Gold and Silver Wristwatch - Detail

(I can’t say who the client is, but it has something to do with telling time.)

Shooting virtual, 360º objects is one of those skills I honed in another lifetime. I’ve shot 360s of corporate jets, firetrucks, model trains and couches, but never 360s of small, highly reflective (basically mirrors, really) jewelry. And shooting a mirror (yes, I know, it’s a watch, but you get the point) as it rotates  is a bit of a challenge. It means lighting that doesn’t burn out, or reflect me, my camera or the studio. This recent assignment meant shooting more than a hundred of them, and well, let’s just say it was work. (On the upside of this, I’m still in shock that I now have a remarkable 10,000 square foot studio and this shoot was almost a relaxing event. Really. More details on the new studio to come…)

In the end, the client was gracious and loved the results.

And me? I loved every minute of it.

D.A.

P.S. Hat’s off to Jim Galvin and Jim Anders for their help – above and beyond the call of duty. You guys are my heroes.

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.

Lighting Services, Inc's LumeLEX 2000 Series - Blue Hero

My client, Lighting Services, Inc. makes simple, elegant track lighting fixtures. And while this doesn’t look like anything revolutionary, it is. It’s green inside, not in color, but as in low energy use LED technology.

I loved teasing out the gradient textures and giving shape to the parabolic mirror. Even the 1980s style blue highlights in the lighting effects, as requested by the client, were fun to do. It brought me back in time…

Now, I’m trying to figure out where I can fit a few dozens of these in my place. The electric bills are killing me.

Since I’m sidetracked right now with teaching my classes, this blog post is dedicated to my design students.

It’s the cold war. It’s the year after Sputnik was launched by the Soviets.

This 1958 film saluting the stylists of the automotive, industrial, interior and architectural design industry reflects the American obsession with consumerism and the future. It proposes that the American dream is here now. The opening features Finnish born and French educated Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center in Michigan, bathed in the light of a sunset before fading into a teenager picking up a Swedish designed Ericofon–a phone that Bell Telephone (today’s Verizon) aggressively blocked from import to the U.S. market for years. Ah, yes, the American dream of “fifties atomic-age minimalism.”

With it’s quirky, theatrical, dramatic, lighthearted, sometimes angelic and very 1950s music soundtrack, the film is filled with hundreds of wonderful designs – some of which our parents or grandparents discarded quickly after purchase, some which we still covet today.

This is only part 1 of American Look. You can find part 2 and 3 at the archive.org web site. Archive.org is one of my favorite places for ephemera.

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.

Corporate Meeting (Detail)

This past week, Calumet selected an outtake from my recent New Zealand job, titled “Corporate Meeting.” You can read about the assignment here.

As always, I’m honored and thrilled to have been selected for a fourth time. Thanks, Calumet.

Climbing to the Top of the Heap

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says, the amount of time required, working at any craft, to become “world-class expert” is 10,000 hours. He also writes that the level of success (I would go further to say that really means, meteoric success) you reach as a world-class expert rests on when and where you were born, something that you have no control over.

He uses the Beatles, Wayne Gretsky and Bill Gates as prime examples of these rules. But he doesn’t mention Richard Avedon, who must have done his 10,000 hours early on. He was born at the right time; he came of age in the heyday of advertising and magazine publishing (I don’t have any solid historical data on how much time Avedon actually invested, but his involvement in photography started as a teenager and, by the time he was 21, he was working with the legendary Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar). He was also really, really, obsessed with photography.

Ten thousand hours.

For us mortal photographers that’s pushing the shutter release (and mastering the camera’s programming and TTL features – plus studio lighting) for 3.42 years – the equivalent of spending your 10,000 hours in daily 8 hour segments – and  if you’re going to do your own Photoshop work, pushing around a few octodecillion (that’s 10 ^{to the power of 57}) pixels for another 3.42 years before you are truly good enough to be, well, good enough. And, few of us spend a mere 8 hours a day at our obsession. If you didn’t sleep, you could pull off becoming a world-class expert in your field in slightly less than one year and two months.

And, no, those 10,000 hours don’t include lunch breaks, snacks or stretching.

So. Were you born at the right place and time to be a great photographer? Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Instead, I propose that there may be a missing 10,000 hours for mastering marketing and social media, getting over the personal issue of making phone calls and socializing face to face – something many of us overlook (colleges, often miss this too) as being an essential component of the success equation.  There may be no additional advantage to when you were born if you market yourself with the same obsession as you do creating photographs. How few of us photographers actually have an obsession with marketing.

And so it looks like it would take about 10 years (less if you’re OCD – and you know who you are) to become a successful, world-class, expert photographer.

Sounds about right to me.

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.