Boris works the Spud, while Chuck took this Behind The Scenes shot from across the stream with the TL120-55.
Tag Archives: Boris Starosta
Maia C312 in St. Mary’s Wilderness
And last not least the picture that came out of my Spud about the same time that Chuck took his Behind The Scenes shot.
BTS: Chuck Comes Across a Wood Nymph – St. Mary’s Wilderness
Chuck Holzner was a onetime contributor to the MF3d folios, and we occasionally worked together on a project. Here we are in the St. Mary’s Wilderness, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, about five years ago? He joined me and my model for a fairly strenuous hike to find some nice situations where we could photograph lovely Maia, who was a champ trooping along in the woods for several hours. We were heavily laden with cameras and snacks and water! He brought his sputnik, I brought my sputnik plus a TL120-55 on loan from John Thurston (many thanks!), plus a couple of digital cameras, and all the necessary tripods. Thus armed, lots of silly pictures got made.
(by the way, the tag “BTS” stands for Behind The Scenes)
Liz 323
In the early aughts I worked numerous times with Liz, who was not just good looking, but quite a friendly jokester too. At the time, I had this inflated vinyl chair sitting around in my studio, and every single time she came for a photo session, she would remark how much she liked it. So finally, one day she came and again she said she loved the chair, so I asked her if she could show me how much she loved it, and could I photograph her loving it? That’s how this session came to be. Numerous really good images came out of the session, but probably my favorite one is this flub – the flash had failed to fire in synchrony with the shutters. She had just gotten down on the floor to receive the chair, and teasing me, had starting moving with it just so (you know what I’m talking about), when I shot this image impromtu, really before I was ready. All the subsequent images were well lit, but none showed this energy. Sometimes the best images are visible and available for only a moment, and too much gear or technical complexity leaves them inaccessible… or too much thought and direction spoils them.
Shot with twin Hasselblads CM500 on a bar, electric twin release.
M2506
Six or so years ago, when I first pursued the notion of shooting a homage to “Fred with Tires” by Herb Ritts, I made a version with my beloved M at the local Community Bikes shop. Our little boy was just a few months old and he got to watch the whole session from his portable playpen, just out of frame in this view. This was likely shot with a sputnik.
Bazaans MF A0204 (glamour challenged)
With this image, we are trying to convey the model’s struggles trying to stay afloat in an ocean of popular media glamour imagery, which features predominantly thin women. Bazaans has a “Rubenesque” figure, so her self-image is constantly challenged as being inadequate. What is she doing there? Is she vomiting some of the published pop glamour imagery? I need your help: let me know if you can figure out what it all means.
This was shot in studio with strobes, I think with my “old” Sputnik.
Selene MF D0514 (glamour challenged)
I’m not sure what to title this shot. I’m not sure what exactly I’m doing with this composition or concept. About five years ago, a vague creative idea started to form in my mind, that intended to be a “challenge” to glamour imagery in general. The idea was to create nominally pinup, or nude, or glamour type imagery, but to embed into the image something that was disturbing. It might be an an odd or disturbing detail that would upend an otherwise tranquil scene, an “easter egg” that would only be discovered if you explored the image relatively carefully and closely. Or it might be an image that more directly challenges the conventions of glamour photography, or that shows in some other way the “truth” behind a model’s reality, which might be quite the opposite of what the picture superficially conveys. This project is naturally self-referential and introspective, as it examines my own critical thoughts on the nature of nude or erotic image making, what it means for the artist, the model(s), or even the audience… and by taking that examination directly to the audience, I hope to challenge the audience to examine itself.
So this picture of Selene is one of several attempts I’ve made over the past few years at creating a “glamour challenged” or “challenged glamour” type of image – I’m still finding my way in this project, and can’t say that I feel any of the resulting images so far are particularly successful. I am still dissatisfied with them.
The day began with Selene and I looking for some pretty, natural spot in which to shoot, and after some hours, we ended up at this river not too far from the roadside. We set up and shot numerous standard or ordinary nude and semi-nude images of her posing among the rocks in this little river. She knew that in the end I’d be asking her to be getting into the water, but by the time that moment came, she was reluctant – she’d already noticed how cold the water was, after having put her foot into it several times. But she was a champ, and finally took the plunge. She gave quite a shout upon first entering the water, but then concentrated on giving me some poses. I had wanted her to look both “attractive” but somehow in trouble, distressed or drowning (?) in this river – and I thought she came up with some passable looks. I think we were both surprised by how she hardly needed to act looking uncomfortable, or indeed of distressed. As we quickly learned the water was indeed brutally cold, and after only thirty seconds to a minute, she needed to come out. I wrapped her in blankets, shivering violently, and it took her probably twenty minutes to recover from this seemingly innocuous dip in the water.
