Chinese Take Out Boxes and Scissors

Funny. I didn’t think this was that interesting the first time around. But now that I look at it again, it fits right in with the Everyday Items theme. Again, no retouching here, just tweaked in Lightroom 3 and a few dust spots removed.

D.A.

Just a Pair of Nail Brushes

There’s something about the dynamic of the negative space and the transparency of these cheap nail brushes that made this work. No retouching here other than to spot it and process it out in Lightroom. As much as I love traveling, I love playing around in the studio.

The steep medieval town of Trevi. Sadly, it was bypassed, due to impending rain.

The canal path near Trevi. Sunny here, dark and gloom over Trevi...

I went to Italy for three weeks to shoot stock and take a little break. The idea was to cycle through Tuscany and Umbria and capture all the scenic backroads, farms, bridges and ancient Roman odds and ends incorporated into medieval buildings or structures that still lay abandoned. No car.

Medieval Door framed with Roman stones and a four button intercom. A few hundred years ago something ancient got dismantled to make this doorway.

So, with Vicki (my significant other) as initiator, organizer, travel and booking agent, navigator and companion, the challenge was on…

A working vacation, that’s a good idea. Right?

This wasn’t a group tour. There would be no van in the rear picking us up if it rained (and it rained with thunder and lightning), if we got tired (and we got tired), if we got lost (I am directionally challenged), or if the water ran out (yup, did that, too).

Graffiti using two air vents on building wall in Spoleto, Italy back street

For a long time in Italy, your closest neighbor was often your mortal enemy and to see them coming was critical, because it wasn’t usually for dinner. So most medieval towns are built on serious hills that are hard to walk up. They are even harder to cycle up. But if you drive up them in a car you’ll have it easy, missing all the good scenery. It was the reasoning behind cycling.

A peek at Castle Rocca Maggiore atop Assisi seen through ginestra blossoms and olive trees from a Roman foot path. Nope, you won't see this from a car window.

However, riding to Montepulciano, we found ourselves attempting to pedal up a steep elevation that abruptly rose from 900 feet to 1800 feet. We gave up and walked it – each pushing fifty pounds of bike with loaded panniers (I’m not proud). It’s Tour de France stuff. With an average 6% uphill grade, that easily cut our speed in half and depleted more than 80% of our energy.  No wonder the town was used by the ancient Romans to protect the main roads; it was impossible for anyone to get there quickly. And, it’s probably the reason they make such great wine. After a climb like that you need a good drink and a nap. As it was, I was so exhausted, all I shot was a misogynistic wine display perched on a ancient window sill; I forgot to shoot the town. We had another 25 miles to go, it was late in the day, I shouldn’t have had that glass of wine, blah, blah, blah.

The two girls of Montepulciano. At least I took this photo...

Overall I got to shoot quite a bit, but regrettably, too many times, we had to decide between shooting and cycling, since frequent stops added hours to each ride and riding in the dark on the backroads in a unfamiliar places seemed like a bad idea. Don’t get me wrong, we both loved this trip and we’ll do it again, but now I know why the national Italian cycling squad won 6 gold metals in the Rome Olympics.

It was the hills.

At the end of the uphill ride to Cortona. A breeze compared to Montepulciano.

(And, yes, I also photographed fruits and veggies…)

Italian Heirloom Tomatoes in Campo di Fiori, Rome

Naked Twins

So to speak, it doesn’t take much to breathe life into dolls after they’ve been undressed. They get strange. Take the clothes off the doll and they take on a life of their own. (And, yes, I know, the color of the heads don’t match their bodies — I’ll fix that in post).

Two Men and a Lady

These are G gauge figures used by architects. They place them in architectural models for scale. I couldn’t take off their clothes, but they sure have attitudes.

The Four Tenors

Again, once the clothes go, things come across differently. It has been suggested that I rename this, The Four Castrati, for all the obvious reasons.

I hope I keep finding bizarre toy figures like these to photograph. Gotta love the World Wide Web.

D.A.

The Hasselblad Masters Competition Web Page

I’m humbled. I’m a Hasselblad Masters Finalist.

No, really, I am. Some time around the middle of last year I entered the Hasselblad Masters Competition and promptly forgot about it.

Then I got a “congratulations” email from Hasselblad. And, thinking that everyone who entered got one, thought nothing of it until I went to the website and discovered I’m in an elite group of 110 finalists selected from of a field of over 2500 entrants. Hey, I have better odds of winning this than I do playing the state lottery, where my chances of being struck by lightning are better.

The winner gets to work on a “Masters” project supported by Hasselblad.

Cool.

Click here to vote for my photos. The voting process is wonky to say the least. But once you’ve muddled through, They fixed the voting and now it’s a breeze, so please give me five points if you don’t mind. It’s appreciated. You have until October 31st, 2011, which has to be one of the longest voting windows ever for a photo contest.

Now, get out there and vote.

Fishtales ©2011 D.A.Wagner

At one point in my career I used to rely on dry ice to create fog and smoke effects. I’ve always been fascinated with the stuff – it’s super cold, squeals wildly when placed on metal, makes water “boil,” and can asphyxiate you pretty quickly. That last point is pretty important.

