I know I promised to stop, but I’ve got a lot of these in the pipeline. I think they’re like warmup stretches for athletes or short fiction for writers. Sometimes something nice comes, but they’re just a springboard for my eye. They keep me and my thought processes honest.
The only thing I’d like to add is that I’ve unabashedly stolen the idea of the text on these from here.
I really like (although I am not very good at) playing soccer. I coached in one place or another for about 10 years of my teaching career, growing to appreciate the sport and still not getting a lot better at it.
One of my favorite times as a player (did I mention that I wasn’t very good?) was when I played at an indoor sporting facility called RISE. Playing indoor means wearing slightly different shoes than playing outside. It also means that one can immediately enjoy a beer after a match with one’s teammates ’cause there’s a bar on the premises, but it’s the shoes that are important.
I wear these most of the time ’cause they’re comfortable and if they’re not too terribly beat up, they match a lot of my clothing, looking simultaneously neat and casual. They’re Adidas Sambas and when I found a pair that fit my daughter when she was still a baby, I snapped them up. Now that my son is that size, he wears them. ‘Cause after all, it’s not like either of them did (or is gonna do) a lot of walking in them,
I’d been thinking about doing a shot like this for a while and finally got around to it. I’m not sure I’m finished with it ’cause the placement of the shoes might need some work. Nonetheless, it makes me smile to see them.
One of the local camera stores is liquidating much of its inventory, getting rid of things they’ve had in stock for ages. They put ads on Craigslist to notify folks of what they have and there were a few manual focus Pentax K-mount lenses left so I picked one up for fun.
It turns out, the 28mm lens I scored is faster than any of my other Pentax lenses and is smart enough to allow the camera to control its aperture despite the manual focus.
The reason such things are interesting is called bokeh. It’s the blurring of the elements in a photograph due to the way the lens “sees” because of depth of field (roughly, the combination of focal length and maximum aperture).
Anyway, this image shows that, despite having been shot with a Hasselblad.
I was playing around with some new film I got to shoot a wedding later this year ’cause I hadn’t used it before (and ’cause I’d gotten burned with this stuff) and the easiest models I had accessible were my wife’s shoes.
I wanted to see what the light requirements would be with the Holga ’cause that’s what the wedding will be shot with. When I got my first look at the negs for these two images I was worried, but once I did a few scans, the worry went away.
I’ve gotta set up one more session with a real-live person to feel really comfortable, but I’m pretty sure the kids are gonna be alright.
The first time I met Tatiana, she was still an undergraduate in college. These days, she’s a bartender and a graduate who’s thinking about law school.
Fortunately for her, she’ll always have a second career.
Sculptors create drawings before they ever touch chisel to stone. Animators create extensive storyboards long before they begin the process of bringing things to life. So it is sometimes with photography.
All I had was time and a pair of shoes belonging to my wife. Eventually, this will be a much cleaner image, but it’ll need a person first. I was aiming for a kind of Gothic look reminiscent of the way that Frank Miller imagined backgrounds for Sin City and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. In both of those pieces, there’s a sort of despair that hangs over the city, a kind of shadow that at the same time seems like it’s relatively new, like it wasn’t always there, and is inescapable and suffocating.
I’ll eventually add a woman to go with the shoes. She’ll be smaller in the frame than I usually make people. I’m toying with the notion of putting someone else, or the hint of someone else, in the very near foreground, mostly obscured. Clearly the woman will be the focus of the image.
I’m thinking that I’ll try a variety of ideas to see which ones I think come off the best. I’d planned on making her defiant in the face of this nameless horror but the more I think about the way the image is situated, there’s also the possibility that she could just be running away, or in an even more evocative image, cowering in fear.
At any rate, this image is just a sketch. I took those shoes to a variety of other places and I think I can make the image work in more than just this venue. One of the fun things about film is that I’ll have to wait until I’ve done it and had the film processed before I can know how successful I’ll be.
Inspiration for images like this comes from interestingly disparate places.
photographic ramblings of thomas scott 