some ghosts

this weekend i had the opportunity to work with carly erin again.  we’ve been friendly enough to each other on the socializing sites, but it suddenly came to our attention that we hadn’t actually tried to collaborate on making some art in almost a year!

i set up some time at my friend george’s studio here in town and another friend bill from lightphile studios also came along to have some of carly’s time as well.  the wonderful thing about working with friends like this is that we all tend to feed off of each other’s ideas.  there really is no competition, although some of us tend to guard our ideas so that we can come away with something truly unique.

i had one or two solid ideas for working with carly, particularly placing her within the great natural light afforded by the large windows in george’s studio.  but other than that, i wasn’t sure what i was going to do.  then suddenly i had an idea to slow down my shutter speed and give carly free reign to dance about and express herself through movement.  she’s had a lot of dance training, so this comes very naturally to her.  the idea was to let go of the absolute sharpness i’m used to capturing and allow the blur of motion into the photo.  watching what remains, the sally mann documentary, i’d seen her embrace and take full advantage of the fact that her exposures were 1/5th of a second or longer.  some of the portraits she’s done are 3-5 minute exposures.  and they’re beautiful!  so much more so than a crisp, sharp, flashed exposure.

i expected that the results would be good, but carly exceeded my expectation on expressiveness.  i’m pretty sure that this has launched a new series of photographs for me, enough so that i hope to bring it full circle into another book.  look for more in the future.