Thursday, February 12, 2009

tuesday in la, summing it up

my last day in la, also hectic!

again i started the day with the gym and their fun individual tvs. fyi, i've never found 8am so tolerable.

10:30am, our model hits traffic and is late. when she arrives we head off to our awesome (though undisclosed) location. despite feeling like i didn't do a great job with this shoot, i enjoyed the challenge. i know i can't win them all and turn out a stellar image every time, but trying is always a valuable lesson.

1:30pm, shoot number two. we drove to pasadena to shoot my friend at his apartment. i was pretty excited to shoot in a classic la apartment and when we arrived i was loving the location. once i started shooting i immediately felt blocked and stuck. i think i was feeling a combination of time pressure from shooting in tandem with chloe, plus just mental fatigue from being on the 5th shoot in 36hrs. i worked it out slowly and did end up turning out a couple of great images even though i didn't utilize the location like i had planned.

5pm, last shoot. we shot my friend at her place. we had originally through we'd pick her up and drive somewhere nearby that looked promising, but when we arrived the sun was 15min from hitting the horizon and we just went with the gorgeous light in her bedroom. again, i felt jammed and stuck but i worked through it as best i could. i think i ended up with some winner images and i'm trying not to let my memory of fatigue and blockage taint my perception of the final shots.

overall, the trip was a big learning experience. i got some great images out of it and got practice photographing real people in unplanned situations and locations. because i didn't rock every single shoot, i feel somewhat disappointed about the trip as a whole (chock it up to unrealistically high standards) but i'm being too hard on myself: the shoots went well as a whole and i turned out some great fresh images.

one thing i noticed is that i may be overusing the 85/1.2mm lens by repeatedly creating similarly composed images. though i spent tuesday trying to break out of this and didn't totally succeed, i did come up with a few creative shots that didn't feel lens-specific. perhaps in the future i'll try other lenses to see what i can get out of a different perspective.

for now, i may go back to shooting real models because i need a modicum of comfort and the knowledge that it'll be easier to knock out some stellar shots. i also will continue working on my polaroid and iphone projects because they make me so happy. combining the 2 shoots i did in kauai plus 2 mad days of shooting, i think i have 10+ new images to take to nyc. i need a day off and it sure is nice to be home!

1 comment:

  1. do you really think it's appropriate to liken the iphone to the polaroid? don't you think that's a bit far-fetched?

    for one thing, few if any can distinguish an iphoto just by the color as you claim. iphotos also lack the irreproducibility of a polaroid. each polaroid is completely and absolutely unique.
    which brings up another aspect of the digital photography which is the blurring of what are considered "standard" sizes. the fact that iphone uses a certain screen ratio is pretty trivial considering how easy it is now to resize, reshape, and rescale.(reseam even!)
    I really don't think the iphone does anything different than any of the million phone cams out there. it's missing so many things that were essential to the polaroid.

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