On Jun 7, 2013, at 10:39 AM, Randy Little wrote:
Sometime in the late-1960’s, a LIFE magazine photographer named Charlie Phillips taught me about black velvet. He was shooting an electronic art show at the Smithsonian and he had me as an assistant. The show was mainly about lights, and Charlie used black velvet to hide things he wanted to not show while a lighted section was pumping out colored strobe light. Sometime after 1980 I discovered (I didn’t invent this, but I discovered it for myself to use) that I could put a dark slide in the film holder and simply remove the camera back and take the whole assembly to another camera set up to see another view in a much more precise move than by simply moving the film holder. I was using an Arca-Swiss and I had two of them - a 4x5 and an 8x10 with a reducing back. Moving the film from the boom-box to the background was a moderately stress-free task, especially after pulling about 20 sheets of Polaroid. For this shoot I had a great assistant who flew in to visit (on the way to Israel with 300 rolls of Kodachrome) just prior to the shoot. Steve Epstein had a sixth sense about bringing Polaroids at the right time. Without his expertise and care I would have gone crazier. The half-round moon was on a dowel put through a sheet of white translucent Plexi and artfully draped with black velvet during various exposures. Someplace I have the production shots and I will try to find one and post it in the gallery. The moon was multi-popped, as was the plexi sheet with the multi-colored filters on another sheet five inches behind the first for maximum blur and color covered with large cut filters on the back. All told it was more than 48 pops complete with moving film into two different cameras. One saw the road and boom-box/boots combo and the other saw the black velvet and the moon-sky setup. It was shot on Fuji Velveeta, which meant along with the other shots, we had to bracket on every combination. It took 30 sheets to get it right. Art Faul The Artist Formerly Known as Prints ------ Stills That Move: http://www.artfaul.com Greens: http://www.inkjetprince.com Camera Works - The Washington Post . |
