Fram­ing in pho­tog­ra­phy — Pho­tog­ra­phy Pod­cast #10

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This is an audio tran­scrip­tion — Spelling, punc­tu­a­tion and gram­mer may not be per­fect
Marko Kulik:                         Hi there every­one and wel­come to the Pho­tog­ra­phy Pod­cast on Photography.ca.  My name is Marko.  We are com­ing to you from Mon­treal, Que­bec, Canada.  Today is Jan­u­ary 18, 2007.  For today’s show, we are lucky enough to be doing an inter­view with Ann Dahlgren.  Ann Dahlgren along with her hus­band, Dou­glas Foulke, put together this fan­tas­tic book called A Fairy’s Child.  I was lucky enough to come across this book a few years back in New York.  I love the­atri­cal pho­tog­ra­phy and I love mytho­log­i­cal por­traits and pho­tographs, so this is going to be a really, really fun inter­view espe­cially for me and I hope for you, too.  Rather than just talk about it, let us get into it now.
So, I would very much like to wel­come, Ann Dahlgren today.  Ann Dahlgren is a fine art pho­tog­ra­pher and author of the book A Fairy’s Child that she did with her hus­band, Dou­glas Foulke, who is also a fine art photographer.  He is hang­ing around closely and maybe will be able to hear from him dur­ing this inter­view, but we def­i­nitely love to get a feel for this book called A Fairy’s Child, which is just a won­der­ful, won­der­ful piece of what I might call the­atri­cal photography.  Hi there, Ann.  Can you tell us a lit­tle bit about your book?
Ann Dahlgren:                      Hi, Marko.  Well, as you said, the book is called A Fairy’s Child.  It is an explo­ration of fairies and some pretty fan­tas­tic environment.  Basi­cally, the book started as just an idea for Doug and I to do a fun pho­to­graph of a fairy.
Marko Kulik:                         Then how did it evolve into a full-on book?
Ann Dahlgren:                      The idea actu­ally started on a com­mer­cial shoot that we were on in Florida and this art direc­tor we were work­ing with started telling us about this island off the coast of Maine where peo­ple build lit­tle fairy houses.  We thought, “Well, that’s pretty cool.“  We have never heard of any­thing like that before and so, we just started brain­storm­ing about the pos­si­bil­ity of actu­ally mak­ing a pho­to­graph of a fairy that looked real, but yet was mys­te­ri­ous and ethe­real and all the things that we love about pho­to­graph.  Basi­cally, it started out with us pro­duc­ing one pho­to­graph and from there it just kind of led to another, which led to another, which led to another. At some point I guess after we had maybe 20 or 30 fin­ished prints, we thought, “Well, maybe we can make this into a book.“  So, that is how it started.
Marko Kulik:                         How long did it take to pho­to­graph all the pho­tographs?
Ann Dahlgren:                      We basi­cally did it on our free time, in between what we do commercially.  So, we worked on it I think over a period of four to maybe five years.
Marko Kulik:                         Four to five years.  Okay.  Where did you find the children?  Were they local chil­dren, were they rel­a­tives, were they actors?
Ann Dahlgren:                      They were everything.  Basi­cally, 90% of our com­mer­cial work is on loca­tion, so every time that we were some place and we came across some really inter­est­ing loca­tion, we would then plan to either go back or else stay after our com­mer­cial shoot to actu­ally do the pho­to­graph for the book.  So, some­times we would do a cast­ing locally to find some mod­els, other times they were friends of friends or fam­ily members.  It kind of was what­ever, wher­ever we could find some­body that fit our idea of our lit­tle fairy.
Marko Kulik:                         For those lis­ten­ers that have not found this book yet, I am going to be putting some links to Ann and Doug’s site, so hope­fully you might be able to find it through there and see extra pic­tures, but I just wanted to tell peo­ple that I was actu­ally blown away when I found this book, wan­der­ing through SoHo about two years ago.  I per­son­ally love the­atri­cal photography.  I love mytho­log­i­cal images.  I love fairies and it was just an absolute treat to find this book in a lit­tle bookstore.  So, if there are still books avail­able, I highly rec­om­mend search­ing for them and get­ting your hands on them.  I will put one or two on our site just so you could see what we are talk­ing about and then you can check out Ann and Doug’s site after that.  I would like to ask you, Ann.  What is your per­sonal con­nec­tion to fairies?  Is it a sub­ject mat­ter that has inter­ested you all along?  Is it a rel­a­tively new thing?
Ann Dahlgren:                      No.  I am not the type of per­son who has pro­fessed to have seen fairies in real life or any­thing like that although we have found that there are peo­ple like that out there.  We have got­ten quite inter­est­ing e-mails from peo­ple that have dis­cov­ered our book and we have found that there is a whole world out there, fairy lovers.  No.  It just sounded like a chal­leng­ing and fun sub­ject mat­ter to try to cre­ate these photographs.  So, I would not say that I have any par­tic­u­lar con­nec­tion with fairies.
Marko Kulik:                         Okay.  Okay.  Well, it is too bad.  I am sure a few peo­ple would have loved to hear the oppo­site, but…
Ann Dahlgren:                      I know.  I know.
Marko Kulik:                         It is all good.  I have no per­sonal con­nec­tion to them myself.  I just love the way they look from my childhood.  So, I am just curi­ous, do you both pho­to­graph at the same time?
Ann Dahlgren:                      Well, sometimes.  Usu­ally what we will do is when we are pro­duc­ing a shoot, I would work a lot on the cos­tume, the make-up, get­ting the kids out­fit­ted, then their ears and their wings and all that entailed.  We would talk about dif­fer­ent cam­eras and films that we are going to be using and usu­ally Doug would start shoot­ing and then I would shoot some.  A lot of times, we would have sev­eral dif­fer­ent cam­eras with dif­fer­ent films loaded, so he could pick up one and I could pick up another and we could direct the child in what­ever way we felt was the right way to go.
Marko Kulik:                         So, it is totally a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort then.  You guys just work on all these projects absolutely together.
Ann Dahlgren:                      Yes.
Marko Kulik:                         Excellent.  Excellent.  So, I would like to always ask, what was your first camera?  How did you get into pho­tog­ra­phy?
Ann Dahlgren:                      Well, for myself, it started back in camp.  So, I was prob­a­bly 10 and we had a lit­tle dark­room at the camp that I went to and that was where I took my first pho­to­graph and processed and printed my first print.  I know for Doug, it started with him at prep school.  His story is, he was told that he should take pho­tog­ra­phy because he could smoke in the darkroom.  That is where it started with him.
