called the “Broadway Melody Ballet,” Gene Kelly slides across the polished floor on his knees – only to be confronted by the long leg of a woman in green wearing a Louise Brooks-style bob of hair. The ensuing dance sequences made my jaw drop – and it wasn’t because of Gene Kelly!

“Wow!!!!!!,” I thought to myself. “Who is that???” I knew it wasn’t one of the major cast members, and I don’t think there were credits at the end to identify the cast members. I did remember that the name of Cyd Charisse was in the credits and I knew that she was a dancer, so I guessed it was her.

I was right. From that moment on, I tried to see more of her films. With the exception of Brigadoon (also with Gene Kelly), I think I’ve seen her in most or all of her major rolls: in the musicals The Band Wagon, Silk Stockings (both with Fred Astaire) and It’s Always Fair Weather (another with Kelly), the comedy Meet Me in Las Vegas (with Dan Dailey) and the noirish crime drama, Party Girl (with Robert Taylor). If you’re interested in dance (and yes – I mean you, DL) or just want to see how great and entertaining a dancer can look on screen, I’d recommend seeing any or all of these films.

I actually had the chance to see her when she was appearing on Broadway in the early 1990’s in Grand Hotel, playing the part of an aging ballerina. I went to see that show with a number of people from my office on a freezing cold night in February, but the play was ruined for me before it even started. The dreaded white slip of paper was found in my playbill, and sure enough, it said that Cyd Charisse would not be appearing that night. I suppose I could have tried to go another night, but I never did. I guess the loss was mine.

In short, Betty Grable may have been the “Girl With the Million Dollar Legs,” but for my money, I’d have gone for Cyd Charisse’s gams any time. The movies would not have been the same without them.

The Weekend

Well, it’s Friday evening and the weekend is finally upon us. It couldn’t arrive soon enough for me. This week I’ve been forced to take a class at work and today was the exam – and basically, I need to pass this test to keep my job! It’s supposedly a means to train us, but this class had very little to do with the work that we actually do. More likely, it’s just an excuse for management to get rid of anybody who doesn’t pass all of the exams for these classes that we have to take. At any rate, I feel pretty confident that I did well.

Of course, I had to spend a lot of my own time reading and studying to make sure I did pass, so no photographic work was done until I got home today. At that time I got busy making some black & white prints on my Epson inkjet printer. (Yes, I still believe in making traditional silver prints, but I have nothing against making inkjet prints just to show people. I still don’t consider them to be art prints of any kind.)

The ones I’ve been printing have been my recent multiple exposure images – including the photo of Sarah Ellis above, made in Ohio last year. I’m attending a photography workshop this weekend and I’m planning to bring these photos in the hope of getting some positive feedback on what I’ve been doing with this technique and some ideas on how to proceed further with them. I’ll try write about it next week.

Have a good weekend, all.

“James Dean”

I finally got to work again today on filing my photos from Tibet that I made last year. Rolls 11 through 19 were taken care of, so I’ve now filed more than half of the images from that trip. Once I finish off the rest, I can get to work on starting to develop my film from this year!

After finishing the filing, I decided to scan a couple of Tibet photos from an earlier part of the trip. The tour began with a couple of days spent in and around the town of Tsedang, and we then headed east into an area of Tibet that few westerners visit, due to the need to have a multitude of travel permits, some of which are hard to get. (As a matter of fact, I just checked the itinerary of this year’s departures of the trip I took and, for some reason, this part of Tibet is no longer included.)

Along the way, we traveled on a road above a deeply cut valley and eventually stopped to admire the view at a small, newly built village called Shar Chang. A number of the residents came out to meet us and pose for photos, and they looked much like the Tibetan people I’d already seen.

Then one fellow appeared who looked different. Up he rode on his motorcycle, a young man with a swept back shock of dark hair. Well, upon seeing the hair and the bike, I thought to myself, “This guy looks like James Dean!” To be perfectly honest, I’ve not seen any of three films in which Dean starred (East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant), but he is a pop culture figure and I have seen photos of him.

