So Many Stars

Making Things Work

i’m really not much of a tinkerer. i don’t have my own soldering iron and i had to borrow one from my dad for this project. but i do like understanding how things work and the simple fact is this is so very simple, it was foolish not to do it myself.

i recently bought a set of Radiopopper JrXs which are radio controlled flash triggers that work really well. they can work in a mode that just fires a flash or studio strobe in a very unintelligent manner. whatever power setting the strobe or speedlight happens to be set to, that’s how much light you’ll get. however, if you connect the receivers to an Alien Bee studio strobe (of which we have 3 down at our studio) using the data cable (which is just a short phone cord), you can control the amount of light on the strobe with knobs on the transmitter that’s right on your camera. this is a huge convenience, especially when you’ve got a light on a boom stand that’s 8 feet in the air. and its a huge time saver because i don’t have to put the camera down, walk over to the light, adjust the power, then take another test shot. and even more so, i can connect the transmitter right to my light meter and adjust the light before i even start shooting.

the Radiopopper folks also announced that there would also be another accessory called the RP Cube for the receivers that would allow you to manually control the output of Nikon and Canon speedlights using these same knobs on the transmitter. the RP Cube was a small cube with a hot shoe to snap your flash into, and a stereo headphone jack to connect to the radiopopper receiver. for location shooting, this would offer the same benefits as using the data cable on the studio strobes. i thought, “great! send me two!!” but, of course, its not going to be shipping for another 6-8 weeks.

i am an impatient man and so is the rest of the internet, apparently. someone figured out that the manual control was done in the same way that most TTL metering is done. full flash power is accomplished with a longer duration flash and lower power is accomplished with a shorter duration flash. so, there are two wires, the trigger wire and the squelch wire. the flash is told to start by closing the circuit on the trigger wire and its told to stop or turn itself off by closing the circuit on the squelch wire. the radiopopper transmitter accomplishes this with some tricky timing and then radios the receiver to close the squelch circuit just in time to achieve the power level set by the knobs on the transmitter.

so, by taking a Nikon TTL E900 cable that has the same trigger and squelch wires, its really easy to wire them to a stereo mini-jack to connect to the radiopopper receiver. a trip to radio shack got me the stereo mini-jacks and a stereo mini-cable. a trip to dad’s place got the soldering iron and some solder. so after a couple bungled soldering attempts and another trip to radio shack, i’d finally had the cables wired up and they actually worked! by clipping and saving the cable portion of the E900, i made an RP-Cable to manually control my flash by plugging it into the TTL control connector on the flash. then using the E900’s hot-shoe cube , i wired up half of the stereo mini-cable to connect it to the radiopopper receiver. the benefit of putting the flash on the hot-shoe cube is that it has a standard 1/4 x 20 mount so i can easily put the flash on a stand and it also has two other Nikon TTL connectors which means i could gang two more flashes together, having two or three flashes working in concert from one receiver. that’s nice!

so now that i have all this cool control, i can do things like this…

Genna Bee - Freak Show Terror! (one Radiopopper triggered speedlight) — Genna Bee - Freak Show Terror!

this was done by balancing the little bit of night time ambient light and adding some flash to highlight Genna. the flash was triggered with a set of radiopopper JrX transmitter and receiver.

again, balancing ambient while adding a remotely triggered flash that was to daniel’s right side. notice the highlights in his hair and the right side of his chest. since the sun was starting to set behind the houses here, this highlight is all from the SB-800 mounted on a hand rail to daniel’s right.

Expectant

i’ve spent the past 3-or-so years photographing the female form. tall women, some skinny, some curvy. i’ve seen some of them change, get more tattoos, cut their hair, and threaten to retire. i’ve shot in waterfalls, deserts, the high sierras, and abandoned buildings of all sorts. about the only thing i haven’t done is worked with an expectant mother-to-be. and though it is something that has always intrigued me, i’ve never had the chance to explore the female form in this way.

i was amazed to watch amber’s interpretation of her body while carrying her unborn son. her movements seemed to be a poetic dance with new found partner. my original plan was to shoot somethings with amber that could be showcased as a maternity product to offer potential clients. however, i found myself quickly falling into the back into a typical figure study with amber. these new curves were unique and beautiful and unlike anything i’d ever seen before.