Marko Kulik:                         Is he still smok­ing in the dark room?
Ann Dahlgren:                      I do not think so.
Marko Kulik:                         Well, good, good, good.  Very nice.  Very nice.  For the tech kids out there, they are going to won­der how these pho­tographs were created.  The first thing that will prob­a­bly come to mind for a lot of peo­ple is going to be Pho­to­shop, but I am not con­vinced that is the case.  Can you give us a lit­tle insight into how these pho­tographs were cre­ated?
Ann Dahlgren:                      Sure.  All of them were cre­ated using tra­di­tional black and white film.  Most of the times, we would shoot with T-Max 100 or 400 and Kodak infrared film.  We were lucky enough to have put a dark­room into our house, so we would come home after the shoot and process and make prints of what we had just shot and then work from there.  So, pretty much 98% of what you will see in the pho­to­graph was actu­ally there.  We had a spe­cial effects make-up artist make some pros­thetic ears for us.  We had a cos­tume designer who make us a set of wings and then from there, we basi­cally started mak­ing our own cos­tumes, our own wings and things like that, but over time of trav­el­ing with these things and tak­ing the ears on and off, all these kids, they started to dis­in­te­grate and we even­tu­ally had to have more ears made.  Towards the very end of the book, when we were kind of on a dead­line with our pub­lisher to bring in, I do not know, a cer­tain amount of images, the wings really were trashed at that point.  So, we started exper­i­ment­ing with pho­tograph­ing insect wings pri­mar­ily cicada and but­ter­fly wings and then putting those on to the last images that we had shot in postproduction.  So, really, that is the only Pho­to­shop that we really used.  It really was not until the end of the book process that we started uti­liz­ing Pho­to­shop.
Marko Kulik:                         Very, very interesting.  So, really these kids are against real backgrounds.  The back­grounds that you are going to see in all the pho­tographs, those were the back­grounds on loca­tion?
Ann Dahlgren:                      Yes, definitely.  Like I said before, when we would go on loca­tion and we would find these inter­est­ing spots, that is when we decide, “Okay.  This is our next loca­tion” and we would go back and pro­duce the shoot.  We shot a lot in West­ern Florida where the Banyan trees are.  Actu­ally, our very first shoot was in the Sara­sota, Florida region and just the way that the Banyan trees grow, it is pretty fantastic.  So, we started with that.  We have shot in loca­tions in Cal­i­for­nia, Col­orado, New York, kind of wher­ever we found a spot that spoke to us.
Marko Kulik:                         For cer­tain of the images, it looks as though the chil­dren are fly­ing almost or one in par­tic­u­lar that I have the lux­ury of look­ing at right now, one of the chil­dren looked almost sus­pended or flying.  How would that have been accom­plished?
Ann Dahlgren:                      Well, she went flying.  We did a few shoots in the stu­dio and one par­tic­u­lar shoot that we knew we wanted to do was to actu­ally have a fairy flying.  So, we hired a rig­ger or a grip per­son from the movie indus­try to come into the stu­dio and set up this whole har­ness sys­tem where we could actu­ally fly her.  I think the shot that you are prob­a­bly look­ing at has two fairies in it.
Marko Kulik:                         Yes, it is.
Ann Dahlgren:                      Basi­cally, we designed the set in the stu­dio and then we had the two girls take turns in the har­ness, fly­ing.
Marko Kulik:                         Fantastic.  If you are going to attempt this today, would you go more Pho­to­shop or would you still try and do it the tra­di­tional way?
Ann Dahlgren:                      I think now since we do use Pho­to­shop every­day in what we do, we prob­a­bly would uti­lize Pho­to­shop a lot more.  It just was not some­thing that we were using on a daily basis at all back when we started this project.  I think we started it in 1997.  So, every­thing we did was on film in there.
Marko Kulik:                         Okay.  Again, we keep hear­ing this all the time, Pho­to­shop has become a pretty impor­tant tool for pho­tog­ra­phers these days and we are using more tools.  It is just a tool that we can use instead of hir­ing a rig­ger, let us say, to have some­one fly.
Ann Dahlgren:                      Right.  It def­i­nitely cost us a lot more money to actu­ally pro­duce the pho­tographs the way that we did, but that was the way that we went about it.  We did not really think about doing it any other way at that time.
Marko Kulik:                         As an artist, for you, is it more sat­is­fy­ing to have done it the old fash­ion way?
Ann Dahlgren:                      Sure.  It was just so excit­ing to be able to have a vision and put it all together, go to a loca­tion, make it hap­pen, bring the fog machine and the whole deal and come back and have on film what we really imag­ined was there ver­sus sit­ting in front of a com­puter and mak­ing it hap­pen.
Marko Kulik:                         Right.  Right.
Ann Dahlgren:                      Yeah.  I think there was a sense of accom­plish­ment def­i­nitely after all the work that we went through.
Marko Kulik:                         A well-deserved feel­ing of accomplishment.  On another tech­ni­cal level, I am curi­ous actually.  I noticed some of the pic­tures are quite soft, which really adds to the mood effect.  Were you using soft focus fil­ters as well or was that done in the printing?  How was some of the soft­ness achieved on the pho­tographs?
Ann Dahlgren:                      Well, it was done both with fil­ters, with par­tic­u­lar lenses and also dif­fus­ing again in the darkroom.  I know in some of the pho­tographs, we used an old lens that Doug had which is an old Imagon por­trait lens.  It just had this won­der­ful qual­ity of hav­ing a very min­i­mal amount of focus to it.  So, that was over dif­fer­ent lens put on the cam­era, but yeah, we would shoot with softer fil­ters and dif­fuse again in the dark­room.
Marko Kulik:                         For good effect, for absolutely good effect.  Are you going to be doing any other the­atri­cal style themes or con­cepts in the next lit­tle while or do you have projects sim­i­lar in nature for the near future?
Ann Dahlgren:                      We do not have any­thing in the works at the moment.  We have thought about it.  We have a lot of images that we played with in the process of this book that were edited out in the process of our pub­lisher want­ing a cer­tain look to the book.  For instance, we pho­to­graph a lot of old peo­ple to make it a lit­tle bit more of a scary, edgy field to it and we did a whole sec­tion of under­wa­ter pho­tographs where we actu­ally have the fairies in the pool and we were down there with them, with scuba tanks and pho­tograph­ing them under the water.  So, there is poten­tial for another aspect to this whole fairy project that we would love to con­tinue with, we just have not had the time recently.
