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One of my early artist's books...'Bikers' Mardi Gras'


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One of my early artist's books...'Bikers' Mardi Gras' (maquette)

Get it while it is hot...Vimeo may shut it down. Strong NSFW content.

Noteworthy as it has examples of some of my earliest infrared flash photography. (If Vimeo takes it down I will send in a link for the Internet Archive.)

 

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Forgot to mention...

The book also has a number of hyper-real HDR images in it. I had learned about hyper-real HDR aka 'painterly HDR' from Les Krims and did a lot of experimentation with single image HDR.

Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, looks like Vimeo is a much better vehicle than YouTube is for the artist that has strong underground content. They didn't bother me at all...(keeping my fingers crossed.) Censorship is a big issue nowadays and getting worse every day that goes by. YT would poop their pants if I put that vid up there. 

I should have gone into more detail on the intertitles as to why high level infrared flash candid photography is tough to do. I don't like to write much on the videos, so I will go into a little detail about IR flash here. With the video processing software I use, making pages of text is not like writing on a word processor. Just making each page match the previous page of text is an issue. Plus I hate those films that require you to read a book before watching the content. Even in my artist's books I have little text in them.

A big problem with IR flash in the dark is you have to shoot blind. You can't see a thing on your screen. If it is daylight or dusk you can see something, but not at night. Same thing with your controls, you can't see anything.  You have to tape down the controls so they don't move or glue something on your main settings to be able to feel in the dark where you are at. There have been times when I was out shooting that it was so dark I could not see what the people were doing. So I take a IR flash photo to see what is going on. 

When shooting candid work you don't have the luxury of chimping. You can get a shot or two off and guess at the exposure and focus, but what you get is what you get. One of the keys to success for 'in your face' candid work is the ability to keep moving... aka hit and run photography. So you can't stay put shootng off a dozen photos and chimp in front of people to see what you got. Sometimes you do a lot of shooting with IR flash and can't review your work in a timely fashion. Everything is zone exposure and zone focus. If something was not right, start deleting in-camera.

With IR flash I can't even tell if I got the shot as my screen is blacked out for auto review and the flash recycle light has gaffers tape on it. Any lit controls of the flash or camera are shut off or taped up. Some of the flashes and cams have so many blinking lights on them they are lit up like GD Xmas trees. I shut off or tape everything up for blackout photography. One time I got roughed up in a crowd and my flash got bumped. I had taken dozens of photos only to find out later my flash was not working as the flash was not in good contact with the hotshoe. You can't hear the flash recycle either, everyplace I shoot is very noisy. 

With IR flash you are dependent on the flash for 100% of the exposure lighting. IR flash does not blend available light with IR light when shot in the dark. The only thing that may show up is strong incandescent lights in the background or fires. LED light barely shows up, at least at the exposure setting my cam is set to for IR flash. But none of the pinpricks of light in the background helps with lighting the subject. With IR flash you must blend exposure to cover 2 feet to 10 feet sometimes. So you expose for 5 feet and burn in and dodge the far and close subjects in post if you want the whole thing doable. It is not studio photography. IR flashes are generally slow to recycle as well. The old school IR flashes were faster, but they gave off an orange glow to the flash head. The new IR flashes don't give off much glow, but do not recycle that fast, taking a few seconds when set to high power. Sometimes I miss shots due to slow flash recycle times.

Another thing that hurts candid work is having a big honking IR flash on your cam. It increases the real estate tremendously to call attention to yourself. Weegee once said there is no such thing as a candid camera, there are only candid photographers. While true to a certain extent, gear plays a big part with candid work. The best gear for candid street photography is small and easy to adjust manual controls. 

Leica perfected what was needed in a reporters cam eons ago. With a Leica you can just count the clicks to adjust your controls, you don't even have to look at the cam. You can feel for the lens focus knob and know where the O' clock setting is on the lens barrel for 7 feet. Some of the garbage they produce nowadays don't even have distance settings  engraved on the lens for zone focus work or F stops...everything is dummied down. (I didn't shoot my IR flash with a Leica...just saying.)

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