Anyone who follows my site knows that I am a commercial performance and publicity photographer. Every one of my clients have gone dark since they are live theatre and dance companies. I know many feel that just social distancing the audience may give some hope to places like performance or music theaters. But what most people don’t consider is how do actors on stage maintain a six foot distance from one another? Or how do read throughs happen? Or dance coupling? Or…..a multitude of other tasks that go into live theatre?
I miss the collaboration and creativity of publicity photography as well as live production work. Being unemployed for the remainder of 2020 is my new reality. So after lamenting my situation and revising my spreadsheets over and over I decided to say fuck it. It became time to create without humans, in total isolation which is something for which I am not accustom. I always ask my clients what the story and mood is for the shoot they want me to create. So I decided to ask myself the very same questions.
- Story: COVID-19 – the airborne virus
- Mood: make beauty out of a shitty situation
So I decided that since the COVID-19 virus is primarily transmitted airborne smoke would represent the virus… I had to plan out how to acheive the images I wanted to create so I began fabricating ‘light modifiers’ that I’d need.
I then turned my garage into my studio….
And began to create….
Intersecting water and smoke in camera. Sure seems easy once you see how I did it! LOLThis gallery are the images I created during the COVID-19 week of May 16-24 2020. Working with smoke or any organic/chaotic material takes much patience and planning. Forming shapes with air currents and moisture is the way I found which worked best for me. All but one of the images is a composite, the one of five different figures. The rest were created in camera which is my personal preference since I’m so shitty with Photoshop! LOL
Creating again put me into a much more balanced frame of mind. I highly suggest it for photographers who are out of work. For me it is a life saver. Be Safe. Be Kind. Remain Healthy.
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