More Than Candy

Wow, here we are already at the last week of July and it feels as though I don’t have nearly enough done to show for it. Sure, the garden has been a moderate success and we’ve traveled a bit to see family, but we’ve not taken many pictures. At times, the weather hasn’t been cooperative; this has been the wettest summer on record in Indiana, and there’s a decent chance of more rain today and tomorrow. My nature is to push myself to keep up with a schedule that, perhaps, isn’t as realistic today as it was fifteen years ago when there was something new to shoot every day, often multiple times a day. That absence of new pictures bothers me.

Then, I look at the collection of pictures we’ve chosen for this week, part of a series called Texture, shot throughout the year in 2010. We didn’t shoot them all in one day. We didn’t even shoot them all in one month. The earliest shoot was done in March, and we strung it out all year with the last shoot taking place mid-December. As a result, we have a full set of images, almost enough to have run two weeks, with a wide array of diversity across the group. We had time to experiment, which was good because only a couple of the shoots came out the way I anticipated. A couple of the concepts were absolutely disastrous. Had we been on a tight production schedule, those two could have killed the whole project.

By spreading the concept out over a year, we were able to figure out what worked best. Lying down produced better results than standing. A popular powdered children’s drink burns when the powder comes into contact with sensitive areas of skin.  Taco seasoning doesn’t wash off for almost three weeks. Having a ticklish model doesn’t help. Recruiting models wasn’t as challenging as it is for some projects, though, because they were able to see what we were doing along the way. We posted images soon after they were shot and that made the project more interesting. While some of the first images were full-length, we eventually decided that it was closer, more macro shots that look best, so we didn’t need to cover as much of the body to get the desired effect.