I think I would have taken some photos of this man had he not looked like Dean, but his appearance did make it more interesting – and I knew right then and there that I’d have to make a blog posting with him. Afterwards, I asked myself the question, “Is it a coincidence that he looks like James Dean, or had he seen some photos of Dean and decided to emulate him?”

I think I may have come up with an answer. Today I did a web search for a photo of Dean on a motorcycle to match my photos of the Tibetan guy. Until I scanned the Tibet photos there was no point in doing it earlier, but now I wanted to see how much he looked like Dean – or if he even looked like him at all. I figured a photo of the real Dean would look good on the blog, too, as a comparison.

Well, now you can see both photos, too. Looking at them, I find it hard to believe that the Tibetan’s appearance is a coincidence. It’s not just the hair. Notice how both men wear dark loafer shoes over white socks. Notice how each one wears a white T-shirt underneath a jacket. Of course, they’re both riding motorcycles, too – so in my mind, it’s no coincidence. There is one great big James Dean fan living now in Tibet!!!
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Yesterday I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York for the first time in quite a while. As it happens, an exhibit about the first 100 years of photography recently opened (titled "Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840–1940"), so I made it a point to see it. I would have gone to the Met even without this exhibit, but a good photography show is always gratifying to see.

The exhibit isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but it does showcase the work of 13 very influential photographers, mostly European and from the 19th Century (William Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton, Gustave Le Gray, Eugene Atget [photo left], Nadar, Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Marville and Edouard Baldus) plus some Americans and 20th Century Europeans (Carleton Watkins, Walker Evans, Brassai, Man Ray [photo below] and Henri Cartier-Bresson). Some of the earliest photographic images ever made are included here (two Fox Talbot prints from 1835) but the show should be seen not just for its historic significance but simply for the beauty of the prints themselves. If you’re interested in the history of photography – or just want to see some great photographs, period – I would highly recommend that you try to see this exhibit.

On the other hand, I was completely underwhelmed by the adjunct photo exhibit, 'Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium Since 1960." While there are some good images, I basically said to myself, “Is this the best that the Met could come up with for more recent photography? Even I could do better than this stuff!” I basically did a quick walk-through for this one as it was getting late, so maybe I'll give it a closer look on my next visit. Regardless, the show to see is the one opposite it.

See-Through Sarah

I’ve been photographing nudes since the summer of 1995. I’ve put a lot of film through the camera since then, trying to capture the nude figure in as beautiful and/or interesting way as I can. Just a year or two into my photographing nudes, I began to ask myself, “How much longer can I go on photographing the same thing the same way?” About ten years later, that question is even louder in my photographic conscience (though I dare say that I’m not the only photographer who’s asked this of him/her self).

So, as I’ve written here before, in an effort to try something different, I’m beginning to experiment more with multiple exposures. This is something I’ve done from time to time over the years, but there was never any consistency to my doing it, no real effort to put together a body of work with this technique.

Here then are three photos that I made of Sarah Ellis while photographing her in Ohio last summer. For some reason the idea of somebody trapped or encased in a tree seems to have a lot of resonance for me. That’s probably because this whole idea was originated by a scene in “The Wizard of Oz,” in which an apple tree with a face in it comes to life. The idea of a face in a tree just intrigued me – and I guess it still does.

Jessamyne

It’s been a while since my last posting – more than a week. Quite honestly, I’ve just been tired. I’ve been told that I have a stomach problem, and my doctor told me to sleep on my left side to help fix the problem. I’ve never slept on my side before, but I’ve gone ahead and laid down on my left side every night for over a week.

The problem is that while I’ve laid down, I haven’t really slept. It’s just been too uncomfortable, and at times downright painful, with my left leg and hip really hurting me. I’ve even gone out and purchased a memory foam mattress topper, and while I do feel better lying on my side with it, I still haven’t been able to get a good night’s sleep. I managed to get some sleep two nights ago by lying down in a semi-sitting position, propped up on pillows, but it didn’t work last night – and neither did lying on my side.

