Anonymous Vernacular

I’ve been feeling under the weather lately and since it was respiratory I have mothballed the 11×14 until I’m feeling better. My tolerance for fixer fumes are very low and if I work without covering the tray I can quickly develop a cough–and that’s when I’m 100%–so I’m staying away from shooting paper negatives for a couple of weeks.

The shot above is for a show that’s opening on April 20th at the Cora Stafford Gallery on the University of North Texas campus. The environment is the show’s theme so I wanted to try and raise some awareness about the dangers of motor oil. The title of the piece “one cup, one acre” references how it only takes one cup of motor oil to add an oil sheen to a one acre pond. Please dispose of your used motor oil appropriately! This hits quite close to home as I walk my dog Maia around a pond multiple times of day and we both enjoy the wildlife that makes the pond its home. My initial thought was to make photographs out at the lake, but as I’m only allowed one image for the show I decided to go with something a little slicker that might have more impact on the gallery wall.

This image was made entirely in the camera (well, except cropping down from 16″ x 24″ to 16″ x 20″ which is the way I imagined it) by placing a sheet of plate glass on a softbox mounted to an Alien Bees B800 monolight pointed straight up. Then I buttressed the light so it wouldn’t rock around if I bumped it and placed the plastic cup containing one cup of oil on the forward edge of the glass. This is so the line from the edge of the glass wouldn’t appear in the frame. This setup would normally have lost a lot of the detail in the plastic cup, but I brought some back in by taping a long piece of black plastic to the nape of my neck and then holding it out over the cup forming a bridge of black over the cup. The black plastic nicely brought some tone back into the ridges of the plastic. Finally, by exposing to just blow out the light at the base of the cup (the part of the softbox closest to me) the light falloff from the far side of the softbox (the top of the frame) creates a gentle gradient to pull the eye back down to the cup.

This image is 16″ x 20″ matted to 20″ x 28″ in a dark wood frame.

Camera: Canon 1ds Mk2n

Lens: Nikkor 50mm f/1.2

Exposure: 1/125th @ f/11