True Stories: The Day Mother Nature Blinked

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Allan Weitz

When people hear you take pictures of boats for a living, they start getting all sorts of pictures in their minds about sunny isles, gentle breezes, and all else that comes with the ‘good life’. Admittedly, there are times when the sun does shine, the breezes are gentle, and for a pleasurable few hours, life is quite good. And those are the times you think about while heading up the New England Thruway on a cold, rainy November morning to photograph a boat for a magazine cover.

Photographing boats, regardless of size or power source, has its challenges. White boats – like the 60-footer we were heading north to photograph – are particularly challenging because of the exposure and contrast problems that go along with trying to maintain high levels of highlight, mid-tone, and shadow detail, often under the harshest of lighting conditions. On this particular day, it looked like we would be having lighting issues quite the opposite, though no less compromising.

When we pulled into the dock area for our rendezvous with the boat and it’s crew, our worse fears were confirmed. Despite the fact just 10 days earlier the trees were a riot of red, yellow, orange and green, now all we had were bare branches against a leaden, drizzly sky, which is hardly the sort of background you want when being paid to take a handsome portrait of something that if not captured in the right light and at the right angle, can easily look like enormous Clorox bottle floating down the river on a dismal afternoon.

After securing permission from the owners of a stately white home that sat on a bluff overlooking a wide spans of the Connecticut River, we found a dock positioned in a way that allowed the boat to power towards the camera at a ¾ angle in order to capture the boat’s sheer line.  (Did I mention the chase boat we hired for the afternoon never showed up?) The spatial compression afforded by my 300mm lens brought the boat, the house, and it’s immediate surroundings into a tight composition that fit the design parameters of the magazine’s cover layout.

We had the boat take a few practice runs to establish the best combination of speed and distance needed to frame the boat to meet the needs of the design layout. While all this was going on the flow of the tide had shifted and the breeze picked up, nixing any chance of shooting with a tripod from the floating dock we were locked into position with.  And with the clock ticking, there wasn’t a hint of sun breaking through anywhere.

Suddenly,, a hairbreadth before the sun dropped behind the hills to the west of us, the sun burned through the smallest of cloud opening as  - amazingly-the boat was entering it’s designated  ‘live zone’. Shooting in high-speed continuous mode, I was able to capture eleven images of the boat passing through the frame lines, bathed in Maxwell Parrish-like golden sunlight, and perfectly angled.

Seven of the frames were ‘OK’, and two were dead-on and sharp as a tack. At our well-deserved dinner that evening, somebody laughingly said, “Mother Nature blinked today!” “No” I replied… ” she winked”.

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How to Make a Gray Barge Sing

Posted on January 16, 2011 by Allan Weitz

About two years before the twin towers fell, I got a call from a shipbuilder down in Louisiana who was about to launch the first of a fleet of barges slated for duty in and around the New York harbor. He said he’d like me to photograph their first barge when it arrived in lower Manhattan in about a week’s time. I said “Let’s talk”.

The first thing I asked was how big is the barge, what color is it, and how’s it getting here because from what I remember from my semester of Barge class in high school, barges don’t have engines and depend on the kindness of tugboats to get around. The answer to the first two parts of the question was “about 90 x 30′, gray on top and black along the sides”, which was as bland-looking as I had feared it would be.  As for how it’s getting here, it was to be escorted by one of the yards sea-going tugboats.

“Any chance you have a tugboat painted red, yellow, or orange? I asked. “How’s red and white?  ”Sold” I replied, and then started talking to my new best friend about chartering a helicopter, and coordinating the event in a pre-GPS, text-enabled cellphone world.

The day of the big event all went surprisingly well. I received a phone call from the skipper of the tugboat early in the morning of the day we were scheduled to shoot, and he informed me he expected to arrive in the lower Hudson bay area around 1:20 in the afternoon under what was thankfully going to be sunny sky. We chose a frequency to communicate via a hand-held marine band radio I kept for boat-related photo shoots and he promised to call when he was about 45-minutes out so not to waste precious flight time dollars.