Marko Kulik:                         Well, when you do have it done, please think of me.  I def­i­nitely want a copy.
Ann Dahlgren:                      Okay.
Marko Kulik:                         For those peo­ple who are going to be intrigued by this book, is it still available?  How can they get their hands on it?  Can they get their hands on it?
Ann Dahlgren:                      Well, at this point, we just were informed that the first print­ing, which was 10,000 copies, is sold out.  In fact, we only actu­ally have two copies I think as our own.  So, we are wait­ing to hear back if Abrams is going to do another printing.  If they do not, then we will have the option to try to take that some place else to have another print­ing done.  So, hope­fully, we will keep it out there.  At this point, your guess is as good as mine of where to find them.
Marko Kulik:                         Okay.  At least for now though I guess thank good­ness for web­sites, peo­ple who want to see some of these images, I know there is a lot of them avail­able at anndahlgren.com.  I am going to put that in the show notes.  Ann Dahlgren is spelled A-n-n D-a-h-l-g-r-e-n, anndahlgren.com if peo­ple want to go directly, but I will put the link in the show notes as well and I believe Ann has allowed me to put a cou­ple of the images on my blog to intrigue you to go to her site because it is also a fan­tas­tic site with a lot of images left from the book.
Ann Dahlgren:                      Right.  The direct link to the fairy web­site is afairyschild.com or you can go directly to the book web­site also, which has a short lit­tle flash movie with some images from the book.
Marko Kulik:                         I am going to put that link in the show notes as well.
Ann Dahlgren:                      Okay.  Great.
Marko Kulik:                         So, I would like very much to thank Ann Dahlgren and Dou­glas Foulke.  Unfor­tu­nately, Dou­glas was not able to be on the line now for tech­ni­cal rea­sons, but we were lucky enough to speak with Ann today and I absolutely thank her.  So, thanks so much for agree­ing to do this, Ann.  I know it was a pretty spon­ta­neous request, but I have been in love with your book for a long, long, long time and your style.  It has really been my plea­sure to speak to you today.
Ann Dahlgren:                      Great.  Thank you, Marko.  It has been a plea­sure.
Marko Kulik:                         So, thanks so much.
Ann Dahlgren:                      Okay.  Bye-bye.
Marko Kulik:                         Bye now.  So, that was our inter­view with Ann Dahlgren.  We really hope you like that interview.  I know I learned a lot and I appre­ci­ated it.  We are going to have more inter­views for you in the next few weeks as well.  If you would like to com­ment, please do so either through the blog, photography.ca/blog or through the bul­letin board.  You can just click on the link and find your way there and you can leave com­ments and sug­ges­tions and any­thing else you like in either of those two places.  So, thanks very much for lis­ten­ing every­one and we will be back prob­a­bly next week.  We will bring you either another inter­view or some knowl­edge, either way you will get knowl­edge on both.  So, take care every­one and happy shooting.  Bye for now.
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This is an audio tran­scrip­tion — Spelling, punc­tu­a­tion and gram­mer may not be per­fect
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ ‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Hi there every­one and wel­come to the Pho­tog­ra­phy Pod­cast on Photography.ca.‚ My name is Marko.‚ We are com­ing to you from Mon­treal, Que­bec, Canada.‚ Today is Jan­u­ary 18, 2007.‚ For today’s show, we are lucky enough to be doing an inter­view with Ann Dahlgren.‚ Ann Dahlgren along with her hus­band, Dou­glas Foulke, put together this fan­tas­tic book called A Fairy’s Child.‚ I was lucky enough to come across this book a few years back in New York.‚ I love the­atri­cal pho­tog­ra­phy and I love mytho­log­i­cal por­traits and pho­tographs, so this is going to be a really, really fun inter­view espe­cially for me and I hope for you, too.‚ Rather than just talk about it, let us get into it now.
So, I would very much like to wel­come, Ann Dahlgren today.‚ Ann Dahlgren is a fine art pho­tog­ra­pher and author of the book A Fairy’s Child that she did with her hus­band, Dou­glas Foulke, who is also a fine art pho­tog­ra­pher.‚ He is hang­ing around closely and maybe will be able to hear from him dur­ing this inter­view, but we def­i­nitely love to get a feel for this book called A Fairy’s Child, which is just a won­der­ful, won­der­ful piece of what I might call the­atri­cal pho­tog­ra­phy.‚ Hi there, Ann.‚ Can you tell us a lit­tle bit about your book?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Hi, Marko.‚ Well, as you said, the book is called A Fairy’s Child.‚ It is an explo­ration of fairies and some pretty fan­tas­tic envi­ron­ment.‚ Basi­cally, the book started as just an idea for Doug and I to do a fun pho­to­graph of a fairy.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Then how did it evolve into a full-on book?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ The idea actu­ally started on a com­mer­cial shoot that we were on in Florida and this art direc­tor we were work­ing with started telling us about this island off the coast of Maine where peo­ple build lit­tle fairy houses.‚ We thought, “Well, that’s pretty cool.”‚ We have never heard of any­thing like that before and so, we just started brain­storm­ing about the pos­si­bil­ity of actu­ally mak­ing a pho­to­graph of a fairy that looked real, but yet was mys­te­ri­ous and ethe­real and all the things that we love about pho­to­graph. ‚Basi­cally, it started out with us pro­duc­ing one pho­to­graph and from there it just kind of led to another, which led to another, which led to another. At some point I guess after we had maybe 20 or 30 fin­ished prints, we thought, “Well, maybe we can make this into a book.”‚ So, that is how it started.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ How long did it take to pho­to­graph all the pho­tographs?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ We basi­cally did it on our free time, in between what we do com­mer­cially.‚ So, we worked on it I think over a period of four to maybe five years.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Four to five years.‚ Okay.‚ Where did you find the chil­dren?‚ Were they local chil­dren, were they rel­a­tives, were they actors?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ They were every­thing.‚ Basi­cally, 90% of our com­mer­cial work is on loca­tion, so every time that we were some place and we came across some really inter­est­ing loca­tion, we would then plan to either go back or else stay after our com­mer­cial shoot to actu­ally do the pho­to­graph for the book.‚ So, some­times we would do a cast­ing locally to find some mod­els, other times they were friends of friends or fam­ily mem­bers.‚ It kind of was what­ever, wher­ever we could find some­body that fit our idea of our lit­tle fairy.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ For those lis­ten­ers that have not found this book yet, I am going to be putting some links to Ann and Doug’s site, so hope­fully you might be able to find it through there and see extra pic­tures, but I just wanted to tell peo­ple that I was actu­ally blown away when I found this book, wan­der­ing through SoHo about two years ago.‚ I per­son­ally love the­atri­cal pho­tog­ra­phy.‚ I love mytho­log­i­cal images.‚ I love fairies and it was just an absolute treat to find this book in a lit­tle book­store.‚ So, if there are still books avail­able, I highly rec­om­mend search­ing for them and get­ting your hands on them.‚ I will put one or two on our site just so you could see what we are talk­ing about and then you can check out Ann and Doug’s site after that.‚ I would like to ask you, Ann.‚ What is your per­sonal con­nec­tion to fairies?‚ Is it a sub­ject mat­ter that has inter­ested you all along?‚ Is it a rel­a­tively new thing?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ No.‚ I am not the type of per­son who has pro­fessed to have seen fairies in real life or any­thing like that although we have found that there are peo­ple like that out there.‚ We have got­ten quite inter­est­ing e-mails from peo­ple that have dis­cov­ered our book and we have found that there is a whole world out there, fairy lovers.‚ No.‚ It just sounded like a chal­leng­ing and fun sub­ject mat­ter to try to cre­ate these pho­tographs.‚ So, I would not say that I have any par­tic­u­lar con­nec­tion with fairies.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ ‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.‚ Okay.‚ Well, it is too bad.‚ I am sure a few peo­ple would have loved to hear the oppo­site, but‚¦
