Crabapple Cove Nursery, Oakville, MO, by Erik Lunsford

Lucked out in the standalone search, actually within a few minutes of starting my shift for the day. Love the name of the nursery and the friendly staff who let me join their hard work unloading a spring shipment of plants. Karma will now see to it that I strike out in the feature hunt tomorrow.

The womens’ fashion shoot that I alluded to in a previous post just published, capping off the summer fashions just in time for July 4th. It comes as a perfect time as my features beat rotation at the paper wanes back into general assignment work.  This year we chose to work at the Ritz-Carlton St. Louis, which worked out very well with a good blend of great locations and a super-friendly staff. Usually it’s a push-pull game of access and permissions for shoots — not the Ritz — they were fantastic and kept things super smooth. While we had several locations, here are two that standout for me. For this photo, I had our model lay on one of the booths at the hotel restaurant and lit her with a bare bulb on a strobe perched high above my position. Bouncing the light into the ceiling and a large mirror above the booth gave the whole scene a “cold light” feel which contrasts against the dark leather texture of the seats. On the other hand, the photo below was a bit more complicated. I had to shoot through a thick window in the fitness center overlooking the western side of the hotel during a specific time in the afternoon when the shadows fell perfectly on the room balconies. To light the photograph,  I used an Alien Bees Beauty Dish mounted high and on my left, shooting through an adjacent window. Next to it was a second strobe on a reflector giving things an extra punch of light. Inside the hotel room was a pair of two lights on softboxes painting the interior and windows. The goal was to shoot a “white hot” feel to the room and clothes without sacrificing too much detail in the clothes and sky. One of the quirky consequences of this composition and location was the rather odd South Florida feel to it — maybe it’s the stucco-like look of the front, the curvature of the balconies, and the sweeping vista of rooms that lends itself more to Miami than St. Louis. Either way, the graphic feel of the entire image kept me coming back.

Recently I visited a river resort along the Courtois Creek in central Missouri while working on a story about tourism, and as I sidled up to a small beachhead I noticed a man diving from a rock into the clear and cool waters. I stopped and made a quick frame; waited for a second jump, then made a few more frames. Each time I worked closer to the rock, each time analyzing the previous frames and thinking about my next move.  Later when I looked through the raw take, this frame jumped off the monitor. It was the first frame, made absent of thought. The mood, the fragile separation between the man’s hands and the water, the subtle tilt in composition to carry the bottom canoe, and the delicate balance of light and dark tones seemed to meet at a confluence of which I can’t seem to recall. It may not be the greatest frame ever — although I tend to produce very quiet pictures — yet it speaks to me, and it’s a great reminder to keep thinking and analyzing down to a minimum while making pictures. Let yourself go and explore with your eye, not your mind.