So, I’ve just been too tired to do a lot of things, including scanning negatives to post here or even sitting down to write.

I did have enough energy today, on the other hand, to go ahead with the photo session today that I’d planned with Jessamyne from Australia. I would have liked to have worked outdoors with her now that the weather is good for outdoor figure work, but last week I told her that we’d better off in my studio setup. The extended weather forecast for today called for rain, and I didn’t want to commit to a long drive to an outdoor location not feeling well.

Well, the forecast was wrong. Today was a beautiful day in the New York area, as the revised forecast from a few days predicted, and while I could have opted to go outdoors, my lack of sleep told me otherwise.

And what about Jessamyne? She was fun to work with, petite in size but with brilliant red hair and beautiful eyes. Of course, the red hair won’t show up as such in my black & white photos (as was the case with Clara Bow in the BW silent film era), but you can see it here in some of the snapshots I made with my little digital camera.

Working in a studio setting has always been rather difficult for me. Without the allure of beautiful surroundings given by an interesting indoor or outdoor location, it’s just a backdrop to work with. I guess someone really needs to think out ahead of time what to do, but I had no plan today. I just got out my fabrics and had Jessamyne work with some of them. Later I got out some of the masks that I have but haven’t used for a while.

Overall, I think I got some good results from today’s session. Still, I think this will be my last studio session until the weather starts to turn cold again. (I expect to spend most of the fall once again developing film, however, as I now have about 60 rolls of film to develop, with more photo sessions coming up over the summer.)

As for short term plans, I just hope I can get some sleep tonight!

Topsy Turvy

It’s been a busy last few days for me. A meeting after work on Tuesday. Visiting a friend whose mother passed away on Wednesday. Then yesterday, I had another doctor’s appointment and had to complete the paperwork and write up my artist’s statement for the Artful Nude exhibit in Colorado coming up this summer.

So, I really haven’t had much time to scan any more images or to think of what to write here. Still, I do have a couple of images to offer today.

The images I’m posting here are from the same negative. The difference is that one has been turned 180 degrees from the other (turned upside down, so to speak, or topsy turvy) and one has been cropped a bit. Of course, I’m not really saying that one has been turned upside, because that might suggest that one is primary and the other is secondary. While it is true that I worked on one image before the image, I really think of these as two different and equally valid interpretations of the same negative.

As for the creation of that negative, this is a photograph of Rachel that I took in her studio in Maine two years ago, following our return from Canada. As I’ve written here before, Rachel is a very accomplished artist and I wanted to create some in-camera double exposures combining her with some of her own artwork. With this particular image, I was looking to create a yin-yang type of effect – the two halves different yet complementing each other and fitting together to create the whole.

Was I successful? If you have any thoughts, do let me know.

Cambodian Wedding

I haven’t made a posting for nearly a week, as I’ve been busy 1) trying to get my apartment straightened up, and 2) waiting for back to feel 100% again. (I’m still waiting, though it does feel better now.)

As for this weekend, I’ve been doing things like shopping, laundry, watching the Mets beat the Yankees, etc. I had thought of getting back to filing more of my Tibet photos, but I think I’ll wait a bit longer for my back to get better before tackling that again. I was thinking of trying to get back to exercising by walking the stairs in my building again today (and I may still be able to do it), but I do have a lot of other stuff to do around here, including finally filling out the paperwork and prepping the photos for the Artful Nude exhibit in Colorado this summer.

I haven’t posted any travel photos for a while, and none from Cambodia since I returned from there a couple of months ago, so today will be the day that I do. Rather than putting up some photos taken across Cambodia in general, today’s images are from something specific.

The afternoon that my group visited the great temple of Angkor Wat (just one of many places in the overall Angkor area, by the way), we encountered a wedding party that was leaving the temple as we were departing, too. I don’t know if the wedding ceremony was actually held at the temple or if they just went there to have some photos taken. Either way, it was an interesting thing to see.

