It's time to begin, isn't it?

In Between

Yesterday, I spent four hours in the dark room developing the prints from Katie's photo shoot, and they're finally ready to be seen!

A true photographer wouldn't have to explain their pictures, but I'm still learning so I'm going to give you a little synopsis.

In the beginning, this young girl is torn up inside, in too much pain to survive but terrified to die. She turns her body into a suicide note for her loved ones to find and walks into the ocean, ready to end it all. She thinks she knows what she's getting into, but as the waves crash over her, she begins to panic. For the first time, her emotional pain is secondary to actual physical pain. She changes her mind and reaches for the shore...but it's too late.

The words are lyrics from In Between by Linkin Park. This shoot was also inspired by Calm Under the Waves by Maria Mena and Into the Ocean by Blue October.

And don't worry, not all of my pictures are going to be this depressing! Most of them, maybe, but not all.

Dragonfly Story

In the bottom of an old pond lived some grubs who could not understand why none of their groups ever came back after crawling up the stems of the lilies to the top of the water. They promised each other that the next one who was called to make the upward climb would return and tell what happened to him. Soon one of them felt an urgent impulse to seek the surface; he rested himself on the top of a lily pad and went through a glorious transformation, which made him a dragonfly with beautiful wings. In vain, he tried to keep his promise. Flying back and forth over the pond, he peered down at his friends below. Then he realized that even if they could see him they would not recognize such a radiant creature as one of their number.

The fact that we cannot see our friends or communicate with them after the transformation, which we call death, is no proof that they cease to exist. 

- Walter Dudley Cavert

Lindsey With an 'E'

Yesterday I did one of the most beautiful photo shoots I've ever seen with a gorgeous girl named Lindsey. It was another film shoot for my photography class, and we had a blast. We went to Bethesda by the Sea, one of the few places in West Palm with nice architecture. Despite the fact that she's still recovering from a bad fall, Lindsey bravely stood on top of stone monuments, climbed trees, and jumped around, all for my sake.

I told her, "It's a bad habit of mine to ask my models to do impossible things. But they keep doing them, so I keep asking!"

We felt a little bit like celebrities when a family from Brazil came up and asked if they could take pictures with us. The feeling grew when another group of tourists tried to discreetly photograph us. (Tried being the operative word. They weren't very good at sneaking.)

Finished up the outing with lunch at Applebees and declared it a perfect day!

Where Hannah is a Trooper

This is the only picture I'm going to show you from my shoot with Hannah last Sunday. Don't want to reveal too much, but I will say this: that girl is indefatigable. Whatever I asked her to do, where ever I asked her to do it (re: the graveyard), she did it cheerfully and better than I could have expected.

Calling 911

Yesterday, I was researching the bystander effect for a speech I'm doing in my Communications class. I watched this video, where an experiment was performed using a man lying down "passed out" in a busy place. The bystander effect is a psychological phenomenon where the more people are present in an emergency, the less likely any one person is to help. So in the experiment, no one helped the man lying on the ground because they all figured someone else would do it.

This morning at work, I saw a man passed out in front of a nightclub. There was a car stopped in the street in front of him and several people on the sidewalk around him. I stayed in my car because, hey, it was 4 am and I'm a female and I was alone, but I rolled down my window and asked if anybody knew the man. They all shrugged and went on their way. Normally I wouldn't have even bothered to ask. I would probably have just assumed that one of the people on the sidewalk knew him, but after watching the videos of the psychological experiments on YouTube and reading about cases where people have died because no one bothered to help, I knew I couldn't just drive away.

So, for the fifth time in under a year, I called 911. It's amazing to me how commonplace it's become for me to state the nature and address of my emergency. And I guess it's true what I read about how just knowing that the bystander effect exists lessens its effect on people.

First Film Shoot

January's almost over, and already I've had a lot of firsts in 2013: my first 16x20 print of one of my photographs, my first time on a train, and yesterday I did my first photo shoot on film instead of digital. It was also my first completely manual shoot (manual focus, ISO, aperture, and shutter speed).

I'm taking Intro to Photography this semester and in the class we have to do shoot a roll of film each week and develop our pictures in a darkroom. I've been wanting to take this class for years. Both of my sisters who are into photography, Joy and Kerry, have taken it in the past, so it almost feels like a tradition now.

Our assignment was to use what we had learned in class (how to shoot in manual on a sunny day) and use that knowledge to make pictures with the theme of "shadows and light." I kind of lost sight of that almost immediately, because I'm not used to having a theme, but I hope my professor likes my pictures anyway.

I knew I wanted to do something really out there for my first film shoot. Our professor had showed us some examples of the "shadows and light" theme and a lot of the pictures shown used the play of light over water. That made me think of a beach, and my recent reacquaintance with Linkin Park made me think of song lyrics. I'll save the specifics for when I have the actual pictures (hopefully I don't ruin the film somehow - this is too nerve-wracking!) but I'll show you some behind the scenes shots my sister Joy took.

10 am - Katie arrived at my house to get ready. We decided what she would wear and what kind of makeup to put on. I drew out a sort of storyboard to show her the pictures we would be taking and she gave a lot of creative input.

11 am - We got our stuff together, woke Joy up and convinced her to come with us, and looked up directions to the beach (don't judge me for not knowing! My beach is closed because the bridge is under construction). We had to drive through Lake Worth so of course it took forever to get there.

12 pm - We ripped up Katie's stockings and I wrote the lyrics all over her body. We had an audience not only from the people around us, but also from a crowd on the boardwalk above us.

12:30 pm - I posed Katie, looked through the viewfinder of the camera, focused the lens, fiddled with the settings, and... decided it wasn't good enough. I reposed Katie, re-focused the camera, looked in, and... nope, still not it. It took me forever, but finally I took my first ever film picture. Film cameras make the most satisfying sound when the shutter is released!

I took a few more shots of that pose, then we moved on to the second. For this one, Katie had to be farther away from me. The wind was blowing, waves were crashing, people were yelling, and Katie couldn't hear my instructions. Joy had to relay my words back and forth until finally she just said, "Well how about something like this?" Katie did the pose she suggested, and I whooped in excitement. It was perfect! There are no digital pictures of the pose, so you'll just have to wait to see it on film. :)

12:39 pm - We spent so long on those first few poses that we only had a few minutes to do the rest. And things only got worse. For the next four poses, Katie had to be in the water, not just standing on the shore. The waves were of average size when we arrived, but I think the tide was going down and they were getting bigger. They smacked my poor Katie around like a rag doll as she valiantly tried to hold on to her poses. They beat me up as well, and at one point I actually fell into a sitting position in the water and only managed to save the camera by holding it high above my head.

12:45 pm - We were on pose 5 when I checked to see how many shots I had left. It said 29, I took four more pictures, and suddenly it was at 36. There are only 36 exposures in a roll of film, and I was heartbroken because we had one more pose to do. We decided to try it anyway. Katie laid down in the sand and so did I, I focused the shot, and click, took the picture. It worked! The film began to rewind all on its own. We had done it and we were finished!

It seemed like a long time to me, but looking at the meta data from the digital pictures Joy took, we were only shooting for 20 minutes.  I can hardly believe it! It was a good thing we finished when we did, though, because Katie had to get back to her college.

1 pm - We packed up, threw towels over the car seats, and took off. I have a little bit of a sunburn and Katie will probably be choking up sea water for days, but I hope the pictures will prove to be worth all the fuss!