Posts in category: BTS

One of the things we love doing with images is telling a story. If you’re new to this image, take a minute or three to check it out, and see if you can hear what it is trying to say. Maybe you can see part of your own life in the image.

Conception

Late in 2015 we had an initial meeting with a couple that became one of our wedding couples for this year, Francesca and Jeff. (I’m pleased to call them both friends now!) It was a pretty normal first meeting – have a chat, talk about life, talk about the wedding plans, and shoot some photographs. You might remember them from their session a few months ago. It’s important to us to get to know our wedding couples pretty well, so we can give them the coverage they want and capture the details that mean a lot to them.

Francesca is bright, fun, chatty, and enthusiastic – just the kind of person you want to know. While we were chatting, she was really open about her life leading up to the point where she met Jeff. Francesca is the kind of person that is always there for her friends, and will drop whatever she’s doing to help them out when they need it. Unfortunately, there was a long period where she had some significant problems of her own, and it took her a while to recognise that she was pushing her own needs away and putting everyone else first, which of course only made things worse for herself. She put on a brave face and was all colour and light to the outside world, even when that’s not how she really felt. She was so open about this part of her life, even though it would be easy to skip past it.

After our chat, we had our session, got some great images of Jeff and Francesca, then called it a day… but her story about that part of her life stuck in my brain. I thought if I could convey that feeling she had, it would be a compelling story. After a little while, this composition started to take shape.

It’s a little scary to pitch an idea to someone where you ask them to basically play themselves, in a stylised interpretation of their own life. I’m fortunate that Francesca was on board right away, keen to collaborate and make it a reality.

Planning

I go through the same steps each time when planning an image. I didn’t mean to set up a little algorithm, but it just worked out that way. 🙂

This image was always going to be shot in-place, with the camera locked down on a tripod, and multiple image components shot separately and comped together. We needed to find a nice interior location with an uncomplicated foreground, and enough hallway stretching back that we can have a room in the background. Had a few options, and one of them ended up being pretty perfect.

Casting. Having actor friends is the best thing ever. I put the call out, and my actor friends Drita, Rose and Siobhan answered the call. I think the brief was along the lines of “sad, non-blonde female.” Rose also came through with a perfect location to tell the story – thanks for letting us borrow your house Rose 🙂

Styling. The three foreground Francescas needed to be bright, happy and colourful, but not identical, with lovely makeup and nice hair. The dresses in primary colours were pretty perfect for styling those three characters. By contrast, the three sad friends, and the Francesca in the back room, needed to be down, drab and desaturated.

Set dressing. For the most part, gotta keep this one clean, with just a few elements to reinforce the location, or to inform the circumstances of each of those little stories.

Execution & Post Production

How nice is it to have a shoot and have it go off without a hitch? It’s very nice! I think we moved through the three foreground vignettes quite quickly.

For the back room, I was actually back there and out of sight, shooting remotely and observing the results on my tethered iPad. Francesca was pretty incredible for this bit – we talked through how she felt again, and she completely went to that place. It was a moment when I was marvelling at how much trust she placed in me. So I’d better do the image justice.

Queensland Professional Photography Awards

At the QPPAs, this print did pretty well, scoring a Silver award. There was no discussion in this particular case, judging moved straight on to the next print, so nothing specific from the judges around what to work on.

I did have a word to my judging mentor, Adam Hourigan (a particularly awesome fellow and a good guy to know), about the difficulty some observers had with associating the small figure with the three girls in the front. I’d assumed Francesca’s blonde hair would be enough to carry that association, but it wasn’t. Full credit to Adam for observing that it would help if those three dresses were in the back room with her. Lightning bolt! Yes! So for the Australian awards that back room came forward a bit, the dresses went on a stand, and a few other aspects changed as well.

At the Australian Professional Photography Awards, very pleased to see this print score an 88 – Silver Distinction. Thank you to Tristam Evison of EV Photo for as always for getting the best print out of every image.

Here’s a short video that shows the evolution of the print, from start to finish. Enjoy 🙂

Fundraising!

One of the pretty significant issues that was (and still is) impacting Francesca’s life is lupus. There’s a lot we don’t know about lupus, and most importantly we don’t have a cure yet. Francesca’s alter ego Goldie Bardot is running a fundraiser event on September 23, Boop Out Lupus. If you’d like to be part of it, or donate, visit her facebook page Goldie Bardot – Lupus Warrior, donate at her Everyday Hero page, or come to the massive Boop Out Lupus fundraising event!

Wanda has struggled with anxiety and depression for many years. The first hints of depression showed up not long after our son was born. From then on, it was a bit of a rollercoaster, until the anxiety thing moved in and set up shop. She’s managing it, but it’s always there, and it seems to sneak out and grab her by the leg at the worst possible time.

One of the times Wanda is most vulnerable to it is at night. During the day, there are sights and noises and people to talk to and things to do… At night, you’re alone in the quiet with your thoughts. Nothing to take your attention, nothing to divert you from thinking about everything that might be happening in life. The way Wanda describes it to me, her brain jumps from thing to thing, all of them urgent and all of them important, and when she tries to get away from one of them another one jumps in her way. So she lies awake for ages, thinking about everything and getting more and more caught up in it. One of her defence mechanisms is her phone; playing Bejeweled or Drop 7 or Zuma or another game like that fills her mind and lulls her back to where she can go to sleep… and eventually she does. Meanwhile, I’m sleeping peacefully next to her. I’m a bit of a super sleeper, I can fall asleep mid-sentence sometimes and I

…sorry, nodded off there. Where was I? Yeah, good sleeper. So I sleep through Wanda’s anxiety attacks when she has them. She knows I can’t do anything about them, so she lets me rest.

