Can I call myself a guru? Well as far as this blog is concerned I run the show, so for today you’re just going to have to go along with it. Send all complaints to Dustin Schmidt at Old Hat Creative along with $5 and I’ll be happy to take any and all complaints under consideration. 
I’m going to talk a little bit today about how I got started in photography.
I started really taking photos in college when I was studying graphic design. I felt like the two things went together like peanut butter and ladies so I decided I would get into both early on. I had a cheap Canon film camera that I thought was the greatest thing ever because you could change the lenses. (Never mind that I only had one lense anyway.) Now I’m shooting with a variety of Nikon, Sigma and Tamron digital equipment.
We shot all film in my college photography classes, (Early classes consisted of Ilford HP5 Plus for the most part), and we developed all our own film and printed our shots in the college’s lab. At the time I wasn’t too far into the digital side of photography and I didn’t mind the countless hours I was spending developing film and printing every evening and weekend. Now it’s a simple matter of downloading a few cards and sending files to my Epson R2400 to print. Could I go back to film after experiencing the convenience I have now? That’s a topic for a later post, so stay tuned for that…
That being said, I’m going to talk just a bit about a few photographs I’ve taken lately (and not so lately) and a bit of the behind the scenes on each one.
• I shot this photo a few weeks ago with a really simple setup in my very small apartment. Not much in the way of setup for this. It’s all done with a single light and one strong-armed helper holding the light stand out to the side (thanks Joe). I lit it with a beauty dish positioned slightly above and in front of the subject. The gradation of tones on the background is light from the beauty dish that happened to sneak by the subject. After trying a variety of different things in post I made the decisions you see above in regards to color and tone. Definitely one of the big advantages of digital is the ability to manipulate your colors after you click the shutter. Also one of the disadvantages, as I’ve spent countless hours trying to decide whether one thing looks better than another. (Hmm, do I like this one better or this one better. I really like this one but this one’s pretty cool too. Maybe if I tried this…)
• This is a photo of a good friend of mine that I took nearly a year ago in my old apartment. I had a bit more room back then, but the setup is nearly the same idea. I shot this with one light and a little DIY engineering. At the time the only external light I had was a Nikon SB-800. The SB-800 is just a small shoe-mount flash that doesn’t really accept a lot of light modifiers so I constructed a small beauty dish out of some simple household items from Home Depot and attached it with a bit of velco and happy thoughts. Worked like a charm and with a bit of post you get the above pic.
• All of the previous photos have been taken pretty recently and were produced with quite a bit of equipment. We’re talking various lenses, wireless triggers, stands, lights, light modifiers, assistants, photoshop post processing, etc. You have to have certain tools at your disposal if you want to do a superior job.
Let me put it this way. If you’re framing houses you don’t beat your nails in with a rock. It might get the job done, but unless you’re an idiot you go buy a hammer. Same thing with graphic design, same thing with photography. But having vision is more important than any of that stuff. You have to know why you’re doing something.
The last photo in this post is a good example of the why. I have several photos printed large and hanging in my apartment and invariably I get more comments on this one than anything else that’s up.
I shot this photo in college with a cheap Canon Rebel film camera. I was using the kit lens that came with the camera and it was sitting on a Wal-Mart tripod I got for $15. It was for my very first photo class, Intro to Photography, and we’d spent the first 3/4 of the semester shooting trees and still lifes and a bunch of other boring stuff that I had no interest in whatsoever.
Finally we got an opportunity to shoot a project that let us do whatever we wanted to. I wanted to shoot people and make cool photos but I didn’t have any of the gear I thought I needed. How can I make this work? First I got a couple of my buddies to dress up in suits. (Guys are easy to dress, put ‘em in a suit and they’re bound to look at least halfway cool). Then I went to the convenience store and bought two packs of cigarettes. Neither I nor any of my friends smoked, but cigarettes are a great prop for that late night, film noir look I was going for. (Sorry kids, but lets face it, cigarettes just look cool. Keith Richards has been smoking them forever and I don’t know anybody cooler than Keith Richards. End of discussion.)
Then I needed to be able to control the direction and quality of light. So I shot this photo at about midnight. Yep, you heard me right. By shooting in the middle of the night I was able to use streetlights and building lights as a directional light source that I could control through aperture and shutter speed. I placed my subjects under streetlamps, in doorways and around corners to modify the existing light. I shot the above photo with my old roommate positioned below a streetlight, with probably a 2 second exposure, and told him to hold still. I lost a lot of photos to blur but the ones that came out looked great and when I developed the film I had the look I was going for. All done with a secondhand Canon Rebel and a few rolls of film.
So whether you shoot fashion models or family photos, I hope your own photography gives you all the joy and satisfaction that you can get out of 1/125 of a second. Cheers!
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