The Tree Song Artwork (Darren Pierson)

You never can be prepared for  some of the strange requests you will receive. Some can be so vague and directionless that the trouble ends up being you have too many ideas, none of which seem to be the in right vein.  Other times, you are asked to shoot very specific images.  I will give you two examples, both coming from my friends’ band Vegas With Randolph.  A few months ago, I receive an email asking me to create cover art for an upcoming single release called The Tree Song. The only direction I was given was “Can you shoot something cool relating to trees?”  Gee thanks Eric.  The window for production was pretty small so I simply walked out into the woods behind my house and started shooting.  I am old, so most of the time I have been around, music tended to come from round spinning objects; 45s, LPs and then CDs.  Even cassette tapes went round.  The creation of the image was pretty simple; stand still, look up and turn while shooting at a slow shutter speed.  Its not the most compelling image I have ever shot, but it works well and the band was pleased.

A few weeks later, I was again asked to contribute to the CD cover art for the Above The Blue release.  Contrary to the 1st request, I was asked to shoot a clear glass bowl of blueberries with a cherry on the top.  The cherry was later changed to a strawberry, but you can see by the final use of the image below, the red fruit became a moot point.  One of the main obstacles to this shoot was the fact that I was spending the week in what was essentially a Florida swamp.  Not too many places to set up lights and a white sweep.

Above the blue indeed (Darren Pierson)

I found what I needed in a local HarrisTeeter and came back to camp just as the sun was setting.  After locating some low flat tree limbs I stood next to the water and started shooting. The final usage of this image was to be part of a composite, so I didn’t worry too much about the background and instead made sure to throw it completely out of focus with depth of field. Again, not the most interesting subject matter or composition but exactly what was asked for and needed.

Vegas With Randolph continues to be one of my few creative outlets aside from my motorsports work, so I hope they keep on asking me to contribute.  Our German Shepherd is a big fan. You can visit their Facebook Page or Listen to their musical offerings on Reverb Nation. Better yet, You can buy the electronic version on CDBaby.

Perfectly Polished Spring Formal Waltz

Despite the rain and thunderstorms just prior to the start of this year’s Spring Formal, The A Dance in the Park shoot went off without a hitch.  The portraits were finished with 10 minutes to spare and the dance candids started right on schedule.  It was a hard five hours of work, but I feel very satisfied with the results.  Images from the Formal can be viewed and ordered at PerfectlyPolishedPics.com.

Thanks!

Perfectly Polished Spring Formal Portraits

Darren

Baby Doll #1 Portra cross processed E6

In an earlier post I started talking about shooting film in the olden days.  It started me thinking about all of the hours I spent in the darkroom developing B&W film and printing.  I miss the process to be truthful.  You learn so much more about light and shadow when you are touching prints in the gloam of the darklight.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the things I can do with photoshop, but mainly I am glad I don’t have to use it if I don’t want.

The other day I was looking at some images that had been tortured to death by a photoshop user.  I just don’t understand why some people think that taking a badly conceived/composed/executed photograph and then beating it over the head with every photoshop plugin available creates a compelling image.  As Sexton Ming once sang, “You can’t polish a turd”.   Why not think about the image you want to create, think about the mood and feel of the image.  Pre visualize the idea until it forms fully in your mind.  Any image that comes through that process has at least an outside chance of being compelling.  At the very least it will convey your idea much more so than shooting crap and then wondering later if reversing the colors and making everyone’s hair green will be cool.  It won’t, I promise.

I grew up during the cold war.  My grade school training involved learning how to properly hide under my desk in case of a nuclear attack.  When desks stopped being big heavy wooden objects with inkwells (no kidding) and turned into smaller wire framed easily moved items, we started lining up in the hallways kneeling with our heads between our knees.  How stupid, I doubt that would have protected us for a tornado, let alone a blast.  It gave me some odd thoughts from time to time though.  I guess I have always wondered what would happen when society broke down.  Maybe more what snippets of life would look like.  I find dolls creepy, clowns also, but that’s a different worry.  I reasoned therefore, that everyone would need a baby doll in the mean streets of the broken future.

I am actually a very good B&W printer, at least I used to be.  I sold my darkroom gear several years ago and probably haven’t printed since 1997.  At the height of my printing interests I was trying lots of toners.  Lots of people I knew were in to selenium and sepia toners.  I of course had to be different and started working with The Photographer’s Formulary iron blue toner.  I loved the melancholy feel that the blue added to my work.  Since I was already shooting for morose, the blue was a complement rather than an additive.  The problem was that the color was really hard to duplicate across prints.  Very small differences in temperatures and mixtures yielded wildly different blues in both color and saturation.  Even in a small print batch, the colors would shift from one print to the next.

Looking back a few years, I remembered working in my College’s E6 processing line.  We had both a C41 (negative reversal film) and an E6 (positives/slides) line and sometimes students would put the wrong kind of film in our in boxes.  No way to tell what kind of film it was in the dark (actually not true since 4×5 film has ID notches on the upper right) so sometimes print film would end up being processed like a slide.  Kodak film tended to make a slide of odd but interesting blueish tones.  The process was fairly simple and repeatable.  You shot color print film, overexposed by a stop or so and then had it processed E6.  The only major drawback to this was that you ended up with a slide.  Slides are good for projection and for duplication, but back in the infancy of digital, fairly expensive to deal with.  You could have a cibachrome made from your positive, but that was about it.  Today with the might of scanners behind you, making a billboard from your slides is fairly simple.  Back then, it was an issue. to combat the problem, I dabbled with the opposite system: Processing slide film C41.  That will be another post though as this one is getting pretty long.

