Night shoot

Even though I've been doing a lot of photography work lately as a poorly-paid assistant to The Wife, I haven't actually done any photography for my own amusement in quite some time. That includes work with models or infrared, which is unusual. My work on the Chicken Ranch book, and the Turkey City workshop story took up a lot of time and energy, yes, but shooting the Strutters reunion for Texas State and various wedding events are more to blame, I believe. In light of that, and The Wife's upcoming photoshoots where I'll be a busy assistant but doing little in the way of actual image capture myself, I set about to schedule myself a photo session with an actual, living, breathing model to whom I am unrelated. You know, to shake the rust off and try something new.

To my delight, I was able to book a shoot for next week in Austin with a talented newcomer who, in the space of just one month, has become very much in demand among central Texas glamour photographers. We're going to do an urban night shoot, using the state Capitol building and 6th Street as our backdrops. She has nothing like this in her portfolio, and jumped at the opportunity. The only problem was that I'd never done anything like this, either. And with lighting being one of my weaker areas as far as photography is concerned, well, that's a recipe for disaster.

Enter Dustin Diaz, aka "Lifesaver." Mr. Diaz is a photographer, and a darn fine one at that. What makes him special in this particular context is that he has undertaken one of those 365 challenges, in which he attempts to take a photo every day or the year. Specifically, he's undertaken this challenge as a theme, using off-camera strobe lights in a variety of creative ways (such small flash setups being commonly referred to as "Strobist"), blogging about it, AND POSTING EACH LIGHTING SETUP along with camera and flash settings for each photo. WOW! Now that's what I call dedication. I also call it extremely useful, because although he uses Nikon and I Canon, I've been able to discern enough information to give me a general idea of how to approach this looming night shoot.

But as book smart and street smart are two different things, I knew I'd be a fool to go into the shoot with no practical experience, so last night, after dropping Monkey Girl off at dance practice, I scooted over to downtown New Braunfels for a few proof-of-concept shots. It was too windy to use an umbrella reflector, unfortunately, so I went with a bare flash instead, which gives a harsher light. Using myself as a model was a challenge with focus and setup of the shots, obviously, and the aesthetics weren't too inspiring, either. But I persevered, and came away with several dozen shots that were well-composed with acceptable lighting. I even got confident enough to try a few little tricks, such as using a star filter for a few shots. Here's one of the more interesting results:



I'm pretty confident at this point that I can take some moderately competent single-light night glamour shots, so the shoot won't be for naught. I could do more with multiple strobes--gelling the light for different colors would be very cool--but alas, I'm not capable of that level of creativity yet. Still, I pull this off, I'll have increased my competence as a photographer by one more notch. That's not bad at all.

Now Playing: The Mamas & the Papas 20th Century Masters

Friday Night Videos

Here I was, all ready to treat viewers of Friday Night Videos with the Toyes' notoriously subversive parody of "Monster Mash" titled "Monster Hash" when to my dismay, I discover there isn't a single decent video to that song extant. Not even a tolerable fan video. So if you want "Monster Hash" for Halloween, you'll have to hunt it up on your own. Instead, I'll follow the path of least resistance: Here's Ray Parker, Jr., before Huey Lewis successfully sued him for ripping of "I Want A New Drug," doing his thing with the Ghostbusters theme song:



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Electric Light Orchestra.

Now Playing: The Smithereens 11

Happiness is Turkey City in the rear-view mirror

So, I survived Turkey City. Significantly, I finished "Where the Rubber Meets the Road" Friday with just enough time to print out 11 copies for the workshop participants. On the downside, the story clocked in at 9,000 words--a full 4,000 more than the stated 5,000 word limit--so everyone there exhibited some form of shock and/or horror upon seeing the massive stack of my manuscripts.



I always go into these things with a mixture of hope and dread. Hope, in that the people there will confound my self-doubt and extol the genius in my work. Dread, in that my biggest fear is that they'll ferret out the very inadequacies in my prose that taunt me mercilessly. With "Rubber" I entered the critique particularly exposed, as I'd originally conceived the story as a 5,000-word jaunt and it ballooned on my uncontrollably. It became progressively more difficult to write as the deadline loomed closer, and there was a lot of literary flailing about as I crammed everything but the kitchen sink into it in an attempt to work through various plot and character deficiencies. The ending, in particular, was a mess--not one I wanted, but one I settled for because I couldn't think of a poignant, against-the-grain resolution that satisfied me.

The other writers jumped all over that stuff. It seems that the places I were unsure of myself and story were pretty transparent to the readers. The elements of the story with which I was most confident were the ones that worked best for everyone else. Which makes sense, but is interesting nonetheless. The happiest revelation came in that the bat cave scene--which I'd worried muchly would be derided as tacked-on and out-of-nowhere--proved the most popular sequence in my story. In fact, Bruce Sterling, who so laser-like identified what I was trying to do with my previous Turkey City submission "Europa, Deep and Cold," why I failed and what I needed to do in order to fix it did the same thing here again with "Rubber." This time, he distilled my problems with five straightforward words: "The story ends with guano." Which, in hindsight, makes a whole lot of sense, and lends itself to my desire for a conclusion that finds some measure of victory in failure. Bruce described the story as "a business caper" which hadn't occurred to me, but is true, since the economic element is the whole plot motivator. Chris Nakashima-Brown called it "an Aggie version of Mad Max" which is indeed true, although the only A&M connection is the fact I graduated there. It's more of a Tejano Mad Max, but however you define it, there are Mad Maxian elements in the futuristic dystopia.



