Marlon Brando on the set of "Apocalypse Now" in 1976. Photo by Mary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark, known primarily for her documentary photography, has a new book out on another aspect of her work – as a still photographer on movie sets. The New York Times has a slideshow online where Mary Ellen comments on a few of the photos plus a short article. In spite of the brevity there’s great insight conveyed about being a photographer. The book is “Seen behind the scene/Forty years of photographing on set/Mary Ellen Mark” published by Phaidon.
I’ve never met Mary Ellen but I did see her once behind the scene. In 1986, I was a staffer in New York City for a firm that did corporate and public relations photography. I was covering one of the first trade shows at the newly opened Jacob Javits Center. The show centered on physical rehabilitation and due to the odd confluence of events (first show plus the subject matter) I had photographed everyone from Spanky of the Little Rascals to Richard Simmons leading hundreds in exercise routines to Governor Cuomo touring the site and the show. I had walked the show floor dozens of times getting images and on one more round found the IBM booth covered with photo equipment cases. Many were open and it seemed like every lens in 35mm and medium-format was on display, each identified with black lettering on a white piece of tape on the lens cap. It was Mary Ellen Mark hard at work. She had a couple of lights set up, assistants with her, and was photographing subjects with IBM’s products.
I don’t know whom she was working for but for a newbie like myself it was a good lesson in not pigeonholing others and it gave me a fuller understanding of what it means to be professional photographer.
I had to visit the same location twice within three days as I worked to get a sunset/holiday-lights photo for a client to use as a future holiday card. Why visit twice? To get different angles while working within the restrictions of a post sunset assignment. Filmmakers refer to the hour after sunset as the magic hour, a time of beautiful light unmatched during the day. As a still photographer I’ve come to realize that the magic hour doesn’t exist. It’s not an hour, it’s the magic ten minutes.
On this type of assignment you mark when sunset occurs, where the sun will set, and you setup ahead of time. The rest is waiting. On a very cold day, as it was this past Saturday and Monday, you also want to be prepared; winter boots, long underwear, layers, warm hat and mittens or gloves that can allow for easy access to the finger tips. When the magic ten minutes will occur is never perfectly set. It depends upon where the sun sets in relation to the subject, the weather and the amount of artificial light. You cannot control the artificial light and you cannot control the natural light. As the skies darken and night comes on there will be a moment when it all balances out perfectly – that’s the magic ten minutes of still photography.
One would think that standing outside in twenty degree weather for two to three hours would be boring. It’s not, it’s anything but. To be forced to slow down and watch the light is a wonderful thing. As you become attuned to its changes, the time goes by very quickly. Often you are rewarded with something special, something expected. In this case, it was the few short minutes when the skies had darkened enough to feel the glow of the artificial lights and the ice encrusted snow lit up purple, reflecting the color of the sunset. It did not last long, another nine minutes and the ugly light of the yellow-green fluorescent street lamps was overtaking the ambient light. The moment had passed.
My blog is almost a year old and it’s the end of the calendar year; a time to reflect and look ahead. Trying to think of what to say, my recent time spent waiting for the light seemed to provide the answer. We all are very busy, leading hectic lives, and we all have miles to go before we sleep. On that journey stop, slow down, and take the time to watch as light moves from day to night. You will be rewarded for your efforts.
Someone has made an iPhone app that is almost exactly what I was thinking about need; Focalware by Spiral Development. This very handy app will show you the position of the sun and the moon, their rise and set times for any date and any location, and it does it via a simple graphic interface or you can see the data in list form.
When planning an architecture assignment there is always a need to get a sense of where the sun will be in relation to the building. In the past I would go to the U.S. Naval Observatory web site, enter the location and the assignment date, and print out a list of the sun’s hourly position. Then I would go to Google Maps, get a satellite view of the location, and print that out. With both in hand I would take a protractor and mark the sun’s position throughout the day relative to the building on the map printout. It was never 100% accurate but it never needed to be. I just needed a sense of when the sun would light the face of a building, rake across it or wrap around an edge.
Focalware’s YouTube Demo:
Focalware will use your current location, you can pick a location from a list or enter a location manually. The software assumes you know which way North is (it won’t find it for you) but there are some work-arounds for that and for determining the elevation of the sun or the moon. For North you can go to Google Maps on your iPhone and look at a satellite view. North is at the top. If you are on location it will be very easy to orient yourself correctly. If you are off-site or planning a shoot for a date in the future you can use the information in Focalware relative to Google Maps on the iPhone or on your computer to plot things out.
To determine the sun’s or moon’s elevation you can use one of the spirit level programs also available in iTunes. They vary between free and inexpensive. A Level by PosiMotion has a built in calibration function and, with the phone in horizontal position, a digital inclinometer or a nice sized level.
Focalware is $9.99 in the iTunes App Store. Direct Link
A Level is $0.99 in the iTunes App Store. Direct Link
Now if Focalware could come up with a way to overlay its information on top of a satellite map… now that is exactly what I was thinking about.