Kat MF A0118 “Full Service”
Kat’s Full Service was shot at a perfectly chaotic and disheveled, local “hole in the wall” tire/repair garage in an older part of town. I’d been looking for a place like this for years, to re-interpret a famous picture by Herb Ritts, Fred (google “Fred with tires” there are actually several variants). After finding this shop in 2013 or so, I shot my first “Fred” session with my beloved partner M, and though this produced some wonderful MF3d images, I feel somewhat restrained in publishing them. To have greater freedom in publishing the image, I decided this past year to reshoot it with a “professional” model, and this slide is one of the images that came out of that session. (By the way, Kat really was a professional, and of the nicest sort. She was super helpful and accommodating in the challenging location, totally un-self-conscious and focussed on the modeling tasks at hand, and spontaneously creative in her posing, even after we had attracted a small audience of passers by. And she was fairly easy on the eyes, too;-)
Now, this particular image does not follow on the Herb Ritts image. (I did get one good facsimile of Ritts’s “Fred” with Kat on film, but I am holding onto it, read on). But at least this image is in focus! While this session with Kat produced many fine images on my digital rig, my efforts with film were unfortunately plagued by bad luck and, frankly, operator error due to my long absence from shooting. (The last time I’d shot a model with film was about one year prior, in the summer of 2017 – Selene at a river, an example included in this round of the folio). I shot three rolls of 120 with a “new” Sputnik, yielding 36 stereo pairs, and a pair of 220 rolls with my twin Mamiya 6 rig, yielding 24 stereo pairs. This particular shot came from the Mamiyas.
All of the Sputnik shots were essentially out of focus… either I made a mistake, or the lens markings were off. The garage in the background was in perfect focus, but the model herself was a bit soft on all of the Sputnik shots – a very great disappointment! This was only the second time I had used that Spud, which I had acquired in 2018, after the first couple of test rolls seemed to come out fine. But the session with Kat was more demanding: it was more close up, and due to the light in the shade, I had to open the apertures a little bit, shooting at f16 I think. The imagery, though “out of focus” for MF3d slide viewing, is however good enough for scanning and stereoview printing… but you know that is of little consolation.
All the Mamiya shots were in excellent focus, but a different type of operator error caused more than half the shots to be badly out of alignment – and in such an odd manner that there is no fixing it. I might include a copy of one of those in future, as an exercise or challenge for everyone to figure out what I did wrong. This view of Kat – “Full Service” – however does not suffer from the alignment problem. It is one of less than ten stereo pairs that ended up looking pretty good.
The upshot is that I’ll probably want to return to this garage a third time with a model – beating this creative idea to death as it were. I haven’t decided yet, but I imagine the guys at the shop won’t mind. They’ve been quite amused to have me there with a model.
PS: prior to the session with Kat, I tried to get two warm up filters for the Mamiyas at least, but couldn’t get them in time. Next time around the color will be much better.
Bazaans MF C0109
Alright.. this one is a little bit nutty. I hesitated putting this in the folio, but I thought: it’s okay if people see where and how I make mistakes…. and yet it might still be entertaining!
The film had gone bad, probably just from old age. Both L and R show poor contrast, weak blacks. The film looks underexposed, though that seems unlikely to happen to me in studio. And the L and R film shows a slightly different color, both tending too much towards magenta. So: let that be a lesson to me: stop using twenty year old film!
But worse than these defects is that I shot too close… way, way too close up, given I was shooting with the twin Mamiya 6 rig, which has a stereobase of over 3 inches. What was I thinking!? I wanted to have an image that did not include the waist, I just wanted head and shoulders and chest. I’ve shot that way before doing cha-cha with a motor-drive Hasselblad (baseline of maybe an inch), but here for some reason I thought it would work out with the twin rig. Silly. Shooting from farther away might have worked better – if I’d had some longer lenses (e.g. 150 mm).
But still I think the the image is interesting. Note that even with the far points set at infinity separation – i.e. the edge of her elbow, not four feet away from me, set to infinity separation – the near points could not be brought to be “behind the stereo window.” So the actual space of her body, which spans a depth of just a foot or 18 inches, in the MF3d view geometry effectively spans five feet to infinity. There’s a lot of stretch!
This is the way I shot for many years in 35 mm film, using a twin rig of film SLRs. All those early images of mine look too stretched to me now – but I guess old habits, or old errors die hard.
I hope you can enjoy it anyway.
Patrick Dougherty “On The Fly” at UVA, 2013
Patrick Dougherty came to Charlottesville a couple of years ago, and I undertook to document his work. If you google his name, you’ll soon find lots of background information that I need not repeat here. Patrick was in town for about a month, commissioned by UVA Arts to make a stick sculpture in the (then brand new) Arts commons, right next to Ruffin Hall (which some of you know as one of my “clear buildings”).
Before his arrival, a crew of local volunteers will have assembled. In his first week, Patrick gets to know his volunteers in the work to gather his sticks. Patrick’s raw material is young saplings. He’ll correspond with people in the area, to find “doomed” saplings – i.e. saplings in wooded areas that are about to be clear cut. So he tries not to harvest saplings that would otherwise grow into mature trees.
After a week of gathering saplings with his volunteers, the work on the sculpture begins. The first slide shows some of the initial work: saplings have been stuck straight into the ground, pressed into ground some four or five feet if possible. Each sculptural structure will be anchored by a few very large and strong saplings. These will be placed into boreholes that were drilled first. At this point, volunteers keep busy preparing the saplings for integration into the sculpture – which mainly involves removing all the leaves. Throughout the work, more and more saplings are trucked in from whereever they had been cut.
