[The five final images in my “Hat Dance” series, culled from hundreds of separate shots. Click on any image to enlarge it.]
Working in writing, I’ve long known the value of drafts: getting something at all — a prototype — on paper being the obvious priority, followed by some number of “stepwise refinements” (additions, deletions, amendments…), over and over, until you’ve got the finished work before you. (Or, sometimes, until you’re simply wrung out from the repetitious task. But if that “reason” for quitting comes too often, you might as well forget becoming a professional writer.)
But until recently, photography always seemed different to me: why, I wondered, would you take more than one or two photos of essentially the same subject? Sure, maybe something would obviously be wrong with the first, even maybe the second take… the sun ducks behind a cloud, say, or someone inadvertently walks in front of the camera as you click the shutter. Those, you had to re-shoot. But in recording a single moment, you’d have to accept that once gone, the moment couldn’t be recaptured, right?
As I’ve mentioned before, in the last few months I’ve been trying hard to take photography seriously — starting with the very most basic question: what do I mean by “seriously”? Roughly, what I mean includes these elements:
- Really understanding — and practicing — all the “hard” stuff of photography: the interrelationships among shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and the effects that manipulating those interrelationships have on exposure, depth of field, and so on.
- Learning more about what’s possible in post-processing — the latter-day digital counterparts, in software, of what used to require darkroom hijinks: dodging and burning, cropping, manipulating emulsions and the paper itself…
- Controlling the product rather than simply accepting what’s right in front of me: not “settling.”
To this end, I’ve been taking advantage of my “free” time for two tasks:
First, I’ve been taking a series of refresher courses in photography basics, through the Great Courses Plus streaming channel. (So far: here and here.)
Second, I’ve set up something vaguely like a “studio” out in our garage. I don’t have a lot of fancy equipment — primarily a moving blanket and a black sheet, used as backdrops, supplemented by a stepstool and various boxes used as “stands” for still-life work and for my off-camera strobe flash. (For the camera itself, I’ve got a couple of tripods.
So what’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned so far? That’s easy, and it brings me back to the first couple paragraphs above: there’s really no reason not to do many takes of the “same” subject, and several legitimate reasons to do so.
Note: One other big change removes pretty much any objection at all to taking many shots of the same subject. I’m referring of course to the cost: developing and possibly printing hundreds of hardcopy photos, vs. simply storing the images on a card.
Take that little “Hat Dance” gallery featured at the top of this post. I didn’t know, going into it, that “two hats in motion” would be my subject. What I did know was that I was tired of shooting photos, even “controlled” ones, in the manner of those from the “everyday black-and-white” series I wrapped up in June. I was tired, that is, of simply photographing static still lifes and landscapes. I wanted to try shooting something in motion.
Also, I’d recently acquired a flash unit for the camera, as well as a radio-control gizmo which frees me of having the flash affixed physically to the top of the camera: I put the camera where I want it, and set the flash elsewhere within range — the camera shutter triggers the firing of the flash from any of, well, an infinity of positions relative to the subject: above, below, behind, in front, to one side or the other.
So I considered how I might learn more about the effects of off-camera flash, using an in-motion subject in an in-studio setting — especially given that I really have no animate subjects at hand. (The Missus and I are staying self-isolated — no walking trips downtown, for instance.) I wanted a subject irregular in shape, to highlight the effects of light and shadow. And it occurred to me, further, that an object in motion might present different problems with an off-camera flash if the object were reflective. I didn’t want to make it any harder on myself!
Well, I was rummaging around in a closet for an unrelated purpose when I came upon the two hats shown in the gallery. Great subjects, surely, but how to put them in motion…?
Eventually, I rigged up a suspension system, kinda: I tied the hats together, loosely, with black thread, and then I tied a separate horizontal length of black thread overhead, draping the hats’ thread over that one. After a bit of experimentation, I came up with this scheme:
- Lighting position: four different horizontal positions relative to the subject’s vertical plane (call them 3 o’clock, 6 o’clock, 9 o’clock, and 12 o’clock); three different vertical positions (high, medium, low). This gave me 12 different configurations altogether (3 o’clock high, 6 o’clock medium, and so on). I also used a combination of overhead lighting and flash, or flash alone.
- Motion: I simply gave the vertical thread several twists, so the hats spun on the vertical axis.
- …and I added some other variations, by changing the hats’ positions on the thread and their positions relative to each other.
So that’s where the “hundreds of separate shots” came from. I cut that number way down by eliminating any photos in which only one hat was shown, or in which both hats appeared but only as brims, not as brims-and-peaks.
In post-processing, at the computer, I did this sort of thing:
- cropped all photos to square shape (vs. the original 16×9 aspect ratio)
- altered the hats’ positions further, by rotating the image to hide the fact that all shots had shown them arranged one hat above the other
- “healed” — i.e., removed invisibly — the various lengths of string, making the hats appear to be tumbling independently through the frame
- converted the original color images to black-and-white, slightly tinted in a couple of cases
- made general adjustments to correct for slightly “off” exposure, contrast, and so on
Consider, now, how I would have tackled this project six months ago (assuming I’d even come up with the subjects in question): I would have taken at most a couple of shots using each of the 12 lighting positions; from say two-three dozen shots total I’d have selected — maybe — two final images for post-processing. And the post-processing itself? Much less tinkering, with much less interesting results.
Since wrapping up “Hat Dance,” I’ve begun one more project — more open-ended, in that I don’t know exactly how many parts it will finally include. The general idea, though, is to tell a story, first to last chapter — and you can probably guess the nature of the story from its title: “A Dog’s Eye Story.”
I won’t belabor you with a detailed discussion of the project (at least not today, ha). But in the context of this post’s topic, I wanted to share two images with you, both considered for “Chapter 3: Mistakes Were Made”:
On the left is the photo I originally took, and laboriously framed/edited, and was just about to post on Instagram… before I ended up a day later doing the same thing, including posting, for the photo on the right.
Photographically (I guess), I still prefer the one on the left. I like especially the way the “mistake” is lit, to make it really obvious that this is a puddle. So why remake it?
The main reason: I didn’t take the photo on the left from the (fictional) dog’s-eye level: it’s up off the floor a few inches too high, relative to the height I’d used (and already posted) in Chapters 1 and 2. (Incidentally, that’s why the lighting is sorta just-right in the left-hand photo: I kept moving up and down until it looked perfect to me.) The addition of the nearby newspaper scrap also makes the “mistake” a bit too obvious — clubbing the viewer over the head with the, well, the mistake-ness. And finally, in terms of the right-hand photo’s primary plus: by including The Human’s own two feet, presumably at the moment of discovery, the right-hand photo makes this more of a one-photo story, as it were.
In other words: I decided I needed a whole new draft, for reasons having nothing to do with mechanics, and everything to do with theme and narrative.
In short: exactly the reasons to start a whole new draft in a written story. Funny how that works out.
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