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I know.‚ I know.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ It is all good.‚ I have no per­sonal con­nec­tion to them myself.‚ I just love the way they look from my child­hood.‚ So, I am just curi­ous, do you both pho­to­graph at the same time?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, some­times.‚ Usu­ally what we will do is when we are pro­duc­ing a shoot, I would work a lot on the cos­tume, the make-up, get­ting the kids out­fit­ted, then their ears and their wings and all that entailed.‚ We would talk about dif­fer­ent cam­eras and films that we are going to be using and usu­ally Doug would start shoot­ing and then I would shoot some.‚ A lot of times, we would have sev­eral dif­fer­ent cam­eras with dif­fer­ent films loaded, so he could pick up one and I could pick up another and we could direct the child in what­ever way we felt was the right way to go.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, it is totally a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort then.‚ You guys just work on all these projects absolutely together.
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yes.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Excel­lent.‚ Excel­lent.‚ So, I would like to always ask, what was your first cam­era?‚ How did you get into pho­tog­ra­phy?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, for myself, it started back in camp.‚ So, I was prob­a­bly 10 and we had a lit­tle dark­room at the camp that I went to and that was where I took my first pho­to­graph and processed and printed my first print.‚ I know for Doug, it started with him at prep school.‚ His story is, he was told that he should take pho­tog­ra­phy because he could smoke in the dark­room.‚ That is where it started with him.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Is he still smok­ing in the dark room?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I do not think so.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, good, good, good.‚ Very nice.‚ Very nice.‚ For the tech kids out there, they are going to won­der how these pho­tographs were cre­ated.‚ The first thing that will prob­a­bly come to mind for a lot of peo­ple is going to be Pho­to­shop, but I am not con­vinced that is the case.‚ Can you give us a lit­tle insight into how these pho­tographs were cre­ated?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚ ‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Sure.‚ All of them were cre­ated using tra­di­tional black and white film.‚ Most of the times, we would shoot with T-Max 100 or 400 and Kodak infrared film.‚ We were lucky enough to have put a dark­room into our house, so we would come home after the shoot and process and make prints of what we had just shot and then work from there.‚ So, pretty much 98% of what you will see in the pho­to­graph was actu­ally there.‚ We had a spe­cial effects make-up artist make some pros­thetic ears for us.‚ We had a cos­tume designer who make us a set of wings and then from there, we basi­cally started mak­ing our own cos­tumes, our own wings and things like that, but over time of trav­el­ing with these things and tak­ing the ears on and off, all these kids, they started to dis­in­te­grate and we even­tu­ally had to have more ears made.‚ Towards the very end of the book, when we were kind of on a dead­line with our pub­lisher to bring in, I do not know, a cer­tain amount of images, the wings really were trashed at that point.‚ So, we started exper­i­ment­ing with pho­tograph­ing insect wings pri­mar­ily cicada and but­ter­fly wings and then putting those on to the last images that we had shot in post­pro­duc­tion.‚ So, really, that is the only Pho­to­shop that we really used.‚ It really was not until the end of the book process that we started uti­liz­ing Pho­to­shop.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Very, very inter­est­ing.‚ So, really these kids are against real back­grounds.‚ The back­grounds that you are going to see in all the pho­tographs, those were the back­grounds on loca­tion?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yes, def­i­nitely.‚ Like I said before, when we would go on loca­tion and we would find these inter­est­ing spots, that is when we decide, “Okay.‚ This is our next loca­tion” and we would go back and pro­duce the shoot.‚ We shot a lot in West­ern Florida where the Banyan trees are.‚ Actu­ally, our very first shoot was in the Sara­sota, Florida region and just the way that the Banyan trees grow, it is pretty fan­tas­tic.‚ So, we started with that.‚ We have shot in loca­tions in Cal­i­for­nia, Col­orado, New York, kind of wher­ever we found a spot that spoke to us.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ ‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ For cer­tain of the images, it looks as though the chil­dren are fly­ing almost or one in par­tic­u­lar that I have the lux­ury of look­ing at right now, one of the chil­dren looked almost sus­pended or fly­ing.‚ How would that have been accom­plished?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, she went fly­ing.‚ We did a few shoots in the stu­dio and one par­tic­u­lar shoot that we knew we wanted to do was to actu­ally have a fairy fly­ing.‚ So, we hired a rig­ger or a grip per­son from the movie indus­try to come into the stu­dio and set up this whole har­ness sys­tem where we could actu­ally fly her.‚ I think the shot that you are prob­a­bly look­ing at has two fairies in it.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ ‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yes, it is.
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Basi­cally, we designed the set in the stu­dio and then we had the two girls take turns in the har­ness, fly­ing.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Fan­tas­tic.‚ If you are going to attempt this today, would you go more Pho­to­shop or would you still try and do it the tra­di­tional way?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I think now since we do use Pho­to­shop every­day in what we do, we prob­a­bly would uti­lize Pho­to­shop a lot more.‚ It just was not some­thing that we were using on a daily basis at all back when we started this project. ‚I think we started it in 1997.‚ So, every­thing we did was on film in there.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.‚ Again, we keep hear­ing this all the time, Pho­to­shop has become a pretty impor­tant tool for pho­tog­ra­phers these days and we are using more tools.‚ It is just a tool that we can use instead of hir­ing a rig­ger, let us say, to have some­one fly.