Cambodia is a very poor country, but it would seem that if people can afford to splurge for something important like a wedding, they do it. The bride was decked out in white with a lot of jewelry (though perhaps a bit too much makeup). The groom and his men were wearing bright white suits. The bridesmaids were wearing white and green and they all appeared to be having a ball, laughing amongst themselves and with others. (I even got one to pose with me for one of my arm’s length self-portraits – though her attention is obviously focused elsewhere!) The bride, on the other hand, seemed very serious the whole time.

I managed to get just one photo of the wedding party with my film camera (as I had just one shot left on the roll and no time to re-load), but I was able to get a few with my little digital camera. I think the best of the photos was the last one that I took, which is the one posted at the top – the bride and groom about to get into their car.

However, I have to say that my personal favorite photo of the bunch was the one I made next to last and that’s posted at the bottom here: the newly minted husband giving his bejeweled bride a drink from a bottle of water. In a place as hot as Cambodia, even brides need to make sure they stay hydrated!

A Few More Sips of Champagne

I had planned this weekend to finally get to work once again filing negatives from my trip to Tibet, but that hasn’t happened. My back went out on me last Thursday as it does from time to time, and as it’s still hurting, I really didn’t feel like being hunched over a table filing negatives and annotating pages for several hours, which is what I’d had in mind. (Someone at my office noted on Friday that from the way I was walking, it looked like I’d just gotten off of a horse.)

So, I decided to go back into the negative archives and scan some more images from my photo session with Carlotta Champagne out in the Nevada desert a couple of years ago. It’ll likely be some time until the film from my studio session with her last month will be developed, so I thought I’d post these “oldies” here today.

Actually, my bad back is just the latest in a series of things that have been bothering me over the past month and a half. Thankfully, though, it looks like the other problems will be resolved before too long. I went for an endoscopy yesterday (it’s strange seeing photos of your own stomach, etc.) and the doctor says that what’s been ailing me is nothing to really worry about. I’m someone who has a history of suffering of from anxiety over medical procedures, and while I felt a bit nervous, it was nothing overwhelming and the whole thing was reasonably painless.

So, I’m hoping that once that’s taken care of and my back returns to normal (and it is getting slowly better, as it usually does when this happens), I’ll be able to get around a bit more and do more things.

I actually had a photo shoot planned for outdoors today with a model named Stephanie Anne, but as it’s rainy, windy and chilly, we decided to opt for a postponement. I supposed it’s just as well, given how I’ve been feeling. If the weather were good I would have gone ahead with the shoot, but perhaps it’s just as well that I’ll have time for my back to get better before dragging my camera gear around again.

This blog entry is also something of a milestone. While it is not my 100th blog posting overall, it is the 100th entry that I’ve written from home (not counting the ones I’ve done while on my travels). I always write up my postings first in MS Word and save them numerically, so that’s how I know that this is number 100. Let’s see how many more I can do over the coming years.

The 8 O’Clock Rule

I just saw a segment on the nightly network news broadcast regarding how much people are crunched for time today. With multi-tasking, people now do 31 hours worth of work in 24 hours, it said. The downside, of course, is that the more you do in any given stretch of time, the less quality you achieve with each thing.

That news segment was rather coincidental, as I was planning to write today about managing my time and something I have dubbed “the 8 o’clock rule.” I may be good at photography (or so some people tell me), but I really need to work at managing my time better. One of the problems is sitting here in front of me: my computer. I guess I’m not the only one who can sit down and find that hours have gone by and at which point you ask yourself, “What have I accomplished?”

So, I have set a goal for myself: to be finished with all of my internet business for the day (including wasting time surfing around) by 8 p.m. After that, it’ll be time for other things: relaxing in front of the TV watching a video or a ballgame, developing film, filing negatives or even using the computer to scan negatives. I also want to finish off things like paying bills before 8, too. I’ll also continue to check my e-mail and such things briefly before going to bed each night.
So far, in the few days that I’ve implemented this, I’ve been pretty successful. Let’s hope that I can keep up with it. I’ve recently switched to a new e-mail account because of the avalanche of spam I’m getting out the old one, and that takes up time, too.

By the way, the photo at the top was made at a workshop in Woodstock, New York, a couple of years ago.