Other positive comments focused on the economy and the decaying future I'd constructed for the story. Often, money is a mere MacGuffin, but I succeeded in showing the desperation, the hardscrabble need for it and where the green stuff actually goes. It's a scavenger economy where the deck is stacked heavily against the little guy, but one I succeeded in pulling off, even if one reader remained unconvinced by my underlying assumptions. My story's biggest failings (beyond the universally-reviled ending) were character and motivation. Which I can't argue with. Motivations changed several times as I was writing the piece, and the result is inconsistent at best. That will be a challenge to fix, but it shouldn't be insurmountable.

My biggest problem to tackle is the ending. Using the bat cave as a climax makes sense on many levels--particularly since it got raves because of the tension it evoked. I can't follow that with anything that isn't anti-climactic. But turning that "failure" into an inadvertent win is going to take a lot of work to keep it from coming off as a Deus ex machina or a "Why didn't they just do that years ago and avoid all the crap they just went through?" kind of ending. I guess challenges like this exist for me to prove my salt as a writer.

For anyone who's interested, I published more pictures from the workshop over at the No Fear of the Future blog.

Now Playing: Johnny Cash American IV: The Man Comes Around

Friday Night Videos

I haven't featured Electric Light Orchestra on Friday Night Videos for a while, so here's a goody: "Hold On Tight." The video itself doesn't make a lick of sense in relation to the song, but that doesn't matter, because I'd happily watch all of the fake movies featured therein. "Jungle Lust" is particularly intriguing with all the bizarre anachronisms (not to mention the title) but it's undone somewhat by being in color. Ah well, can't please everyone.



Previously on Friday Night Videos... The Hollies.

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A few errant lines

Apropos of nothing, here's a short exchange from my in-progress Turkey City story, "Where the Rubber Meets the Road." It amuses me far more than it should, so I feel compelled to share.

Lupe lit up a grapevine and blew the harsh smoke out the window in a long, tenuous stream.

"You been smoking the vine a lot, lately," Manny said.

"Can't afford tobacco and dope interferes with my sunny disposition," she answered, braking and swerving enough to avoid a pair of panicked emus running along the concrete median barrier. "You rather I take up drinking on the job?"

Now Playing: Bowling for Soup Drunk Enough to Dance

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Made some good progress on "Where the Rubber Meets the Road" last night, to the point where I have only three scenes left in the story to get down. They're big scenes, though, and I'm doubting my goal of finishing tonight so that I can do a once-over tomorrow is realistic. Wordcount's all screwed up because of my issue with Courier, or lack thereof, so I'm not clear how much I actually wrote. More than a thousand words, certainly.

Two things struck me last night at the end of my writing session. Firstly, I didn't have any legit reference for a particular item's cost in my future economy. I'd just made up a number that suited the story, but that's as far as it went. A bit of research this morning revealed that my "invented" cost was actually very much in line with my background world building. That's nice when it happens. The other thing I learned was that I'm woefully ignorant of a tangential technology that key, though minor, role in the narrative. I knew enough generalities to fool myself into thinking I could fake it-- until it came time to actually write that part. Oops. Hand-waving will have to suffice for now, because time for more thorough research is a luxury I don't have.

Time remaining to Turkey City: Two days.

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What happened to Courier?

Okay, so maybe I'm unobservant. So sue me. I've written a considerable amount in the past year, but for various reasons I haven't paid close attention to word counts and manuscript format. But with the Chicken Ranch sample chapters and the current Turkey City WIP, accurate word counts have suddenly become more relevant.

So tell me, what the hell happened to my Courier font?

Courier, that plain, dull, workhorse font that pretty much every manuscript formatting primer swears by for its uniform character spacing and ease of word-count calculation, has vanished from every single computer I work on. How did this happen? When did this happen? Why did I not notice before now? I first noticed this on my old Dell 4600, my home office PC that I do the vast majority of my writing on (I use Word Perfect to write with, just so you know). A month or so back, I did a complete re-install of Windows XP because of some lingering instability issues, and over the course of several days, re-installed all of the software I normally use. At this point, I noticed that some of my writing--those using the courier font, natch--were showing up with ugly square blocks where the quote marks were to go. If I tried to print, the whole document reverted to "Courier New," an invention of Microsoft's that is over-sized and not a particular favorite of mine.

No problem, I though. I'd simply move the files to my laptop and print from there (the laptop running Windows Vista--not my personal choice, but hey). Lo and behold, no Courier there, either. With growing concern, I pulled out a huge CD set of clip art and font files I keep on hand. No Courier there, either. Nor was plain Courier to be found on my computer at work (which runs MS Word). I'm finding Courier (W1) and Courier PS. There is a whole family of Courier New variations, and also Adobe's Courier Std variants. But no plain, simple Courier.

Did I miss the memo on the planned obsolescence of the Courier font? You folks out there paying more attention to these kinds of things, what are my font options for manuscript formatting?

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