Photo Credit: Hyunsoo Leo Kim of The Virginian Pilot "Dut Daniel Aketch, a Lost Boy of Sudan, holds the first documented picture of himself taken at a refugee camp in Kenya. He does not know his own age, but he knows he was young when he fled the massacre of his village of Southern Sudan. He is one of thousands of children who escaped the country's civil war."
The photograph shown above by photographer Hyunsoo Leo Kim won an award of excellence during the 67th POY contest in the Portrait category. From the context of the caption provided, I believe that the photographer made a good decision by having his subject hold a photograph of himself instead of just taking a portrait of him without it. The photograph, the one that he is holding, reveals part of his story. When I look at this photograph, I see this man holding up a mugshot. He is a prisoner to his surroundings. The war is pushing him into a confined area just to survive, but the conditions there are bleak as well.
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Single-Flash (direct) 10/11/11
For my direct single flash assignment, I decided that I wanted to use an athlete as my subject and use panning to help show movement. I felt limited with what I could shoot as I hadn’t gotten back into town until late Sunday evening, and then rain further delayed me on Monday evening. I decided that the best place to go was Stankowski field and photograph some of the track runners there that night. When I first arrived there wasn’t anyone running the track, but a little while later someone finally arrived. I first started at 1/20th, knowing that she was jogging I would need to go to even slower that usually when panning and that the flash would help capture her face clearly. 1/20th wasn’t slow enough for what I wanted, so I moved to 1/10th. I found 1/10th the most pleasing as it gave a pretty good amount of motion while still capturing the subjects body clearly. 1/15th wasn’t enough of a difference from 1/20th. My flash was set at ½ at 24mm. I had originally started at 1/8th, and moved to 1/4th, but found a ½ power to be the most useful. The most aggravating aspect of the shoot was the time it took for the subject to get around the track, which was about 4-5 minutes. Later, two other subjects started running around the track after my first subject had stopped. After a few laps of taking their photos, they asked me to stop, and seeing that they were the last two on the track, I called it a night. I wish I could have found a subject that moved faster, such as someone on a bike so the movement would be more clear, as the ones in the running images are a bit distorted.
"Maddie Hienson, a 19-year-old sophmore, runs during the night at Stankowski Track and Field on Monday, 10. "I prefer to run at night because it's always cooler, but i was so busy today i wouldn't have had time to run earlier anyhow.," she said."
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Bounce-Flash : 10.13.11
For the bounce flash assignment, I decided to use a photo that I had shot over the weekend at wedding as my select. During the wedding reception I used bounce flash a lot and thought that it was the best opportunity that I had for this assignment. I attempted to shoot in a few other places while home but without much luck. I attempted to shoot at midway truck-stop but there was not much activity going on outside and inside I was asked to stop shooting as I was bothering some of the guests. Then I tried with the same luck to shoot at Campus Bar and Grill in hopes to get some reactions of STL Cardinals fans watching the baseball game, but was once again told I couldn’t shoot there. I crossed the street for Shakespeare’s but it was almost empty, which was surprising. I figured that the best opportunity that I would have at that point would to be roaming the streets in hopes of finding something worth shooting. I saw some men huddled up under a doorway drinking vodka and staying warm, and snapped a few photos of them while talking to them and listening to them get hassled from across the street at Quinton’s. My next stop was town hall where I was hoping there might still be a few people ‘occupying’. There were three people but I struggled to find something to bounce off of. I tried using the ground which worked a little bit, and then off one of the girl’s umbrellas which really didn’t work at all. For the wedding shot I was grateful for my ceiling. It wasn’t too high and was all flat white. I had shot a rehearsal dinner the night before and had to work with a short dark red ceiling, which was frustrating. For all of my shots I mostly used TTL, it seemed to work pretty well and plus I didn’t want to deal with another aspect of the image to worry about when I felt it wasn’t necessary.
"Zach Besselman dances with two of his uncles during his father's wedding reception on Friday 7, in Cape May, New Jersey."
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For the color correction assignment I decided to head over to Dawson’s Shoe Repair shop and photograph them at work. They were great about letting me shoot there and I had few restrictions from them. The lights inside Dawson’s were all florescent with a rather large window at the front of the shop. After I shot in daylight with no flash I noticed hue’s of green on the edges of the photograph. These colors increased when I added my un-gelled flash. I started off with using just the basic green gel. After taking a few photos with this gel, it seemed to get a little better but not quite the color I was hoping for. I added the orange gel to the mix and started seeing a more neutral color than before. I was pretty happy with the colors I was getting after awhile of messing around, but I seemed to depend on where I was in the store. Some places my photos would come out too green whereas other a bit blue. In retrospect I wish I had tried a green-blue mix as well, but didn’t think of it at the time. I shot my flash on ETTL, which I regret as well, but just seemed easier at the time. I regret using TTL because I thought I would have had more control if I had done it manually but the way my colors were changing in the photograph from location to location prevented me from doing so. Some of the reasons that I believe I may have been receiving different colors was due to where I was in location to the florescent light. There were tiled throughout the store, and I may have effect my image if I had either been directly under one of the lights, if my subject was directly under the light and if I had bounced my strobe off the store light. I’m not sure. I had also at one point attempted to use two green’s with one orange which produced a image that was drowned out in green. I thought there was a bit too much orange in some of the images and thought that some extra green might solve the issue.
