Confused as to which element I should be finding.
This is Alayna, who sure knows how to rock a lens. But I’m not here to write about her.
I’m not even here to write about the technical or artistic sides of shooting high key stuff like this. Plenty of digital ink has been spilled about that, and I’m not the kind of guy to start going over lighting ratios that can be found in eleven hundred other places.
What is really on my mind is what, exactly, I want to do with photography as I continue on with it. Right now, weddings are proving to be all manner of fun…I love meeting the people, seeing the celebrations, eating the cake. And I really had talked myself into thinking that I wanted to be a photojournalist in the long-run, with a focus on human rights and education issues.
Then I get to toy around a bit with the kind of studio equipment I can’t quite justify investing in yet, and lo and behold, I really feel like I am in my element working in a studio, with models and soft boxes and lots and lots of strobes and, heaven forbid, an assistant! I like spending that much time with one person, working with his or her personality, breaking them down, coaching them back into being themselves. I love shooting tethered and seeing great images on my computer rather than chimping away on the back of my camera.
I know it doesn’t have to be, and probably shouldn’t be, either-or. Photojournalists can do great stuff in a studio as well as in the field, but I had in my mind an image of myself in five years, or ten years, and this whole studio thing has made that image much fuzzier. Hopefully it’s also more interesting, like a good, decent shifting fog. I’ll be back to the studio shots periodically here, and I’ll have to warn you that there is going to be some rhapsodizing about color transparency film, as well.