I wanted to put an image together that told this story. I think this was mostly art therapy; trying to communicate a rich visual representation of Wanda’s state of mind seemed like a good idea. I sketched it out, as I often do. Wanda found the sketch on the iPad and left a little note of her own.

Earlier this year I arrived home (from the Queensland photography conference Hair of the Dog where we talked about art therapy, by coincidence) to find Wanda had decorated our bedroom to match the sketch. She did a pretty masterful job, with pages flowing off of the wall in a chaotic mess. It looked just like the sketch!

Wanda: “Hey, we can shoot this tonight!”

Kris: “Um, no – we need to do it first thing in the morning so I can light it with the morning sun.”

Wanda: “OK. So should we take it down or leave it up? Leave it up I guess?”

That night, I’m pretty sure Wanda sat bolt upright in bed surrounded by papers, while I slept soundly. Life imitating art – even art that hadn’t been created yet.

In the morning, we set up the camera pretty much touching the ceiling and looking down at us, and I photographed it by remote.

Post-production was pretty straightforward, there isn’t a lot there. Everyone assumes the pages are photoshopped on, but can you imagine what a pain that would be? The only significant photoshop tweaking was to shift the pages along the wall just slightly so they were right dead set in the middle. Otherwise lots of edits for colour and feel.

The end product is something I’m really proud of, because it’s our story. I’m glad the judges saw something in it; it’s great that something so personal crept over the line and (after a challenge) scored a Silver at APPA 2015. (Yes! Got a silver medal for a selfie!!)

One really amazing thing about this image is the way people connect with it. Nearly everyone that looks at it can see a bit of their life in there. Maybe they’re the sleepless one, or maybe they see that in their partner. I feel more connected with people after we talk about how the image affects them. What do you see?

Most images are collaborative, often involving a big group of people. I completely owe this image to Wanda, for being the inspiration, for the hard yards in set dressing, for being in it, and for critiquing my edits as it slowly became this print. She has a hand in pretty much everything that we do, and this one was no exception, but I’m honoured that she would entrust me with telling her story.

Conception

A few years ago I was thinking about how to tell a story about how music is timeless and important. In my life, music is pretty important; I’ve been a piano player for about as long as I can remember, through all of the highs and lows, three round-the-world relocations, all of my school and uni and single and married and parental life. I thought it would be cool to capture that somehow, and I was thinking through ways of showing a piano and its passage through time.

(Side note: Why do I have to love photographing pianos so much! They’re a massive pain to move! How about a nice guitar, or a harmonica maybe?)

I was working through ideas about seasons, or the evolution of a single place around a piano. Then the idea of a multiple image story popped in to my head, structured around a piano that moves from left to right as time passes. That quickly grew in to a story about the boy that belonged to that piano (or vice versa?) and how he grew up and changed. The story grew by itself, until the main building blocks were there.

I remember driving with Wanda, explaining each of the four panels one by one. When I started on panel number four, she started crying, because she knew exactly what I was going to do. I guess that’s good 🙂 The main impediment at that stage was skill; I was pretty sure I didn’t have the chops to shoot it, light it, and composite it to make it happen. I’d recently worked on a poster for a production called Critical Hit involving similar composite work, but I wasn’t quite ready yet. So I parked it for a couple of years.

Planning

I like to sketch out my ideas first. It helps when there are iPad sketching apps with lovely watercolour brushes that make your work look half decent. (I use Paper by FiftyThree.) So here’s the sketch outlining the general plan.

Execution

Next step – location scouting and casting! The location part was tricky; I couldn’t quite find a location that met the brief. Enter our amazing clients, Aimee and David. We’ve had the privilege of photographing their wedding as well as their ever-growing family on a few occasions. Their house nearly fit the bill. They did most generously allow me to remove all of the furniture from one of their rooms and shoot it from a few angles to get enough to composite it in to a bigger room. And voila, one room.

Now for the casting! Aimee happened to be quite significantly pregnant late last year, and that’s where the casting started. A bunch of people jumped in with both feet, and I am very appreciative of their time and effort! That goes for the piano too. Even the window shades from my parents’ place in Las Vegas made an appearance.

Can I say a massive thanks to everyone that appeared in this project: Aimee, Fiona, Roger, JC, Declan, Aaron, Tara, Gabby, Michael and Rose. You guys completely made this possible.

Shooting was anywhere and everywhere – loungerooms all around Brisbane were turning in to studio spaces for this project.

Speeding it up

Generations got over the line at the Queensland awards with a Silver award, and that was very cool indeed. I did get quite a bit of consistent feedback from judges along the lines of… “AAAAH, Right! I get it now! I didn’t see all of that when I was judging, but NOW I do! Hey that’s great!” which to me is code for “Nice job, but takes too long to read – make it faster!” That advice, plus advice from a few trusted mentors, resulted in a bunch of changes, including losing the girlfriend’s friends (agh sorry guys), reshooting the boy’s older family (c’mon guys, you looked pretty young before), and removing a few elements that cost more in reading time than they gave back in story and understanding, like the text on the boxes, the box on the piano, and so on. The new print felt a lot faster to read – still very full of detail and story, but hopefully something that the judges could see most of in the limited time they have with the print.

APPA!

At the judging, this one scored a solid silver on the first round, with four judges in the mid-80’s, and one judge in the low 90’s. I’m very very happy that the 90’s judge challenged, spoke passionately about the print and what they saw, and on rescore helped a few other judges to move up as well, bringing this up to Gold! A gold award is pretty exciting. I figure it’s going to be a rare, rare feeling to earn one of those. I’ve probably put more work in to this print than any other print in my life, and I’m glad the work was rewarded 🙂

The evolution vids have been getting a good rap, so here’s the evolution of this print… Enjoy!