Hands down, this was the hardest shoot. Sadly I don't think it was our best.
Two Saturdays ago when Terry and I were taking one last look at our locations before I got started in the studio we revisited this hill. Once I took out the tape measure I realized that this space was really big and that my plans had to work with such a big expanse. The plan was to make an enormous plaid pattern using copy paper secured with golf tees over a 80 x 70 foot expanse and photograph it repeating across the hill. In order to accomplish this we'd need several hours and several assistants. We had the perfect assistants, and the supplies but time was not on our side.
Each piece of copy had to be put down individually and secured with two golf tees into a hill full of roots and rocks while maintaining the plaid pattern. This was incredibly time consuming since many of the stripes were several pieces of paper wide. We moved down the hill very slowly, not because we were four slow people but because this simply took a long time.Sadly after about an hour and a half we had just barely repeated the pattern once (the plan was two and a half repeats!) and we were losing our light. The piece wasn't close to done and we had to shoot anyway or we'd loose the light.
Here's Terry setting up the camera as the long evenings shadows creep across the plaid. The Iowa painter in me loves the shapes and colors interacting in an abstract way. The part of me that's really invested in the project was cringing at the fact that at this scale the plaid was probably unreadable. The biggest challenge in working on a hill and our biggest concern from the dandelion piece and the impetuous for continuing this project!
I wasn't sure. If I was alone in my studio I'd just erase it and start over. But I wasn't alone in the studio, I wasn't the only artist working here and the light in the trees WAS beautiful. I couldn't just erase and start over. We're working under the constrictions of time, of working on site, having a team of assistants and of course the number of hours of sunlight slipping away from us.
We ended up shooting from a much more extreme angle, letting the plaid go out of the frame of the composition like it would if I were drawing it. The location and light were perfect. I just hope the sculpture is readable.
I should give a shout out to our helpful assistants, all three of whom are recent alumni or students at the school where Terry and I teach. One of the main reasons Terry and are keeping this blog (outside of sharing it with the whole internet) is so we can share our process with the students we teach, so they can gain insight into how we both approach a project. It's fun to be able to include a few of them in our process as well.
This week Terry will be in the think of compositing the photos, color correcting them and editing them. Since we don't share a studio and I'm headed to Chicago for a wedding I won't get my first look until next week. Fingers. Crossed.