The Blog

De’mone Heller by RC Concepcion

This past Sunday I was doing a meetup with my local meetup group, and we designed this contest where people would break out into teams and work with a model for a few hours. Afterwards, we would all meet up at the Dave Cross Workshops studio to do some post processing, nosh on some Pizza, and then submit 3 per team. 7 teams, 5 people per – 35 people total submitting 21 images. From there, we would do critiques and just talk about the experience. That was incredibly fun to do.

While everyone was working on their images, there was someone in the group that was frustrated with their SB600 flash. It seemed like one of them worked, but the other one did not. They were using a D300 camera, a Tokina 17-50 (from what it looked like), and overall just not digging what they were doing. I looked over the camera and the flashes to see that they were ok.. but in the process of it wanted to see if I could just figure a shot with it. I guess I felt like there was a general feeling of this gear sort of letting a person down, and that better/different gear would produce a better image.

Seeing in Music
I asked De’Mone (a model who was hanging out waiting for Pizza) to go over to one of the sets Dave has setup. Most of the times, I tend to think in music.. if that makes any sense. Weirdly, I saw this “I’ve Been Loving You” Otis Redding meets “Dreaming” by Amos Lee vibe and wanted to see if I could get it to work. In about 5 minutes, we had two poses done, and I handed the camera back to the person.

The Voices In My Head
For me, I absolutely love the internal challenge that goes off in my head. I saw the wall, and saw De’mone. I didn’t have any camera with me as I was just there to help. But man, oh man.. I wanted to get that shot. I’d shoot it with anything if I had to. So to be able to get the shot in just a couple of minutes with a ‘lesser’ (her opinion.. not mine) camera, was even cooler…

It’s The Arrows
One of the things that makes me really inspired in what I do for a living is that I wake up every day and try to break through the clutter. I love being able to just be able to talk through the technology and get down to what really matters.. taking the picture. In the end, here’s a person that totally thought that a new X would solve all of the problems.. and all we need to do is sit down and show how -this- rig works just fine. A photography buddy of mine once said to me “It’s not the arrows, its the Indian” – and I totally think that this holds true.