FREYA
Upon her golden throne
Upon her golden throne
Meet Freya, my friend Maeve’s pointy-eared aging-like-fine-art husky. I have a glowing red weak spot for dogs, so when Maeve asked me about a photo shoot because there was a chance Freya’s cancer might be back I jumped at the chance.
Into the storm
We tried a few different scenes. First were candids inside Maeve’s apartment, before we moved outside to the fenced-in side lot next to her building. On our way out, the light was catching just right and turned the lobby’s plaster into a tapestry of texture and shadow. The sconces only drove the point home further: We had to shoot here too.
For Maeve, it was important that I captured one of Freya’s most defining characteristics — the latter’s dead eye. For me, I wanted to capture the bond the two share and the glimpse I got at Freya’s wild side.
Black and white doesn’t quite capture a dead eye the way color does
The good news? A few weeks ago, Maeve got word that Freya is currently cancer-free.
N Y E 2 0 2 3
Wherein I gush about the 28mm focal length
Enter The Void | Nikkor Z 28mm F/2.8 SE
I’ve fallen madly, deeply in love with 28mm. And aside from work stuff, my Z 28mm f/2.8 SE hasn’t left my Z6ii since buying it in September. Because it takes such small filters (52mm), experimenting with new looks hasn’t cost me a ton. For daylight I stack a warming polarizer over my Black Satin 1, and at night the former comes off.
Shooting black and white in 28mm just feels right too. So I bought a red filter for that. It forces me to use my camera’s monochrome setting, this way I’m actively composing in black and white versus just converting in post. The contrast I’m getting is blowing me away.
The only real issue I have with my modern 28mm is that setting a focus zone for shooting from the hip (or, in my case, lower) for street is kind of impossible. While I’ve figured out the settings to increase my hit rate — whatup continuous high extended mode — I’m still relying on my camera’s very solid auto-focus to grab what I’m hoping for. It locks about 70 - 80 percent of the time.
[All images below captured with Nippon Kogaku 2.8cm f/3.5 NIKKOR-H Non AI unless otherwise noted]
City Club
“Why not just manual focus your lens?” Good question. The issue there is in its infinite wisdom, Nikon doesn’t have an explicit guide for doing so. On my Z6ii, instead of a readout with indicators for focus distance in feet there’s just a horizontal bar with an infinitum loop on one end and a flower on the other. Not helpful. I can’t trust it’s going to keep the same focus zone as I walk either.
So I bought a Nippon Kogaku 2.8cm f/3.5 NIKKOR-H Non AI for $92 shipped from KEH. It’s the same filter size as my modern lens so the value goes even further. I’m sure I’ll have more to say the more I take it out, but for now I love the images it produces. I haven’t spent any time doing color with it, but given this lens’ heritage documenting the Vietnam war its monochrome output is what will keep it in my bag.
Do I wish the aperture opened wider? Sure, but the F/2 model was out of my budget. As it stands, I’ve got under $500 invested between two lenses and the array of filters in my kit. Proof that you don’t need to spend a ton of money to inject new life into your photography.
I don’t have the best relationship with New Year’s Eve. One bright spot though, is taking photos with Martin. This was our third time out, and the weather was pretty miserable; gray and drizzly in Detroit. Not great for color, but perfect for black and white with the red filter.
We started out in Corktown walking down Michigan Ave, before a brief foray to the top of my office’s parking garage downtown after sunset. It’s there that I got some long exposures with his tabletop tripod. And, it’s where I got a chance to try out his new telephoto, the Nikkor Z 70 - 200mm F/2.8 S.
The reach on that thing is unreal. Especially when you switch to crop mode and gain an extra 100mm at the expense of half your megapixels. Going from such a wide FOV to that was damn near whiplash-inducing, and I only got a couple of frames that moved the needle for me [above].
I’m not the biggest fan of resolutions. Last year I started setting goals instead:
Launch photo website: gestures broadly
Reduce photo catalog by 30 percent: This is harder to track when I took over 12,000 photos in 2023. And then culled over 5,000 of them before getting through August during the holiday break
Enter four photo contests: Done and done. National and global contests are tough. I entered Life Framer (and did a year’s membership), and Whalebone and didn’t make the cut. I fared better locally with Composing Detroit but didn’t make the cut for Dirty Show ‘24.
Model session: Nope. 2024 though.
Launch Plain Sight Insta: Not yet. I did add a new feature to Plain Sight though, Feed. It’s, as the name suggests, a feed of images I don’t have to crop or stick on white backgrounds to accommodate different aspect ratios.
Weekly photo blog posts: Sigh. What I need to do here is set a deadline for myself to just post something here in general, whether it’s a big blog like this, or just a set of images to Feed. Not everything needs to be a gigantic post such as this.
CMP DTRT
A postmortem of my first gallery show as a featured artist
A postmortem of my first gallery show as a featured artist
Seeing people react to my work - in the flesh - was addicting
“Unnerving”
That’s how someone described my work last weekend at the Composing Detroit Spring gallery. While it might sound like a dig, I still can’t think of a better compliment. That my work evoked an emotion. Especially one so strong.
I still remember how I felt after seeing Se7en as a kid: Like I’d witnessed something I shouldn’t have. Walking out of the theater with my parents, my mind was racing after the infamous scene where a DHL driver delivers a box containing Gwyneth Paltrow’s decapitated head and unborn child to Brad Pitt.
Even though there were no restrictions of what I could pull out of the VHS cabinet when I was growing up, this felt different from Goodfellas or Terminator 2. What was burned into my 11 year-old brain was the lingering visceral response I had thanks to fever-pitch tension chiefly built through cinematography.
