mcmullen-smith's photostream

A tear sheet of the full page article in the June Chronogram about Dzul Dance featuring my photo.

Taken in the studio entirely on film (smoke was added in photoshop but all film). Taken with Mamiya 645, Kodak Portra 400. Light setup; Alien Bees AB800 with standard reflector as key, AB800 with grid as rim light behind models to camera right and a speedotron pack with one head bounced into a v-flat on the left.

Over the past year I have been developing the Smoke series, inspired by the fantasy of fashion photography, the movement of dance and the grace of the human form.

Please visit the Smoke micro-site, mcmullensmith.com/smoke or my full website for more photos and information.

Both models were shot in studio, on separate dates. Two lights were used, one alien bees ab800 as the main light, most likely with a standard reflector and a second ab 800 with a grid as the back light. I may have used a white v-flat on the female model. The night shot was taken with a Mamiya 645 with Kodak Portra 400 film, a 4 second exposure at around 2 int he morning. Smoke was shot using an incense cone atop a plexiglass sheet on top of a stockpot with a Nikon sb800 set as a remote shooting up. The on-camera flash of my Fujifilm S5pro or a SB-24 on my Mamiya 645 triggered the SB-800.

This is a composite of around 5 or 6 images.

I don't have a means of scanning my polaroid 55 negatives directly so I made some palladium contact prints which I then scanned.

This was amongst my first attempts at palladium printing and using polaroid 55.

Promotional shot for Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire which will be featured in the Fringe Festival in NYC this summer. The concept of Blanche drowning in a sea of Mardi Gras beads came from Mark Sam Rosenthal the writer and star of the play. He assured me he had a whole box of beads but when the day came to shoot we realized there was maybe a third of the beads left. The director, Todd Parmley, and I figured constructed a platform for the beads out of black foam core placed on three saw horses and made a whole and flap system so Mark Sam could get in and out easily. We draped black fabric with a whole over Mark Sam and arranged the beads the best we could so that there was enough density and spread to fill the frame.
The lighting went through a few revisions and in the end wound up being a variation on a clam shell setup with one large softbox on an ab800 behind Mark Sam and another soft box on a m11 head connected to a speedotron 1604 pack to camera right and just a little below my vantage point on a ten foot ladder. The final photograph is a composition of seven different shots. One of Mark Sam's head emerging from the beads, one of the hand reaching out and five different shots of beads we took without Mark Sam.

When I figure out where I put the cable for my P&S I will post a setup shot for the curious.

*I uploaded an edited version of the photo so more people could view it safely*
I did a shoot the other day exploring fabrics and figures again. I had a vision in mind but the fabric I chose wasn't draping as I had hoped. I still got some great photos which inspired a much different final image.

The fabric was hung from a boom above the model. Light was one head with a medium softbox on a boom basically high above my head), speedotron 1604 pack at half power. Two black v-flats on either side and white seamless paper. The smoke was shot with a sb-24 and a sb-800 on either and to the back of the smoke against black seamless. Two v-flats were used to block the flash. I layered, inverted and blended the smoke in PS.