–
Original Notice of Focalware was seen on Luminous Landscape and another review can be found here.
–
Update 12/23:
Another iPhone App for measuring a slope or sighting the elevation of the sun and moon, Clinometer.
iPhone App that does not show the sun’s position but does show the length of daylight, Sol: Daylight Clock.
iPhone App that can quickly display the time of sunrise, sunset, twilight, moonrise, moonset, moon phases, and more for locations around the world, VelaClock.
I was at Neil Young’s concert this past Friday in Philadelphia, not as a photographer but as a fan. Out of curiosity I brought my Canon G10 along. It seemed like a good opportunity to push it to its limits and see how it could perform.
The photo above looks like I ran it through a Photoshop filter but I did not. It’s a slight enlargement of a 100% crop (72 dpi). The image was shot at ISO 800, processed from a raw file in Canon’s DPP software and no noise filtering was added except that suggested in DPP.
So, how did the G10 do? It did quite well. Now, in case you think I’m crazy and have lost all sense of image quality the photo above is an extremely tiny crop of the whole image. I was about 250′ from the stage and the image above if printed at 300 dpi would be about 1.5″ x 0.5″. Here’s the full frame:
I think the image at the top works in spite of the grain and the digitalness because even as an abstraction this is Neil without question; the stance, the jacket and his guitar, “Old Black.” The G10 does show a lot of grain at ISO 800. ISO 1600 is unusable and prone to a cross-hatch effect when files are viewed at 100%. ISO 800 sometimes gets that effect, sometimes not. You can see it in the top image but keep in mind that it is a very tight crop and the G10′s files are huge – ~42mb as an 8-bit file at native resolution. That effect looks like natural grain when viewed at 50% or at print resolution (usually ~25% if at 300 dpi.) If you are sizing the ISO 800 files down that effect is unlikely to be an issue. I’ll need to make some prints to confirm this.
What I like about the G10 is that the camera feels substantial. There’s a good deal of metal in it and it is reminiscent of a small Leica. Canon has arranged the analog style dials nicely making it easy to operate in manual mode. The camera is not perfect. It probably would have been better as a 10mp or 12mp camera rather than a 14.6mp camera. It is not a fast camera, don’t look to shoot sports with it, and I would prefer it to remember what focus point I had selected if the camera goes to sleep or is turned off, but it’s great to have as an always-around camera and is a huge step up from a cel phone camera.
Click the photo above or either of the two below to see larger versions of the images.
I had my first assignment in a hazardous waste transfer station in early November. Considering I live in New Jersey, the state with the most Superfund sites, one may wonder why that took so long. The assignment, for an IBM custom magazine, was to photograph two women who work on the IT side of things.
The facility was incredibly neat and clean and in many ways looked like countless other mixed-use office parks I’ve photographed in. It had a two-story shallow front populated with cubicles and a large single floor two-to-three-story tall back end where everything takes place. These places are always a challenge. You want to tell the story but stay away from desks, cubicles, and in this case the photo editor prefers not to have the client’s products in the shots. The exterior fronts of these buildings rarely present a nice background, they come off as more of an architectural afterthought than anything else.
One difference with this locale is that upon arrival you are given a small foldout safety card just like the one you get on an airplane. The receptionist then outlines escape routes should any alarms go off. I was not aware of any drop down oxygen masks nor anything that could be used as a flotation device.
A walk-through quickly nixed the idea of shooting in the actual transfer area. It was dark, much smaller than you’d expect, and setting up lights or locking down a setup was problematic. What immediately caught my eye was the interim space between the offices and the transfer area. It was a large open warehouse where supplies are kept and some training facilities are on site. Off to one side was an array of color coded barrels, some stacked three high and all were empty, awaiting future use. Perfect! The barrels made the connection to the company’s business, having some colors to choose from was icing on the cake, and “empty” translates into “easy to move.”
There already was a natural channel between some blue barrels and a wall of cardboard containers. I took that as a lead, we then had to move a couple of dozen barrels to fill things out and create a channel one row over to place a back light. The final touch for the setup was to bring in a large yellow drum for the second person to sit on. We knew that the two subjects had a significant height difference so the yellow drum would even that out and provide a nice contrast to the wall of blue barrels.
The subjects were each lit with their own grid spot and a beauty dish + grid provided the back light. To get the back light high enough we commandeered an industrial utility cart, placed the light stand on top of it, so that the light could easily clear the wall of barrels.
Veolia Environmental Services, Flanders, NJ, November 5, 2008
Veolia Environmental Services, Flanders, NJ, November 5, 2008
I thought I’d pass along some blog links. Some folks have been blogging for a while, others are just getting started.
Chris Ryan is a principal at Wheelhouse Communications and a video producer. He’s just started a blog looking at video, marketing, the web and social networking: The Way We Watch.
Kris Rackham is a designer/photographer/blogger living in Belgium. He found me out and featured my work just over a year ago. Kris’ musings about design, photography and life: No Man’s Land.