Once the installation’s initial layout is secured with these larger saplings, then the work can proceed with smaller saplings and “sticks.” My (uneducated) impression is that the sculptures are more or less woven into place. It is weaving with sticks. Dougherty uses no fasteners of any kind. No nails, screws, twine, rope, zip-ties, nothing of the kind! Only the sticks. The work proceeds for about two more weeks, at which point the sculpture will be mostly complete.
His structures thus fashioned can get quite large. Although the one he built at UVA was nowhere more than about ten feet tall, others I’ve seen depicted online can be multiple stories tall. They are also very strong. Dougherty typically specifies that his installations should be taken down after a year to 18 months. But for some reason, this one at UVA was left in place for over three years! (UVA wanted to get its money’s worth, and I bet Dougherty had to remind the university to take it down). Surprisingly, even at three years old, the sculpture didn’t look all that bad – it got a little shop worn around the edges, and some of the structures had started to sag a bit. (I should have photographed it at the end of its life, but I failed to do so).
In the fourth week of his visit, Patrick tidies up loose ends and gets ready for his next project. I include a slide taken at a farewell reception, of Patrick talking with one of the UVA big wigs who funded the project; and a slide showing the finished project with all (or most) of the volunteers standing with Patrick for a portrait (that last slide was helpfully exposed by my beloved Michele). Patrick makes about ten sculptures per year in this fashion: one per month, anywhere in the world. Then he takes off two months to be at home with his family.
PS
I did undertake a 3d timelapse of the birth and subsequent aging of the sculpture: I shot two stereo pairs per day for about four months. After an initial review of the imagery, I decided that it was not looking very “good” (constantly and rapidly shifting light was very distracting in the video), so I didn’t do anything more with it. But you can see some of the beginnings of aging, if you look closely:
John Grade – Middle Fork at the Renwick “Wonder” Exhibition 2016
Last year we went to an exhibition of installation artists called “Wonder” at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. Several artists made very interesting pieces for this show. Using hundreds of thousands of pieces of reclaimed, old-growth cedar, John Grade built an intricate structure – Middle Fork – based on plaster casts taken of a massive, old-grown hemlock tree in the Cascade Mountains. At Wonder, I shot cha-cha’s with my Sigma DP1-M and a Sputnik. Tripods were not allowed, but I was incredibly lucky: each room in the Renwick had a fairly broad chair rail along the wall, wide enough to give good support to the Spud. The exposures were typically 15 to 30 seconds.
Bazaans A315
Another model I’ve been working with since 2016, this one is still in town good for more creativity! With her I’ve been trying to explore what I call “Challenged Glamour.” THat’s were I create an image that is nominally an ordinary glamour image, but then I put in some details that disturbs or mocks the normal first impression.
Aaria-A116
I briefly worked with this lovely model early in 2016. She had some great creative ideas, but sadly we were unable to follow up on all of them, because she ended up leaving town after just a few months. Them’s the breaks working with models – as inconstant as the weather.
2015 UCI Worlds from Libby Hill
The Union Cyclisme Internationale held its World Championships in Richmond recently, to the great delight of bike racing enthusiasts all over the east coast, but especially central Virginia. This view is overlooks the crowds on Libby Hill, the next-to-last climb on the about ten miles around loop of city streets that the riders raced (but they raced something like 15 laps). Ben King, a Charlottesville native, was in the race (he raced in the Tour De France last year as well), and many C-villains were there to cheer him on.
I shot my pictures of the event all at this basic location. From the very bottom of the hill looking up, and also from halfway up, and then this view looking down. You can make out the cobbled road snaking down left and right through the crowd. This was a very difficult surface to ride on – keep in mind the road is ridiculously steep here, and the cobbles reduce traction on your tires. Coming around these bends, most riders tried to stay in the gutter, which was made of poured concrete – much smoother. But the gutter was only ten inches wide or so, right next to the crowd, thus also presented its own difficulties.
I shot a twinned set of GoPros from this location also, trying to capture the action in 3d video. Alas, one of the cameras was malfunctioning (but I didn’t know it – GoPros will sometimes be failing and not let you know…. not good!), so all I got was the “flat” video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55ZElh8q-Ws
You’ll hear a lot of noise in the video which is me fiddling with the Sputnik – I was sharing the same tripod with both cameras. A twin camera bar held the stereoscopic GoPro enclosure on one side and the Spud on the other.
Foliage (aftermath)
We have a number of trees on our property. Last year we were very busy with our jobs, with Jet, late summer and fall, and so we kept having to postpone raking leaves… or we just didn’t feel like it. 
The more they accumulated, the less we’d feel like it! Sometime in December, we just had to do it. It became a huge chore taking us the better part of two days. I think we hauled two dozen TARPfulls to the curb, I bet close to a ton of leaves, no joke. Only a 3D picture can properly convey the mass, the heaps and mountains of leaves collected.
Shot with Sputnik, f22 probably, 1 sec. on Provia I guess.