Thursday, September 6, 2012

Vietnam Woman

This imabe was used by both Nikon and Epson, Nikon in an article about the D300 and Epson as a print sample that comes with several of their printers. What took me first was what is now the background of this image.

The Image Tale

"The way I approach photography is not to take pictures, but rather be taken by an image. If I have any rules of composition that I follow, besides simply being taken by my photographs, they are:
  • if it looks cool-take a picture of it
  • a still photograph is called a still photograph because the objects in the picture are not in motion – the mission is to capture motion with stillness
  • be taken by an image, do not take the image
  • find the stage and the players will come
  • the background is as important as the subject
  • a photograph is more about the quality of it’s blur, the “bokeh”, than it is about the point of focus.
To be perfectly honest the only thing that was going through my mind the moments before I captured this image was “wow…. look how cool the crumbling wall and scuffed up tiles look… whoa…”. This means that the consideration of “if it looks cool take a picture of it” is now at play. So what happens next is I put my tripod down, set my camera on top of my tripod, and move the tripod around until I get a “framing” that is “whoa…. cool…”. Notice how the tiles are angled, how the red line at the right bottom corner of the image moves at an angle, how the bicycle moves from the edge into the center and how the colors, specifically the rich blues and mustard yellow, work in concert with each other. There’s just one thing missing – something interesting happening in the image. I have the stage…
What I have is a too plain interesting plainness. It’s really nothing – then BAM! The moment of extreme gesture that is perfectly balanced in my framing happens – a woman enters. Following what is the core basis of how I photograph, which is a belief that with absolute spontaneity you get absolute truth. You can only be one way if you are spontaneous and that’s truthful. I never pose or stage a subject. I just frame a stage for the interplay of life to walk on to."


This image was taken during my Palm Beach Photographic Centre's Vietnam workshop and was captured with a Nikon D300 with a 70-210mmD series lens.

All images post processed with captureNX2, and Photoshop CS4 using NiK Color Efex Pr 3 plugins, Shot on Lexar 32 gigabyte UDMA Flash media.

Final file is stored and scaled using Genuine Fractals.

© Vincent Versace 2012

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