Rainy Autumn

I went for a walk today to take pictures. I find that when I talk these walks, I can't get the pictures I want. I have no way to make landscape pictures work. All of my pictures are so hard, so focused, so tightly cropped. I frustrate myself sometimes. But I always have to remind myself that this is my style. This is who I am. I am a details person. The big picture escapes me, but the details never do.

I have to embrace that style. I have to remember to shoot what I know and how I know how to do it. If I fight my own style, I wind up shooting horrible pictures.

As I was walking looking intently at the ground, I saw this fortune. I wonder how unobtrusive it is to leave garbage in nature.

Skin Retouch

Macro shots are insanely hard to retouch — at least for me. They take me hours to do because I retouch each tiny hair, one by one. Then each pore, one by one. Then I redraw missing elements (like lipstick or a blown highlight). I find the closer you get the harder/longer it takes to retouch. And when you add in a cheap, dollar store lock that must have been painted blue by a blind monkey, you have your retouching cut out for you.

This is a shot of Jen, she's learning to be a photographer and retoucher. She had a copy of this image and wanted to edit it herself, but it was frustrating her so she asked me my "secrets." I had to show her in person the trick to doing it which is getting your healing/clone brush down to 1 to 2 pixels. In general the trick is getting the brush slighting bigger than the "imperfection" you are trying to fix. If it's a pore, then your brush is only slightly bigger than a pore. You can try to do a larger area, but you'll find that it usually blurs the area instead of leaving the skin texture in tact. While I think pores are natural, in a shot this close they are magnified to a level that makes them look like craters and people will be put off by them.

I spent three hours fixing things in this image and I could probably spend more, but I had to call it quits at some point. Just put the tablet pen down and walk away, I say to myself.

And for those interested, I shoot these close up face shots with extension tubes on a my macro lens (100mm/2.8). The lighting is my standard beauty lighting, two soft boxes on the right and left about 1 foot from the face at 45 degrees or so — it varies since lighting is an inexact science for me.

Medusa

People come to me with all kinds of ideas. Some are pretty basic, "I want to shoot in a bright color shirt" and others are something I can sink my teeth into, "I want to be Medusa." Ah, now there's an idea! Thanks to Mel for bringing it my way.

I made the hair for the shoot. It's fake hair, back combed and twisted into dreads and then boiled in hot water (burnt all my fingertips) and strung with wire (so it could bend). I'm grateful to artists/models when they come to me with something that makes my brain come alive and jump for joy. Sadly, I'm not an endless supply of ideas and I'm always looking for something to create and not just a picture. I like to make things with my hands as well — hair, headpieces, jewelry. I find that my favorite pictures are usually the ones where I was able to add something more than lighting and good focus.

Weird

As I struggle to refine my style, what bothers me the most is that I don't think I'm mainstream, nor do I want to be. But I also don't think I'm weird enough to be considered cool and weird. I think people just look at my work and wrinkle up their brow and go, "humpf." Very few people "get me," but I think that may because I don't always "get me." I mean I don't know what, if anything, I'm trying to say. There's no deep, underlying message in my photos, and if there is, I don't know what it is. I just like to make unusual things and make people wear them. Can art be as simple as that? Should there be more to it?

I don't know.

Tourist Season

A model from California came to shoot with me. He's never been to DC before so I felt compelled to take him to all the monuments. Having been around DC time and time again, I get tired of photographing the monuments. So here's my shot from the day. It tells you a different story about tourists, I think. I have to admit, I was surprised to see so many apple cores, I thought tourists were much more unhealthy than that.

What to Shoot Next?

I strained my back last weekend (lugging photo equipment around, of course). It requires me to take super hots baths for 20 minutes at a time. I'm lying there trying to think of what to shoot next and, well, you see what I came up with.

Nothing like lying in your tub, trying to relax and then jumping up and getting your camera. Sometimes I think photographer's brains are wired a little differently. Always framing a shot, looking at lighting, figuring out what is the lowest ISO that will work in a location.

For those who care, I shot it with ambient light only, ISO 4000, F4, 1/50 sec. My bathroom is really dark and really tiny.

Wilson Bridge Shoot

I went walking across the Wilson Bridge today. I thought it would be a good place to test out my new tilt and shift lens. Well, I still need some practice with the tilt and shift lens, but I do like this image, shot from under the bridge. No tilt or shift used.

Here's one of my car on the road below. That has full on tilt, but it's not quite right. But it was a good day for a walk and I did need the practice.