An Idea That keeps Coming Back To Me

This week I worked on a Single Shot Cinema image that was fairly fresh in mind. I didnt want to put it off for too long, although I did procrastinate it a bit because I knew it would take a while to 'refine the location' (ie: it was shot in a garage that needed about two hours of cleaning to get junk out of camera range) But other than the cleanup and sweep-down, it went very fast, and very smoothly. There is a really unusual aspect to it that I cant reveal until I get the final image worked up in Photoshop, since I dont want to "spoil it" for [all three] people that read this blog. But it's definitely atmospheric!
In any event, as I was "striking the set" I was once again struck with the realization that these Cinematic Style shots are great - and they let people "star" in an image that looks like a movie, and all that... yet there is another idea that keeps coming back to me. One that 'serves the greater society' in many ways. A direction I have not seen a huge number of photographers going in, and something that may very well prove to be a new horizon for my work. It just keeps recurring to me... So now, I am thinking I may just have to pursue it.....
So after a blog post that says very little, and does it pretty vaguely, right now I can clearly say - Stay tuned...This might be kinda big....

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Playing With Dramatic Light

I have this image that keeps recurring in my mind. It involves the cold blue feeling of a dark winter and the glowing orange of a firelight. So far it seems to keep eluding me, although I think this is largely because every attempt I have made to capture this "mood" has been done in a hurry, or in the rain, or some other situation that forced me to run through it rather than walk it out. This shot is one such version. I may need to go back with a slightly different lighting setup and try some more. Perhaps in a different location.

Turning Day Into Night

Shooting at night is like having a clean slate. A very challenging clean slate. Why do I say it that way? Because as far as the camera is concerned, there is nothing there. We may know there are houses, cars, or trees in that moonlit space around us - but without adjusting the ISO to extremely high (and usually noisy) levels, the camera sees a blank, black canvas. In order to make it come alive, we need to paint with light. In the world of big budget films, this means using huge amounts of lumens and wattage to create either a large wash of psuedo-moonlight, or pools of selective light shining on specific parts of the scene. Either way, it means having lots of lighting - and lots of power - at your disposal. Maybe. And maybe not... There is an age old trick that has been used by Hollywood for decades, and is even seen in large-budgeted modern films such as Jaws (1976), Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005) and Mad Max Fur...

Everything Old is New Again...

Due to events that would take far too long to explain here, I now find myself working with a camera that I have not used for more than half a decade. Granted, it will largely be used only as a back-up at this point, but the question of why anyone would 'go back' to using such "antiquated" technology as a 10-year old (at the time of this writing) digital camera that is only 12.3 megapixels and has a max ISO of 3200 has an interesting series of answers. Let me cite the method to my madness. The camera in question is a Nikon D-90 with a vertical grip. At the time it was released it was considered a top-shelf pro-sumer model, and it was the definitive purchase that pushed me from film into digital. At 12.3MP, it was quite the heavy hitter for it's time, considering it was not all that many iterations down the line from the days of the "5MP cieling", where even high end DSLRs were still climbing out of the 3.2 range. To show you just how far things have co...

C. M. Franke | Photography

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