"Bob Wood, owner of Dawson's Shoe Repair shop at 212 S. 8th st., smoothes out the sole of leather shoe on Tuesday, 18th of Octobor. Wood began working at Dawson's alongside his father when he returned from military service in 1979, and has worked there since."
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I shot two different subjects for my color correction of tungsten lighting with flash — a small acoustic house-show and Sparky’s Ice Cream. I found shooting tungsten easier that shooting under florescent, as I didn’t have to mix gels in order to get a neutral lighting. Orange always seemed to equal everything out in both shoots. During the first shoot, at the house-show, there was only one light on in the room, a small tungsten light bulb under a lamp. This provided a problem of trying not to completely overpower the existing light, which was difficult because it didn’t provide much of a light source at all. In order to take a photo with enough lighting without any flash I had to go to H2 with my ISO, and it still wasn’t enough. Though, after doing so, I could see that the image was primarily orange, and a bit so after the un-gelled flash. I continued shooting with an orange gel during the performance, and it seemed to create a neutral color in the house. The house was an enjoyable place to shoot, besides the provided lighting, it was also very tiny and cramped so moving around for different images was difficult without causing too much distraction. The moving space at Sparky’s was obviously a lot better, but unfortunately it was very slow and there weren’t many photo opportunities. One of the employees was making ice cream in the back, but it was under florescent lighting. I figured I still shoot some just to get a better feel of using gels, but it proved to be uneventful.
"Hannah Rainey from Dubb Nubb plays a show at 'Candyland' house on Lyon st., October 17. Dubb Nubb includes Hannah's two sisters, Amanda and Delia."
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Balance:
Fill:
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Multiple Flash
We had originally hoped to shoot a boxing gym, but they were closed on Wednesday night. We than traveled to Galactic Fun-Zone in hopes of getting some kids playing games in the arcade as the atmosphere would have called fall some flash, but that too was closed. The police scanner wasn’t providing any worthwhile events to shoot either, so we began walking around town. We both noticed a tattoo parlor that neither of us had ever been to and decided to check it out. Luckily, the artist inside was in the middle of a piece and he and the woman receiving the tattoo both allowed us to come and photograph the session. I shot first using an infrared remote with two flashes. The flashes were both set to manual. Some difficulties that I encountered while shooting is the appropriate light to use when strobing the artist. Chris stood behind me to my left adding direct like to the subject receiving the tattoo, and also bouncing it off of the ceiling. The biggest problem that I had, and could not figure out was why my light was not filling the artist the way that I had wanted it to. I kept the flash in relatively the same location, which was direct light hitting the artist. If I kept the ratio of the flash the same, it would still either not give enough light or too much. I had put new batteries in the flash and the flash was popping every time I shuttered. It was frustrating trying to figure out how to fix the problem. I was shooting below 1/200 the entire time to stay below my sync, usually around 1/125 and metered here and there to try and toy with the lighting. The image that I selected as my select was chosen because it best achieved was I was hoping to capture, though I was not completely satisfied with it. I wanted to light the girl and the artist equally, the girl needing less and the artist more as his head was tilted downward away from the ambient light. I believe that my select was able to evenly light both subjects, but they were definitely both too hot, especially in comparison with the background and the shadows the were created. I wish the subjects were lit a little bit less, though I still think that the image works and helps make the subjects stand out, as the flash is not too hot to make it look skewed or too unnatural.
"Kristie Chaney sits while Peter Tieman of Gaslight Gallery Tattoo finishes up her tattoo. Kristie's tattoo was inspired from artwork from one of her favorite bands, 'In This Moment'. "I love their artwork," she said. "And that they are an all woman band playing metal music."
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Video Interview
Watch Nick Agro’s interview Here
The video and lighting for this assignment went pretty well, but the struggles that I encountered were with audio and editing on FCPX. I set Nick off to the side of my lens, looking away from the camera. I tossed a hair light on the left of his head to accent his hair and edges, and put the key light to the camera’s left with a transparent reflector in front to balance some of the lighting. I set Nick up with the mic, and right off the bat we ran into some technical problems. I had to figure out how to get it on the right channel, but no matter what I did I couldn’t get any audio to come from his mic. After about 15 minutes of toying with that, we found out that his mic was muted. I brought Nick’s reception volume down, as I know his voice can be calm and then hit high points every once and a while and I wanted to avoid clipping. Somewhere along the process I must have messed up, as Nick’s audio clipped a lot in the final product. Once everything was finished, I took to editing on Final Cut Pro X. Still largely unfamiliar with the new software, I was able to manage getting everything the way I wanted fairly easily. There was a lot more that I would have liked to do though, such as when the video takes up the entire screen, I would have liked it to cross-dissolve, but for one reason or another every time I added that effect it would mess up my syncing of audio and video. I was able to add it to the end, so it confused me even more as to why one would work and the other didn’t. The most frustrating part of it all was adding lower thirds. I added lower thirds by dragging the effect over and placing it where I wanted it in the clip. Then, for the next hour, I was driven bonkers as to how to change the text. I know this sounds silly, but it wouldn’t allow me to just go double click and edit the text. So I watched videos and read blogs and googled the heck out of it. I finally found out what the problem was. When I was dragging it, I was dragging it below the video, instead of on top of everything. When I put it on top, I was easily able to double-click and edit the text. I’m guessing that FCPX works more on order, from top to bottom, or something, I’m still uncertain, but I was able to get it to work.
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a blog following my fall '11 photo semester 