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.‚ It def­i­nitely cost us a lot more money to actu­ally pro­duce the pho­tographs the way that we did, but that was the way that we went about it.‚ We did not really think about doing it any other way at that time.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ As an artist, for you, is it more sat­is­fy­ing to have done it the old fash­ion way?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Sure.‚ It was just so excit­ing to be able to have a vision and put it all together, go to a loca­tion, make it hap­pen, bring the fog machine and the whole deal and come back and have on film what we really imag­ined was there ver­sus sit­ting in front of a com­puter and mak­ing it hap­pen.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.‚ Right.
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.‚ I think there was a sense of accom­plish­ment def­i­nitely after all the work that we went through.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ A well-deserved feel­ing of accom­plish­ment.‚ On another tech­ni­cal level, I am curi­ous actu­ally.‚ I noticed some of the pic­tures are quite soft, which really adds to the mood effect.‚ Were you using soft focus fil­ters as well or was that done in the print­ing?‚ How was some of the soft­ness achieved on the pho­tographs?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, it was done both with fil­ters, with par­tic­u­lar lenses and also dif­fus­ing again in the dark­room.‚ I know in some of the pho­tographs, we used an old lens that Doug had which is an old Imagon por­trait lens.‚ It just had this won­der­ful qual­ity of hav­ing a very min­i­mal amount of focus to it.‚ So, that was over dif­fer­ent lens put on the cam­era, but yeah, we would shoot with softer fil­ters and dif­fuse again in the dark­room.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ For good effect, for absolutely good effect.‚ Are you going to be doing any other the­atri­cal style themes or con­cepts in the next lit­tle while or do you have projects sim­i­lar in nature for the near future?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ We do not have any­thing in the works at the moment.‚ We have thought about it.‚ We have a lot of images that we played with in the process of this book that were edited out in the process of our pub­lisher want­ing a cer­tain look to the book.‚ For instance, we pho­to­graph a lot of old peo­ple to make it a lit­tle bit more of a scary, edgy field to it and we did a whole sec­tion of under­wa­ter pho­tographs where we actu­ally have the fairies in the pool and we were down there with them, with scuba tanks and pho­tograph­ing them under the water.‚ So, there is poten­tial for another aspect to this whole fairy project that we would love to con­tinue with, we just have not had the time recently.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, when you do have it done, please think of me.‚ I def­i­nitely want a copy.
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ For those peo­ple who are going to be intrigued by this book, is it still avail­able?‚ How can they get their hands on it?‚ Can they get their hands on it?
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, at this point, we just were informed that the first print­ing, which was 10,000 copies, is sold out.‚ In fact, we only actu­ally have two copies I think as our own.‚ So, we are wait­ing to hear back if Abrams is going to do another print­ing.‚ If they do not, then we will have the option to try to take that some place else to have another print­ing done.‚ So, hope­fully, we will keep it out there.‚ At this point, your guess is as good as mine of where to find them.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.‚ At least for now though I guess thank good­ness for web­sites, peo­ple who want to see some of these images, I know there is a lot of them avail­able at anndahlgren.com.‚ I am going to put that in the show notes.‚ Ann Dahlgren is spelled A-n-n D-a-h-l-g-r-e-n, anndahlgren.com if peo­ple want to go directly, but I will put the link in the show notes as well and I believe Ann has allowed me to put a cou­ple of the images on my blog to intrigue you to go to her site because it is also a fan­tas­tic site with a lot of images left from the book.
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.‚ The direct link to the fairy web­site is afairyschild.com or you can go directly to the book web­site also, which has a short lit­tle flash movie with some images from the book.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I am going to put that link in the show notes as well.
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.‚ Great.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, I would like very much to thank Ann Dahlgren and Dou­glas Foulke.‚ Unfor­tu­nately, Dou­glas was not able to be on the line now for tech­ni­cal rea­sons, but we were lucky enough to speak with Ann today and I absolutely thank her.‚ So, thanks so much for agree­ing to do this, Ann.‚ I know it was a pretty spon­ta­neous request, but I have been in love with your book for a long, long, long time and your style.‚ It has really been my plea­sure to speak to you today.
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Great.‚ Thank you, Marko.‚ It has been a plea­sure.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, thanks so much.
Ann Dahlgren:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.‚ Bye-bye.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Bye now.‚ So, that was our inter­view with Ann Dahlgren.‚ We really hope you like that inter­view.‚ I know I learned a lot and I appre­ci­ated it.‚ We are going to have more inter­views for you in the next few weeks as well.‚ If you would like to com­ment, please do so either through the blog, photography.ca/blog or through the bul­letin board.‚ You can just click on the link and find your way there and you can leave com­ments and sug­ges­tions and any­thing else you like in either of those two places.‚ So, thanks very much for lis­ten­ing every­one and we will be back prob­a­bly next week.‚ We will bring you either another inter­view or some knowl­edge, either way you will get knowl­edge on both.‚ So, take care every­one and happy shoot­ing.‚ Bye for now.
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‚This is an audio tran­scrip­tion — Spelling, punc­tu­a­tion and gram­mer may not be perfect

Hi there every­one and wel­come to the 8th Pho­tog­ra­phy Pod­cast on Photography.ca.‚ My name is Marko.‚ We are com­ing to you from Mon­treal, Que­bec, Canada, and today is Jan­u­ary 10, 2007.‚ Well, first off, I would like to wish every­one a very happy new year.‚ We were slightly delayed in get­ting this out because it was the hol­i­day sea­son, but we are back on top of our game and I expect, I intend, my goal is one pod­cast a week for 2007.‚ So, if I fail, if I miss a week, please feel free to send me your com­ments, photography.ca@gmail.com.‚ You can leave any com­ments there.‚ In fact, you can also com­ment on our bul­letin board about any­thing you like, this pod­cast, pho­tog­ra­phy in gen­eral, at Photography.ca and you will find the link to the blog there as well and to the forum as well.
