Boxing Day 2006 Stephen DiRado

On Jan 3, 2007, at 8:42 PM, sdirado wrote

Hi Rob:

(Oh, sorry for this long rambling letter, got carried away about process.)

I’m up here in Worcester, MA about 3 hours from you in Brooklyn. I do come down your way from time to time and will see Brian’s show at Julie’s at one point.

Yes, flashbulbs! The amazing thing is how portable they are and yet so powerful. I can setup very, very quickly wherever, I can clamp it in the room I’m working in. I carry with me a few quick grips, some tinfoil (to create barn doors) and a shit load of bulbs in a satchel along with my film holders. The 8×10 sits by while eating with friends almost every night. During dinner, anytime during the eve, if there is a photo to be made, I quickly set up the camera, run a focus through the table, and place the flashgun someplace that accents the scene– create a sense of drama, or an overall soft light effect. It all depends on what I feel is going on emotionally within a situation. I use (clear) number 22s for some major light, they will give me an f64 direct at 15 feet away. BUT rarely will shoot them direct. Most of the time I will bounce it, or use tinfoil to scatter the light, or even cover most of the bulb in the center, to create a soft ring light effect. I use number 11s for about an f32 at 15 feet away, number 25s for an f22 at 15 feet. Most of the time I overexpose by 2 stops to flood a room with light in order to get details into the shadows. I have to underdevelop my negs to reduce contrast. I’m writing to you about this stuff– and I’m hoping that you are laughing away, because it can’t get more archaic. To add to this silly way of working, I never read the f-stops on my lens, I look at the iris and judge the opening. In part, because the damn f-stop ring has worn away, and because I can’t see shit for details at 49. For my shutter speeds, mostly shoot at about a 1/5th of a second, or slower if I want candles to burn bright on my negs. I just lower room lights, pop the flash (it goes off at about a 1/50th or so) for this effect.

I bought a couple of Sunpak J110 flashes (one works as a slave) but mostly use them in the nursing home. The flashbulbs freak out the patients in the Alzheimer’s ward. You can feel the heat from a bulb 20 feet away. The dif is that the strobe fires off at about 1/2,000 of a sec. Everything looks plastic. BUT a flashbulb burns bright and slow for about a 1/50th of a second. The result is a softer light on faces, and glow room wide that for some reason no strobe can replicate.

I just attached one I made on Boxing Day. (I shoot 2 to 5 dinners weekly, most images suck. BUT the law of batting averages gives me one or 2 a month that work, something about them that go beyond predictions.) Here is the breakdown on how this photo came to be: The setup is the dining room of the lady on the far right, she is the ex-wife of the man, Mike in the back reading the wine label. Mike to this day (divorced now for 12 years) leaves his good wines in his ex-wife’s cellar. Once every few years he invites friends to come and drink a few bottles. The ex made a nice dinner before tasting the wines but that was not a photo. The photo came to me after the dinner while we were drinking these great wines! I wanted the camera to be an observer, equal with the group but set back to observe quietly. I ran a focus (tilts front and back) through the table to concentrate on expressions. I pushed this tilt thing far, in order to create a canopy overhead to contain the chandelier. I placed the flash (used a #25 bulb) on the mantle of the fireplace, and covered the end near the camera with tinfoil to prevent light flare. I’m holding just outside the camera’s view, a cable release. Over a period of about 6 minutes, I popped off 3 shots. I partially directed my subjects to stay put, not move around while I photographed. BUT I do not contain them from talking, or drinking, or chatting. That is the magic needed to makes these things work… When it works.. My friends are so used to me setting up, that it goes unnoticed.

Stephen

My reply;

I am reminded of Abelardo Morell in all of this, for how he uses the simplicity of what the camera is, just a box with a hole in the end of it. You could light with a bonfire if you wanted, (its just not always convenient to burn the house down during a meal…:)

Photography is a silly little thing. I think a lot of that is lost on the current incarnation of photography, anything post 2001, the digital realm etc, there has been a tremendous rush to these new technologies. A friend of mine from Maine just released a book on Holga. Such a simple tool. But even the holga has been changed, there is a flash now, a polaroid back, etc.

A good friend of mine just bought one of the Leica-clone point and shoots, the Panasonic one, 10mp, 16×9 format, it’s really nice. We were out on New Years and he said he really liked it but hated the red eye preflash. So we tried to figure out how to turn it off, two professional photographers, no luck, and then we tried to figure out how to fool it to turn it off. Can’t be done! So you miss the moment. I had my M6 and flash on it, f11, hyperfocal distance, 28mm lens. I didn’t even need to look through it or focus it, and it goes off instantly, exactly when you want it to. It really is a little bit like “shooting.”

I was watching some girls pose for a picture taken by a friend in the subway today, and there is that frozen expression, the waiting. This is new, used to be we all got fooled by the preflash, the red flash, etc, now we all know to wait for several seconds while it all goes on. Immediately after the pic (this is the pic that got away for me…) one of the girls instantly turned to bored, the effort of holding that smile. It was so artificial.

I like that you can feel the heat from the bulb, it means something, makes me think of Weegee bar-b-queing a corpse with his flashgun just as the police arrive. “Hey he’s a little warm this one…nah that’s just the flash, he’s been dead for hours mack…”

I think on 8×10 you almost need that much power to shoot at f64, not many other portables (none?) can achieve that. There would be no other way.

About the photo; not many of your pics have the out of focus so out of focus, (that I have seen) and usually I really don’t like extreme tilts, but here, it does exactly what you say, it contains the moment in the room, a toast, that moment when the world is supposed to wait, listen and appreciate. I like that it is so circular, like another idea of a toast, the circle of friends, a sharing. You might go as far as Emmet Gowin and use a lens with less coverage and make a truly circular image, which is what the lens projects anyway, on 8×10, I could see and accept that easily, not for every image, but for some. Or like the Escher drawings of the silver globes.

A photographer that I assist, Sheila Metzner, introduced me to their family rule that you are not supposed to cross over someone to clink a glass, and you have to make eye contact. I like that. The toast is a moment of eye contact, and the camera is another eye.

If you are ever in the brooklyn nabe, give me a call.

rob