We never saw what was in the box because we didn’t need to. Morgan Freeman’s reaction filled in the details and intentional camera work did the rest.
I didn’t go to photo school. And unlike with journalism, I didn’t have much first-hand guidance in the realm. Cinematography has always been something I noticed, though, and movies were a constant in my childhood.
My first real memory of cinematography was watching Jaws with my dad on a rare lazy Saturday afternoon. Infamous technical problems meant Bruce the robotic shark was off-screen the majority of the running time. The camera became the shark. Unblinking. Cold. Disconnected.
Spielberg made me wanna direct movies. My favorite shot?
The reflections in Roy Scheider’s aviators as he pages through a book about the prehistoric automatons. I was eight.*
Fincher came a few years later, then two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins.
I didn’t get a chance to make a movie until I took a film viewing and construction humanities credit at community college. Our final was either a shot-by-shot scene analysis from Young Frankenstein or a short film. I opted for the latter (below) and discovered very quickly how difficult stop-motion animation is.
Beyond making a choppy silent short starring Venom as a mob hitman in a custom suit, that class taught me the basics of shot construction, camera angles and lighting.
Shoot low to convey the subject’s power. Use diagonal lines and off-kilter symmetry to create tension. Obscure the eyes to sow distrust.
That visual language is something I’ve been subconsciously using since I picked up a camera again in 2013. It took a long time for the vision to align with my execution, though.
Lately instead of buying new gear, I’ve been hitting the books and have found a few photographers on YouTube whose work I really like. I’ll write a post about my research another day, but the tl;dr is that simply seeing the work of others has helped me narrow in on a focus and style of my own.
“Seeing the work of others has helped me narrow in on a focus and style of my own.”
It’s also given me a new perspective on my own photos, and insights on how to better achieve the results I’m after.
Now when I’m editing, unintentionally blurry shots are at a minimum and the hard part is choosing the best moments from the pile. The insights I’ve picked up for well under $100 have been priceless.
Which brings us back to Composing Detroit.
The spring show was very different from last fall’s gallery.
Last time I submitted two photos, and one was picked.
I submitted 11 photos in March and all of them were selected for a full body.
I also wasn’t sprinting to the finish line. Which was important considering how much work I had in front of me.
Last-minute stuff was minimal. I grabbed a different binder and display pages and made some new signage for print sales. It’s almost never like that for me, and I’m honestly proud of myself for giving myself enough time to get everything done without too much stress.
I’m working with a designer on a logo right now and still wanted to do some branding for the event. So I bought QR code stickers for the back of my business cards and the manilla envelopes I used for sold prints. So far I’ve gotten one new click on my Linktree. Gotta start somewhere.
The show itself was invigorating. This time, Friday night was for friends/family and gallery owners, and the following was open to the public. That format made it easier to take everything in and hang with my friends. It was also was a lot more relaxed than last year’s show with two public nights.
Saturday was a whirlwind. Some 700 people RSVP’d. I’m not sure how many actually showed up, but it was a lot.
In addition to ten 8.5x11 prints of everything hanging on the walls I brought in my stack of 5 x 7 proofs.
Those were $10 each and I priced my 8.5 x 11s at $40 each, or two for $70. That last bit was a mistake.
Last show I priced 8.5 x 11s at $25 each and sold five.
Photo credit: Geoff Larson
I ended up almost selling out of the 5 x 7s and moving three 8.5 x 11s.
Honestly, it was a last-minute call and I was trying to make up for the investment on framing and supplies. What that tells me is the print price ceiling for most people is $25. I purchase lots of art online and for me, $25 is a no-brainer impulse buy if I love the piece.
Walking the gallery before close on Saturday, I saw everyone else had priced theirs at $25.
Another artist told me he sold ten. Lesson learned: I need to start thinking about my work like a customer, too.
When someone was buying a 5 x 7 she commented it’d be perfect for her nightstand.
Living in a 520 sq. ft. tiny house for a year and a half gave me a new appreciation for small format art. It’s a lot of fun! Small prints feel like less of a statement/commitment and offer tons of personality in a modest size.
There’s a much bigger profit margin on smaller prints too: paper is far cheaper and they use way less ink.
In terms of selling stuff off the wall, I’ve got a pending sale with a buyer tomorrow morning. [Ed. note 5/9/23: And Takis sold for $200 the day after publishing this and I’m still absolutely over the moon about it.The buyer said it was the only photo in the gallery that made her smile.]
More than anything, seeing so many people reacting to my work in the flesh was absurdly rewarding. There was a direct sightline to my corner and my 20 x 30 crowdsurfing canvas from the door. The DJ was off to the left, and my corner served as a natural starting point around the gallery.
Photo credit: Shane Morris
Going in, I had realistic expectations. I knew it was going to be an investment much like self-funding a majority of my E3 trips.
Where, on a long enough timeline, I’d break even or eke out a profit from contacts I’d made or reporting I’d done toward larger features.
Connections I made last weekend are already bearing fruit. From here, investment for future shows will be minimal. Plus now I’ve got inventory and signage ready for when I launch my online store.
Will I submit that many photos to the next show? No. Or, if I do, they’ll be in a smaller format. Sure, I went way in the red but the experience I gained gives me the confidence to approach art fairs and other galleries.
Which is good - I need to rattle some more people.
Photo credit: Geoff Larson
Photo credit: Shane Morris
*Yeah, there are a few things to be said about the movies I watched as a kid. It was the ‘90s. Beyond that, my upbringing isn’t up for discussion here.