Rick’s Rants and Raves

OMG, I totally love this image. If you have Instagr.am, you gotta follow my wife, bennettanneb. She’s totally come out of her shell, photographically speaking. I knew she had an eye and latent talent, but was a bit intimidated by the millions of settings on a dSLR. Instagr.am has helped open her up. I just wish there was a way to link to her feed or something outside of the iPhone app [Update: I figured it out! Her images are here, and so are mine]. So, while I’m thinking about it, here are some other images she’s posted…

Imma so proud of you sweetie!

Over the last couple of years, one of our cats, Ashes, as developed an adorable attachment to our daughter. He sleeps in her bed most nights, and will generally prefer her lap to others in the family. He follows her upstairs to her room, and will scratch at her bedroom door if it is closed.

The most adorable habit he has is dragging her articles out of her room, generally leaving them at the top of the stairs. He meows loudly as he’s dragging the item, and we’ve been able to tell the difference in his voice when he’s dragging something to the hallway. He particularly loves her long-loved teddy-blanket. She’s had this lovey for more than a decade, and Ashes certainly recognizes it as something special to her. The picture above is where Ashes left teddy a couple of days ago. Her room is at the far back left of the picture.

One of the common refrains among photography forums is “get out there and shoot”. This is usually in response to someone asking questions like “which lens is best?” and “what should my settings be for shooting in a park?” etc. The response, get out there and shoot, is typically meant as encouragement, a la Nike, to just do it. Photography is as much about practice as it is about knowledge.

Yesterday I had a choice: I could either watch one of my favorite photographers doing a live broadcast of a class, or I could go shoot a bunch of teenagers at a middle school dance. I had arranged with one of the organizers to do something like prom formals, but in a moment of self-doubt I wondered if anyone would care if I was there. These were 12-14 year olds at a dance–I would just be an old guy in the way.

Then I reminded myself of a comment I’d made to a friend recently–I feel like my technical competence has reached a decent level, I just need more subjects. So I stuck to my loose commitment to take pictures at the dance, and I’m glad I did. Full set here.

I set up my white seamless background in the lunch run on the floor just under the dance, in a simple two light set-up: one on the background, another into an umbrella. The seamless I own right now is only 54″ wide and is perfect for one or two people (if they’re friendly) but doesn’t work at all for groups. When the first onslaught came down for some pictures, it was a group of about 20 kids, and they all wanted to be in the same shot. I told them no more than two at a time, but I was overruled as the four teens above got into position. I very quickly had to let go of the idea that my background had to be perfect–the kids were there to have fun together, and therefore my images would be about their friendships, not whether the background was perfect. In pretty short order I was up to 14 kids in a single shot. The kids kept coming down, group after group after group. Some wanted to be goofy, some more reserved. My fear that none of them would be interested quickly gave way to a bit of perspiration.

Then this kid describes a series of poses he wanted to do, and I decided to make it more dark and dramatic.

And that gave way to more dramatic lighting shots…

This young woman really enjoyed employing inappropriate hand gestures in her pictures (most of which haven’t been posted).
After 90 minutes of shooting in the lunch room, I decided to put the DIY diffuser on the flash and the flash on my camera and head up to the dance floor.

The girls ate it up–group after group were posing so I would take more pictures, and that was fun, but I wanted movement and action. So I had the group above jumping, and the boy perfectly anticipated the shot and went sliding through.
I also worked my way into the midst of the kids dancing, for more action.

And then I opened up the shutter speed to capture more movement.

And that brings me to the shot that lead this post. I’ll repeat it again…

Two years ago I might have deleted this image. Today, I like it a lot because it shows the passion and movement at the dance. I like how the kids are a mix of blur and crisp–for example, the center bottom girl’s eyes are in focus behind a veil of motion-blurred color.

The remaining challenge for the photography was what to do with the images. While I was doing the more formal shots, I was handing kids a small piece of paper with the address for a specific page on my website. I created the page as a placeholder because I hadn’t decided what to do, but I knew once I decided, I could edit the page and direct visitors to the appropriate location.

I had several options for posting the images: facebook, flickr, shutterfly for prints, or my own webhost. I seriously doubt these kids want prints. They live their lives almost entirely in the digital realm. Putting them on my own host would make it easy for me, but the kids would have to go through some steps to put them on their own profiles in facebook. So I decided to post them to facebook publicly for the kids, and on flickr in case there are families out there that don’t approve of their kids using facebook.

So, what did I learn from the experience?

• That the kids would really enjoy the process of having their pictures taken. Around 80 kids voluntarily came to the portrait setup I had, many of them making multiple trips
• My thought with the white background was that it would not look like a dance floor. If I were to do that again, I think I would need a 9 foot wide roll.
• Another possible idea would be to simulate the dance-floor effect and shoot in an open space with a gelled flash behind the group shooting toward the camera and a more direct main light above and behind the camera. I could probably make the lunch room nearly disappear to black with that kind of setup, but I’d definitely have to test it out.
• I still need to figure out what to do with hands, especially for girls in a more formal pose.
• Despite my worries, I had a blast.

OK, I know I just recently wrote an entire post on how faces are important. But I just couldn’t resist this photo. This was during a cub scout outing to go bowling. The picture above violates my usual rule to kill an image if the face of the subject is obscured. But I like the way the faces of my son and his friend are being obscured–arms pointing to what’s on-screen.

My son had just bowled his first ever Turkey–three strikes in a row.