Inessential Stuff

This is Matt.  I did senior pictures with him and just had a great time.  His mom had described him as “very thoughtful, introspective, intelligent, philosophical, a musician and an artist.”  I didn’t spend enough time with him to verify all those things, but from what I DID learn about him, it all seems to be true.  Though I might add that with that killer smile, he might also be a bit of a heartbreaker.

Here is a little gallery of some of my favorite pictures from the senior portrait session.

I had been wanting to do a shoot with a band for a while, but I didn’t know where to find a band.  As it ends up, Tim Wallace (second on the right), whose wedding I shot several years ago, is now in a band, and they wanted some band pictures done.

So, this past Monday, on a cold, windy, drizzly day, the band got together and we did some pictures.  They rock, so they wanted to convey that in the images, but they were polite, gracious, and pretty excited.  To paraphrase Ed Sullivan, “Level Zero has five of the nicest youngsters we’ve ever had before our camera.”

To learn more about them, check out the facebook page of Level Zero.  And, of course, check out their promotional photographs!

Pullman isn’t THAT far away. Still, when traveling across the Palouse to do a shoot, I figure we might as well make it worth it and go all out. Fortunately, this was exactly Courtney’s thinking as well. So we made a day of it. Indoor shots. Outdoor shots. Industrial shots. Landscape shots. We shot for about four hours, with only a coffee break in the middle to warm up.

And yes, it was fairly cold, which makes Courtney’s effort all the more spectacular. Some shots seem quite summery, with a cotton dress and bare feet, but that is misleading. While she was moving gracefully in bare feet, I was blowing on my hands and bundled in a bulky sherpa fleece. She insisted it wasn’t that cold if you just put your mind elsewhere.

Oh, by the way, she’s also proof that beauty and brains go together: she’s a doctoral student in engineering at Washington State University. Anyway, here are about fifty images from the day.

I had talked to Nirvana for, literally years, I think, about doing a shoot.  We finally made it happen.  And then, once it happened, it was entirely different than planned.  I was thinking of doing a shoot with a car, but I wanted some good scenic buildings and background for the car.  I thought some of the old buildings in the Hillyard district of Spokane would be cool.  But once we got there, I liked the buildings as a background without the car at all.  So we just did that.  Plus I had just purchased a new (old!) chair as a prop, so we had to test that out, too.

At the end of the shoot, we happened upon a gentlemen who took us on a mysterious little venture into an awesome building where he invited us to do a future shoot.  And so, something to look forward to!  Until then, here are some of the photographs from last night.

Sometimes, when I tell my friends I am doing some “senior portraits”, and they imagine people in their 60’s.  No, no, not those kind of seniors.  High school seniors.  And this is the time of year they are getting their pictures done for the yearbook.  I don’t like to do too many senior sessions, or they start feeling the same.  But a handful a year can be a lot of fun, and this year I was lucky to work several really remarkable (and photogenic!) individuals.  Here are some collages of the latest:

For some reason, this shoot sort of slipped through the cracks.  Kylie and I did our third shoot together back in July, and I’ve had these images sorted out and ready to post, and then they never got posted.  So I’ll post them now.

It was, as usual with Kylie, a fun, relaxed shoot.  She chose the wardrobe thinking blue would go well with the green of the fields.  We stopped by an abandoned building on the way to the fields, then shot until after dark.  We also lucked into some noctilucent clouds.  So productive was the shoot, that the image you see at the right now is in my home studio.  Click this way to see the rest of the shoot.

Whenever someone asks me who my favorite photographer is, the answer is easy:  Henri Cartier-Bresson, followed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and then Henri Cartier-Bresson. August is a good time to celebrate his life, for he was born on August 22, 1908, and died five years ago, on August 3, 2004.

With a small Leica 35 mm film camera, Cartier-Bresson forever changed photography. He was the great master of “street photography”, capturing people unaware, documenting their movements, activities, and emotions.  But he was no simple snap-shooter.  Himself a painter, he brought the eye of an artist to his work.  In fact, it is that combination—capturing the spontaneous moments around him with a keen eye for composition—that made him so great.

Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote about his photographic philosophy in a book (with a cover drawn by Henri Matisse) that is called, in its English translation, The Decisive Moment.  For Cartier-Bresson, the decisive moment is “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.”

Elaborating further, he said, “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative.”

Even when taking a portrait, Cartier-Bresson aimed for something natural and spontaneous, that somehow captured something essential about the person’s personality or character.  His portrait of Alberto Giacometti is illustrative of his ability to create a natural portrait of someone in one’s own environment.

For his talent for capturing such decisive moments, Henri Cartier-Bresson has been called the father of photojournalism, and his philosophy has had a big impact on me as a photographer.  I had no interest in wedding photography until I saw that it was possible to bring some of Cartier-Bresson’s philosophy into traditional wedding images. That is, to shoot a wedding as a photojournalist. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s inspiration to me, and impact upon me, can be detected, by those who are especially observant, in the name of my company itself.

A gorgeous collection of his work can be found in Henri Cartier-Bresson:  Photographer, and you can learn more about his life and philosophy here.  So, 101 years and 2 days after his birth, everyone raise a cup for Henri Cartier-Bresson.

I have driven past Ritzville, Washington too many times to count.  It sits 60 miles west of Spokane, just far enough off Interstate 90 to be easily ignored, either as I head on toward Seattle or as I turn off onto US Route 395 toward the Tri-Cities.  I have, on several occasions, gotten off the eastern exit of Ritzville (it is a two exit town), sometimes as a place to launch off onto back roads, and once to stop at a highway mini-mart.  But I had never been past that mini-mart, down the road, into Ritzville itself.

It was never ritzy—it derives its name from its founder, Philip Ritz, not from monuments of glamour and glitter.  Even so, I had heard it was a fine little town, with a picturesque, though deteriorating, downtown. So one evening this week, I drove off the first eastern Ritzville exit, and continued down the road past the mini-mart, to see what I had been passing by all these years.

I take pictures here and there all the time–at Marcus’ t-ball games, on the way back from weddings, on photoshoots. It gets to be an odd assortment of photographs that aren’t easy to categorize and, therefore, don’t usually end up in a gallery on my blog. So I decided to lump them all together into a category of their own, and here they are. Will notice a rural theme, and an acute interest in hay bales.

I met Amy on the day of our shoot.  Within the first few minutes, she told me, “I’ve been sick all my life.”

She is 23 years old, and has been in and out of hospitals all her life. She has fought cancer twice. She has had open-heart surgery. She has had countless images taken of her body—–MRIs, CAT scans, X-Rays.

But she’s been in good health for a while now, and, as if to remind herself of who she really is, she wanted some pictures of the outside of her body, pictures that showed a healthy woman.

She told me beforehand she didn’t want me to photoshop out the scar on her sternum from the surgery, but that she really wanted me to make her look pretty.

That was not difficult to do.

It so happens that her boyfriend is a motorcross rider, so she wanted pictures of her with his bike and gear, and she found a great farm location.  I met her and her friend downtown, and they led me to the farm.  We did some shots around the barn at first, and then moved out to the field, which was much better.

She was very nervous at first, skitter-ish, and reluctant to look into the camera for more than an instant.  But with a bit of coaching and encouragement, she became more and more relaxed.

We tried a bit of this (some shots by the barn) and that (shots in the field), and by the end, not only was she anticipating what I wanted her to do next, and posing beautifully, but she was actually enjoying it

We finished up.  I packed up my gear, and she put away the bike equipment.  And as we were heading back across the field to the barn, she said, to no one in particular, “This has been the best day of my life.”

That makes for a pretty gratifying day of shooting.