Rejects from the Road
thLast year I went on the road with The Jonbenét, a hardcore band from Houston, Tex. It was loads of fun and I had the opportunity to try to make photographs in a completely different way than I ever have before. I narrowed the hundreds of photos that I took over those three weeks down to the handful I’ve had up on my site for a year. Most of the editing wasn’t that hard – I took a lot of shitty pictures. But I was looking back at the scans tonight and there were I few things that I thought would be worth posting and writing a sentence or two about.
This is one of the handful of photographs I made on tour that I consciously anticipated until I was able to get it processed and take a look. I ended up a bit disappointed in the final result because, if you look too quickly, you’ll totally miss just how young this kid is. I kind of forget what I didn’t like about it now though.
Yeah, I guess I ended up thinking that this one was awkward and cheesy or something like that, but, again, with a little distance from the time it was taken has turned out to be pretty interesting to me.
These kids were amazing. They’re a band that played with the Jonbenét at this Goth Christian youth center in, like, Pioria, Ill. or someplace like that and they were pretty stoked that I wanted to take their picture. Needless to say I was just as excited to take it. Shooting with a Hasselblad in the dark proved to be pretty tough time and again on this trip though, and you can see that the exposure is off and both images are soft. I was pretty bummed about it but it still makes for a pretty hilarious memory.
Speaking of soft images, the next one’s an example of all the images that got screwed up because I managed to dislocate my camera’s focusing plane at some point during the trip. I didn’t know about this until I’d been back for weeks and was looking at the pictures, but what it basically meant was that if a picture came out focused properly, it was a total fluke accident. Even some of the ones that ended up in the portfolio would totally fall apart if they had to be printed larger than like 6″ x 6″.
Here’s a detail view of this image: part of the tree at 100%.
Compare that to one that actually came out:
So, there were a lot of pictures that I lost to that issue.
There are two things I’m taking from this experience at this point. The first is that I’m learning that my work happens over a long period of time. The second thing is that nothing teaches me more about photography than taking pictures.