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In My Dreams We had our night photography class wrap up last night. Everyone brought in their slides and contact sheets, compared exposure times and talked with Troy Paiva and his wife, who had come in to show us some of his night photography work, particularly things he'd done in the western deserts. He's fascinated with derelict buildings and airplane graveyards, photographed at night and illuminated by everything from flashlights to the headlights of passing cars and hand held strobes. The results are an eerie treatment of discarded America in jet blacks and weird saturated color.
Bob Bathrick, one of the students in the group, handed out a promotional
I think I shy away from the discipline and tenacity involved.
So I'm taking my photography one leisurely step at a time. A year on focus here, a year on exposure there, none of it coming into conflict with my early morning coffee or my after dinner nap (when the light is at its best and real photographers are out shooting up a sweat). Shit. Maybe I should send for one of those "Become a Hot Photographer in Three Sleep Filled Nights" courses on CD and learn it all through specially padded headphones as I sleep: Exposure, composition and dream analysis all wrapped in one. Cartier-Bresson without having to lug a camera around. It could happen. In my dreams. |
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card for his "Three Views" exhibition opening on May 22nd at the Albany Arts
Gallery in Albany, California. (No I don't know where Albany is either, but it's
around here somewhere so I'll look it up on a map.) I think I'd like
to go to see what he's been shooting. Both he and our fellow student Ron were
are working toward becoming professional photographers, something that's always
sounded like too much work. Back when I was younger I would have,
well, shit, I would have said the same thing. You become a photographer the
same way you become a writer: "It's the hardest thing I know, except
for everything else." I believe it's Nelson Algren I'm misquoting, but you get
the idea.
If I were to progress beyond the "snapshot shooter" phase I would have to
get serious about "making" my pictures. I shot one or two photographs during
the night photography sessions, for example, that might make decent finished
photographs. To get them to the "finished photograph" stage, though, I'd
have to go back and reshoot them to really get the composition and the
technical side right. I would have to worry about the processing and the
finished print production with real attention to detail. None of it comes
by waving a camera in something's direction and sending the prints to the
Museum of Modern Art when you get them back from Kodak.