This week I have been beavering away at an interesting assignment for the Creative Photography course at Garage Studios.
Last weeks lesson we looked at some photographers who I am genuinly interested in. For me, street photography is shite. Possibly a contrasting statement being that my sole driving factor in photography is its journalistic properties, and this tends to be the primary driver behind the so called medium of street photography.
Instead we have begun looking at artists who use the camera as a means to capture their creative works. Blinding! Welcome to the world of Jeff Wall.After seeing Jeff Wall’s image Milk, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. It was all a question of how to put the image together.
This is usually where the teaser reveal would be. Unfortunately, I failed in the short timescale I had to get this together.
So here is another adventure in Flash, slow-shutter shooting and experimentation.
Jeff Wall is a master at creating images which upon first look seem like a run of the mill snap. It is only on second glance that you realise there are elements within the shot that just don’t add up.
In the case of Milk, it is the fact that liquid is travelling at a velocity and direction which simple don’t add up. How he did? We will never know. Do I like it? You bet your ass I do.
This is exactly the kind of thing that gets my mind jumping.
My own concept was simple in thought, and I knew after bounding the idea around a few people that if successfully delivered could really be a spectacular image. Hell I will say it, it might have been the greatest thing I had achieved.
I wanted to take the tired and rehashed learner shot of slowing down water from a tap and put my own spin on it.
The spin was that I wanted to reverse the flow of the water. This would mean that on first look you would just think, oh it’s another bloody tap with silky water photo.
See - tap - water - yawn
Looking again things would start to look out of place.
My initial concept was to find a way to pour water into a tap – thus reversing the flow. Sounds pretty Back To The Future right!
After some preliminary sketches, I got to sourcing materials. This was my firts mistake. I bought the wrong kind of taps. The second was that taps are a lot heavier than I thought they were.
My main mechanism was to use a shower snake to pour the water into the tap using fishing wire as a guide line between the two.
This would have worked perfectly, had I a) remembered to by fishing wire and b) had somewhere to fasten the missing fishing wire to in order to suspend the entire construction.
Framed up and testing the concept
from this test shot my first problem arose. I already knew I was going to need a much much tighter crop that this, taken at 18mm. But the problem with water is you can see through the stuff. Which makes it quite difficult to focus on.
Fear not! I had a rather cunning idea! Change the colour. Cutting out some blue gel which was then attached to my flash head I set up to colourise the bathroom. My theory being that by putting a colour in rather than leaving a white background would bring out the water more.
blue moooooooon you saw me standing aloooone
Yeah kinda. I figured once I had the tight crop I needed I could work more on the focal depth and pick out the water a little better.
Still a very funky trick though eh!?
Time to get the tap in. And this things started to go wrong. As I stood experimenting with the tap and working out the right pressure to run the water so that it would produce the effect I wanted it dawned on me that I had failed to think of one critical aspect of this entire project.
It needed to be inverted.
With this in mind I had to try and think about what angle to shoot at that was going to best represent the composition when it was flipped. (there is the secret)
There was a second massive hole in my plan. I couldn’t press the button on the camera AND hold the tap in frame exactly where I wanted it AND run the water into it.
So that’s the final shot of the sequence. Game Over.
But I am not deflated – I know I can make this image now, and I have a firm mental grip – plus some visual story boarding courtesy of this not so dry run, to make it work once I have found someone to help me put it all together.