For today’s show, it is pretty much an exper­i­ment, an exper­i­ment that I did actu­ally.‚ For the longest time, I have been want­ing to exper­i­ment with paint­ing with light.‚ For those peo­ple that do not know what it is, paint­ing with light is illu­mi­nat­ing a per­son or an object with light.‚ In order to expose a pho­to­graph, in case we do not know or we need a reminder, we need light.‚ We could leave a shut­ter open for two days straight in a dark room and there will be no expo­sure at all on that film, which means you can leave it open for two days, close the film, put it back to frame 1, for exam­ple, and then just shoot again nor­mally and there will be no dif­fer­ence at all because no light hit that film.‚ We need light to expose a pho­to­graph.‚ Usu­ally, that light will come from the sun, it will come from a flash, it will come from ambi­ent room light, and that is how we light our sub­jects.‚ With paint­ing with light, we pho­to­graph in a dark or very dark envi­ron­ment and then we manip­u­late the light to light the sub­ject or model or what­ever we are pho­tograph­ing.
The typ­i­cal way to do this is with a flash­light or some type of light source where you will leave the cam­era on a tri­pod because you do not want it to move at all and you will just out­line the object or paint in the object or illu­mi­nate the object in some way.‚ I should tell you that this is not the eas­i­est thing to do.‚ I should also tell you that if you are lucky enough to have a dig­i­tal cam­era, it is way eas­ier with dig­i­tal cam­era because you could just do your exper­i­ment and if it works, yahoo, keep it; if it does not, just dump it and start again.‚ With­out a doubt, one of the hard­est parts of this exper­i­ment would be the expo­sure.‚ How do you deter­mine the expo­sure?‚ Well, if you are using a dig­i­tal cam­era, it is just so easy.‚ You do not even really need a light meter or expose.‚ You just out­line the object with a flash­light or a pen­light or some­thing and if it is well exposed, you see it; if it needs more expo­sure you give it more and if it needs less you give it less.‚ If you are using a tra­di­tional‚ cam­era, it is pretty hard or it is much harder actu­ally, but how I sug­gest doing it is using an ambi­ent light meter, hand­held.‚ What you would do is you would prob­a­bly use a sec­ond per­son, that would be eas­i­est.‚ You get that per­son to shine the light source.‚ In my case, I used flash­lights, we will talk about that shortly, but any­how you would get that per­son to shine the light source and then you meter the light source and you have to go through the entire expo­sure with that read­ing.‚ If, for exam­ple, it said f/5.6 at 1 sec­ond, that would be f/5.6 at 1 sec­ond for that sin­gle spot of light.‚ If you were out­lin­ing an object, you would have to go around the perime­ter of that object, if that is what you wanted to do let us say, for 1 sec­ond at a time hold­ing the flash­light pretty steady and mov­ing it at a 1-second incre­ment.‚ Pretty dif­fi­cult to do, again, that is why dig­i­tal makes it so much eas­ier.‚ The effects are amaz­ing and one of my favorite words in the Eng­lish lan­guage is serendip­ity, which means the thrill of find­ing some­thing unsought.‚ This often hap­pens with paint­ing with light.‚ We will try to get one effect and after it is over and we see the results, some­thing really weird and wacky and won­der­ful hap­pens.‚ It is part of the art and you improve on it.‚ If you get a result that is pretty good, you try and do it again and get it bet­ter and bet­ter and bet­ter and hone your result until the pic­ture is fan­tas­tic.
Here is how I did my exper­i­ment.‚ I bought a bunch of small­ish flash­lights and I just wanted to illu­mi­nate dif­fer­ent objects dur­ing the expo­sure while my cam­era was on a tri­pod. ‚Okay, I bet some peo­ple are won­der­ing, “All right, all right, get to it.‚ How did you do it, Marko?‚ How did you do it?”‚ Well, I do not know if I did it the right way or the wrong way, but I sure as heck had a lot of fun doing it and here is what I did. ‚I pur­chased a lot of small flash­lights.‚ My goal was really to out­line the perime­ter of the object and to just get it to glow.‚ This was pretty darn dif­fi­cult actu­ally because it was hard to con­trol the spray or the fine­ness of the light, let us say, so I bought a Maglite and other dif­fer­ent types of flash­lights, all small, and I tried to con­trol, let us say, the noz­zle by mak­ing it really, really thin.‚ I tried using a fun­nel.‚ I tried using a cap.‚ Every­thing I used, the light still was not fine enough for me, so I really was not 100% sat­is­fied with the result.‚ I still had a good time.‚ I still had time.‚ I think a cou­ple of the results are cool, but I did not have the ulti­mate pre­ci­sion tool.‚ I have heard that there is some­thing out there called a Hose­mas­ter, which also hap­pens to be my pornonym, a hose­mas­ter, but it like costs sev­eral thou­sand dol­lars for this machine and appar­ently using fiber optics, it really gives this very con­trolled, fine stream of light in which you can out­line objects.‚ I did not have it so I went to the depart­ment store, spent 20 or 25 bucks on some flash­lights and had a blast, actu­ally.‚ I used these flash­lights to out­line cer­tain objects.‚ At first, I started with some­thing that was alive.‚ I actu­ally started with my cat and I tried to make the spray of light as fine as pos­si­ble out­line the cat and the result was actu­ally pretty cool.‚ It was cool because you need a long expo­sure.‚ When you close all the lights or get it really dark and you place your cam­era on a tri­pod, you really need a long expo­sure.‚ A cat is a liv­ing thing and a cat, unless it is sleep­ing, it is going to move.‚ What hap­pened was, I tried to out­line my cat and my cat would move through­out many of the expo­sures.‚ Although that was not what I wanted, serendip­ity, word of the day, I really had a cool effect with one shot in par­tic­u­lar whereby the cat was still for, let us say, 4 sec­onds of an 8-second expo­sure and then moved his head to another direc­tion and was pretty still then too.‚ You actu­ally have a ghost­ing effect with two heads, which is really, really inter­est­ing.‚ So, that was my first test.‚ I used — I think it was the Maglite actu­ally.‚ I bought two size Maglites, the mini Maglite and the medium-sized Maglite and I out­lined them both.‚ I did about five shots with the cat.‚ I will prob­a­bly put one up, so you can give me your com­ments.‚ Let me know if you like it.
