WIP.CRACKER

I worked with Art Director Adam Weisman, on a project for his portfolio. When he told me about his idea, I jumped at the chance to make some pictures about nothing. Well, space, really.

I like working with Adam a lot. He has a lot of energy, concise ideas, and he's really dedicated to faithful execution of them. We bounced some refinements off each other, and came up with a plan that included locations, props, and models. We shot these three images over two days, in the studio and on location.

It's interesting to start out talking about an idea, and to watch it to take shape as the project moves. Sometimes things that seem important early on wind up being trivial; for example, initially I thought we'd have to do the harvest shot in an orchard, because I was afraid the "harvest" idea wouldn't come through. As it turns out, it comes through fine with just a backyard lemon tree. On the other hand, we both thought from the beginning that the right props would be key, and I think that is true.

One thing learned is that it's often, counter intuitively, much faster to show someone something than it is to tell them. During shooting, when Adam would wonder what it might look like with pliers instead of solder, instead of talking about how it would look, it was much faster to rough it out and then talk about it. Similarly, we could have had a conversation about how much better the blue gloves would look than the tan gloves, or I could just switch them out. This is usually true for even large changes, like "What would this look like with completely different lighting?".

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Re my earlier post about how Flickr doesn't have an economy, apparently it does. According to The Searcher:

"Ever come across a photo with dozens if not hundreds of comments, and they all have these little blinky "Best of Sparkly Award" graphics in them? "Diamond in the Rough!". "Flaming Sword of Awesome!!" etc etc. Well the reason for that is many people are members of Flickr groups that enforce strict "commenting" rules. To post to the group, you have to first comment on some other photos in the group, or favorite them, or give them award blinkies. It's an artificial "game" of false attention, almost all geared towards one thing: getting their photos on Explore."

I had wondered why so many mediocre photos had so many hyperbolic (and blinking) adulations in the comments.

But really I made this post to increase exposure for this awesome image.