Going In Head First

So last month I wrote a post about moving into 8×10 format which can be seen here. This month I just wish to say that I’m now diving in head first.

I’ve gotten myself an 8×10 Deardorff with a modern lens along with a bunch of the other fixin’s needed to manage this format. Tri-pod, backpack etc. But more importantly, I got a solo exhibition booked at the Duluth Art Institute for sometime in the 2013-2014 winter that I intend to entirely shoot with the BFCamera. So all of you out-of-town people reading this – start planning your vacations now. Northern Minnesota is lovely in the winter.

This is a pretty new, and exciting experience for me. Up until now I’m mostly been shooting haphazardly with no real goal in mind. Dark Winter Nights was the closest I’ve come in the past, but even then if was only through a few three to four-month busts of shooting.

This is going to be at least eighteen months of shooting focused entirely on one project. But that is just to fill the solo show. I have bigger plans which may take even longer, but I’ll shut up about that. I don’t want to be an artist who talks of what he is going to do and then doesn’t follow through for whatever reason. So for now:

1. Big Camera.
2. Grant Writing.
3. Solo Show.

So far so good.

A large amount of the photos I want to take for this project rely on what I like to call stranger crashing. Wander. Find someone I don’t know. Interrupt their life for a few minutes. Sounds simple enough, but for a giant introvert like myself, this requires a great amount of mental energy to overcome pull off. On the bright side though, I think having an actual endgame with is rather creditable has been helping me considerably lately. I went out wondering last weekend and was successfully able to get myself into a few situations with strangers that I know I in the past I would have ended up walking past out of fear. This is good. Like most things in life, I hope it just gets easier with experience.

Until the show

I’ve also been trying to figure out a plan on how to release images before the show, without just posting everything I think has the slightest bit of merit. Last thing I’d want is for someone to go to it, and have seen every image already. I’m going to try to adopt a policy of releasing one teaser image a month, with the requirement that it has to have been exposed the month before. And since the final edit won’t be done until fall 2013, there is even a change nothing I post will actually make the show. I think that could be a slow enough trickle to get some buzz going without ruining everything.

That said. Here is one from January.

See you in March!