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.
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.
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.
Gyoza in Oil (After Dennis Dunbar)
Twitter works. Maybe in mysterious ways, but it works.
Since I started tweeting a little less than a year ago I have been asked to write for Leaf Digital, Photocrew, The Photo Argus and other photo communities and blogs. I’ve met some pretty interesting photographers, retouchers, assistants and art directors. Many are just people I follow or who are following me, and then there are the dialogs that have turned into great friendships.
Take for example, Dennis Dunbar, a terrific retoucher from L.A. He’s a founding member of UPDIG (Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines) and is an ever-present constant in the world of Photoshop retouching known for his tutorials and lectures. Out of the blue one day, I find Dennis is following me. I check out his creds and start to follow him. Pretty standard stuff until we start DMing about each other’s projects and he suggests we work on a personal project or two. Okay, Dennis, I’m in.
I’ve got this series I’m working on with water tanks and there are challenges to deal with. Water is always cleverly unpredictable, no matter how well planned, or there can be food particulate in the water, and then there are a lot of foods that are buoyant. Water is a challenge. Fun, but a challenge.
Gyoza in Oil (Before Dennis Dunbar)
Photography with a creative team is always exciting and now Dennis was coming in fresh as a key player, so there would be a new dynamic with the results. I had worked out a stylized shot of a single dumpling being fried in oil with stylist, Corey Earling. Couldn’t really shoot it in boiling oil (I guess we could have, but the idea of working with boiling oil seemed kind of dicey), so we gelled the lights on the water, pinned the dumpling into the strainer and connected a couple of airstones to a fishtank pump for the “boiling” oil. So far so good, but not good enough. As always, I wanted more out of this shot. So I upload the select dumpling shot with notes and suggestions onto my FTP site for Dennis. What followed was a truly collaborative dialog of exploration and expertise, what proved to be an amazing transition from original to final.
3000 miles separate me and Dennis, yet we were able to meet, collaborate, communicate and produce an effective final image.
Hey, Twitter, what else you got for me?
01/09/2010 - Akamaru Modern Ramen at Ippudo, NYC
I put an ad up on Craigslist in February for a food stylist and much to my surprise, there were responses from 2 chefs: Corey Earling, the third place runner up from Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen (season four) and Rob Endelman, a wonderful natural food chef and educator.
These responses plus responses from 5 other established food stylists and one dessert chef left me stunned. I never expected such great talent to respond to my posting.
This winter I started making my own udon and ramen at home. I’d been eating out regularly at Setagaya Ramen, Rai Rai Ken and Ippudo, each within a few blocks of each other, and each bowl of ramen is so very different in taste and appearance, it intrigued me. So it was bound to happen; this all started to migrate to my home cooking and somewhere along the way, I got the notion to shoot food and thus, the posting on Craigslist.
Everyone is so thrilled to be collaborating toward a vision and style that expands each of our individual books. I’m really looking forward to this new endeavor.
And I love the fact that digital food photography isn’t something that can be done with 3-D.
Onion Mirror
A vision evolving.
While in the process of this particular exploration I’m finding there is a lot of failure. Not failure in the sense of exposure or composition, but failure in concept and vision. And, there’s certainly no value in putting images into my book simply because I did it. Right now, I’m developing the concept of a dark series. The vision is evolving and this shot is more like what I need for the new series; it definitely feels like a sister image to the Steak photo that started it all, back in October.
Now the challenge is to find a thread that connects my next dark image to the first two.
Detail - Slipcase and Top of Book. Click on photo above to see the whole story.
The folks over at Legion Paper, the parent company of Moab, took a liking to my hand-made portfolio and featured it on the Moab Facebook Fan page. Made with Ballistics cloth, Rayon and Japanese hand made fabric, the portfolio pages were printed on Moab Lasal Matte 235.
And, as nice as the detail photos look, the inside of the book is much prettier, it has my photography in it.
Production Photo from Scissor Birds Portfolio Shot
The world of psychology was knocked upside down when, in 1979, Andy Meltzoff, tried something that had never been done: he stuck his tongue out at a 42 minute old baby. The baby, being a newborn, had no idea what a tongue was but somehow, through some deep inherited characteristic, she stuck her tongue out at Meltzoff in reply. (And where was it that I heard that newborn babies cannot see much?). According to developmental molecular biologist John Medina, in his book, “Brain Rules,” curiosity is one of the 12 principles he believes are necessary for surviving and thriving. Exploration is how how we learn to be creative. We do it by mimicking and testing the world around us. Monkey see, monkey do. And we do it literally from birth.
Little kids constantly test objects and boundaries to see what happens. Drop a cup of milk, throw a rock at a window, walk into a mud puddle when we’re told not to. It’s the way we learn. As we mature, we continue this process by taking on challenges, even risking life and limb, just to see what we can do or what will happen. In this particular case, it just comes down to soap and scissors.
During the early process of creating a portfolio of new work, I bought ten pounds of soap from Lush and some translucent Chinese takeout boxes, but this concept became something else when a half dozen hand-made scissors I bought the same day came into play. The soap was simply going to be an arrangement of pretty colors in the boxes but it didn’t work out and, in the end, we dropped the boxes. The images were not anything worth writing home about. Pedestrian at best.
Lush Soap arrangement
During the shoot, my 18 year old daughter, who assists me when home from college, had thrown the scissors into the takeout containers and held them in front of the light table we were working on. We both thought that scissors as birds was the right concept but a nest didn’t appear until she brought the box to the light table. Like John Medina’s two year son (see the John Medina blog link above), my 18 year old daughter delighted in her find, as did I. The shot came together quickly with a loose piece of twine I pulled from a drawer and frayed the edges of a bit. The end result was a remarkable, clever image that we had not planned on. Like music, two minds, working in concert – one song.
Scissorbirds
It’s no wonder, when we add art directors, stylists, retouchers, and editors to the creative mix our work becomes more than sum of its parts.
Creativity is an exploration that happens within us. Creativity shared is exponentially more rewarding and exciting.
Second place (it’s good to be number 2, we try harder) 2012 Hasselblad Masters Finalist D.A.Wagner is a Brooklyn boy who took up photography after finding his father’s old twin lens reflex roll film camera in the attic. After a stint at the Fashion Institute of Technology he jumped into assisting for a few notable still life and fashion photographers and then, being an impatient sort, launched his own career. He’s shot everything from big budget, large scale video productions to special effects imagery and everything in between. For the moment, he has returned to his roots, eschewing the old David Wagner for D.A. and shooting still life and editorial projects that keep him closer to home. Brooklyn, that is. He changed his mind. He’s now working out of a 10,000 square foot studio just outside the Lincoln Tunnel and thinks big projects are just way too much fun to pass up.
It may have been Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe who said, “Less is more.” But it took D.A.Wagner to do more with even less.
If you’re curious about the old David, click here to see the somewhat secret archive page:
