Some things are best left unmolested- paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, a perfect ripe fig, Ennio Morricone scores, and mojitos. These days everything is remixed, mashed with something else, fused culturally , dumbed down and f-ed up to accommodate our ever diminishing attention spans and need to consume newness for the sake of new. Movies are remade, and lounge versions of ‘90 death metal circulate at restaurants like elevator music for hip adults . Just try to find a Mojito recipe that isn’t spoiled with white chocolate, peach, cloudberries, or basil to accommodate the creators sense of  creative self worth. It is simple, sometimes things that are good and perfect must be left alone. I don’t want an E-Type Jaguar with those huge and stupid chrome rims, and I don’t want Valrhona chocolate in my summer drink .

THE BEST MOJITO HAS SIX INGREDIENTS.

Here they are:

Cuban Rum, preferably Havana Club dark.

Fresh, washed mint.

White Sugar.

Soda Water. Not San Pellegrino or Perrier, but Soda Water.

Ice, in cubes.

Limes   (thanks Jules)

Add a Tablespoon of sugar to the glass with many sprigs of fresh mint. Use more mint than you think that you need. Smash the hell out of the mint and the sugar with a mortar, or as I like to use a stalk of sugar cane until it is seriously bruised.

Add rum and mix with mint. Use a lot of rum, why screw around with the active ingredient?

Add the ice in cubes. (crushed ice dilutes everything too quickly and is for tourists and dilettantes)

Add soda water to fill, and mix well by pouring in another cup and back again.

It is best to drink Mojitos in Havana while chain-smoking Russian cigarettes, but anywhere hot and humid will do. Do not drink Mojitos in Michigan during the winter, that is like drinking Sake at Thanksgiving – It is pointless, lacks context, and shows the world that you are a Philistine and a poor host.

For the photograph I used a backlit shooting table and a silver reflector to the left, Broncolor strobes, a D3 Nikon and a 100mm Zeiss Makro Planar ZF.2 lens. The photo has real ice cubes, not fake acrylic, and the mojitos were enjoyed after the photoshoot.

farc-ing in Costa Rica

When the Discovery Channel decided to create a documentary about Tom Hargrove’s epic flight from the hands of the FARC militia in Colombia, they made the smart call and filmed the episode in peaceful Costa Rica. The FARC is a bit of a painful and recent memory for the people of Colombia, and parading a film crew and actors dressed as FARC paramilitary in the jungle would be something like dressing up like Klan members for a shoot in Alabama, simply imprudent and possibly hazardous. The production company Cineflix recreated this epic saga of kidnapping and escape, and brought all of the appropriate props, from the AK-47’s to the militant armbands and  enlisted the director Roger Pike for his brilliant eye with the camera and sense of tension. They also hired me to shoot production stills during the filming.

Roger Pike, Director

Tom’s story is pretty well known. The film “Proof of Life” was loosely based on his saga, and Cineflix was to do it justice with an accurate description of what went down during a year in captivity and his eventual escape.

“In September 1994, I was kidnapped on my way to work when I drove into a roadblock manned by FARC–the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or the “narco-guerrillas.” FARC initially demanded a $6 million ransom, and kept me in isolated camps high in the northern Andes Mountains.I spent days locked in a dark cell where I could stand, barely, but couldn`t move around. I spent 2.5 months in chains, and endless days, then months, hoarding scraps of food, building campfires to keep warm, and trying to stay sane. I always harbored an empty hope: that another hostage would be brought in, so I`d have a friend (I learned, after my release, that three other hostages were being held in other parts two of the camps). During 334 days of captivity, I never saw a road, a wheel, a window with glass. I never spoke English, and knew nothing of world events outside the FARC camps.”

-Tom Hargrove

Working as a stills photographer on a set is equal parts boring and amazing.  The crew brought into the Costa Rican jungle a silent generator, enough lighting to ignite a house, a full kitchen, trucks of cameras and gear, a reflector that must have been 5×5 meters, and all of the actors and support crew. The director taught me the best trick for shooting in the jungle- use a polarizer. It cuts the glare off the leaves and makes everything look more lush.

You really have no idea when you watch something on television, how much manpower goes into an hour long program. Watching a kidnapping, even a staged one is eerie, and the actor (the one with the gun on the top of the page) was a brilliant and chill Tico guy that morphed into a raging psychopath as soon as the scene began.

Having hiked in the Colombian jungle for a week a couple of years ago ( another story ) I can understand completely the impossibility of survival there. It is a harsh and formidable place where creation seems unfinished and barbaric. For Tom to manage a year of the deep Colombian jungle in hostile captivity is a testament to human survival through pure will.

The shoot was a blast and I gained a lot of respect for the men and women of the film industry, they really work hard and theirs is a labor of love.

The above video shows a shutter cycle at 1/4000th of a second. As you can see, the shutter never fully opens, just a slit of the front and rear curtains scans the sensor during exposure. Now if you can imagine a flash burst that was faster than this shutter cycle, you can see why you would only see a thin slit in your image. What we are doing with the Broncolor is using a flash duration that is longer than the shutter cycle so that the flash is on during the whole 1/8000 of a second sweep of the shutter.

Color balance is of key concern when taking only a portion of a flash curve. The first part of the curve is quite blue in color temperature, with the temperature gradually getting warmer as the flash burst fades. I used a gray card and took a custom white balance with the settings as follows.

Nikon D3 ISO 1000 F22 @ 1/8000 second.

Sb-800 speedlight on manual 1/16 connected to camera with a duct-taped peanut slave on the front. Pocketwizard sender connected to peanut slave.

Broncolor Mobil at full power 1200 joules, pocketwizard receiver.

Pulso head with gridded beauty dish and bounce reflector.

The above water drops from the top of the page are shot at exactly these settings.

The holy grail of beverage photography is the ability to sync a flash at a high enough speed to stop the liquid, and beverage photographers have been using exotic and expensive lighting to achieve these results. Beverage photographers have traditionally used very high power strobes, dialed to the minimum power settings to create the shortest flash durations. With the advent of the fast flash duration, Profoto and the Broncolor studio packs boast the ability to achive durations as fast as 1/8000 (Broncolor Scoro) of a second, but let’s face it, a Scoro pack is ten grand! Using affordable power packs like a Mobil (any older design budget flash unit with a slow duration should work) the ability to freeze liquid in mid air can be applied by the average photographer with more modest equipment.

The real difficulty in shooting a “pour” is not the flash sync. I found that once the technical part of my flash duration was under control the real problem was getting the liquid to behave in a way that is visually pleasing. Liquids tend to froth and foam, and to counteract that I added a bit of salt to the water above.

For this test of a wine pour, I used a frosted shooting table and a bowl pressed against the back side of the plex to create a pleasing gradient. The procedure of testing this pour trashed my kitchen- wine EVERYWHERE, paper towels on the floor, wine spatter on my lens and camera, clothing- a disaster. The result is still beyond sloppy, and nowhere near what I want, but this is testing right? The key, as in all food photography, is styling. Everything must be perfectly clean and spotless. This is time consuming when you shoot a pour,  the glass and shooting table must be cleaned, the set must be be refreshed, camera refocused, and another pour is attempted. This process repeats many, many times and you wind up with a kitchen soaked with lightly salted red wine. I believe the key is to mount a hose in a place to give a consistent angle of pour and create a system that can be tweeked a little at a time to create the desired result more accurately.

I am in no way finished with my high speed sync testing with beverage pours, there is a long way to go. The beauty of the technique is the ability to see the world in frozen time. Liquids look like they are carved from glass at 1/8000 of a second, it is surreal. I will update this post with finished images of the next test as soon as possible. Let me know if you have any questions, and I will do my best to answer them.

-Sean Davis

Surf & Turf

Sometimes things just work perfectly, the planets align and good fortune smiles upon you. As a food photographer, I am at the mercy of the chef – bad chef = crap photos, no matter what kind of tricky lighting and Photoshop skills you have. A great chef gives you the plate shown here.  Chef Michael Brough from the Four Seasons in Costa Rica created this study in simplicity and perfection, riffing on the classic surf and turf and bringing to the party the finest piece of beef that can be prepared. The meat is cooked sous-vide style, a technique developed by Thomas Keller from the French Laundry. Sous vide cooking involves seasoning and searing the beef, vacuum packing it, and cooking it at a controlled temperature for several hours. The result of all of this is sublime, and superior to conventional cooking methods. In the wake of this recent “molecular cooking” trend, the real winner is sous vide, it is just that superior. I believe that the foams and the sodium alginate pearls will fade away with the standing rib roast of yesterday, but my grandchildren will cook with their meat in vacuum bags.

For the photograph I used natural lighting from the 12:00 position, a gridded strobe in a beauty dish above, a large softbox at 9:00, and a mirror kicking a focused beam of natural light on the face of the beef. Processed from RAW in CS5 and NIK.

Camera: D3 with a Carl Zeiss 100mm ZF.2 Macro Planar.

Lights: Broncolor

Ferenc and István Ivanics in Costa Rica

Ferenc and István Ivanics walk the Earth like Cain from Kung Fu (but without the violence), and three years into their epic 6 year 9000 mile journey they drifted into Costa Rica. I spotted them while I was driving in Villareal and almost wrecked my car rubbernecking, trying to figure out if they were missionaries from a strange cult that tracked UFO’s into the jungle or perhaps something more sinister and bizarre. These are a couple of guys that really stand out, tall, with matching clothes, ZZ- Top beards and homemade digeradoos – and even in an odd place like Tamarindo they definately do not look like our run of the mill tourists or dropout freaks. The next day I approached them on the street and asked them what they were up to. It turns out that they are really warm and funny guys from Hungary that feel compelled to walk, and learn about humanity, life,  and cultures from the road on a mission of peace.  They told me about camping in a desert in Africa that consisted entirely of snail shells as far as the eyes can see, and asked if I knew a local Hungarian woman named Kata. Their blog is a blast, and should definitely be checked out for the humor and open candor about such diverse topics as diarrhea from a three meal a day diet of tacos, random drunken Mexican gunplay, sleeping in a vegetarian insane asylum with the patients, and banking Catch 22’s in Europe. They were booted from Honduras for public begging, and thought to be terrorists by some local Mexicans, although it turns out that looking like a terrorist is better than being a Gringo in parts of rural Mexico. They manage to do this journey with no money (an impressive accomplishment), and they always seem to need new shoes.  I talked them into letting me photograph them in the streets of Tamarindo, and sitting on a broken Jeep next to the beach (irony). When a photographer like me encounters subjects as compelling as these guys, the camera must get involved no matter what, it is just how I interface with the world.

Check out their blog here: http://www.worldwalk-peacetour.blogspot.com/

If any publication wants to do a story on them and needs some decent photos, I will be more than happy to provide high resolution copies for free, whatever helps them on their mission.

When the Ivanics brothers come to your town, give them a place to stay, some food, money, whatever they need and whatever you can spare. Sometimes it seems that with the conquering of space and the climbing of the highest mountains being commonplace these days that there is nothing left to explore, no adventure untapped. Think again. Strip away the transportation of the modern world, regular money, jobs, food, and walk for a few thousand miles with only your wit, balls, and a belief in the decency of humanity, and you will find real adventure. I am happy to have met the brothers Ivanic, thrilled to have photographed them, and envious that I can’t do the same thing. I just can’t imagine what life would be like after such a trip. What can possibly follow that?  Accounting?  Factory work? An office? I think not.  I hope that they become teachers or write a bestselling book.