Based on my experience photographing boats small and large for magazine covers and feature stories, I already knew I would be shooting my camera of choice at the time for boat-chasing, a Nikon F3  and a 24mm/f2 Nikkor, which was the perfect focal length for filling a majority of the frame with the barge and still have enough area in the top portion of the frame for the city skyline. I also had a 20mm and 15mm lens on standby, but from experience already knew the wide lenses were more likely record the prop blades in the top of the frame too.

For a sunny afternoon in July, the sky was remarkably clear. Regardless, I used a warm-toned, UV coated Polarizing filter to knock down the ambient glare in order to ‘separate’ the boat from the water, make the clouds pop a bit more from the midday blue skies, and saturate the red and white colors of the tugboat, which aside from the Polarized blue of the water, was the only strong dash of color in an otherwise monotone scene.

Text & Photograph Copyright Allan Weitz 2011

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The Sweetest Light of the Year

Posted on January 16, 2011 by Allan Weitz

One of the better metaphors I’ve come up with to describe the difference between mid-day light during the summer months and winter months is to compare them to an overhead lamp at full Wattage (summer light) compared to a desk lamp on a dimmer switch dialed down by about 30% of the lamps total output (winter light). And while you can reasonably argue that unless it’s cloudy, the same thing happens twice a day at sunrise and sunset, during the winter months the light glows warmly from a close distance to the horizon most all day long.

Like the summer sun, the ceiling-mounted lamp casts a bright even light that baths everything in it’s reach from a (relatively) uniform point-of-view. Desk lamps are different in that they light whatever’s around them from a lower angle that along with casting longer shadows, enables the light to reach inside the various creases, indents, and recesses of whatever is in range of the lamps glow, which thanks to the dimmer, has a soft gold quality to it compared to the full-Wattage of the overhead lights.

The reason winter light is so appealing to the eye has to do with warmth, shadows,and texture. At sunrise, sunset, and most of December and January, there’s a comforting look and feel to the light. Shadows become more pronounced, and more often than not, become integral parts of the dynamics of your image composition.

Unlike summertime shadows, which art midday are minimal at best, during the winter months the smallest pebbles cast long shadows,  textures in walls, sidewalks, and the bark of trees become prominent, and at times, exaggerated beyond the scale and form of whatever is casting the shadow in the first place.

Color-wise, even on the chilliest of winter days, if the sun is out, it never has a cold touch to it, and  even on the most monotone, overcast days, there’s often a warm edge to the otherwise seasonal gloom.

Something to keep in mind when trying to capture the warmth of winter is to make sure your camera’s white balance (WB) is set to daylight, and not ‘Auto’. The ‘Auto’ mode of your camera’s WB system is designed to keep the color range of your photographs neutral, and the last thing you want to do is neutralize the very warm tonality that made you stop and take the picture in the first place.

To maintain the warm ambience of winter and/or the light quality of a sunrise or sunset, it’s best to keep the WB set to ‘Daylight’ or  5500K, which sets the WB to record the scene as if it were a sunny afternoon in May, June, or July regardless of how golden the light becomes, which is exactly where you want it to be.

Text & Photographs Copyright Allan Weitz 2011

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Same Place, A Time Apart

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Allan Weitz

One of the benefits of shooting on location is having the opportunity to travel to places both near and far and finding interesting subjects to photograph along the way.  On many occasions I’ve returned to, or at the very least, passed through many of these same places and sometimes the things that caught my eye are still there, though not necessarily in the same condition or color scheme, and sometimes they’re simply gone. Times change.

Hunt’s Casino, an old Art Deco movie theater in Wildwood, New Jersey is one of the places that’s still there. I first came upon Hunt’s Casino years ago while working on a series of old amusement park structures. At the time, I shot everything using a 4×5 camera onto Tri-X, and when feeling adventurous, an occasional sheet of Ektachrome. The final B&W prints were sepia toned and hand-colored using Marshall’s Transparent Photo Oils and Q-Tips, which seemed a proper way to present the images.

My second encounter with Hunt’s Casino occurred about 4 years later. It was shortly after dusk and the combination of the neon signage of what was new called the ‘Hollywood Casino, against the last hints of blue sky was enough to make me slam on the brakes with the same sense of urgency I had the first time I set my eyes on the building years earlier.

