A Rush To Judgement

I had an interesting couple of days off, taking photographs in Chicago and here at home in St. Louis. I'm pretty worn out and have lots of stuff to keep me busy the rest of the week with sorting and editing photos. Who knows, maybe there will be a few keepers when I'm done. I was slow getting started because I had to move a bunch of stuff off my laptop in order to have enough space to edit some massive panorama shots. That's done so all I need to do is to find some time for the rest.

I had an interesting time at the park last night dealing with a person who claimed to be the leader of a bunch of girls who were performing with lighted hula hoops. Performing is probably a bit strong because they seemed to lack any coordinated sense of direction and they arrived about an hour too late to take advantage of any good ambient lighting even though they had a photographer with them who should have known better but maybe photographer is too strong of a word also.

Let's just say he had a camera and a very large bag. I never saw him take anything out of the bag so I am forced to guess what might have been in there. Do I have a match for "Rufees" and "Duct tape?" No? Well I tried and thank you for playing our game. I don't want to tell anyone how to work their craft but dude, how about some fill flash? I would have done things much differently for sure.

I first saw this bunch out of the corner of my eye while I was taking photos at the splash-fountain. They had on some interesting outfits that I like to refer to as Circus Hooker Chic. I shrugged and went back to what I was doing. A minute later some blue haired women started screaming like, well like blue haired women at an Elvis concert and took off running (slowly) towards the other end of the park still screaming about a "performance." My lovely assistant who was very bored with splash-fountain photos by this time said that a (lighted) hula hoop "performance" might be pretty photo worthy. So I picked up my kit (both of them) and headed towards the far end of the park to check it out.

The self proclaimed leader of the circus hooker hula hoopers came over and informed me that she was not comfortable having photos taken of her group.

"What?"

"Yes, I'm just not comfortable with having photos taken of me and the group."

That took just about one half of a second to hit the part of my brain that really hates being told what to do and what I can do.

Uh, you do realize that you are in a public park and eight out of ten people here are taking photos right now?

"Well yes but..."

I started (launched) into my boilerplate speech about civil rights and the constitution and who knows what else and then she said, "Well I just wanted you to know."

I was already irritated before I got to the park though not looking for a fight. So I said, "Well I just want you to know that I am well within my rights to take photos of anything and everything that I want to in a public park."

Fine by me, I'll respect your wishes because in general I loath taking photos of people who don't want to be photographed because nothing useful usually comes from it. I picked up my cameras and tripods and moved another twenty yards away to a comfortable bench to watch the big "performance" which consisted of general milling about with no coordination or choreography and not a lot of enthusiasm. I thought about polling the rest of the group to see if anyone wanted to pose for a private session. Sort of a divide and conquer or splitting the ranks move but I was frankly too tired to care about photographing unwilling subjects in poor light.

Now mind you the "group" had their own shmuck photographer with that big ass bag of who knows what, taking available light shots (it was very dark by now) using the floodlights from the sculptures I guess. No fill flash at this point though much, much later he did start using an on camera flash (lame). Very dramatic and probably pretty unflattering. The lighting in this park is pretty horrible in general before you even start to think about taking photographs.

So now I am sitting and minding my own business almost a half a football field away when a security guard comes over with another guy in tow who I figure is the father or grandfather of one of these circus hooker hula hoopers (man I love saying that).

The security guard looks serious and asks if I was taking any photos of the girls.

Now I'm on fire (hey it's been a long day) and the first thing I say (loud enough for half the park to hear) is, "Do those girls and that photographer have a commercial photography permit to take photographs in this park?

"Did they reserve the park?"

"Do they have a city license?"

I guess my thinking was that they were going to claim this was some sort of commercial copyrighted photo shoot or something to that effect to claim that no one else could take photographs.

Bam, bam, bam I hammered on that guard like nobodies business until after several minutes when I finally came up for air he said, "I just wanted to ask you if they told you that you could not take photographs in the park."

"Oh."

So basically (for once) somebody was on my side, as was the other guy he had in tow, who was bragging by this time about getting the circus hooker hula hoopers photos with his special night vision camcorder. I imagine those turned out every bit as well as the official shmuck photographers efforts. We all agreed to play nice at the park and that (so far) the circus hooker hula hoop girls did not really seem as photo worthy as we had all hoped.

I walked back to the other side of the park figuring the hoopers would end up there and be in my shot which they were but they still managed to keep a distance by having their photographer shoot from the wrong angle.
I'm pretty sure that some of the girls would have appreciated having their individual photos taken but I was pretty disgusted with the whole thing by then and decided I would come back some other time with my own hula hoopers and flock of assistants to do a proper job of the whole thing.

So the moral of the story is not to judge people before you hear what they have to say, be nice to your daughters when they use your stuff and always agree with your lovely assistant when she suggests taking photographs of young women performers.

Point & Shoot Paradise

Late in the day
There came a summer rain
That washed all the dreary colors away
And turned the skies to soft gray

Early in the night
Came the return of clearer skies
So I went for a walk outside
To a little city park that people like

Until once more it was time
For me to turn and go back inside
To work on numbers, reports and files
And silently dream of quitting time

The little camera in my pocket brings me comfort and a small sense of purpose in recording the scene as a storm brushes against the window and blocks the sunset. Buildings vanish into the mist and clouds. It's a low tech image at best but the image describes the mood and emotion. I visit this window nearly every working day and watch the scene change with the seasons as I wonder if anything has been accomplished or affected by my presence. Perhaps there is someone watching me looking out my window.

