Etwas düsteres Licht, ein charmantes Model, fotografiert auf analogen Schwarz-Weiß Film. Mehr braucht es oft nicht für eine fesselnde Serie an Bildern.
Halyna
Ich hatte zweimal die Freude, mit der wunderbaren Halyna zu arbeiten, sie hat eine ganz besondere Ausstrahlung
..at a 1/15th of a second..
..1/15 of a second seems like the blink of an eye to most people. when holding a hasselblad c/m500 loaded with iso80 film it becomes much longer than that. but it fit the situation at the end of our shooting absolutely perfectly. the slow focus, cosima's slow movements, the music, and – finally – the beautiful sound of the mirror slap and shutter of an old camera..
Die Suchende
Suchen.
Nach Licht.
Nach Hilfe.
Nach Kraft.
Da sitzt du, alleine, auf dich gestellt. Wo beginnt eine Suche, wo geht sie weiter, wo endet sie?
WIE endet sie?
Mein Dank geht an die wundervolle Iryna.
Teilnehmer: Model Iryna Berdnyk
Ballett Fächertanz
Dies ist mein neues Edeldruck aus meiner letzten Ballett Serie. Ich finde dieses Motiv wunderschön, die Ausstrahlung und Haltung meines Models, macht es zu einem ganz besonderem Motiv. Es durfte auch schon das Cover des Untold Magazin aus Griechenland schmücken.
Bei der Erstellung des Druckes war es irgendwie wie immer. Und doch ganz anders. Am ersten Tag bereitete ich das Negativ vor. Dann ließ ich es erst mal bis zum Morgen liegen, da mir irgendwie nicht danach war, einen Druck zu fertigen.
Manchmal gelingen die ersten Versuche nicht auf Anhieb. Entweder bilden Streifen auf dem Druck, oder es sind unschöne Flecken entstanden. Doch hier war das Gefühl irgendwie andres. Es passte von Anfang an alles und ich war sehr gespannt auf das Ergebnis.
Erst als es aus dem Wasserbad kam, sah ich das fertige Ergebnis und das alles geglückt ist. Geht es euch manchmal auch so, dass Tage dabei sind, wo einfach nichts gelingen will und man sich in X Versuchen vergräbt und dann doch alles für die Tonne ist?
Vielleicht sollte man hier auch sagen, Kunst ist eine Leidenschaft und kann sehr stimmungsabhängig sein. So ist es jedenfalls bei mir. Diesmal bin ich froh, dass gleich beim ersten Mal alles funktioniert hat und dieser wundervolle Druck dabei entstanden ist.
It doesn´t matter.
Ich mach das mal, egal was dabei herauskommt.
A sombre summer splash
Water gives life but may swallow it within the glimpse of an eye.
Marina amidst two worlds.
A sombre summer splash.
PolaroidLAb
A bit of fun with the Polaroid Lab. Go from digital to analog and revisit old photographs.
2 Welten
Dieses Bild entstand vor einigen Jahren während einer Ballett Session mit meinem Stammmodel. Sie ist mit Leib und Seele Tänzerin und begeht ihr Leben genauso wie im Tanz voller Leidenschaft.
2 Welten prallen hier aufeinander. Indes könnte man meinen, dass hier ein Widerspruch entsteht, doch zeigt dieses Bild für mich wunderbar, wie sich 2 Welten vereinen und zu einem Werk zusammen fließen.
Ein Schuh im Leben, der andere im Tanz.
The Archive Reveals All
My start in photography was very very backwards. I had no experience or real training other than having toyed with point-and-shoot cameras rather unsuccessfully. To this day I am not a "good" photographer.
The initial impetus was seeing aerial dancers rehearsing through some decorative lighting at an art museum gala. We were using high-definition glass gobos of winter branches for an autumnal effect and the shadows wrapping around the aerialists were entrancing. I had recently had corrective surgery on both eyes and it struck me that I could recreate this look to get a better picture than my phone was going to give me. Three days later I was at my local camera shop buying an entry-level Nikon and a wonderful 105mm lens (which turned out to be too long for the space I would use it in). My day job in production (mainly sound, lighting and projection, all playback oriented) did give me some understanding of noise floors, gain structures and the like. I kitted out a spare room in my warehouse with a ring of truss and theatrical lighting and became obsessed with losing and finding models in the patterning. The focus was, literally, less on the people than the technique and I certainly confused the hell out of the sensor on my poor little camera. I quickly discovered some features I wanted and moved up to a mid-range Nikon and then a full-frame. And then I moved outdoors.
The difference between nutso patterning and portraits in natural light could not have been a wider gap. It very much laid bare that I had learned the exposure triangle backwards, among other oversights. One that is jumping out tonight as I look through the archive is that I had some fundamental misunderstandings of the Nikon focus system. I'm still not impressed by Nikon's NX Studio software but I re-downloaded it in order to access the "show focus" feature. This particular day my D750 was set to AF-Area multi-point and it wasn't until nearly a year later that I realized I needed to swap over to single-point, which immediately did away with the stubborn habit of auto focus choosing the wrong damned thing to focus on! There were other instances of consistent misses but this particular shoot, with one of my favorite people who had made a point of coming to my state to work with me….well, it was a bitter evening when I got home and was able to look at these images full size. They looked FINE on the back-of-camera view (I also hadn't yet learned to zoom in and check, a shortcut that I very much appreciate).
These are, I suppose, how one truly learns a work flow. I've never quite been able to ditch handheld in favor of a tripod — I want to be more active in choosing angles, to drop down to my belly to see what it looks like from there. And I'm not usually overly concerned with sharpness itself — I use a lot of vintage manual lenses or lenses designed to be troublesome and I like the result. But there are times when something needs to be sharp.
As painful as it is, I spend a good amount of time on even the worst of shoots. And I don't throw them away in disgust. It's not just to rub my own nose in my mistakes but to come back and see the lesson again every so often. To think about the lesson and then wonder at it a bit and see if I'm drawing the right conclusion. And every so often, as tonight, I find a gem or two that survived my blunders.