INFRAportraits

I just posted the first set of INFRASTRUCTURE “trading cards” to flickr. Here are some notes of two of them:

RB Jamming – I saw this shot a little while before I took it, possibly while taking some video of the session. The blank wall behind, the reflection of the (deleted) logo and the recording and personal debris on the floor just made for a hell of an interesting shot, and to isolate Rob, to harken back to the Dungeon shot with the microphone on the speaker, and just get the man in his element – killed it. Him having his shoes off and beside him just added an extra intimate element while providing another touch of white. The headphone cable adds a nice horizontal effect, bridging the man and the recording gear.

Micah Rocking Out – Micah is hard to shoot, behind the drums and often in the back, usually in a position where I can’t get close to him and still have good lighting. By this point in the shoot, I was trying to make sure that I had portraits of everyone and I needed him, and had to do it without disrupting the recording gear.

I forget if I actually laid down on the floor, but if I didn’t, I got damn close. I wanted him, in action, with all the cables flowing before him. And that’s what I got. I wasn’t counting on the wall angles converging with the lighting to make impossible angles above him, but I love how that happened.

What really makes this for me is how all the lighting of the photograph is centered on his face, and he’s just completely in the moment. The shutter was quick enough to prevent more than just a touch of blur. This is beyond my best photo of him yet, and belongs on someone’s wall, hung with posters of other drumming idols.

Photographic lineage

If you’ve been out drinking with me lately, and if you brought up photography, odds are you’ve heard me say something to the effect of “every shot makes the next one better.” And it’s true: everything you’ve ever done informs everything you’re about to do. The more you shoot, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you know what you want out of a photo, how to see it, how to use the camera and your skill to make the shot.

Case in point: the photographic lineage of the LRBDY “Under the Pier” photo and the (old) Ore Dock of Marquette, MI. Taken over a year apart, these two images are related, as is the DS09 Tybee Island pier (as shot by Rachel).

“Under the Pier” was from the final full day of shooting, after a week of art and exploration, and it was Labor Day weekend. (It was also beautiful weather, I had had a Yuengling or three and wanted to see if I could beat Rob’s shot of the pier.) To sum, I was in the zone, got under the pier, zoomed in on the vanishing point and shot away, getting every angle I could see and once the child walked by, I knew I was golden.

But it wasn’t just the pier shots from earlier phases of DS09 that informed how I looked at the pier. It was the Ore Dock shoot, and my high school architecture and drawing courses.

In high school we spent WEEKS on vanishing points, learning how to properly create, and later, distort them. You would think all drawing stemmed from vanishing points and the heroic scale of modeling my teacher spent so long on the topics. But the lessons stuck. My eye was trained to look to for them.

That brings us to Marquette. The (old) Ore Dock lays in the water, inaccessible and cut off from town, now that the train trestle has been demolished, leaving it a gigantic hulking shadow of the past in the town’s skyline. It’s phenomenal, and I got as close as I could to get a vanishing point shot that would make my high school art teacher proud. According to RB, a junkyard-dog of a man was sniffing around me as I shot the Ore Dock, and I didn’t even notice I was so engrossed by it – I was in the moment and half-wading on a broken pier, so my attention was focused on the shot, and nothing else.

Well, I never did get that A+ shot of the (old) Ore Dock, but I don’t mind. The experience of being of a hair off-center, shooting the vanishing point wide and taking in the surroundings, using something else to weigh one side of the shot while using the water to add a touch of a reflective vanishing point… well worth it, and more than paid off over one year later and 1,300 miles away.

And this blog post? It’ll make the next thing I write better. Stay tuned.

From Manic Terror to Everyday Drudgery

Yesterday, I got back into the city at 2:40 AM from a Boston party/ABBQ09 video editing/Dale Watson weekend on Fung Wah. Canal Street was deserted, completely, and especially so after the gypsy cabs swarmed the bus. Got on the 4 train within seconds, got off at 59/Lex and walked to the N/W transfer.

