Womanwise 05

05/09/09 23:16 Filed in: Technique

I've known Mariel Brown for several years; a familiarity that doesn't help as much as you might think. What you gain in trust you often lose in perspective and freshness of seeing.
Mariel's space would prove to be more of a challenge than her giddy shyness.

The big picture was something I'd been preplanning (always a mistake), a plan to make use of her video setup to put another “dimension” to the photo. Damn, writing that sounds so fake arty I could puke.

Ramrodding the notion into the reality proved to be daunting. Mariel works with two 20 inch monitors in a space that most ladies would be shy about calling a closet.
Determined, I continue on my quixotic path, jamming the video camera into a corner (losing the plan to show the camera in the shot), wedging a strobe up above it (and forgetting to turn it on), and aiming a small overhead task light so that it would provide the primary light that would allow Mariel to register on the screen via the camera.

The compromises on the shot were iced nicely by the Womanwise page designer, who treated the photo to uneven scaling to make it fit the window of the front page, turning Mariel’s head, normally a pleasing, roughly spheroid shape into a deeply disturbing oblong.
The shot that I didn’t plan worked out just fine. Mariel sat in front of a bank of portable computers being used by her staff to plan the private screening of her new film, stretched her legs out on an empty chair and beamed.

Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery

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