Fear and the Camera

I have a perfectly vivid memory of looking at my kindergarten teacher’s realistic (ish) crayon drawings of me and my fellow students, and welling with a pungent cocktail of awe, jealousy, and yearning. If only I could do that! And then the sharp pang of humiliation when my childish effort was so abysmally inferior.

After decades of painting, drawing, printmaking, and now, photography, that cocktail of emotions still overwhelms me sometimes. I look at the work of my fellow photographers and wonder if I’ll ever be able to do what they’ve done.

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I’ve been learning a new skill: shooting subjects in an aquarium and freezing the splash, or the bubbles, or the waves. It’s intimidating. My fellow Project 52 shooters are advanced photographers, and many are doing high-level commercial work.

And my test shots for this particular shoot—perfume and roses—were okay, but not special. My heart started sinking the day before the due date. I didn’t want to go into the studio.

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But as the saying goes, the only way forward is through. You’re afraid of the water, but you jump in and swim anyway. You’re afraid of the violin, but you pick it up and practice, no matter who’s listening. You’re afraid of the camera, but you shoot anyway, and shoot, and shoot.

Until you get it right.

It Isn't What It Is

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This commercial fuel stop is right at the edge of town; just a half mile north of here, the busy industrial road becomes a rural highway that winds through Oregon's wooded hills and farmlands. 

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This is the first picture I took at the station, back when I was a shy photographer who didn't know how to sneak around. It's the view of the mill to the east of the station. I stood on far edge of the property, trying to conceal myself in the grassy field between the tarmac and the fence. I was too chicken to walk around the tarmac itself.

I worried about being watched, being asked what I was doing, being told to leave. Now I'm an old hand at getting kicked out of places at night, for reasons I would never have guessed when I was a teenager.
 

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In a previous life I might have been a long distance trucker, or a lonely traveling salesman. Scenes like these, in which (for example) a bare bulb glares into the indifferent night, make me yearn for experiences I don't even want in this life, but which I somehow feel can--must!--connect me to the cosmos, and to the true meaning of everything. Is this what the Germans call Sehnsucht? 

Light Nerding

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The problem isn't finding interesting subjects, it's being alert to interesting light. 

 

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Fortunately for photographers, interesting light happens every day, everywhere you go. Even when you're waiting for your order of chicken wings to arrive.

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Never hesitate to arrange subjects to capitalize on an interesting light situation in progress. Even if your in-laws look at you funny (they're going to anyway, admit it).

But Is It Art?

Dulcimer at Train Station                    Photo by Roseanna Smith 2018

My friends are smart, sensitive, culturally aware people. Painters and writers, musicians and actors. I adore them, and I like to think they return the sentiment. Some of the ones I love the most--and who knew me when I was a painter of gigantic canvases, back in the Paleolithic--have asked if I feel like I'm turning my back on my "true calling" by taking photographs of chocolate and lipstick. 

Before I get to my answer, let me take a detour into the literary world for a moment. 

If ever there was a poem for product photographers, it's Rilke's Ninth Elegy. Yes, it's long, confusing, and written in German (is that redundant?). But its heart is a spiritual celebration of the mundane, the visible world of things--exactly what can be captured in photographs.

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things.

So my answer to my friends is, I'm fully embracing my calling. I love shooting product. I would even say I feel a kind of joy doing commercial photography. Taking an interesting picture of candy, or shoes, or shampoo bottles requires spending time with them, and getting to know their physical properties: How they absorb and reflect light, what their smell and taste and texture is and how to convey that, how they're used in real life. And also what they mean to people: Their symbolic lives, their place in our dreams. Sure they're just objects, but they're brimming with purpose and meaning. 

Rilke would get it. Superficially the work of the commercial photographer is to depict and sell products, but our real job is to astonish the angel by telling him of Things. 

Roseanna Smith 2018

I Made a Mess

This week I wanted to shoot a Swedish Fish leaping out of a martini glass. I'm not sure why I wanted to do that, and I'm not sure it really matters why.

It took some practice to synchronize the timing of the splash and the shutter, so I got water all over the place. It's a lucky break that wading pools are on sale right now.

Here are some of the hits and misses:

Chocolate is Like Skin

Nearly every day for the last three months I've taken pictures of chocolate. My kitchen looks like a chocoholic went on a manic spending spree: There are bags of Godiva dark chocolate hearts and milk chocolate lions' heads; cliff-edged slabs of Callebaut cooking chocolate; boxes of colorful Moonstruck liquor-infused candies; and quirky, individually-wrapped handmade truffles from Euphoria Chocolates. 

Now, chocolate's normal surface blemishes aren't obvious when you're gazing lovingly at the piece you're about to pop into your mouth, but the camera doesn't take the same romantic view. At the very least chocolate requires a little prep and some careful handling, but most of the pieces I shot needed extra post-production editing to bring them closer to the perfection we all have in our mind's eye.

And it was while exploring ways to retouch the chocolate that I discovered chocolate is--visually speaking--almost identical to skin. 

In the first place, chocolate's light-reflecting "efficiency" is nearly the same--that is, the surface texture of ordinary chocolate, like you'd see in a candy bar or an undecorated piece from a box of chocolates, is at about the same place on the matte-to-shiny spectrum as human skin.

Also like skin, chocolate has many completely normal surface variations that look fine in real life, but which are magnified under the lens so they become distracting, if not disfiguring. Blisters, bubbles, and bloom are the chocolate equivalents of moles, pimples, and rough patches. 

Finally, just as with retouching human skin, the artist needs to make some choices about how much "perfection" to strive for. Some kinds of flawlessness look artificial and almost robot-like. We've all seen those shots in fashion magazines that have been hyper-shopped right into the Uncanny Valley. 

In each image I'm striving to achieve that Goldilocks ideal: If a lot of tweaking is needed--a Papa-Bear-sized chunk of Photoshop--then that's what I'll do. If it's just a light pass-through, then I'll just do a Baby-Bear-sized squiblet. The image of the frosting was right in the middle; not too much, not too little. At least, I think so; hope you do too.