I Shot a Lot

The messy political conclusion to World War II had an interesting and beneficial impact for photographers.  With four nations occupying the ruins of Germany, each country quietly began attempts to loot the decimated Nazi empire of all its valuable scientists and technology.   While the majority of their efforts were focused on trying to capture high-value German military scientists in the field of rocketry, aeronautics and nuclear research, there was also a campaign of direct seizures of German commercial designs, industrial trade secrets and manufacturing equipment.

The Soviets, having overrun a Carl Zeiss factory in Jenna, claimed the existing designs and tooling to all the pre-war Zeiss optics as war reparations and began manufacturing copies of Zeiss lenses and rangefinders at their own factories, Krasnogorskiy Mechanicheskiy Zavod in Krasnogorsk just outside of Moscow and Zavod Arsenal in Kiev, Ukrane.  While the quality control and finish details of Soviet manufacturing were far below the German Zeiss standard, the Zenitar and Kiev photographic lines they turned out eventually found a secondary market in the west with quirky and adventurous photographers.  

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Professionally, I’ve shot one wedding before and it was a complete nightmare.  I was somewhat roped into it by a coworker at the last minute and I ended up shooting the whole thing with a Nikon D200, a Nikon SB600 flash, a Nikon SB800 flash and the wretched Nikkor 18-200 VR zoom lens.  I had very little experience on the equipment, zero experience shooting a wedding and zero room for failure.  Although the pictures were mostly acceptable from an artistic perspective, I would never put myself in that sort of situation again.

The flowergirl was a ham.

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Now that we’ve established the potential pitfalls of fluorescent lighting, it was now my ambition to see if I could build an off-the-shelf lighting system using parts from Home Depot.  In some ways I was successful, and in others I faced some intersting limitations.

Knowing that the end goal is shooting some of the food we cook for my wife’s site The Fashionable Foodie, I decided that I would set a few parameters before shopping.  Since we’re both new at this, I wanted to minimize as many variables as possible.  We have very little experience plating, styling, photographing, lighting and setting scenery, so I thought it would be best to cut out table settings entirely.  I decided to begin by building a table-top cyclorama to shoot all the subjects on a plain white background for simplicity’s sake. 

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The truth is that I obtained this domain name almost by accident. 

The wife and I had been discussing a project for quite some time to unify her two great loves of food and fashion.  In prepping for a Next Food Network Star Season 5 audition this past year, we finally happened upon a theme that melded her two passions: The Fashionable Foodie.  The title summed her up in a nutshell, encompassing her ridiculous lust for all things fashion related as well as her constant tinkering in the kitchen.  The Food Network audition went very well, but she did not receive a callback.

While my personal long term goal is to turn the concept into a weekly video podcast, it seemed like a shame to just let the idea languish until we bought a video camera.  I decided to just go ahead and jump in headfirst and create the concept for her as a website.  I thought that by creating content now and working to refine our style and content, we should have a backlog of good material to pull from when we’re finally able to jump into production.  Getting in a bit over my head as usual, I bought the domain name, started re-teaching myself wordpress and bought a year’s worth of webhosting at Bluehost.  The hosting plan came with a free domain registration, and thus ishotalot.com was born as a side project.

All things must dovetail in life and while prepping recipes for the site, I quickly discovered that photographing food is much more difficult then I’d thought.  Below is a shot of a delicious Vietnamese pork lettuce wrap.  Not terrible for a first attempt, but I could immediately see that I was going to have problems with backgrounds, proper camera support and lighting.

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October 17th, 2007.  It was a sunny day in Washington DC as hundreds gathered on the south lawn of the US Capitol hoping to get a glimpse of Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, better known to the world as the 14th Dalai Lama.

They began arriving early in the day, staking out positions on the lawn as if it were some festival concert.  Some in traditional Buddhist robes, some carrying handmade signs urging support for a free Tibet; they crowded along the capitol steps and watched a jumbotron feed of the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony taking place inside the Capitol Rotunda.

I did not watch the jumbotron because I was inside photographing the ceremony.  Of the hundred plus pictures I took that day, one stood out immediately:

Click to see larger

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Easter 2006.  After running around in the backyard in search of plastic eggs, the festivities die down and the simple act of blowing bubbles entertains us for a half hour.  I knew I wanted to get a shot of my wife Gretchen blowing a bubble, but I  had no real ideas about the image that I was trying to capture.

Looking back on it now, I’m surprised to see that I actually took 71 frames before I finally arrived at the winning shot below.

Click to see larger

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Vegas, September 2005: I’m newly married and on the first leg of our honeymoon tour.  The Canon 350D is very new in my hands and I’m still trying to understand why I would ever bother shooting RAW images.  After living for five years in New York City, the New York, New York casino at the bottom of the strip fascinates me to no end.  A completely generic version of one of the greatest cities in the world, complete with a mini skyline and a scale model of the Statue of Liberty.  

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I wonder if people are ever aware that something they’re creating has mass-market appeal. I don’t mean “mass-market” in the sense of a deliberate and methodical effort to appease the widest possible audience, but rather a universal charm that is the unintended result of creativity. Certainly one must expect that an artist is often thrilled at their own creations, but is there ever a point when one can step back from something they’re creating and say with accuracy “this is going to be big”?

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