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I read with sadness today that a photographer named Yuri Bonder died a week ago at the very young age of 41. I really didn’t know much about him, other than that he lived in Israel and had apparently moved there from Russia or another part of the former Soviet Union. All I knew about him were the photos that he posted on Deviant Art – and they were great. Yuri excelled at both nudes and portraits (the latter both formal and on the street) as well as things like landscapes.

I think I once sent him a message on Deviant Art saying that if I ever were to visit Israel again, I would want to try to meet him. I never received a response, but now the point is moot. That meeting will never happen. An excellent photographer is gone – and as a photo of his son is prominently displayed on his DA main page, obviously a father, too. My thoughts go out to his family.

You can view Yuri’s Deviant Art page at http://yuribonder.deviantart.com/ and his website at http://www.yuribonder.com/?lng=eng .

I don’t normally post other photographers’ work on my blog here, but in this case I think it is appropriate. You can see a few of his photos below.

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PS The time on my computer now reads 8:00 p.m. Just in time, I guess.

Suicide Attempt

One of my mother’s best friends died two days ago. From what I understand, she died from ailments related to her having been a long-time cigarette smoker. She was not very old – just 61 years of age. What a senseless loss. Still, I suppose she was lucky in a way. One of my aunts died from lung cancer from having smoked cigarettes. She was only 48 years old at the time.

And still, despite people dying like this every day, millions and millions of people continue to pollute their bodies and destroy themselves with this shit we call tobacco.

Of course, people who smoke say things like “My uncle Joe smoked three packs a day and he lived to be 95.” Well, lucky for Uncle Joe – but so what? As it happens, today is May 4, 2008 – the first anniversary of my having been hit by a car last year.

That’s right. It was one year ago today that I was crossing the street when a car hit me, knocking me down and causing my head to smash into the ground so hard that I was knocked silly and had to be carted off to a hospital emergency room strapped down to a stretcher, half-choked by the neck restraint they put on me. What does this have to do with smoking cigarettes?

Like “Uncle Joe,” I was lucky. I got hit by a car but managed to escape with a couple of busted fingers and a concussion – not too bad, all things considered. So, just because I managed to get away lucky, does that mean that any of you out there would be willing to step in front of a moving car and get hit just for the fun or the thrill of it? Heck, there’d even be an insurance payment in it for you if you survived. (I got one.) Doesn’t the thrill and the potential for money make it worth giving it a try?

No, of course it doesn’t – but cigarette smokers go ahead and do the same thing every single day by lighting up. The question is: why? After all, people don't generally wake up in the morning and think to themselves, "I'm going to ingest arsenic just for the fun of it," so why should tobacco be different?

Not being a smoker, I can’t really say, but I think a lot of it has to do with image. I once heard that tobacco companies used to place beautiful and elegant looking women (maybe men, too) sitting in hotel lobbies smoking cigarettes to make cigarette smoking appear to be beautiful and elegant. You know: if you smoke cigarettes, you’ll be sexy, you’ll be beautiful, you’ll be hot, you’ll be cool.

Personally, I don’t see what’s so cool about being a patsy. That’s right, a patsy – to a bunch of tobacco company executives who are pissing in their pants with laughter as they happily stroll to the bank, knowing that they’ve hoodwinked you into spending your hard-earned money to buy a product that can bring you nothing but disease and death. (You think the cost of a pound of beef is high? Try figuring out how much a pound of cigarettes costs.)

Naturally, it’s more than just people sitting in hotel lobbies that get people started on smoking. Among other things are all of the films and still photographs made over the years (and that continue to be made) that make cigarette smoking appear to be something desirable. As far as I’m concerned, every single photographer, filmmaker and image maker of any kind who has made cigarette smoking look cool, hot, sexy or attractive in any way has got the blood of thousands on their hands – and if anybody has died as a result of their imagery they can spend eternity burning in the fiery pit of Hell!!!

