EricScott

I had the unique opportunity to shoot in Steve Tobin’s Sculpture Gallery (www.stevetobin.com) as part of a workshop conducted by the photographer, Olaf Starorypinski. The gallery was actually a warehouse the size of a football field with 40 foot ceilings to house his large quantity of massive work.  There were also large sculptures surrounding the building on the outside, as well an old train that we shot in.

It was my good fortune to team with two other photographers,  Scott Nichols and Bill Earle, whose work I really admire.  We had the pleasure of working with a local model, Nori and Kythera from NY.  To make it even more fun, Kythera has a shaved head and multiple wigs which made for different possibilities.  Scott, Bill and I worked as a team supporting each other by setting up lighting for each other.  This was the first time I had ever worked with other photographers on a shoot.  It was interesting for me to watch them work and how we each approached lighting and shooting in the same space. I’m looking forward to seeing their results and compare notes because the three of us have very unique styles.

This blog only represents a few of the pieces of art work we worked with.  The first piece of work was a little house (big enough for 3 or 4 people to stand up in) built from tin with tiny pinholes throughout. Scott set up the lighting to have a strobe at high power light the outside of the house to get light filtering through the pinholes to the inside and a speedlight inside to side light the model.  I approached shooting it from two different approaches – one shooting through the house doorway and getting in the house with the model and shooting with a wide angle lens.

The other venue as another house made entirely of small glass picture negatives welded together.  It was amazing.  We set up one strobe to flash behind the model.  Bill and Scott were primarily shooting silhouettes, so I wanted to do something different and opted for more of a high key, glamour look. One shot included in the blog was one of those partially planned lucky shots.  I had Nori leaping at me. I wanted to capture her off the ground and by circumstance captured a shot where the light was streaming through her legs making a star effect.  In the other shot, I was trying to get a different angle  and capture some of the negatives on the side frame of the house within the picture. The shot I got captured some lens flare from the strobe and, at first, didn’t like the results…almost trashed it.  Then  I saw the lens flare was making a spotlight effect on the lower right hand corner.  That gave me  the idea to make a smaller version of the picture and embed it as a “new” negative on the house frame – picture in a picture….like the flash of light on Nori was making a new negative.

The other piece was shooting both models on top of a bar that was about 4 feet high. The sides of the bar had various nuts, bolts and metal pieces welded to it.  Steve told us that he had projected the image of a coral reef on the side and used that as a template to place the metal objects so that the finished piece looks like a coral reef (which it does…gorgeous).  he said that piece represented 1000 man hours to create..wow.  So we set up two softboxes, and used  a forklift in to get us above and shoot down on the models.

The last venue represented in this blog was a gallery of glass sculptures with swirling colors, etc. created in the glass.  Some of the glass pieces weighted up to 3000 lbs!…it was a delicate operation to place the lights and avoid knocking them over. The glass pieces were located in a blackened room and reminded me of a graveyard with tombstones. We set up the lights to backlight the art and get light streaming through the glass pieces.  One shot  had the lens flare working for me again…creating an alien looking environment with Kythera’s shaven head.

Many more fabulous images to come from this marvelous experience, made even better by working with all the talented people.  A fun, productive day!!