Photo by Douglas DublerA Tale of Two PhotosOnce a year, on the anniversary of Guest Blog Wednesday, Scott affords me the opportunity to share some thoughts. All I can say is that it is a good thing that he gives me a year between these g...
Photo by Douglas DublerA Tale of Two PhotosOnce a year, on the anniversary of Guest Blog Wednesday, Scott affords me the opportunity to share some thoughts. All I can say is that it is a good thing that he gives me a year between these guest blog posts. Once again, thank you, Scott, for your gracious generosity.Tale 1 Of all of the images I have or will take in my life, I suspect “Paris in Snow” will be by far my most iconic. It is the cover of my book From Oz to Kansas, and Epson uses it as the image on their worldwide packaging of Cold Press Natural paper. So the image has received some airplay.This image is one of the best examples I have of how to capture “timelessness” in a photograph. There is no way to tell if the image was shot yesterday, one, 10, 50 or 100 years ago. This has to do with an observation I made several years back when photographing New York City: “modern” happens four stories and below, and “timeless” happens four stories and above. The shops at street level come and go, fashions change, cars change, and the banners that get hung for this or that special event all tend to be hung from the floor of the fourth story (or the ceiling of the third if you want to be picky) and below. But the truth of the city and the age of its creation all live four stories (from the floor up) and above. Case in point: in this image, I am nine stories up, and I am shooting down toward the fourth story of the buildings in the foreground.Note: This is also an ExDR image (Extended Dynamic Range). Not merely an HDR image (High Dynamic Range). For me, HDR images tend to be ones that scream “I AM AN HDR IMAGE!!!” and are an exercise in how to make a photograph look like a Harry Potter set. Just because something looks weird does not make it art. It just means it looks weird. In this image, the dynamic ranges of focus, time, and gesture have been extended. The goal of any technique is that when the image is completed you cannot see the technique in the image.But I digress…. Back to the tale of this image. It was February 1, 2010, two months after the year we all wish we could forget—the economic nightmare known as 2009. To say that the previous year had not been kind to many photographers is an understatement, and truth be told, I had been luckier than most. What I remember about February 1, 2010 is looking at my career and seeing that I had no work lined up so far into the future that I could see the word “bleak” stretching to the infinity perspective point. At the time I had no idea that 2010 was to be one of the best years I have ever had as an artist; in early 2010 it just looked like I was going to have to learn to start saying, “Would you like fries with that?” as part of my new job description.So when I received an email in which I was offered the opportunity to go to Paris to attend a convention—all I had to do was be willing to be asked questions and answer them—and the hotel room was free and all I had to do was get there….Well, I had nothing better to do, and all I had at the time on my dance card was to bemoan my economic demise and fate. I could do that in L.A. all by myself, or I could just as easily do that in Paris where the food is better. The math here was: 1) all it would cost me is to burn off some of my pile of frequent flyer miles, 2) the room was paid for, and 3) if I ate off of the craft service tables I could eat for free. As you might guess, the decision was a tough one, but off to Paris seemed the best call. The trip started with me being placed in the last row, in a middle seat that required a shoehorn to be fit into it, and I spent the next 19 hours sandwiched between two “seatmates” that had yet to discover soap, were so big that they each had their own zip code, and they each occupied—in addition to their own seat—a third of mine. Well…at least the ticket was free. And free has always been my favorite four-letter word. All I can say is that by the end of the flight I knew what a pimento feels like stuf
