on fire...

here are some fun portraits i made last night at a campfire at the good earth farm

farming

morning at good earth farm

in my documentary photography class i decided to use my long doc project as an excuse to continue shooting at the Good Earth Farm. what captivated me the most about this place was not just the organic farming but the faith and dedication of the people who live and work there, and i have been working and struggling at times to illustrate that convergence with my images. for this project i had to basically create my own assignment. i wanted to work to slow down my shooting and really focus on light and detail, as if i was shooting with film. since i did not have time to process film, i decided to try and replicate the idea by only bringing one or two 1gb cards, ad not "chimping" (looking at the LCD on the back of my camera as i shoot). it has been a challenge and i  have occasionally broken the rules. but i feel that in this struggle i am coming back to some aspects of the shooting style i had lost when i switched to shooting color and digital.

i longed for film when i had 2 hard drives crash on me losing more than half my work, but i have since recovered it, and will begin chronologically blogging my work. i made these first two images after staying up all night and then heading to the morning prayer at the farm. i was so captivated by the morning light and the fog, as it had been so grey and rainy for so long (even though it was May and there was frost on the ground!). i was also slightly delirious from my lack of sleep that i feared i might have been to hasty with my shooting and not made any good images. but i was happy with these two images.

light painting

in portrait class one of our last assignments was to work with an alternate process. there was a time when digital was an alternate process for me, but that's another story... i decided to try light painting with models, i had done it before in the studio and with strobes in a cave. i knew i had to work faster with subjects that could move, but I also wanted to show a bit of the movement and grain so that i did not just produce something that  i could have done with strobes.  i shot at ISO100 f5.0, it is the combination of two images, the one of michael in the front is a 55 second exposure and the one of kyle in the back is a 49 second exposure. thanks so much to michael seiser and kyle grillot for being awesome models, and also to mark dawson for lending me the shutter release and my dad for always buying me flashlights.

slacklining

 i had to do on location lighting for my portraiture class. dan had mentioned that he is really into slacklining, so i thought that could put a fun an interesting twist on the assignment. i decided to stay within my comfort zone and shoot with cannon strobes with a remote transmitter, but of course, even when I am comfortable with the equipment it will still find ways to misbehave and confuse me. despite the challenges i was able to play with different lighting setups as well as motion, and here is the three image series i turned in for class. thanks to dan olson for once again being an awesome model.