(Photo: From a promo shoot for one of the bands I'm in)
Shooting other peoples art is tricky. Some might say that when you photograph another persons art you should endeavor to only document the piece, and not try to expand on it or try and claim your photograph as art. Some would say the exact opposite. I am leaning towards the latter.
That is to say, I did not approach the sculpture garden to just inventory and document the works there. I wanted to capture it's effect on me, it's often visceral and wrenching effect. So I put all of the tools I could to work towards that end, camera position, composition, light, focal length, aperture, bokeh etc.
The Martyr, Rodin
Light became a bit of a problem, in that there was way too much hard light most of the time. I had set aside lunchtime to work on this project so the middle of the day was when I had to shoot. I was lucky in that there were some (rare) overcast days while I was there.
Over the course of shooting I tripped the shutter a total of about 1000 times on 6 trips of between 1 and 2 hours each. It's a 15 min round trip to the garden from work, so a few long lunches were involved.
All of the photos were imported into Aperture for initial editing and ranking. However, my fuzzy month was made even more fuzzy because of that crazy bad flu going around. Being in bed ate up a lot of shooting and editing time. As a result I spent my up-time shooting, and down time in bed. This left most of the sorting and editing to the end which, in hind sight, was a mistake.
Looking at the book now (with a weeks perspective on it), I should have cut it down to about 1/2 the size. But, without the limitations of SoFoBoMo I bet I would still be out shooting.
Next: Creating the book itself
