Throwback Thursday

Our haul from the archives this week brings a few favorites I’ve not looked at in a while.

One of the things about being around photographing for this length of time is not just the abundance of material in the back catalog but the perspective it gives you looking back. Hindsight, they say, is 20-20.

Can’t you just feel the love?

I’ve mentioned a few times in this space how it took several years before I was able to find my “voice” as a photographic artist. Like most, early in my career I tried to do things like many of the successful photographers of the day. While I admire many of those artists, I never felt comfortable working as they did. And, needless to say, my work hardly measured up. And why would it? The cover band rarely sounds better than the original.

It’s one thing to think you know what you need to do, and it’s entirely another to get out and do it. I remember being very unsure of myself as I gradually let my work evolve to where I could honestly call it my own. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it all seems so predestined. The perfect path. Who knew?

This little guy couldn’t be more relaxed as he waits for his turn on stage…

Because I do love a grand love story, I’ll illustrate this weeks thoughts with a few wedding pictures. The two images above and the one below are everything that a wedding photographer would never do in those days. Grainy black & white? High speed films? Shallow depth of field?Motion blur? TOY CAMERAS??? A kid yawning? Are you kidding me? What kind of “pro” does that? Who’s gonna buy any of those?

Well, those are all the wrong questions. The real question should be: With what tools in my kit can I best tell my clients story?

Once I had that part worked out, the answers just flowed, and I finally felt like I had something that belonged to me. Sometimes it’s not enough to just ask questions. It’s more about knowing what questions to ask.

He won’t appreciate this moment until he’s a little older…

I just LOVE these three pictures. They tell such a great story. Seeing them now takes me right back to the moment I made them.

While I may be a little fuzzy on the names, the emotion of the moment has never left. And that’s what makes for a powerful story.

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…