Yes, I’ve said it before. I’ve come in all gleeful, heart filled with joy, proclaiming I’m finally back on track with my photography. Unfortunately, there was something unsatisfying even in my efforts with Marcela and Kelly, some missing ingredient that ended up having the effect that while the end result was OK overall, it still felt like it lacked something vital, some spark to make them feel alive.
I think I’ve hit it.
While Marcela’s portraits came out from average to OK (Cthulhu bless her, she was extremely happy with the results), they had the same problem as the five or six rolls I shot of Hailey Reifel: I basically limited myself to pointing the camera in her general direction, trying to get a composition that didn’t embarrass my entire family for generations, and pushed the shutter. I was playing it safe, trying to get to a minimum common denominator that wouldn’t upset anyone but would get the job done.
That’s just no way to accomplish anything.
It turns out that during lunch today, my friend Sileny casually mentioned she needed some portraits in her bellydancing outfit. She knows I’m a photography nut, and that I was itching for a chance to do some experimenting with the new baby. As luck would have it, or more likely because of her evil scheming (she thinks a lot like me), she was carrying one of the costumes in the back of her car, so we set for the house to do an improvised photo shoot in my living room. We moved a couch, took down some portraits that were on the way, I set up the flashes and experimented a bit while she changed upstairs, and we fired away.
The first photos came out pretty damned average. She was happy with them, but it seems I’m a damned lot more strict with myself than other people are with me - I just wasn’t pleased. You could clearly see there was a house wall behind her, on which there were often shadows projected, the hooks from which the photos had been hanging were painfully obvious, and many other tiny details that just bothered my detail-obsessed brain; I considered it, overall, a disaster.
You’re working with a bloody digital camera, I told to myself. You made the damned investment, start using it.
So I started tweaking parameters, using the limited controls that the Digital Rebel has (my film EOS 3 has spoiled me), and shooting frames as I went - tweak, shoot, evaluate; tweak, shoot, evaluate; ad nauseum. I experimented. Finally I hit a combination of manual metering, flash, aperture, and other technical crap I won’t bore you with, and got some results I liked.
While they may not be completely original, I dare you say you can tell I took these in my cluttered living room during a dark, rainy afternoon.
Yes, they’re not perfect, but there are two things I love about them: the quality of the light is aeons ahead of anything else I’d managed to accomplish so far, and Sila’s mischievousness really came through on those photos.
Next thing we knew, it was two hours later and we had shot about 150 photos. Most of them I’ll end up discarding, but there are several which are keepers. Currently only two of them are up, I’ll be adding more as I edit them. You can also expect a rant about the wonders of digital photography in the near future.
I’m so hooked.
Need. Digital. Camera. Badly.