Blog About Photography

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.

Posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 2:52 pm

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