Ok- not really sure how to start this one off, or what angle to take it. Been churning it since the shoot last weekend, still haven't come up with what I want to say. So hopefully a beer (or three) and some free typing will get to what I want to say. So let me start by saying it is hard to answer the question, "do I support gay marriage," or "do I support equal rights for the LGBT community?" The reason it is so hard for me to answer is that, really, the question never would have occurred to me without all the current media hype, it's rather like someone asking, "so, do you support oxygen and people's right to breath it?" It's not even an issue for me, everyone should have the right to live and love as they please as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. But if I have to take a side, I totally support equal rights for all and the right for everyone to be married if they so chose.
So what the hell does this have to do with photography you might ask? Why the hell is this in my professional blog, instead of on my personal Facebook? Well, last weekend I got a gig shooting a couple for OutViewOnline, part of a series on honeymoon destinations. Met the couple at the Dana Hotel on a Saturday morning. Before we started shooting, met up with the hotel manager, who explained to me that the hotel was incredibly supportive of gay marriage, but all their wedding advertising featured heterosexual couples, so they were looking for some shots to use to try to help their position in the new market. The idea was I do the shoot, guess it was supposed to be an engagement shoot (even though the models- while actually a couple, weren't engaged) and later this summer I come back and shoot a wedding at the hotel. All I could think about was the Prop 8 Musical video from a couple years ago.... if you haven't seen it, check out the link. It's a riot, basically the gay marriage advocates convince the conservatives by explaining how much money there is to be made by allowing gay marriage and opening up the new market. Admittedly, I am a cynic, but hey, if the hotel wants to expand their marketing, who am I to argue. But really, as much as I hope it's not just a marketing ploy, the couple wasn't actually engaged, who knows when/if this mysterious wedding will happen or not, bottom line was I couldn't get Neil Patrick Harris out of my head the whole morning.
Ok. Enough with the background, how did the shoot go? Overall I wasn't happy with it. It really was the worst of all possible worlds. Late morning bordering on noon. Worst light of the day. My "models," while not really engaged, were a real couple, and not experienced models. And they were both slightly hung over from going out the night before. Couple this with my inexperience with directing models, you have a recipe for disaster. What I didn't realize until later on looking to see if any of the pics wound up on the web site yet, was that this same couple has done several of these shoots at various locations before. Thus, in addition to being hung over, they were also bored with the photography side of these little adventures they were having on the magazine's dime. I was just basically the price they had to pay to get their vacation. But anyway, the shoot was decked against me from the start.
Technically, I can deal with bad light. That's my job as a photographer. Bright daylight, use some fill flash to kill the shadows. Ideally, I would have been able to find some shade to put them in, or if I was really high speed, a couple of assistants could have followed us with a flat to hold over them and create our own shade just out of the frame. I would have set up a couple of radio fired strobes off camera to fill the shadows and life would have been good. Alas, I had no budget, no assistant, and barely an hour to shoot all over the hotel and grounds, so I had to make do with on camera flash and a diffuser. And hung over models who couldn't help but squint into the mid day sun.
My biggest weakness was really brought out by this shoot. I am not comfortable yet directing and posing models. It's a totally new arena for me, I am used to shooting events in motion, performers at work, or generic crowd shots in a photojournalistic style. Lifestyle portraiture, where I catch my subject spontaneously and organically in the middle of what they are doing. I am good at that. But not so much the manufactured posing. Give me a model who knows what they are doing and I am fine, I can capture them as they work, (see image below, the model dragged me into this restroom and basically told me to start shooting while she did her stuff. I did her bidding and got some great stuff. Wish all the models were as awesome as the firebird)
but I have a long way to go before I will be comfortable directing models. The best moments I was able to come up with was when I could get them to laugh a bit and forget to be "posing," I would crack some jokes, like telling them to look into each others eyes and pretend they loved each other... or since it was an engagement shoot, to take the life preserver from the pool, use it as an engagement ring and propose to each other... I think I managed to get a few real moments. At least when I looked at the rest of the series I could say my pics were at least as good, if not better, than the rest of the series so far , so I feel a bit better. Anyway, until the article gets posted on Outview, you can see my gallery here and tell me what you think.
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