This week I visited one of my favourite photo locations, Old Car City in White, Georgia. It's always a harsh day out, with high temperatures and mean biting insects, but I was really looking forward to adding to my portfolio of fabulous paint and chrome textures on abandoned vintage cars.
I spent most of the morning focusing on one particular car, a 1940s Buick Special sitting in perfect leaf-dappled light, hoping for a nice set or even a panel of images.
In fact, it's always a challenge to shoot in this light - very bright in the sun, quite dark everywhere else. I was working with a tripod and a shutter release, using live view to save bending over to peer through the viewfinder for every single shot. It took a while to make this combination work, but after a while I thought I had it sorted.
We went for a well deserved lunch break in the diner across the road, and I checked my images more carefully. They were all slightly out of focus. I had totally not handled things in live view.
I was really frustrated to have spent so much time and effort on some well framed shots which were completely useless.
The afternoon light wasn't working on my Special. But I did, sort of, get my tripod/shutter release/live view/focus combination to work. It was a useful reminder of how much I don't know, to try to be positive.
I wasn't loving my tripod much, though, by this point, so I switched to hand-held and concentrated instead on some darker shots, with shadows and suggestions, a little bit Gothic. A slight salvage of a painful day.
My new AV, Car Guy: click on the photograph below to see it on Vimeo...
This one has been a challenge, technically and emotionally.
After the unexpected success of Matthew Loney's Miracle, which built up a little collection of trophies and medals from various national competitions during 2017, I was suffering from a bad case of impostor syndrome. I was very pleased with Matthew Loney, but I'd had so little experience of AV work when I made it that I felt its success was a bit of a lucky accident. It was frequently praised as being very different. And it was, because I didn't really know what was the usual thing for an AV.
February sees the start of the 2018 AV season, with the NIPA festival as the first event, and I felt that I needed to make something new - but also that whatever I made, it would never be as good as Matthew. This is a paralysing attitude. It's one I see often in my own students. I'm sympathetic to it, but when someone else is feeling this way, I'm great at proffering sensible advice and encouraging them to move on. It's much harder when I'm the one paralysed.
I still have the syndrome, but I made the AV too. I got started by deciding that I was right, it would never be as good as Matthew, and that was ok. Instead, I treated it as a chance to try some new things. There's a voiceover. It's half the length, but I still wanted to convey a cohesive story. And it's in colour.
This proved to be a good approach. The always supportive J helped me with the script. We spent several happy evenings over the Christmas holidays lounging on the sofa, arranging fragments of text on a plastic tray from WyseByse, arguing over individual words, high-fiving each other when we hit on a good phrase.
Working out the technicalities of the voice tracks was a good learning experience too, once I'd constructed a pop shield from a coat hanger and a pair of tights, having forgotten to borrow a real one from work. We recorded several takes to get the voice right, though it was freakish how easily J was able to sound like an 80-year-old. I chopped the best track up into multiple segments, which made moving the voice around to work with the music track and slides much more flexible in my PicturesToExe AV software.
The music is my own. I wanted to keep it simple, with just piano and bass and very little else. The mood is influenced by cool jazz of the 1950s, when the cars and Car Guy would have been in their teens. The music starts with a little two-note motif, G - E, a setting of "car guy" - and this idea, backwards, forwards, decorated, filled in, and at different pitches, permeates the whole score.
The heart of the story is Car Guy himself, beautifully played by my friend's dad. And in a way, he represents the best of all our dads, with his homespun wisdom, his integrity, his mild humour and his understated but longstanding love for Isabella.
I hope it all comes together effectively for viewers - I'd love it to come across as touching, and for you to enjoy wandering through that southern scrapyard as much as both Car Guy and I have done.
One of my favourite days this summer was the one we spent at Old Car City in White, Georgia. We went last year - you can read about that visit here and here - so this time I was better prepared for the mosquitoes. I brought my pride and joy new lens and planned to take lots of really close details of the beautiful old cars.
It was very hot. I got three mosquito bites (not too bad at all). I wished I hadn't bothered bringing my tripod, and then J accidentally set it in the poison ivy. I looked like a dog's dinner in my sun-blocking, insect-blocking, hair-up-in-a-handkerchief outfit (clearly reflected in some of the shinier hubcaps). But I could have stayed for hours longer than the time we had available, and I made good use of the lens (it's an 100mm f2.8, if you like to know such details).
The overriding mood of the best photographs was one of mellow wistfulness, and I thought it would be cool to make a little slideshow, combining my favourites with a couple of jazz tracks composed and performed by my brother, bassist Paul Kimber.
So here is that video - just click here to see it on Vimeo...
