Miracle on Powell Street

Right after I shot "We Are Legend", I saw this guy walking down Powell street, and I chased after him. "Excuse me", I said, "I'd love to take your portrait since you just have one of those faces..." He interrupted me and answered, "Of course I do, I'm Santa Claus!"

That took a minute to set in, since when I saw him, I thought of precisely two things:

• Santa Claus
• Dumbledore

He went on to explain that his name was John Toomey, and he had been Macy's Santa for 20 years before they gave him the boot in an (imho) pretty gross display of Corporate Dumb. He said he had a new, more lucrative gig as Santa for Lefty O'Doul's, so it had all worked out well in the end.

John was an amazing performer -- the moment the camera came out, he only got more like Santa. On cue, the wind kicked up, and he cracked a big smile as he waved.

Awesome moment, and one of my favorite portraits from last week.

Dale

I shot this portrait last December, when I was out in Austin to visit my old friend Stephen. Dale was a drifter, who'd moved out to Austin in 1989 after the Loma Prieta, and had lived there ever since. Liked this portrait for a lot of reasons -- it had 'scene', and wasn't just Dale, but at the same time is completely about his character.

There are some other technical things I like about the shot. It's difficult to get bokeh out of a 28 f/2.8, and harder still to get bokeh that really works. Generally, it's not smooth enough to be painterly, while in the same time being just out of focus enough to be distracting. Here, the background scene is kind of a canvas, and Dale pops out of it. I shot two frames, but the one with his eyes closed was far better than eyes open, giving him a kind of hangdog look that I really liked.

I'll be going back to Austin right before this Christmas, and I look forward to the chance to shoot there again.

Smoked Out

I snapped this last Saturday as I was walking down Market, where a lot of people will be out in front and between stores taking a break -- either from working, or from the madness of shopping Thanksgiving weekend. This guy had stepped back out of the light a bit, and resulted some pretty pleasing feathering of the light. The texture of the background caught my eye too, along with expression as he smoked and watched people walking by (something I can relate to!).

Shaken, Not Stirred

I was near this dancer most of the time I walked in El Dia de Los Muertos, and she would stop every other block or so to perform. Tough shot in the kind of ugly yellow light of the Mission, but I loved how fast she moved and how much energy she brought to the performance.

Woken Furies

I went to Día de los Muertos in the city Tuesday night, excited to see it, especially since I missed the religious festival up in the Mission on Monday (e.g., the Feast Day of All Giants). I brought along my flash, diffuser, and TTL cable, since it seemed ideal for doing portraits of celebrants in the parade. More on when this did and didn't work in a later post, but basically here I angled my flash from below to give the girls here scarier, more horror-show light. Love their outfits, and their expressions -- while it was a lot of fun, definitely a lot scarier for me than Halloween.

If you live in the Bay Area (or any place that celebrates it), I highly recommend going to Día de los Muertos -- very cool, and very unlike a lot of other events I've seen.

Kiss Kiss/Army of One

The hardest thing for me about photographing something like the Folsom Street Fair is to not let it turn into a documentary work. When an event is full of characters (which Folsom is), it's very, very easy to just start shooting the individuals and call it a day. Colors and costumes do the heavy lifting, and if you're competent with a camera, you end up with a nifty record of the event.

These images are invariably garbage.

Let me explain what I mean -- if someone came to you and said, "Give me a box of photos that tell me what Folsom is about!", you could show them to the person, and they'd ooh and ahh, and they'd get a picture in their head of what it was about. But the individual images would not, as a matter of course, be something that you'd want to revisit. You wouldn't hang them on a wall, you wouldn't show them to friends who knew what Folsom was about -- they could just sit in that box, or on that Flickr group, waiting for the next person who wanted to know the score. Add to this the fact that so much of Folsom is about shock and spectacle, and the seduction of doing this can be almost irresistible. I'm sure I succumbed at least a little.


Let me tell you about the sort of images I wanted to make though, and hopefully you can see what I mean.

