Throwback Thursday

Henri Cartier-Bresson once said that your first 10,000 images were your worst.. Of course, this was during the film age and long before the digital age, so for mostly digital photographers, the math should look much different. In other words, the 10,000 images you made at the wedding you shot last week won’t make much of an improvement in the 10,000 you make at this weeks wedding. Just sayin’…

Nevertheless, there is, I think, something to love about the work we make very early in our careers. Long before we get bogged down in all the “rules”, we make work for the joy, for the fun, because it satisfies some innate need, and we can’t say no. (For me, the need was to get out of class, but that’s another story…)

The two contact sheets here are from some of the first rolls of film I shot with the first camera I ever owned. (A Yashica 35mm that I got as a kit with three lenses and a camera bag!)

Contact sheet 0001! made sometime early spring 1979

This first contact sheet is of the very first roll of film I ran through my new camera, images made while walking back and forth to school. Because I was working on my college yearbook at the time, I believe the missing strips are from frames that were shot for yearbook use. Like all the work I made in high school, those images are lost to time.

contact sheet 0006, made sometime in the spring of 1979

While there are certainly some technical issues and the framing for many of these is a little loose, there is no denying the joy that’s apparent in their creation. In those days I took my camera everywhere, photographing whatever I found interesting, and I was having a great time doing it.

And maybe at the root, that’s why in some ways, I like a lot of my early work better than some of the work that followed while I was learning the “rules”. This work seems freer to me, less formal, less constricted. Or maybe I’m so fond of my earlier work because I was so much younger when I made it. Who knows?

But looking back, it should come as no surprise that my client work as well as my personal work became much more satisfying for me as a creator, when I worried less about making work the “right way” or the way everyone else made their work, and just made work “my way”. And also no coincidence that right about the same time my career started to take off. Not everyone “got” what I was doing, but in the end it didn’t matter. What mattered was the people who did “get it”, loved it. Just as it should be.

Long time and sharp-eyed viewers of this blog may have noticed that the first contact sheet made an appearance on the September 19, 2019 post, and frame no. 24A from the second sheet was discussed in detail on July 25, 2019. Check them out!

Throwback Thursday

Through the years, photographers have often defined themselves by the gear they used. Early in my career, I’d often get questions like: “Where are the square pictures?”, “Do you use the ‘hass-lee-blad’?”, “Are you a ‘professional’ photographer?”

Ugh.

Advances in technology have made creating images more accessible and easier than ever. (I didn’t say “better” than ever…) Thus proving the dictum: “The best camera is the one you have with you”.

This group was made while on a trip to Savannah, GA a few years ago. I had a bag full of cameras but these were made with my iphone using the Hipstamatic and Snapseed apps.

Throwback Thursday

Dipping into the archives once again…

This picture goes back about 25 years to the time I was still based in Buffalo, NY. About three quarters of the work I did in the spring and fall during that time were weddings. If there were more air conditioned churches (I only knew of one!) I might have taken more work in July and August. (I know it’s hard for some people to understand, but it does get hot there in the summer. It’s the winters that kind if get to you…)

Unfortunately, I’m not sure of the year, or the church. I believe the church is on Main Street near the University of Buffalo campus, but I could be wrong. Perhaps a sharp eyed viewer can fill in the gap.

If this picture looks a little dramatic, it’s because it was made using the now dearly departed Kodak B&W Infra-red film. This film is sensitive to the far red end of the light spectrum and beyond what the human eye is able to see. Alternatively dramatic and dreamy, I felt that the special characteristics of the film lent itself particularly well to telling a wedding day story.

Because the film is sensitive to wavelengths of light that humans cannot see, it could not be metered for exposure, nor did infra-red light focus along the same focal plane as white light, so you could never be completely sure what your pictures would look like until the film was processed and printed. And, oh yeah, you could only load and unload your camera in complete darkness because the film could fog through the film slit in the canister.

Every time your prints came back from the lab you’d feel all the anticipation and excitement like you would opening a birthday present. What could be inside this package? Will I like it? How could any photographer NOT want to work with this film?

Well, because the film was so unpredictable and difficult to work with, few photographers would ever dare to use it in a situation where you couldn’t go back and redo, or take a bunch of pictures and bracket exposures like crazy. But like anything else, the more you use a tool, the more familiar you are with it and your hits will out number your misses.

Of course, like many specialty films it was discontinued several years ago. There are digital equivalents but I don’t think they measure up. For purely nostalgic reasons I still have one roll in my refrigerator. Even cold stored, after all this time I’m not sure I’d count on getting much were I to shoot it now.

But maybe that’s the reason I ought to…

Throwback Thursday...

Once again, we dig into the archives and bring the past into the present…

It’s been several years since I last photographed a wedding but I still look back on my wedding photography days fondly. I considered it an honor and a privilege to be such a big part of one of the most important days in a couple’s life and to use my art to create their first family heirloom.

In an earlier post, I mentioned how early in my career I worked very hard to make work that looked like what every other “pro” was making. I felt that if I was to be as successful as they were, I needed to understand how they made pictures and replicate them as best I could.

It made sense at the time, but looking back, that strategy would only be useful if I were creating another commodity, like widgets, off an assembly line. Good for widgets, but bad for art which is what I felt I needed to be making. Needless to say, it was something of a struggle in the beginning. And not so much a struggle to make work that clients loved, but to create work that I loved.

So what to do…

Dancing

In college, I had a professor in a creative writing class who talked all the time about the importance of the “central emotional structure” of every story. Without it, you didn’t have much of a story. He was right. And the more I thought about my wedding photography, the more I realized that’s what was missing in my work.

While overall, my work was decent, I wasn’t creating a narrative for each bride and groom as unique as they were, but creating one narrative that every bride and groom had to fit. In other words, the pictures were interchangeable. The only difference from one wedding to another were the faces. No two stories are ever alike, so why should your pictures all look alike?

This is OK if you’re a factory, but not so good if what you want to do is tell a story as unique as each couple you meet. I may go a little deeper into this idea in another post, but for now I think these three images illustrate how my approach had changed.

First Dance

First, I began to add B&W images to each coverage. I felt that color pictures told the color of the day, but B&W pictures expressed the feeling of the day. This may not seem so radical today, but back then it was almost unheard of.

“Do they still make B&W film?”

“My parents wedding pictures were in B&W. Why would I want that?”

“No real professional photographer would make B&W pictures. Not these days. I think we should get some of our money back.”

I’m not making any of these up. Clients actually said these things. And more. And in the beginning, it was confounding to me. Couldn’t they see the beauty of it? (BTW, the couple from the last quote did not get money back!)

Eventually, I found my audience and things took off. Which then, I felt, gave me licence to explore many other techniques to enhance the ways I could tell a story. I began using different types of film, like high ISO B&W film because I loved the grain; infra-red film because I loved the ethereal look and feel; high speed color film because I loved the subdued color palette.

Waiting

I spent less time posing and more time documenting. I enhanced motion by “dragging the shutter” as in the first two images here. I used different angles looking down, looking up, tilting the camera to create dynamism and add impact.

In short, I used every tool I had available to tell THE STORY!

Because at the end of the day, it’s all about the story…