Tight

Yesterday was the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, and I was up there about thirty minutes before the fair started.

I believe I've said this before, but it's worth saying again:

By far the most disturbing aspect of this fair is not any of the sexual or generally bdsm-themed activity that goes on. It's that the same vendors who sell garlic fries and grilled corn at the Mountain View Art and Wine festival also show up here, for this event. It makes me wonder: What is the life of one of these vendors like? One day, bourgie art & wine festival. The next, sketchy Central Valley carnival. Then *bam*, naked people are tying each other up in the street and getting whipped, and you're still there, peddling the same old fries. Anyway, just a fun thought -- maybe there's a photo essay in the lives of those folks. ;)

Anyway, back to the FSF. The light was awesome. I stayed for about four hours, and felt bad to leave even then, since the light was still going great.

The subject here is a man doing a demonstration of various types of masochism at once -- being blindfolded, whipped, and then also have more sensitive parts roped up. For my part, the hard part wasn't imagining dealing with the pain -- it was imagining how much time this guy has to spend at the gym. Regardless, he made for a wonderful subject, and the alternate title could almost be, 'Grace Under Pressure'. ;)

We Are Legend

My assignment this week for my portrait class was to go up to a random stranger and ask to take their portrait. I was walking along by Powell (by that touristy pizza joint), and saw this group hanging out. You know how you can tell a group of people in a crowd is a group? All those subtle signals, and something just different about the geometry of how they're together?

Well, these guys had it in spades. And sure enough, when I asked to take their picture, they didn't require any direction at all -- the shot just happened.

I take so few group photos I'm happy with (read, none), that I was really happy to snag this one.

Living Dead Girls/Fireflower

"Living Dead Girls"

I'm always a little torn about photography at events. Generally speaking, if someone wants you to cover an event for them, they're looking for a narrative about the event, with a string of photos to back it up. The only concern is that the intersection between those photos and the ones I like is often small. You know, if you're shooting a wedding, there is, 'picture of the bride and groom, posing', vs. 'banshee streaks through time and space to grab flowers in a fit of madness'. Not that you can't take amazing photos that do both things, but it's a lot to hang on a photo. And since I do this for fun (or at least, to satisfy some obsession to solve a creative problem), I can get pretty bored with the latter.

The first photo in today's post, "Living Dead Girls", is a good portrait. I gave it some nice light with a flash with a lumiquest diffuser in my left hand, and I got two people who were clearly characters, dressed to the hilt for the Day of the Dead. There's even a little bit of ennu in the girl on the right (though realistically, probably mid-blink), and some sadness on the girl on the left. Love the texture of the gloves, and the implied intimacy between the two. Most of my friends following my stream on Flickr loved this shot. To me, it's not interesting enough, since ... hmm.. it's the shot I *expected* when I saw of the two of them together. I see the limitations everywhere -- the bare few seconds I had to pose them before the parade started, the sledgehammer of a single flash with a medium-sized box on it and tied to a wire. I would be happy if it showed up on the front of the Day of the Dead website -- but it's still not my pick.

"Fireflower"

The second image, "Fireflower", is way more what I was after, even though it's less technically perfect. It captures the mood of walking through the streets with candles and other flames way more. The little flare kind of splits the image along a diagonal. The guy's expression? Perfect. Bits & pieces of a Volkswagen, with some gas flame? If you knew nothing about the tendency of people in SF to be precious, you might almost believe this guy is part of some Bohemian street procession, or just another local madman. And the light is alive with character -- it traces out edges, it has shadows, and it casts his face with the tone of the evening.

I'm not sure what to conclude from this. Well, except maybe the most obvious, which is the next time there's a parade at night, I totally would rather carry around a giant flaming torch with me than a flash. ;)

I guess just I'm interested in my reaction to both of these images. One of them is one that I more definitely made, with posing, more control of the light, etc., and it just seems lesser to me than the other, which is one I feel like I definitely found. Maybe it speaks to a lack of experience and imagination on my part as a portraitist, but I think it's probably something a little deeper about the way I view photography.

Best in Show

One thing about street photography is that it requires a certain amount of social heedlessness at times. Some people who I know take a few drinks before shooting stuff on the street -- I generally try to get in a place where I'm just lost in the feel of the hunt for good pictures. But it's one of those things like being up high -- don't look down, or you might get freaked out about what would happen if you fall.

I wonder if the people at Folsom feel this way. I've never really been into any sort of sexual scene (for lack of a better word), so I wonder how it happens that you wake up one morning and decide that your partner is going to walk you around on a leash like a pig. Maybe it's just the most natural thing in the world. "Honey, I'm the pig this week!", but I have to think there's a certain state of mind that's required to pull something like this off.

I was telling my best friend about Folsom, and he quipped that he had been lead to believe it was a festival for celebrating your compulsions.

I think I fit right in.

Hubris

This is actually a shot from the same day where I captured 'Mass Transit'. Once I noticed the good light, I kind of went to town with the portraits.

In a lot of ways, I feel like this sort of tight, close-up portrait (basically something near a head shot) is kind of a challenging thing to do well. Not the technical stuff (which can also be hard), or even the implementation (ditto). I'm talking about that to a lot of people who look at pictures, there is an emotional disconnect with portraits of strangers.

This one is a toughie for me, since one of best things about getting my first dSLR was that photos of people 'looked right'. I'd never taken pictures of people before that on vacations or whatever since they didn't seem to be rendered the way I thought they should be. Once I discovered that my camera could make faces the way they ought to be, I was pretty hooked.

This isn't everybody though. So, when I try to get a portrait of someone on the street, I try to go for something with character that draws people in. Character, or some emotion we can understand and relate to. Best of all if it's character and emotion, and it's in some nice mass transit-driven lighting.

The High Cost of Living

In honor of tax day:



More about the project that gave me this portrait in a bit -- but I love the use of the dollar here.