I made the mistake once (and only once) of lying on the floor of a CO₂ fog-covered set to see if some lights were in the right position. The moment I hit the floor my throat immediately closed and I stopped breathing for one very long moment. I panicked. Lots of stuff went through my head until I realized (duh) all I had to do was to get up out of the fog. Was I shocked at the speed in which my lungs shut down.

While CO₂ is about .035 percent of the air we naturally breathe, increase that to 30 percent and you’re in for convulsions, coma or death within a minute. Make that pure carbon dioxide and, well, I’d guess death might come even faster. I’m not looking to find out. I’m just sayin’.

A few of my personal rules for working with dry ice are:

1. Don’t handle the stuff with your bare hands. Ever. (Give or take, CO₂ freezes at about minus109.3 degrees Fahrenheit, water freezes into ice at 32.)

2. Never stick your face into an ice chest filled with dry ice. Ever. (Refer back to the third paragraph of this blog post.)

3. Do not let dry ice come in contact with expensive electronic devices. Ever. (Just another one of those learning experiences not covered here.)

Anyway, once burned, twice shy. But I’ve come to love what dry ice freezing does to food, so this week I used dry ice to freeze miscellaneous crustaceans and fish into a crystalline state.

Without incident.

Dancing Baby Bok Choy

After 5 years of shooting greenmarket produce in the studio, at Union Square, Italy and other various places, I needed to do something with all those digital images other than use them to grace friend’s and family’s homes and fill numerous hard drives to capacity. So, with a little trepidation I started an Etsy store to sell digital prints, not as expensive art, but as affordable graphics to frame and hang in the kitchen, which is where I think they belong.

And although I’ve been focused on business these past few months, I’m now anxiously waiting for spring to return so I can continue this project.

It’s just way too cold to go out now.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to test out a couple of Broncolor’s Scoro A4S packs. These pricey, high-speed,computer controlled flash units (about $28,000US for two packs and two heads) are unbeatable when it comes to short flash duration. It froze everything we shot as crisp and sharp as one could expect and, no, I’m not going to make any freezy jokes. As always, turning many of the images sideways and upside down made for the most interesting splash results. And I couldn’t resist throwing in (quite literally) some of the toy figures sitting around from recent jobs.

Lemon Drops

It was a fun day in the studio. Thanks to Steve Warren, my assistant, for the extra Canon 5D to shoot the behind the scenes video. And special thanks to Tim Hawkings at Cheeky Little Monkey for making it all happen.

D.A.

Drug store dolls from Rite Aid. Cheap. Sexy. Coy.

Last month I stopped waiting for phone calls. Instead, I approached a potential client from New Zealand with a concept for their publishing project. I presented images from my personal work (a good reason for throwing toys into water) along with a smartly written creative brief that clearly identified my approach. If I won this job it would be a labor of love: 19 photographs as chapter dividers for a series of 4 creative business books. Not a big fee, but a big return: A complete portfolio of interesting work that would be produced in about a week and paid for by the client.

Negotiation took a few days; there’s a 16-hour time-forward difference between NYC and New Zealand. And like moose and mice, the client responded to my emails while I slept. We negotiated a fee and copyrights and the job was on.

I had initiated an assignment.

This job was no walk in the park. Propping and modelmaking took five days and the two scheduled shoot days ended up being 16 hours long (plus another 26.5 hours of retouching). At 2PM, when we (we = me and my intern, Steve Warren, from the School of Visual Arts) had already been shooting for 5 hours, the client was just waking up, putting on his robe and slippers to view the work we posted for his approval while he ate his morning porridge. It was all done via email, and he was online as promised and giving feedback to move the job along. By the time we wrapped up each shoot day, it was 1AM, 5PM in NZ. Hard work, but a pleasure.

And here’s the best part. The client gave me full creative license, which could have been a disaster, but this client was a prince. He gave clear responses and never waffled. He knew exactly what he wanted and that was for me to do my best work.

Who could ask for anything more?

Did I make a profit? A little.

Did I have fun? Oh, yes.

And that portfolio? Just as soon as the books are printed, it goes up on my dawagner.com web site.

Simply Thinking...

During one of my recent web dalliances to read more about how photographers, or humans in general, are creative, I found a 2004 paper published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review called, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity by Arne Dietrich, who is at the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon. He’s actually a very funny Ph.D. specializing in the neurobiology of creativity who writes about himself in self-deprecating fashion. His papers are however quite serious and he is well respected.

As it opens, he writes that creativity includes two significant characteristics: The production of work that is “original and unexpected” and “useful.” As a photographer, I understand original and unexpected, but useful? I’m not to sure how useful photographs are versus, let’s say, an artificial heart valve in the shape of a pretzel.

He goes on to say that creativity requires the ability to maintain a decent attention span (that made me nervous). If our brain can store what we’re thinking long enough so that a creative solution – those original and unexpected and useful thoughts that solve the problem at hand – can evolve, primarily in our prefrontal cortex, we have the ability to be highly creative.

Now, what I was going to say?

Oh, yes. I love his description of creative thinking – “novelty production.” That sounds like someone who invents cheap ten cent toys you might find in Chinatown, or some very clever photographers.

Anyway, he continues to write that research studies show “creativity goes beyond the rational” and there is a link between creativity and bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. He references that with a half dozen studies but then in his next sentence, counters that with other studies that demonstrate, “creative work can also be the result of laborious trial and error.”

Now, that sounds like photography.