As for my image at the top here, I can remember how it was made. I was at a workshop in Tuscany ten years ago and we were photographing a local girl, Beatrice. Someone asked her to light up a cigarette – and I was so furious that I stormed out of the room in anger. How dare someone put somebody else at risk like that for the sake of a photograph? Yes, I’m pretty sure that the girl was a smoker, but I would no more give a cigarette to a smoker than I’d give a stiff drink to an alcoholic. If they want to destroy themselves, we don’t need to encourage it.

At first I refused to take a photograph of the girl smoking, but then I relented. I took a few photos of her that way – but only on the condition that if I ever displayed one, I would give it the title “Suicide Attempt,” because that’s what I consider smoking to be. I have never shown it until now, so at last I’m able to follow through with my intention. (Fortunately, most of the photos I made of Beatrice - some of which you’re seeing here, too - were without the cigarette.)

Then there are those people who are afraid to quit smoking for fear of gaining weight after quitting. I once saw a poster at a store in Berlin, Germany, that addressed that pretty well. "Smoking makes you skinny" the poster said (in German, of course) and it showed a picture of a skeleton.

Ultimately, I guess, it’s up to each individual to decide how suicidal his or her behavior should be. Even though governments ban other products as lethal as tobacco, people can smoke themselves to death just as they can drink themselves to death. The main thing is that I don’t have to be affected by their behavior, so as long as I don’t have to breath in the smoke from other people’s cancer sticks, I guess I can’t complain. That still doesn’t leave non-smokers like me totally unaffected, because we feel the pain and the loss when our friends and loved ones succumb to the murderous plans of the tobacco companies and those who support them.

Unfortunately, there are those who still aren’t able to complain – and it really upsets me to see parents smoking with their small children around them. (Not enough to poison themselves; they'll got to poison their kids, too.) Even though smoking indoors is now banned in many places, the outdoors is not necessarily safe, either. Just try walking down the street behind someone smoking a cigarette - or even worse, a cigar - and you’ll end up breathing in the whole stream of smoke (or so it feels).

Sir Walter Raleigh is credited with popularizing tobacco in England after his visits to the New World, so it’s ironic that John Lennon of all people should put it so well in the Beatles’ song, "I’m So Tired":

“I'm so tired, I'm feeling so upset

Although I'm so tired I'll have another cigarette

And curse Sir Walter Raleigh

He was such a stupid get.”

(For another blog posting on this subject, see the one by Fluffytek from last month: http://www.fluffytek.com/blog/2008/04/cigarettes-death-sticks-or-creative.html )

Six Days with Maria E.

As I wrote at the end of my most recent blog post last Thursday, the model Maria Eriksson had just arrived for a visit to New York and I had agreed to host her while she was here on her first visit to the city. This morning she left and is now in California. As I had predicted when I last wrote, the days she was here were fun.

Maria worked with other photographers in different parts of the city, but before she arrived she had set aside Monday of this week as a day to work with me. As Monday was a rainy and chilly day here in New York, we had no choice but to work in my makeshift home studio – and I readily admit that I’m still very much a novice when it comes to studio work. Still, it is something different from working outdoors and possesses different challenges.

Among the things that Maria had brought with her was an object that she had bought on a recent trip to Egypt: a reddish scarf decorated with silvery ornaments (for lack of a better term in my vocabulary). As this seemed like an interesting type of prop that I had never used before, I decided to spend most of my time photographing Maria using it – first with a light gray background and then with a black background. I thought that the Middle Eastern item would go well with Maria’s somewhat exotic look.

As my readers here should know, I use film exclusively for my serious work. However, I do like to make some color photos with my pocket digital camera to get some quick feedback as well as to post work here from new photo sessions. You can see some of these color images of Maria here now, but don’t hold your breath when it comes to seeing the film. (Including the seven rolls of Maria, I now have 52 rolls of film to develop – plus 25 from Tibet to file!)

One of the things I need to get over when doing studio work is the typical ‘model standing in front of the camera’ kind of shot. There are some horizontally oriented studio images here, and it was Maria’s idea to try them. We managed to get her stretched out on the black backdrop by putting together a couple of chairs beneath it (basically, covering the chairs with the backdrop.)