Good luck Ferenc and István. See you on the other side.

-Sean

Camera: D3 shot RAW

Lens: Zeiss 100mm Zf.2 and Sigma 15-30

Lighting: Broncolor Mobil, Pulso Head & P45 Reflector

On the street in Tamarindo

Relaxing on an abandoned Jeep on the beach

Backpacks in 2 languages

]]> http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/world-walk-peace-tour/feed/ 2 http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/product-shot-guild-nightbird/ http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/product-shot-guild-nightbird/#comments Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:23:28 +0000 admin http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/?p=572 I bought this guitar new in 1988, and every few years I photograph it.  It is a reference for me, a litmus test of lighting and patience, and this shot was a really tough piece of camera work. I set the guitar up on a wooden block on top of some oiled black formica for a background and spent the next couple of hours trying to light it. The thing that must be kept in mind is that you aren’t so much seeing the top of the guitar, you are seeing the reflection of the light on my studio ceiling in Costa Rica. A couple of reflectors complete the lighting setup, and after that a dreamy photoshop effect was added to accentuate the highlights. Depth of field is a serious problem with a shot like this, and nothing that I could do would give me the whole guitar in focus in one shot. When I manage to buy a tilt shift lens in the future, I will photograph it again.

Saint Vivant Armagnac VSOP

I wanted to create the “classic” luxury brandy shot with the golden spot background  and the glow in the bottle. I also need to test a new lens, camera, and lighting, so with some reflectors pilfered from Peter Lippmann and a sheet of glass for shooting I set up the studio and got to work. The lens is special, a Carl Zeiss 100mm f2 manual focus Macro Planar ZF.2, that was somehow converted from its primary role as a Arri motion picture lens to work with a Nikon DSLR. I bought it to shoot products and headshots, and after a couple of days of testing I must say that it is the finest lens that I have ever owned, sharper than my camera sensor and with the best bokeh that I have ever seen for portraits. Everything shot with it just snaps and looks three dimensional, with perfect colors. Amazing.

The camera tested is a Nikon D3, and for this shot I set it to full blast RAW 14 bit. The dynamic range of this camera is awesome, and that can be seen clearly in this product shot filled with sweeping gradients and subtle tones.

Lighting was accomplished with a  Broncolor pack, a Pulso focusing head with a deep gold gel firing at a black card (for the glow), and another head in a socked beauty dish that was modified with black paper to give a linear spectral highlight on the left side of the bottle. The hard part was arranging the reflectors to light the label and make the liquid glow. Photoshop work mostly involved removing pollen from the bottle and glass surface and some mild dickery correcting imperfections in the glass and glow.

The Armagnac with the phallic bottle is, ironically, from Condom France.

Fashion shoot in Costa Rica for a German company selling American westernwear using Swiss and Argentine models. Jesus, the world is getting to be a small place.

We had a great time during the three day shoot despite the blazing sun and heat of Guanacaste.  Location scouting was the key to making Costa Rica look somewhat like West Texas. I found a rodeo arena full of tall grasses, cattle shoots, old wood, and other assorted western themes; and we worked most of the shots within 100 meters of the arena. I talked a nice family into letting us shoot in front of their house and in their yard, and we created quite a stir in this otherwise quiet little town. The models did a great job, and Robert from Stars and Stripes was fantastic to work with.

]]> http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/stars-and-stripes/feed/ 3 http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/product-photography-at-night/ http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/product-photography-at-night/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 01:23:56 +0000 admin http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/?p=482

Click photo to enlarge

I recently had the opportunity to assist the great Parisian product photographer Peter Lippmann while he was on a shoot here in Costa Rica. Peter was contracted to take some interesting product photos of shoes, but in an entirely different way. He chose to photograph the shoes in trees lit by strobe power at night. Assisting Peter is the sports equivalent of being a caddy for Tiger Woods, you shut up and observe, soaking in every detail of his technique and photographic mastery while assisting in the creation of something amazing. It was an experience that I will not soon forget. Peter was great to work for, a real pleasure – simultaneously funny and laser beam focused. I look forward to spending a day in his studio in Paris someday and learning more from him.