Just Sit And Think For A While

I’m feeling a little lethargic today much the same as I felt yesterday. This is usually about the time when I start hatching plans for things to do during the coming week. I desperately need an out of town trip to get me out of this slump. It seems as though I haven’t been anywhere in ages when in reality it was only a couple of weeks ago that I was taking photos up in Michigan. Of course that trip is mostly what is responsible for busting the budget and keeping me at home for the past week.

I am supposed to do some night shots with the Brownie Hawkeye Flash camera this week. Since I have several Brownies that have been modified to do different things, I am always trying to figure out which one I want to use. I like the one I converted into a pinhole camera the best lately but that makes for some really long night exposures. I have another one with a flipped lens but that seems to work better at close range and I am thinking more of wide angle shots for this project. So I will probably use the straight stock model and load it up with some Kodak film. I’ll try to hit some spots downtown on Tuesday night.

The other thing on my mind today is waterproof equipment cases. Over at www.adventurecanoe.com we are knocking around the idea of a guided river trip on the Jacks Fork River. Of course you have to have cameras along on a trip like that and you have to keep the cameras dry. If anyone has any good experience with waterproof cases please email me or add a comment down below this post.

I have used Pelican brand cases in the past and they work well. There seem to be a lot different cases out there to choose from so if anyone would like to send me one for review I would be happy to put it through the paces. Until then here is a video review of an HPRC case that I found on Youtube.

Home Schooled

Right now over at the Strobist website David Hobby is running the Strobist Bootcamp II. The current assignment is to take a real estate or architectural interior photo of a residential living space with the intent of using it to help sell the property.

Since I have gotten back from vacation I have been asking everyone I could think of if I could shoot their house. It seems that either everyone is out of town or that no one trusts me around their expensive furniture. Oh well, there is no place like home. So with the deadline looming I decided to just go ahead and get it done in my own humble apartment.

I broke out my sparse little kit of old mismatched flashes only to find that one of them had retired and refused to work any more. There are lots of lights in the apartment so I went with what I had and spent an hour opening and closing blinds, turning lights on and off, moving furniture and adjusting the power output of my two remaining flashes. I’m fairly happy with the results though I can think of a few things I might to differently the next time.

Strobist info: Daylight creeps in from behind the camera through the horizontal aluminum blinds. I was hoping that there might be some interesting patterns cast on the foreground by those but no go at this time of day.
Shortly after I started, I came up with the idea that I wanted a diffraction star in this shot so I have stopped down to f/22 and opened the shutter for 2 seconds at ISO 400. I started out with tungsten white balance on the camera and gelled the second flash but with a fair amount of ambient in the beginning it was coming out way too blue. I ended up using the “shade” setting for white balance because I wanted more of a warm fuzzy feeling. It would be easy enough to dial things down to daylight balance but this seems more cozy somehow.
There is an overhead bulb in the hallway right along with a table lamp hidden behind the wall between the arched openings. The dining room is on the left with a chandelier that has 6 bulbs. I pulled the shades off of four of them to make that a little brighter. There are also 4 table lamps in the dining room. The kitchen is behind the dining room on the left and is being lighted by a fluorescent ceiling light above the sink. There are also windows in the dining room and kitchen but they don’t seem to be adding much to the exposure.
One of my flashes broke so I am down to just two at the moment. One flash is in the fireplace with doubled up orange gels. It is set to 1/4 power. Both flashes were triggered with a Cactus V2 radio. The other flash is in the hallway on the left side sitting on a table and aimed at a mostly white painted canvas so that it bounces some light around that area and hopefully illuminates the framed photographs on the opposite wall.
I pulled out the clamp I had borrowed but I forgot to use it. I was going to put the Nikon flash on its little stand but I couldn’t find it right away so I just laid both flashes on their backs instead.
No stands, just my tripod backed against the wall with the legs splayed out so I could get a lower vantage point. I did learn that perfectly arranged furniture has nothing to do with architectural photography. The camera has a slightly different idea about perspective and geometry than the eye so the furniture gets moved around so that it makes sense in the photograph rather than conversational seating groups.
I used the histogram on the camera to tweak the final exposure so I didn’t need to do much in post processing except to clone out a couple of pesky dust spots.
It occurred to me after the fact that I could have turned on the light in the hallway on the left. My goal in this shot was to be able to see into as much of the space as possible. Normally I would shoot from one corner but I wanted the fireplace and the piano really takes over the space in the opposite corner so I was force to shoot from the center instead.
I thought that those hurricane lanterns in the fireplace would act as gobos for the flash but it didn’t work out that way. Also I think I would have like to add a diffuser to the table lamp in the center because it is still a little too hot. I did think about the perspective up and down and could have changed it but decided on this because I wanted to include the edge of the carpet. Now that I think about it (and the lack of that extra foot of space) I could have just moved everything in the room forward about 12″ and I would have had it made. That piano is pretty heavy though…