The signage wasn’t the only thing that had changed since my last rendezvous with the old building – my gear changed too. Gone was the 4×5 and all that went along with it and sitting atop my Gitzo was a Nikon F3 and a 28mm/f3.5 PC lens, a far lighter and flexible alternative for shooting architectural photography, and a lot more forgiving on my back and shoulders. Gone too was the black & white sheet film, replaced by Kodachrome 64, an amazing film that too has become an iconic piece of the past.

Sometimes you realize you have photographed the same subject on more than one occasion long after the fact, as happened with an old fishing shack that used to sit alongside the main road heading east into Orient Point, Long Island. The first time I hit the brakes to photograph the shack was at dawn as the sun burned through the morning mist. Muted colors and theatrical lighting aside, I particularly liked the ‘home, sweet home’ feeling of the flower boxes, and the way they played off the ramshackle appearance of the rest of the structure. The camera was a full-frame 35 with a 24mm lens, a favored focal length for landscapes and environmental portraits, which is precisely what this style of photograph is.

My next encounter with this fishing shack was 2 years later, but it wasn’t until recently that I recognized the connection between the 2 photographs, which dynamically are quite different from each other. Unlike the earlier photograph, which was taken at dawn with a wide angle lens, the second photograph of the shack was taken late in the day, from a distance, and with a 300mm lens.

The dynamics of the two images couldn’t be more different. In the earlier wide angle view, the shack appears to be sitting on an open island of reeds, whereas in the second image, which was taken with a far longer, image-compressing telephoto lens, the shack seems shoehorned into a tight, cluttered spot along the water line. In the second, more recent shot, the flower boxes are gone, and though the shack is not much worse for wear after all those seasons since I last took note of the scene, without the flower boxes, the place finally looked abandoned.

Text & Photographs Copyright Allan Weitz 2011

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One Last Dance with Film

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Allan Weitz

I last peered through the ocular of my Schneider 4x Lupe in August 2001. Little did I know I was editing my last rolls of slide film as I hunched over my light box, eyeballing a dozen or so boxes of FujiChrome slides of  - fittingly – a pair of classic wooden runabouts for a Wooden Boat calendar. Two weeks later I purchased my first DSLR and a couple of 512MB CompactFlash cards. The rest is history, and for the most part, I never looked back.

Fast forward six months shy of a decade, and I find myself once again peering at slides on a light box though that very same Schneider Lupe, only this time in retrospect as I rummage through drawers filled with countless slide sheets, each containing 20 transparencies, as I cherry-pick the best of them for digital conversion, a project I have managed to put off until recently, when I obtained use of a film scanner with which I’ve been getting to know very well during these long winter nights. Funny thing is, the experience, which I anticipated as being dreadfully tedious, has been illuminating on a number of levels.

For starters, the experience of leafing through images I’ve taken over the course of oh-so-many years has taken me back to many distant times and places, many of which only exist on celluloid within the cardboard frames I hold in my hands. Each group of slides is a time capsule of a time and place I have visited and recorded. Many of the best of these images originally appeared in print, and some circulated as stock images, but most, including some of what I always felt were my strongest images, never made it further than the boxes I got back from the lab. And these are the images I’m now getting to discover once again as I take them for one final twirl across the dance floor.

Perhaps the most amazing part of this experience has been having the ability to apply many of the image enhancing attributes afforded by digital technology  to images that at the time of capture, were mostly limited to setting the exposure, composing the image, adding filters (if any), and firing the shutter. Apart from selecting a film with the right ‘look and feel’ for the job in the first place, there was little more than one could do to enhance or improve the image. It was off to the lab along with a few prayer to the film processing Gods.

The cool part of scanning  old chromes is opening up freshly-minted RAW files,  and digging into the shadows while maintaining detail in the highlight, and tweaking the  contrast, hue, saturation, and tonal dynamics in ways unimaginable  all those years ago.

During the scanning process I’ve been able to revisit what I’d originally considered to be ‘compromised’ exposures, and finally set the record straight so to speak. As such, many of the scanned images I’ve produced are, at least in my mind, better than the originals.

So while I miss many aspects of film – a medium I grew up with and still cherish, the advantages and possibilities made possible by the ever-improving abilities of digital capture make me far less misty-eyed these days when glancing into the rear-view mirror.

All Photographs & Text Copyright Allan Weitz 2011

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