Amber - Expecting, No. 2 — Amber - Expecting, No.2

twas a rare opportunity, and one i’d love to experience again.

– scott

My Broken Heart Eyes

They say time heals all wounds. But broken hearts never mend.

Loving the Killer

Today is the day they shipped
home our summer in two crates
and tonight is All Hallows Eve
and today you tell me the oak leaves
outside your office window will
outlast the New England winter.
But then, love is where our summer
was.

Anne Sexton – Loving the Killer

16 Is The Number

sixteen is the number of times i’ve tried to make things right. each time, i keep coming up short.
fashion: May 23
star power: Kat

Bruised

I was in a bar tonite satisfying my hunger as well a my thirst. I noticed a woman sitting next to me wearing a very short gingham skirt. She had a buise on her upper thigh and I wondered for a moment where this might have come from.

By the time I realized that this was none of my business, she turned to me and said, “You’re wondering about the bruise, aren’t you?” I couldn’t deny my curiosity but before she answered, I gave her the easy out and inquired about her lack of coordination around cabinet door handles. She nodded in agreement and cursed the kitchen in her new apartment.

The conversation changed suddenly to the fact that the Phils were up 1-0 on the sixth and did I think they could pull it out tonight? When I told her that the only true sports were Formula 1 and rally races in Sweden, she turned back to her girl friend and asked, “Are you going to eat the last ‘wing?”

Radio Controlled

i recently purchased a set of Radiopopper JrX gizmos. they’re radio frequency triggers used to fire flashes off-camera. i wanted to use the Allentown Fair as a backdrop for some interesting experiments with the new devices. before we started, we had a bit of a scare as they seemed to be triggering randomly and without any input from the transmitter. for whatever reason, the optical slaves on my Nikon SB800s were just firing the flashes randomly as if some giant source of IR was out there blasting away in the darkness. don’t worry, its probably just the government protecting us somehow. in the end, covering the optical slaves did the trick.

it kinda took me a little while to bring this all together, finding the right model, getting a HPLS (human powered light stand) to assist, but when it all came together we had lotsa fun. Genna Bee is a great model that brings a lot of creativity to something like this, especially given my minimal direction. i’ve seen her style herself for various shoots and i just trusted her.

the sweat really comes when it gets down to the brass tacks for me. when i actually have to produce something, and do it with a lot of people watching. i’m getting better at it, not being so self conscious. trusting that i really do know what i’m doing here. in the end we got some loverly shots and had lots of fun along the way. Genna even got a big, loving hug from a little 3-year-old girl that was walking by! i mean, its still cracking me up!

its good to think about breaking out of my molds from time to time. and when i attempt projects like this, it just convinces me that Annie Leibovits got nothing on me. so, i’m for hire and mostly debt free, so my rates are pretty good. got a magazine? want something cool and unique? you know where to reach me now.

What’s That

for today, just a little poem that i’ve always loved. it always seems to capture me and i guess i just seek it out when i need it most. enjoy.

What’s That

Before it came inside
I had watched it from my kitchen window,
watched it swell like a new balloon
watched it slump and then divide,
like something I know I know —
a broken pear or two halves of the moon,
or round white plates floating nowhere
or fat hands waving in the summer air
until they fold together like a fist or a knee.
After that it came to my door. Now it lives here.
And of course: it is a soft sound, soft as a seal’s ear,
that was caught between a shape and a shape and then returned to me

You know how parents call
from sweet beaches anywhere, come in come in,
and how you sank under water to put out
the sound, or how one of them touched in the hall
at night: the rustle and the skin
you couldn’t know, but heard, the stout
slap of tides and the dog snoring. It’s here
now, caught back from time in my adult year —
the image we did forget: the cranking shells on our feet
or the swing of the spoon in soup. It is as real
as splinters stuck in your ear. The noise we steal
is half a bell. And outside cars whisk by on the suburban street

and are there and are true.
What else is this, this intricate shape of air?
calling me, calling you.