My next test was with a model, actu­ally.‚ I used a live model and, again, I tried to out­line.‚ My out­lin­ing attempts again, it was dif­fi­cult to con­trol the spray of light because I really wanted to get fine detail and it was dif­fi­cult.‚ If you are not inter­ested in the fine detail, you could just go over var­i­ous aspects of the body, legs, face, hands, breasts, what­ever, and you can get good effects.‚ For me, my best effect hap­pened when I actu­ally used a laser light.‚ I bought one of these $3 lasers.‚ I have cats, too.‚ My cats love to chase the thing.‚ Dur­ing the expo­sure, I out­lined the model with a laser light and that effect was really cool in my opin­ion.‚ Again, it was not per­fect.‚ The con­trol of the light was not per­fect, so hard to do per­fectly, but the result is quite good and I am actu­ally pleased with the result.‚ Again, serendip­ity being what it is, we also tried using a crys­tal.‚ We had the model hold the crys­tal and then we shone the light using the laser light through the crys­tal and then that dif­fracted light hit the model in all kinds of weird and cool ways.‚ I did a few expo­sures with that as well, which you will also see on the blog.‚ Really, it was a com­bi­na­tion of both out­lin­ing the model, try­ing to get the best result I could with the light, hold­ing it steady as I could, mov­ing my hand as steady as I could, and then shin­ing the light through the crys­tal, which also illu­mi­nated the model and gave a really very inter­est­ing result.‚ If any­one wants to try to do exactly what I did, please, enjoy, exper­i­ment.‚ Take my idea.‚ Go with it.‚ Run with it.‚ Make it bet­ter.‚ Do some­thing fun.‚ Do some­thing art­ful.‚ Do some­thing dif­fer­ent.‚ Do some­thing inter­est­ing.‚ That is what this pod­cast is all about, fine art pho­tog­ra­phy, mak­ing art from pho­tog­ra­phy, and really hav­ing a lot of fun with it.
Next, I wanted to try to out­line dif­fer­ent objects out­side.‚ This was just the wrong time of year for it, I must say.‚ I mean it is freez­ing in Mon­treal.‚ My cam­era died.‚ I was using a dig­i­tal cam­era.‚ It died in mid-shoot.‚ My hands were freez­ing.‚ I highly sug­gest doing this in the sum­mer­time.‚ If any of you are lucky enough to be in Cal­i­for­nia or the Mid­dle East or some­where warm, enjoy your­self.‚ Go out­side and do it.‚ I have seen paint­ing with light pho­tographs where you could paint a whole tree or a moun­tain.‚ The results are really, really inter­est­ing as well.‚ You can use even a flash.‚ You can use a portable flash and just really pop that flash at dif­fer­ent lev­els of inten­sity, again, for great effect.‚ Take a light meter.‚ Do an expo­sure, let us say, of the tree and then just try pop­ping it.‚ Try get­ting as close to the orig­i­nal expo­sure as pos­si­ble and then play­ing with it and mod­i­fy­ing it from there.‚ One thing that is very cool, which we men­tioned at the begin­ning of the pod­cast is that you need light to expose the pho­to­graph.‚ So, while I was light­ing cer­tain objects out­side, I wore com­pletely black.‚ I got in my bur­glar uni­form, put on some black jeans, black sweater, black hat, black gloves, and that way I was actu­ally able to manip­u­late the light dur­ing the expo­sure and walk through the shut­ter with­out my body affect­ing the expo­sure. ‚Because my body was so black, it was so dark, not enough to reg­is­ter on the cam­era sen­sor.‚ I was able to walk like in front of the lens with no prob­lems what­so­ever.‚ For one of my tests out­side, I tried to light a bird­cage and I used the flash­light, one of the smaller ones.‚ I tried my best to only light the bird­cage and the result is pretty inter­est­ing.‚ It is okay.‚ Like I said, my hands were freez­ing.‚ I moved quickly, but I did spend like over an hour out­side, maybe even an hour and a half just try­ing dif­fer­ent exper­i­ments, try­ing and look­ing, try­ing and look­ing, and it was quite inter­est­ing.
Like I said, I would have loved to have had more con­trol over the light, over the fine­ness of the point of light only because that is what I was after.‚ If you have an image in your head, you always try and achieve that image, but it is not really nec­es­sary.‚ If you want to just light some­thing thicker and not get the fine detail, you could also do some really inter­est­ing results.‚ I know that some peo­ple have also put like fil­ters, soft focus fil­ters on front of their cam­era dur­ing the expo­sure and that soft­ens the whole thing up as well.‚ I did not do it this time, but it is some­thing that I would def­i­nitely con­sider doing in the future because I do intend to try this again, prob­a­bly in the sum­mer­time when it is warmer.‚ For another object that I tried to light, I tried to light a boot.‚ I took a boot and I put in the win­dow, in a win­dow rather, and again I tried to out­line the boot and the result is pretty inter­est­ing.‚ I think it is inter­est­ing.‚ You can leave a com­ment and tell me what you thought as well.‚ Again, I took a light meter, shone it, took a base expo­sure, and just try to go over the entire boot at a reg­u­lar rate what­ever the expo­sure told me.‚ I tried to deal with about a half a sec­ond or a sec­ond and then go around the entire object for that half a sec­ond, leav­ing it half a sec­ond at every point while trac­ing the object in effect.
If you are going to light an inan­i­mate object, in a way, that is kind of easy because there is one less vari­able of move­ment that you have to con­tend with.‚ When I lit the cat and the model, the expo­sures were like from 8 sec­onds to 30 sec­onds.‚ Those mod­els — your cat can­not be per­fectly still for 30 sec­onds, a human can­not either, usu­ally a 60th of a sec­ond is the max you can nor­mally shoot some­one with­out like a ghost­ing effect or a move­ment effect.‚ They were pretty still, but there is still move­ment involved, so that is a vari­able that may add or detract in the photo, but it is a vari­able you need to be aware of.‚ When you are deal­ing with an inan­i­mate object like a boot, a bird­cage, a tree, a small hill or moun­tain, there is no ghost­ing effect, so you could really take your time.‚ You could put your cam­era on bulb with a shut­ter.‚ You could leave it open for min­utes at a time.‚ The max­i­mum I did was 30 sec­onds, but you could leave it open for min­utes for sure, min­utes.
That pretty much sums up my expe­ri­ence with this test with paint­ing with light.‚ I would absolutely love to hear some posts or com­ments or send me some pic­tures, post it on the blog or post it in the bul­letin board or send it to me by email, photography.ca@gmail.com.‚ I would love to get some feed­back on your own exper­i­ments or maybe if you took some­thing away from this pod­cast or you have some­thing to add or you think, “You know what?‚ Marko, you could’ve done some­thing dif­fer­ently or bet­ter,” I would love to hear it.‚ So, please shoot me a com­ment and it will be my plea­sure as always to com­ment back.
