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.

Making a Splash

I grew up playing deep-sea diver, cowboys and Indians, and playing war games. My parents encouraged it, I don’t know why. I would have never called dolls I owned “dolls” but soldiers and warriors and my time was spent setting them up to kill the bad guys.

So here I am, years later, still playing with dolls, no longer playing war but instead tossing them into a tank of water, adding bubbles and watching what happens over and over again as I capture a fleeting nanosecond of time with my camera at different heights, at different speeds and stuffed with different amounts of lead shot.

This could just be the greatest job in the world next to being the guys out there mapping the Titanic in 3D.

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?

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.

Shopping with the Kids

About a year ago I was searching for an identity, a vision that would make me, me, at least in the eyes of others in terms of my work. Along the way, I found something more profound than a voice or an identity.

I found shopping.

I found the cheesy children’s toy department in Rite Aid Stores (Search for “toys” at the Rite Aid website and you get comprehensive listing of sex toys – search “children’s toys”  and you get, of all things, vitamins first, then toys. I recommend that you just go there in person).

I found the mask store in Antigua, Guatemala on one of my bike tours.

I found the housewares and glassware departments in Macy’s with a 6-month return policy.

I discovered Sephora (just for props, honest).

Then there’s Petco and CB2 and Pearl River (which I thought had closed) and the fish-mongers in Chinatown and the rubber store on Canal Street and Muji and Pylones and Lush (love the soaps, hate the fragrance) and Bed Bath and Beyond and the Lighting and Beyond store on 14th Street and, and, and…

I think only my daughter understands this.