Another thing I tried for the first time was mounting one of the lights on the boom arm that’s part of my lighting kit. I’d used the boom once before for suspending some fabric, but this was the first time that I used it to have the light facing downward from above the model. You can see one of these photos (without the Egyptian scarf) here, too. I think this set-up has the potential for dramatic imagery.

As for Maria’s sightseeing, I took her to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Brooklyn Heights promenade. We later walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, where we visited the World Trade Center site, waited for two mintutes on line at the Empire State Building (before finding out that the wait to go to the observation tower was too long), walked through Times Square and Rockefeller Center, the lobby of the famed Waldork-Astoria hotel and then the great expanse of Grand Central Station. We also visited Central Park another day (where Maria noted at least one good spot for a nude photo) and had dinner Monday night at a kosher deli on Kings Highway here in Brooklyn – to try to give her a fuller New York City experience. That’s her in a photo with the triple decker sandwich she ordered.

Like I said, she’s in California now, continuing her US tour. If you’re a photographer in an area that she’ll be passing through, I highly recommend working with her. She’s a great model and a lot of fun to work with.

As for me, having Maria here as my guest for six nights, I am going to miss her. Even though I had worked with her last summer, I had still thought of her mostly as a friend of my friend Alex Ingram in Scotland. I think I can safely say that she’s now my own friend, too. I hope she returns to New York sometime soon.

Sightseeing:

At the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

On the Brooklyn Bridge

In Central Park

With those sandwiches at the deli

A Professional Model

I like to tell people now and then that I used to be a professional boxer. That’s right, it’s true: I got paid for putting things in boxes (among other tasks). I did that while working in the summer of 1979 at a textile factory located in a loft building at the corner of Broadway and Franklin Street in lower Manhattan.

Of course, when one hears “professional boxer,” one thinks of a guy in a ring (or as Gorilla Monsoon used to call it, “the squared circle”) trying to beat his opponent’s brains out – not someone standing over a counter putting pillow covers destined for JC Penney into boxes (as I did).

On the other hand, what about “professional model”? Someone who gets paid to wear clothing (or in the case of nude models, nothing) for the purpose of being photographed, drawn or seen in some way by others – right??? Well, I can honestly say that I was a professional model in the meaning of the term that I just described. I even got paid an hourly rate.

“Okay, okay. There’s got to be a catch,” I can hear you saying. Well, I admit it. There is a catch: I only did it for one hour.

In the summer of 1978, when I was all of 19 years old, I had a job working for a promotional firm on West 39 Street in midtown Manhattan. I was basically a gofer, as I recall (I can tell an amusing story about making the coffee every morning), and one time I was told to assist in making a small catalog for some camping gear the company was promoting. One of the things I remember that we had to do was to steam out the wrinkles in some of the bags to be photographed for the catalog - and we didn’t do a very good job of it, looking at the photos now.

A more interesting thing I was asked to do was to model a rain poncho – and hey, who was I to turn down an offer like that? I really don’t remember much from the photo shoot, other than that I got to take an hour off of work to go to the studio – and that I got paid $25 as a modeling fee, in addition to my regular salary. (So, I like to say that as a professional model I got paid $25 an hour – but I only did it for one hour.)

I still have two copies of the eight-page catalog and the photo above is scanned from its back page. The guy on the right is Wayne, one of the people I worked with at the firm. The pretty boys in the middle were hired from a modeling agency (and I have no idea what they got paid).

The guy on the left, of course, sporting the rain poncho and looking a bit like Jesus (or so I thought back then) is me.

And that, my friends, is the story of my career as a professional model. Like I said, that was in 1978. Little did I know at the time that being a professional boxer was just a year into my future.

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In more recent news, I drove to Kennedy Airport after worked today and picked up my friend, the beautiful model Maria Eriksson from the UK. She’ll be staying with me here for almost a week. This is Maria’s first visit to New York and though she’ll be doing some modeling (including getting in front of my camera), I’ll also be leading her on a sightseeing tour around town.