Portrait Example (Darren Pierson)

I shoot quite a few portraits.  Bridals, engagements, corporate sittings, the odd senior, you name it, I have shot it.   Lately I have been doing fewer of the single person shoots and have gravitated to portrait lines.   By this I don’t mean slamming people through as they walk off of a cruise ship, I am talking about quick but proper portrait sessions.  To me, there are several sorts of commercial portraiture that can be arranged into three basic groups:

• Environmental – You shoot your client in a setting where they often find themselves such as a forest, football field, lake, warehouse or the like.  Seniors and Engagement portraits are often done this way.  You meet them at the botanical gardens and wander around finding great spots.
• Studio – Your client comes to you.  There are probably several clothing and background changes.  The lighting can vary, but generally these are straight forward and encompass all that is generally thought of as a traditional portrait.
• Location – Can be similar to environmental, but in my mind this typically refers to a photographer(s) arriving at a school or business and continuously shooting lots of people, one after another.  I call these Portrait Lines.

You probably went through assembly line location photography every year of school.  I didn’t like them much and liked shooting them even less.  I knew there had to be a way of shooting quickly while obtaining quality results for the clients.  Turn to the left, turn to the right just didn’t work in my mind.  I slowed down, talked to the people, found quick and easy ways to direct them while keeping them happy and comfortable.   I can still shoot four keepers in a minute or two so my overall speed isn’t down, yet the client is much happier with the results.

For this type of shooting, you need to be able to reproduce the look.  You might have more than one line running, you might have to shoot on multiple days, portrait #12 needs to look just like #312.  Its not really that hard.  Write it all down, take a tape measure, mark everything and keep track.  Reassess after the end of each job and make adjustments. Also, you have to remember to shoot for cropping.  By this I mean shoot so that the image can be printed in a variety of aspect ratios.  Look at the image of the directory portrait at the top; you can see that there is more empty space on the left and top than is required.  In fact, this makes the proof appear a bit lopsided.  I do this so that my clients can order 5x7s, wallets, 8x10s, whatever they want of the same image and still have the prints look nearly the same.  All too often I have seen people shoot a tight crop which looks great on proof, but can’t be printed as an 8×10 without cropping out some essential detail of the image.

My upper example probably needs to have a bit more light reflecting off of the table I was using as a posing area, but I am overall pleased with the look. My bottom example probably isn’t the best photographically since I was constrained by space during this shoot and had to put the posing stool too close to the background.  This caused the background to be too much in focus.  I could have shot at a shallower depth of field but that has its own drawbacks in this sort of portraiture.  Everything is a compromise, you just have to decide what is most important.

Lindsay Danielle Tatum (Darren Pierson)

Vegas With Randolph - Side Trip Cover

My friend Eric has always had or been in a band. Most usually with my other friend John. A great while ago, even I was in the band; be happy you never had to hear that.  Over the long years since I sold my Rickenbacker, I have had the opportunity to produce cover art for many of Eric’s bands.  The 1st one was for a cassingle (yes, I am very old) called Silhouette.  For that cover, late one evening, I set up a few monolights in the backyard of the house next door to us and handed Kristi (the model) a loaner Kramer guitar and shot several rolls of Tri-X (Yes, film.  You read the cassette part, right?).  I had been given no direction other than, “shoot something cool” so my intent was to backlight the form of the model, resting the guitar out to her side.  Towards the end of the shoot, I thought it might be fun to try for a double exposure as well.  Since this was well before digital camera systems and I wasn’t shooting Polaroids, I had to rely on my skills.  I think I had 2 frames left and came up with this.  (The green grain was added in post by the band.)

Euphoria Cover Art for Silhouette

Many bands later, Eric and John had formed new band called Vegas With Randolph. Randolph being another mutual friend and Vegas being a city I cannot imagine him wanting to visit. They needed cover art for an un-named four song CD. No name, no instruction, shoot something cool. I have always thought that one of the worst ways to travel would be by cross country bus. Consequently, it then follows that the worst way to travel to Vegas would be by bus. As it happened, my wife and I had recently purchased a 1958 Trailways Bus. A picture of a certain steering wheel started to gel in my brain. The final results are pictured at the beginning of this post. I was quite pleased by what I came up with as was the band. (The title, Side Trip, was mine also :)) Euphoria later changed their name to Cherrysmash. Music by Cherrysmash and Vegas With Randolph can be heard on both CD Baby and iTunes.

Thanks for looking and listening.

Darren

All portraits and candids are online for viewing and ordering.  Perfectly Polished Pics.  The payment gateway is through PAYPAL, but you do not need a paypal account to order; if you do not, simply pick the Continue link to the left of the PayPal login box and you can check out with any major credit card.

We have extended the Last Chance Coupons until April 27th 2010.  Enter coupon code PERFECTLY for $5 off of any purchase $35 or more or enter POLISHED for 10% off any order.

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EDIT: This link now goes to the 2011 Spring Formal as the 2010 is offline.

All portraits and candids are online for viewing and ordering on the Darren Pierson Photography website. This is a direct link to Perfectly Polished Pics.  The payment gateway is through PAYPAL, but you do not need a paypal account to order; if you do not, simply pick the Continue link to the left of the PayPal login box.

Thanks!

EDIT:  This gallery is NO LONGER ONLINE