This is a story of connections. We went to this financial planner about 6 months ago for some advice. In the process I talked about starting my own business and the principal planner (the guy in the front) gave some off the cuff advice about how important it is to stay in contact with your real and potential clients. I took his advice and kept in contact with him and 6 months later got a call to do their updated corporate photos and website.
In the process of doing that I have now landed another contract with a husband of one of the other employees helping with his company’s website.
My wife, Linda, took this while waiting in the ‘green room’ for me to finish the interview on ‘Good Day Tulsa’. It is a morning show that follows Good Morning America here in town. I was being interviewed about my napkin being in Time Magazine and the napkin story behind it all.
The best part was that the interviewer, Kristin Dickerson, agreed to let me do a photo collage of her for my ‘Velveteen Woman’ project!
The video was taken down long ago but here is a screenshot. I was interviewed by a local TV station about the Obama napkin and the napkin story in general.
Models getting ready for a shoot are sometimes more interesting and fun to photograph than the shoot itself.
The Application
She had been running around off-set wondering where her lip gloss was, so when she found it I followed her into the kitchen at the auto repair shop/photography studio and took some shots as she put it on.
We were having a photo shoot in an auto repair garage that adjoins the photography studio. We had someone in who was giving a tutorial on studio lighting. At one point he asked this model to do some poses on a divan/couch with her shirt pulled up, exposing her abs and belly button. I could tell she was a bit uncomfortable with that and was worried about what her parents would think, especially her father. The poses weren’t exploitive as such, but they were on the cheesy side and I could tell she was a bit awkward about it.
Turns out she has the same name as one of my daughters and graduated from the same high school, a few years later. We talked a bit about her going to college and what she wanted to do. She seemed to like the photos I took off-set. I will have to ask her what she thought about the ones I mentioned above.
Our photo club was having a photo shoot in the auto repair garage that is attached to the photography studio where we meet. They had brought out all the lights and back drops into the garage to do a tutorial on studio lighting.
It was a bit too crowded to really hear what they were saying so I stole a few of the models and went to another part of the garage where I found a scaffold for them to get up on. I went up a ladder and got this shot, among others.
I had the camera on manual settings for a long exposure and then added the flash at the end to get the effect.
First series taken with my new camera, the Panasonic G1. I was doing a shoot in my home and we had her sillhouetted against the window when we realized there was a fire truck in the lonely subdivision on the other side of the park. I asked her to go outside and look at the truck through the top of a broken picket in the back fence. She was a trooper and did so, even though it was windy and cold! I love the pose and the reverse voyeur feeling of the nude looking over the fence at the fire truck.
What a perfect walkabout find at the Fair! A beautiful African American woman was standing at a food booth and there was that ‘gotta stop moment’ when all the world fell into perfect harmony.
‘Composition in Fall’
This was an instant favorite of mine before I even looked at the results a few moments later. It couldn’t have been set up in a studio any better.
Two days later the cheerleader was transformed into a race car driver.
I met her by accident elsewhere at the fair and stopped her to tell I had posted the photo of her as a cheerleader and the immediate response I got from a friend of hers who she went to high school with. She was very happy to hear it, saying it completely made her day.
‘Stripe’
We got into a conversation about how many costumes she has (about 150) and the amount of work she does traveling between Tulsa and Los Angeles.
She mentioned she needs to have photos taken of her in all her costumes to update her website and I offered my services to do the photo shoot but it never came about.
Tulsa State Fair – The area behind the midway and outside the big expo building is a great place to see spaces and people in unexpected juxtapositions.
‘The Painter and the Custodians’
But don’t go there if you have a sensitive nose. It truly stinks!
I love groups of people that hold on to something. They are the keepers of the flame.
The Keepers of the Flame
I like that there is a young woman in the midst of the older women. She will be those women in another 30 years, and will have handed down the clogging tradition to someone much younger. I love that.
