Halle’s Smooooth Words o’ Wisdom

…but often, those are the days that are most fun to work outside.

Big thanks to the Miller family for being game and for the Multnomah Falls café au lait.

These portraits of Mert are part of an ongoing project tentatively titled Voices of Et Cetera. The title arose from an NPR story on historian Studs Terkel. My friend Steven D. Lenhart helped make these pictures in Wamic, Oregon and posted a photo and iota from the day on his blog.

Darryl is a longtime Tygh Valley, Oregon local. I photographed him in his garage for my portfolio and to see if a mag would be interested in this subject for an upcoming story on how ‘main st.’ Oregon is faring during these economic doldrums. Greed induced implosion is probably a better description than ‘doldrums’ actually.

When you know in advance that you’re shooting in a large modern art gallery the stress of making an office complex cubicle look interesting fails to manifest. Location means tons in real estate and photography.

For this portrait of Elizabeth Leach I gave myself a challenge before even entering the gallery: I didn’t want to shoot the dealer with any of her current exhibition. The story is after all about the dealer and her business and not necessarily her stable of artists.

The first spot to catch my eye was the storage room with its long tall row of paintings, drawings, and prints that reminded me of photographs of delightfully crowded old school Parisian salons and art galleries.

EJ stood in for some tests and we had things just about right in this one.

For the 2nd shot we used Elizabeth’s ginormous office door with Hap Tivey’s light sculpture maquette in the background.

Ouch! That’s what a first exposure without any tests can look like. To make things look better the gridded spot’s power was dialed down, extra diffusion in the form of a hampshire frost gel was added, the spot was pointed more to the right so as not to hit the wall so much, and EJ took a few steps back to leave the door in the frame.

Senator-elect Merkley was the Democratic candidate when I shot this in late August 2008. The Teamsters hired me to shoot an environmental portrait and group shot of the would be Senator with members of a Teamsters local. The shoot was scheduled in East Portland at the last minute. I couldn’t find an assistant for the day but lucky for me a Teamster at the scene was johnny-on-the-spot and his help made all the difference.