Anyone with an interest in great product photography should have a look at his  portfolio here: http://www.peterlippmann.com/

The above photograph illustrates a very simplified version of his technique. I shot it during the dinner of a wedding using strobes and reflectors. It was outside at night so the background is naturally black, perfect for the almost Japanese simplicity of the photo. I used a system of post processing that through the deduction of what I learned from Peter I assume is his method. The look is lightpainted, and I was trying to emulate the effect of a flashlight painting the surfaces of the flowers during a long exposure. Actual lightpainting has a chiaroscuro effect  due to the irregularities in the distance between flashlight and product, and the greatly saturated color of a direct light source. I look forward to more experimentation of this technique as I believe that it can create a breathtaking effect for interior photographs and landscapes.

]]> http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/product-photography-at-night/feed/ 0 http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/la-guajira-colombia/ http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/la-guajira-colombia/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:30:03 +0000 admin http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/?p=346

Healing Shells and Potions

Our Hostess

Shipwreck

Goat Leg Lunch

This is the end of the world, a place so beautiful and desolate, forsaken by God and government in the middle of nowhere Colombia on the coast bordering Venezuela. The Lonely Planet guidebook that we were using for travel information ended paradoxically hundreds of kilometers away from here, giving this place that special travel mystique that is hard to find in these days of accessible tourism. Getting to Cabo de la Vela was a bitch. Helene and I stopped at a crossroads dotted by a few food merchants where the bus line dropped us off  before it continued en route to Venezuela. This is the desert, the real outback of Colombia, with an Indigenous population living further off the grid than I could begin to imagine. Passage to Cabo de la Vela was to be made in the back of a pickup truck that served as a taxi, covered with a tarp to ward off the brutal sun, and filled with 23 Wayuu Indians and a live goat that was hogtied and shrieking randomly. If you have never traveled with a hogtied goat, you will not understand the eerily human-like sounds that it produces when frightened. It sounds something like an abused child with Down’s Syndrome crying in panic, and the sound is deeply disturbing. There was no room in the pickup, we were packed and stacked like cordwood as we bumped along the endless rutted dirt road towards the sea that never seemed to get any closer. I am a tall man, 6′2” plus pack, and I was doubled over and compressed for the length of the journey. We passed through small Wayuu villages  to pick up and drop off the passengers. It seems impossible that these people should be able to survive in these conditions, the villages are just a few huts made of found material and trash, with makeshift roofs, no windows, nailed together somehow to protect the people from the brutal and impossible desert. What these people do for survival and sustenance evades me. There is no water or electricity. There is no farmable land, no infrastructure, access to education, churches, nothing, just goats and Indians clawing away at the barren land in an unholy symbiosis of mutually dependent survival. I believe that goat must be on the menu every night, as I simply could not see anything else to eat other than weeds and rocks.

After what seemed like hours the sky began to change to a deeper blue and we knew that the sea was close. Cabo de la Vela is a tourist destination of sorts. It is home to a kind of mutant spring break for young Colombians that come to this seaside desert and party like hell for a week and then depart to a more fertile and hospitable home elsewhere. The only industry in this region is a coal mine far away. The Indians that live here are a mix of local Indigenous mixed with Islamic pilgrims from somewhere that must have been hellish enough to prompt a move to this desolate and lost outpost. The town of Cabo consists of small houses made of sticks from a scrawny local tree, a couple of dilapidated concrete buildings, a radio tower, and not much more. There was an infestation of mosquitos that week that was unusual, and no one in town was in any way prepared to deal with the sleepless nights that a sudden and unexpected mosquito plague brings. Everyone was swatting bugs all night, and Cabo has no electricity of running water so that means no fans, no bed coverage because of the intense heat, no repellant for hundreds of miles, no relief from the biting torment. There was also, confusingly, no place to sleep on a budget. There were thatch rooms for rent on the beach at $40 per night and no one would budge on the price despite the town being utterly devoid of tourism. This price was well beyond our budget considering that we were living on a couple of dollars a day the week before, fishing and eating coconuts on a desolate beach near Santa Marta. In town, we found a hamburger stand with a generator and some Latin boombox music, and asked about a place to stay while eating a sad hamburger on a stale bun. The proprietor mentioned that we could pitch out tent at her house, she had a water tank, but her generator at home was broken. It woud be $10 a day. It would do.

