SoFoBoMo wrapup: Shooting Rodin

(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

Resignation

Today will be my last shoot for SoFoBoMo Book one. If it is not, I will never finish. I have enough shots to do it... so as one horse said to the other "Why the long face?"

I want perfection, it is in my nature. Perhaps it is even the reason I take photos and play music, it's all about the pursuit of the perfect moment. Well, it is for me at least.

However, if I don't finish, I fail. Failure is as far from perfection as one can get.

So... last shoot ... today.

And, for LeeAnne, I have had five shoots at an hour each so far and generally click the shutter around 200 times each time I go out (Filling a 2 gig card). However, I may only get 4 or 5 shots that are up to snuff, or none ... as has happened ... so while I have more than enough shots that *could* be used for the project, I'm not sure if I want to use them.

Thinking about Roy Decarava (SoFoBoMo)

Shooting Rodin is turning out to be much harder than I thought. The specular highlights make it hard to capture the detail in the highlights and the dark areas.

Roy Decarava would use the darkness to his advantage ... but I'm thinking about bracketing exposures and HDR ... then again ... there is Roy....

SoFoBoMo - First shots and research

I took my first set of shots yesterday. The first thing that went wrong was... I forgot to bring any of my zoom lenses. All I had on me was my low light kit 30mm 1.4, 50mm 1.4 and 85mm 1.8 prime lenses. I stayed with the 30mm.

I shot for about 30 min, ate lunch in the car on the way over from work. 15 min to get there for a total of 30 min drive time. It fits into a lunch hour well.

I may have one keeper shot from this session, but I will reserve that decision for later in the process.

Meanwhile I have begun to research the artist and the works I'm photographing:
Wiki Page for the B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts
Musee Rodin
Rodin Wikipedia
Rodin Web

Pictured above is "The Martyr", part of "The gates of hell" but removed from that context and displayed larger and on it's own. It seems that much of the work from Rodin, done is his later period, springs from "The gates of hell".

As Mr. Spock would say ... "Fascinating...."