About a week before Folsom, I went to a gallery where I got to see a lot of Diane Arbus' portraits hanging on the wall. My reaction to seeing these portraits was the same as my reaction to Garry Winogrand's street photography: I could look at my own work, or even portraits of some pretty decent photographers, and if you tried to compare them, you wouldn't even be on the same planet. Seeing an Arbus photo work was a little like saying "I'm heading up to San Francisco" -- only, it'd be like stepping out of your house, hopping onto a rocket ship, going to the moon, looking at San Francisco through a telescope, then being hurled by a mass driver down into Dolores Park. You may not agree with the photos. You may not even like them. But it would be impossible to deny that the process at work was wholly different to the world you came from.

I can only dream about taking portraits that do this. But I do know if your portrait is going to step past being just a documentary work, you have to do more. You have to get some sort of connection with your subject -- you have to hyper-control the scene or be hyper-sensitive to nuance to detect when their real character is going to shine through. I know if I can do that even a little, I like what comes out a lot more.

The two images here aren't perfect, and I only had a minute or two to get my shot. I feel like I connected to them in the time that I had -- and while I don't feel like they took me to the moon, they did at least get me a few feet off the ground.

Folsom Street Hero

This is another one of my shots from Folsom. This one was shot as this guy walked by, and I thought it was interesting to see one with such a perfect physique (uh, and largely unclothed) in the foreground, with some people sort of trailing off behind him. Since the guy was in the shade but with bright, bright sky behind him. Did the same trick as before, where I dropped the overall exposure, and popped up the flash. The result was better than expected -- rather the opposite of my normal experience of walking around with a flash in hand.

The Dog Catcher

For this photo, I had my camera, trusty 28mm, and an SB-800 on a TTL cable in my off-hand. Using a flash like this is tricky. Despite a fair amount of monkey-ing around with flashes, I never feel like I have an instant intuition for what a picture with a flash in it will look like. Something I can plan for to predict, but not something that I have instinctively.

What this meant in practice was that I was not yet ready to be a complete bad-ass, walking around with my flash in full manual, getting the look I wanted by whipping the flash around to just the right spot for the right amount of brightness...

Well, maybe one day.

One I did instead was to rely on the balanced i-ttl mode, which works pretty well. I set the camera to meter off the background, and the flash pops a little pre-fire, then computes what it would take to fill in the parts of the scene that *aren't* background. Great way to reliably make a sunny scene less harsh. When I got a little daring (like I did here), I'd drop the camera exposure about 2/3rds of a stop to get a more darker (and generally more dramatic) background, and kept the flash so that it would 'normally' expose the subjects.

The result is what you see here: These guys are lit up in a pool of flash, with an underexposed sky and dark mid-ground. I liked the effect, and the folks here helped out by being arranged just-so.

Miss Piggy

I've lived in the Bay Area for ten years, and I've never been to the Folsom Street Fair. So, this year I resolved to go, and (of course) bring along my camera. Looking at the weather report earlier last week, and then again on Saturday, I realized that after a summer of glorious cloudy, partial-directional light, I was going to have nothing but the worst shitty straight-over-head-beat-me-like-a-Folsom-Street-booth-babe light there was. I'd been thinking about this Bruce Gilden video I've seen, and about how people like Diane Arbus used flash in daylight, so I had a notion. I went out and picked up a TTL cable for my flash yesterday, and thought I could put it to some good use as strategic fill, or (more interesting for my purposes) a tool to inject some drama into a poorly lit scene.

I learned a lot in just a few hours of using the flash-on-a-rope, and I'll probably write more about it here. In the interim, please enjoy this lovely young lady, who saw my flash an immediately offered to pose.

Raggedy

This is the same woman from "The Offer". She had so much character, I snapped this as the transaction was going down -- gust of San Francisco wind did the rest.

Drum Solo

Took the train up to the city yesterday, and went shooting around the Market Street/Union Square area. This guy was drumming up a storm near Market and Powell, beating on some old paint cans and anything else he could get his hands on. I got this by swallowing the last vestiges of my pride -- laid down on the ground and shot up while he performed.