Getting Ready ©2012 D.A.Wagner

It only made sense that I started out assisting fashion guys, since I attended the Fashion Institute of Technology. But through a series of fateful events, I ended up assisting the brilliant photographer and lighting master, Ben Somoroff. Ben is one of the photographers whose career and vision blossomed under the tutelage of Alexey Brodovitch of Harper’s Bazaar fame. Brodovitch also influenced the likes of Art Kane, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, to name just a few of the ground-breaking photographers in that elite circle.

Ben shot fashion. He shot still life. He directed television commercials. He was a master craftsman and I was his apprentice. And while he was inventive and clever, patient and thoughtful, he was also easygoing and immensely likable. Remarkable traits in an incredibly challenging industry (polite words for stressful). During my time with Ben we worked with Milton Glaser, Walter Bernard and Gael Greene from New York Magazine, and Madison Avenue icon David Deutsch, who designed my first business cards because I asked (I didn’t know who he was). I was sponsored into NABET (National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, a union) by Mel Sokolsky’s studio manager (and former B&W printer for Avedon), Frank Finocchio, so I could work with Ben on TV commercials as a prop man. Ben taught me so very much over those years and I’m still learning today. I owe him a debt of gratitude, but regrettably can not give it. Ben died in ’84.

I never saw Ben loose his temper. Not even when I accidentally ruined a batch of film by washing it in near boiling water. He wasn’t happy, but I didn’t get fired either. I was a pretty lucky kid. Over the years, Ben has increasingly come to mind in my work. I now see and think in ways that allow me to take bigger risks. Ben did that all the time, he went with the flow. Now I find I’m doing that, too, and with a bit of patience as well. Some risks fail, fall short or look routine, while others succeed.

Eventually the risks become technique. Technique becomes style and style becomes vision. I’m taking even more risks these days, because even now, there’s so much more to learn. So why not reach out and explore?

The heydays of photography may be long since gone, but the challenges of reaching for greatness never change. Be complacent or take risks. It’s a choice. I’ll keep walking on that ledge to see what happens.

And if I fail or fall short, I’ll get right back up and try again. Boy, have I been there before.

Fresh Beets © 2012 D.A.Wagner

For years I’ve entertained the idea of pursuing a line of kitchen art. I even toyed with a shop on Etsy for a while called Kitchen Graphics. Now, after shooting thousands of personal photos of fruits and veggies, both in the studio and out, these berries,hot peppers, sprouts and assorted salad fixin’s are available online as museum wrapped prints from Somerset House Fine Art in their Kitchen Decor category. I have them in my kitchen. Why aren’t they in yours?

I (very loosely) use Richard Avedon’s series of Nos as a guideline to capturing my produce - “No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narratives.” This allowed Avedon to get to the raw unadorned beauty of his subjects. I apply this approach to appliances and products as well. (Is there no shame?)

Well, it had to happen sometime.

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.

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.

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.

Nastutium + Tomatoes

I’ve been trying to match a hundred or so photographs from my Shooting from the Hip series into complimentary pairs. A lot of questions came up regarding color, texture, light, camera angle, and a myriad of other qualities. But the one overarching question was, what makes two photographs viewed together, side by side, visually more interesting than one?

That lead the discussion back to my last posting, where Feature Integration Theory was mentioned. Okay, I’m not out on the street taking in the sights (or in caveman style, looking for food or danger), but sitting at a table with a carpet of two inch thumbnail prints I’m jockeying around like a board game. Intuitively I arranged pairs of little prints on the fly – instantly, they either matched or didn’t. Of course there were some gray areas where I couldn’t decide. In many cases however, I simply took two images I had glanced at and instinctively paired them, left and right.

In Feature Integration Theory, “Preattentive Stage” is the first stage of seeing, when we recognize color, shape, direction of light, etc. I researched this a bit, but didn’t find anything substantial online about differences in perception between the left and right eyes when viewing two different images. But I have to think there is something in our brain that definitely favors seeing a particular color or shape on either the left or the right. Probably has something to do with predatory animals attacking from our left, because they are mostly right-pawed or something like that.

Maybe I should have been a researcher so I could get funding and figure this out.