– Anne Sexton

Chaos Theory

a colleague at my day-job recently set his communicator status (the nearest thing we’ve got to a facebook stream in the office) to a quote from a fortune cookie. normally they’re just rubbish and often poorly translated adages. but this one struck a particular chord with me.

“Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos.”

when i look around the post-production suite that i used to call my office, i certainly hope this fortune will hold some weight and come true! i recently borrowed a friend’s Mamiya RZ67 medium format camera and liked it so much i decided to not give it back. he gave it to me with a really nice 140mm lens, great for portraits and i quickly bought a wider-angle 90mm for my outdoor landcape work.

now there are about 21 rolls of film that are waiting to be scanned, cataloged, and post-processed. these rolls contain some wonderful work that i’m hoping will form the basis of my next book project. at any one point in time there are also 6-8 rolls of film that need to be processed as well. it really is just chaos.

and when i look to the fall, i really want to consider building up a wet darkroom again and get to a point where i can start making some silver prints.

finding order in all of this is not easy for me. organizing and (probably more importantly) staying organized is not one of my strengths. but in the end, there comes a weekend, or a week, or a month when everything else fades away into the background, nothing else is important, and all my energy, my spirit is completely focused on wrangling the brilliance and beauty from all of this chaos. i know its all in there and i know its good stuff. i’m just not sure what the process is, how this all works deep inside my brain. its almost as if i have to work within very small bursts of creative energy, focusing first on a photo session. (make sure the film is loaded, get a good exposure, frame the shot, direct the model, wait for the sun to disappear behind clouds… press the shutter!) and once i know its all there, i can just develop, bag it, and toss it in the pile.

its just difficult to have the patience to wait for it to germinate and grow. all the lush rich soil is there, its moist and warm and a lot of energy is pouring into it, both from me and through everything the models bring to these images. for now, however, i’ll swim in the chaos all the while trying to nurture the brilliance to come.

On Becoming Small

when i was in high school i played in the band. it was great fun learning to play an instrument and eventually i had what i thought was enough experience to begin basic forms of improvisation. it was fun and when it was done well while everyone else was playing a piece straight, it sounded great. but nothing (and i mean nothing) pissed off our band director more than some 16-year old kid who thought he knew better than John Phillips Sousa. and it was hard at 16 to learn the value of that restraint, but truly, when everyone played what was written and as we were directed the result was stunningly beautiful. to this day, when i listen to music, i still have a deep seeded respect for the rhythm guitarists, the bass players, and the guy pounding out chords on a piano while the front man wails away. they’re the anchors that provide the pillars of foundation for a beautiful expression.

recently, when i was shooting with a friend, we were trying to find some beauty within a very creepy space, i saw this small opening low on the wall and knew that the light coming through there was special. i wanted to convey the space, the light that i saw, and a degree of emotional isolation that would anchor the scene. when i showed yarrow the preview on the back of the camera she simply said, “i’m so small!” when i assured her that’s exactly what was needed to convey this vision, she sort of agreed and had to trust that i knew what i was doing.

there comes a point as you mature as an artist when the novelty of its creation becomes secondary to executing a vision. and i see many photographers struggling with this when they begin to explore photography as an expressive medium. it often comes off as documentary and somewhat matter of fact with a near complete disregard for composition. there’s often very little expression, emotion, or purpose, for the nude figure in this scene. one can disregard or even blatantly break compositional rules, but only for the purpose of conveying some higher purpose: emotion, drama, story.

and i struggle with these problems every time i pick up my camera. every time i am trusted with the beauty of the human figure, i find myself not taking more and more shots. and ultimately, i come away with so many more pieces that truly move me. as artists, when we begin to trust ourselves and we tend to have more confidence in our vision and our skills. this allows us to slow down, work with a more deliberate vision and in the end come away with so much more.