The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage. —Herbert Hoover
Sometimes it’s good to take inventory of the garage, to see what treasures we’ve forgotten
Life is hectic this morning. We’ve already completed three fashion reviews for Pattern. I’ve read about the suspect in yesterday’s Chelsea bombing, the five devices planted around New Jersey, Â and gas shortages as the result of the Colonial pipeline spill. While you’re having breakfast, I’m having lunch. I have a brief period of time before the next fashion show. I have enough hours in the day, mind you. They’re just not grouped in a convenient manner at the moment. So, for this morning’s article, I had little choice but to run to the garage.
By “garage,” I mean my L drive. This is the backup drive where I keep stuff done prior to 2010. Last decade. Old stuff. You know how it is, every ten years or so you go through and clean everything out. While you don’t really want to throw anything away, you want new pictures on your walls, you’ve found a new author whose books you’d rather have out, or you’ve bought some new clothes but you know the old ones are going to be back in style soon enough. This is why we have a garage, even in the digital world. Some files we just don’t need to access as often.
When looking for something I could pull together quickly, it made sense to select a few images from one of my books. Those are all neatly compacted together, RAW files and finished photos, so I can pull from that source quickly and easily. I go to the garage, grab what I need, and add appropriate copy. No extra research is necessary.
A Little Taste Of Gravity
I decided that it might be fun to pull from my 2009 book, Gravity. You can still buy it, if you like. With the book, we were going for a very specific, classical look. The images there are done in black and white, cropped, framed, and finished in a very specific method to convey a particular time period and a certain set of emotions. The blurb for the book reads:
The Law of Gravity is immutable. Without gravity, the entire world would break apart and float off into the cosmos. Yet, while holding everything together, as Sir Issac Newton discovered, gravity can cause unexpected things to happen. Sometimes the result is only a bump on the head. Other times, one’s eyes are opened to a whole new perspective on life, love, and the earth in which we live. In this beautiful set of images, Lisa Marie and Carrie Kellar explore an unexpected gift that has fallen upon them. But the same gravity that brought them this gift also keeps them bound to the earth, unable to become immortal. Ah, if only the goddess Aphrodite would help!
This book is special in part because of how the models responded when they saw it. Neither had shot with another girl before and both were a bit anxious about the whole experience. Yet, when they saw the finished product, both were amazed. One even cried because she never expected to be portrayed so beautifully. This is a truly unique book. You should buy one.
Taking A Different View
As beautiful as the images in the book are, when I pulled them from the garage this morning I thought they might could use a little work before making them public. Not much, mind you. We did no airbrushing, no body modification, not even any cropping or horizon balancing. You can still see the garage walls where we shot, you can see spider webs, the elevated platform, and other such things that we would normally crop out. We left the images rather raw. All we did was provide a little cross processing to keep them from feeling too washed.
There are only ten images in the slideshow below. The book contains over 100 photographs. Who knows, maybe we’ll pull some more of the pictures from this set the next time our schedule goes nuts on us. In the meantime, enjoy the re-processed pictures and don’t forget to buy that book.