Hell ensued. Noise and water everywhere. Every light seemed to be flicking on and off and I could see people moving in swarms from the top of the staircase. I worried about electrocution for a second – there was no rain, and everything was wet, yet there no signs or warning posts blocking my path. Had a pipe burst, rupturing the power lines or something?

I had a train to catch. I went down, closer to the source of the sound and the liquid. On the platform, workers were power-washing everything, hence the noise and water, but not explaining the faulty power.

Train comes. Sleep for a few hours. Awake/shower/coffee/back on train.

I get back to 59/Lex, and it’s full of hordes of working-people, herding in every direction to their jobs. Nothing was wet, every light worked. No one else has seen the station looking like the set of The Poseidon Adventure only a few hours earlier.

…

A few weeks ago, someone asked me “Is it that you go to odd places or do you just look at the world differently?” The answer is both, but more importantly, I know what I'm looking at when I see what is going on around me.

Late night perfectionist

I love the process. See the shot, KNOW that it’s good and take the shots.

Wait XX weeks/months, process the film.

See the results. See that it’s good.

Talent + (practice x repetition) = Mega-talent

Debbie #2

Debbie #2 is one of my favorite photos, but it didn’t start out as one. At first, I liked Debbie #1 much more – it’s louder, she’s smiling and you see the patrons… but it’s also less focused and lit differently.

The photos are from the end of CPC 1 in 2006, back when I was still a novice at all this. I think months went by before I really looked at the two photos and #2 then began to stand out. It’s quieter, more intimate and off-the-cuff. It’s more personal and you don’t see the patrons, only their half-drunk beers. The keno on the screen as opposed to That `70s Show… everything just adds up to a very different feel than #1 has.

It’s almost as if #1 is Debbie being the gregarious bartender, welcoming this horde of young patrons, while #2 is her with her guard down, trying to figure out some receipts… a peek behind the curtain of sorts.

Two years later, on CPC3, we went back to her bar, but Debbie wasn’t there that night. We wanted to recreate that night, and I wanted to recreate these shots, but she was gone.

Ever since entering the Ektar contest, I’ve been on flickr daily, trying to up my views/comments/favorites on the photos that I entered, and that’s led to a mini-retrospective, as I’ve been going through a lot of my older work, re-organizing some things, re-evaluating others.  Not much of my older work holds up to my newer output, but I feel like Debbie #2 does.

Vulcan 26

Dan Meade - Vulcan 26
Originally uploaded by Dan Meade

DS09 - Day 9: Vulcan, the Greek god of fire and steel and iconic statue of Birmingham, Alabama.

Among the Vulcan facts that I wrote down the day after taking this photo: The blueprints by Italian designer Giuseppe Moretti and original stereographic photos were so good that the 1999-2003 reconstruction used them nigh-exclusively.

Good plans and good photos taken in 1904 were able to render 95 years of wear, tear and mis-reconstructions... and now Vulcan is back, and better than ever.

Tales from MEADEstoria: $1 Jupiter

Walking back from the train after spending the afternoon at Time Café (fantastic spinach/shrimp/portabella/goat cheese salad) I saw a guy on the corner with a high-powered telescope and a sign that read “SEE JUPITER / donations welcome.”

I’ve seen him a few nights before, well, him or another person with a good camera and tripod set up at the same intersection, so I thought “cool” and kept walking. Then I realized, “wait – I can fucking see Jupiter… what am I doing?” So I turned around and headed back to the telescope.

Another dude was there and looking through the lens, so I joined them and pretty soon we were talking about the planetary convergence of 2012 and what we can expect to happen (the ability to stand an egg on it's small side, lots of storms, no mass destruction… after all “just because the Mayan calendar ends in 2012… doesn’t mean that it won’t start over in 2013”).

Another guy came up and started talking to the telescope guy about some drywall project that he was supposed to be doing. While they talked it out, I took a look through the telescope – and there’s Jupiter, and four of it’s moons (“each of which is larger than our own”) all in alignment. I stayed and planet-gazed for another moment, taking in this slice of the cosmos, and then donated a buck to the guy for his setup.

And yeah, I could have just been happy with seeing Jupiter with my naked eye over the end of the El, but going back was just more interesting. Viva la MEADEstoria!