Her family was lovely. All of us laughed and spoke of the world, we asked questions about life in Cabo. It seems that she and her husband had wanted out, away from people, society, everything, and had moved to Cabo and built a simple house and lived a simple and happy life. I could relate in every way, as I have always felt like I was carrying  a crushing weight when I lived in the States and needed to flee and be far away from what I had always considered to be ever-widening circles of meaningless, soul crushing activity. Later that morning we bought a freshly killed goat leg from a dirty truck, no wrapping, no refrigeration. They just handed us a goat leg with the fresh blood still dripping. Our hostess hung it on a hook next to the house that was out of the sun, and I watched the flies begin land on our lunch. She cooked it well, and we ate with the family for lunch with beans and rice. The next day, across the street in a makeshift hut church, I saw a full blown Penecostal Baptism of the holy spirit complete with speaking in tongues, wild gesticulation, crying and praises to Jesus. It was surreal. The Indians in this hellish place, without sleep from swarms of mosquitos were engaging in this most bizarre American sect of Christianity, gibbering away in unknown dialects and asking God for a mercy that he had surely forgotten to grant eons ago. I suppose whatever mission reaches a place first wins the hearts and minds. Here it was the Pentecostals. Later I went to a local store to buy some potable water in a plastic bag and some ice when a small naked child shit on the floor. It seemed strangely natural. His mother was a teenager and seemed ill prepared for motherhood, as I am sure was her mother before her and so on. With no electricity or water, there is not a lot of activities that are non carnal. Screwing is free, or at least free for nine months.

After a long walk on the beach we went to a small voodoo type shop in the town perimeter to check it out. It sold mostly shark based products, skins and oil, turtle shells and bones. Beasts with large power are to be consumed and ingested to transfer their energy to powerless people. The Chinese have been at this for millennia and it looked like the Indians had been practicing this for quite a long time as well. Everything had a purpose here, shark oil for some ailments, ground turtle shell for something else. There were bottles of snakes in liquid for God knows what. I found Cabo to be beautiful in a strange way. Helene and I sat on the beach and watched fisherman catch baitfish with nets in primitive boats while oil tankers drifted by from Venezuela to Northward destinations full of the precious cargo that powers the civilized world. La Guajira is not the civilized world, not by a stretch. It is wild and untamed, savage and brutal. The light here is striking,  laser sharp, and the buildings made of cement crumbling in disrepair have an apocalyptic beauty in the afternoon with the sun at the perfect angle of illumination. The lone concrete church looks like a weapon, some horror designed in the futuristic ’70’s that is an architectural model of fear and control. Our vision of architecture in retrospect is crystal clear, but like propaganda, it can’t really be noticed for what it is until years later.

I really loved my days in Cabo. I will never return, but I am glad that I went. The people are tough, the landscape is brutal, the life is impossible. It is a beautiful place, interesting in so many ways. I was an outsider like I have never felt before. I could have landed from a spacecraft and felt more connected to humanity. La Guajira is the end of the world, but it is a good place to be for a while. When we travel, we consume difference; that is the point and that is why we leave our comfort in search of the unknown. La Guajira is a lot of difference to consume, but as any exotic travel the learning is the reward.

Helene and our Taxi

Typical Home Construction

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