That about wraps it up for our first pod­cast of the year and our 8th pod­cast in total.‚ Again, please com­mu­ni­cate via the blog, via the bul­letin board.‚ We intend to do this once a week.‚ Next week, I am not sure what the topic is going to be yet, but I have an idea that it might have to do with fram­ing, ooohhh fram­ing, and the pos­si­bil­i­ties and the dif­fer­ent types of com­po­si­tion and/or art­ful­ness that you could cre­ate with var­i­ous fram­ing tech­niques.
That about does it for me.‚ Thanks so much for lis­ten­ing.‚ Keep on shoot­ing every­one and we will be back next week.‚ Bye for now.
[Cam­era clicks]

[Cam­era clicks]

This is an audio tran­scrip­tion — Spelling, punc­tu­a­tion and gram­mer may not be perfect

Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Hi there every­one and wel­come to the Photography.ca Pod­cast on Photography.ca.‚ My name is Marko.‚ We are com­ing to you from Mon­treal.‚ Today is Decem­ber 24, 2006.‚ So, it is the day before Christ­mas and we are all hav­ing some fun, get­ting ready for the hol­i­days and I have decided to put together a pod­cast with a fine art pho­tog­ra­pher, Dita Kubin from Mon­treal.‚ So, we actu­ally were able to do a tele­phone inter­view together and you are going to lis­ten to it very shortly.‚ The inter­view lasts about 20 min­utes, so I am going to get into it right away and with that, I guess I just want to wish all the lis­ten­ers the hap­pi­est hol­i­day sea­son pos­si­ble and a Happy New Year as well.‚ Thanks so much for lis­ten­ing to our shows.‚ We intend to do so many more dur­ing 2007 and we are going to do many more inter­views.‚ We would love to get your com­ments, so what­ever you have to say, send it to us on the blog by e-mail, on the bul­letin board and it will be my plea­sure to dis­cuss any­thing you like with you.‚ So, Happy New Year every­one and on that note, let us get into the inter­view now.
So, I would like to wel­come a really spe­cial guest today.‚ Our guest is Dita Kubin and she is a fine art pho­tog­ra­pher in Mon­treal.‚ I would like to wel­come her to the show and we are going to ask her a cou­ple of ques­tions and hope­fully, she will give us some insight into her art and her activ­ity.‚ Wel­come, Dita.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Thank you.‚ Thank you very much.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Excel­lent.‚ Good.‚ Nice.‚ Wel­come.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Thank you.‚ Thank you very much.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ First off, you have a very unusual web­site name for peo­ple that wants to go and visit your pho­tog­ra­phy and it is Phudge.ca.‚ Phudge is spelled P-h-u-d-g-e, Phudge.ca.‚ How in the world did you end up choos­ing Phudge.ca?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, what is funny I guess is people’s reac­tion to it because I think that it is pretty obvi­ous and peo­ple often also mis­pro­nounce it and they say, “Fyudge.”‚ That is pretty funny to me.‚ Actu­ally, it is pretty sim­ple.‚ Phudge, obvi­ously, pho­tog­ra­phy with the ph.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Phudge, well, the idea that it is all just visual dessert, visual plea­sures and not to take it so very seri­ously because I think that within sort of this arts, arts milieu, there is this ten­dency to take every­thing so seri­ously and every­thing has this heav­i­ness about it that I just absolutely did not want to go there with the art that I was mak­ing.‚ I just wanted it to be kind of a light thing, a very light thing.‚ It is not brain surgery.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, it is just very, very play­ful.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah, it is.‚ It is.‚ I find the whole art process to be ther­a­peu­tic and play­ful for the indi­vid­ual and not to get stuck behind the heavy con­cepts of art.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Excel­lent.‚ Okay.‚ That is great.‚ Well, thanks for that intro­duc­tion.‚ So, I would like to get right into it with you.‚ A lot of your pho­tographs, they caught my eye, which is def­i­nitely one of the rea­sons that I con­tacted you.‚ I def­i­nitely find your pho­tographs some­what unusual.‚ Is there some way you can describe your cre­ative process a bit?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, unusual, an inter­est­ing adjec­tive to describe my‚¦
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ They are unusual, just let me clar­ify.‚ They are unusual in that they make you look twice.‚ They are just not like the reg­u­lar head and shoul­ders por­traits within an envi­ron­ment.‚ There is other stuff def­i­nitely going on.‚ I guess for that rea­son, they caught my eye.‚ So, back to the ques­tion.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Can you describe the process a bit?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I guess you are talk­ing mostly about the last series that I had been work­ing on.‚ That series, I was work­ing on for two years.‚ It actu­ally began orig­i­nally because I needed a cou­ple of images to donate to an art show and I had noth­ing new.‚ I just decided to pho­to­graph some­one and I was just exper­i­ment­ing in ways that I had not done before.‚ When I started to put the image together, all of these really inter­est­ing tech­ni­cal ele­ments started com­ing out and I had such a fun time work­ing on it that I decided to actu­ally to try to push this sort of tech­nique that I did not even know what I was doing at that time just to push it fur­ther and see what I could get out of it.‚ For me, it began very much as a tech­ni­cal explo­ration.‚ I did not really have any pre­con­ceived ideas of what I wanted to do.‚ Then when an image kind of made itself, I stood back and I quite enjoyed what the result was, then decided that I would try a cou­ple more por­traits in that vein to see if there was some­thing in it.‚ When I had then the next two, I just some­how really opened my eyes and enjoyed so much the process of it that I decided I would do a whole series of that.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Let us talk about one photo in par­tic­u­lar and we are also going to put that as the main photo for this entry in the Photography.ca blog.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Let us talk a lit­tle bit about the Soma por­trait that you did.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ How was that por­trait con­structed?‚ Can you describe the process a bit for that one in par­tic­u­lar?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ That one in par­tic­u­lar was one of the harder ones that I had made although con­sid­er­ing that this was a two-year project, the ear­lier ones were not as elab­o­rate, as com­pli­cated because I was not in the place where I under­stood what I was doing very much.‚ So, this was the first very dif­fi­cult one I had set for myself think­ing, “There’s no way I’m gonna be able to do this, but let’s just go and try.”‚ Obvi­ously, for the main rea­son that you can­not con­trol smoke and what it is doing.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, I had invited this woman, Soma, to pose for me.‚ She is a friend of a friend.‚ We just brought sort of props with us to the stu­dio.‚ I rarely shoot in a stu­dio, but I thought that with the smoke and it was still quite cold out, that this was the best place.‚ It was all shot with ambi­ent lights, so no flash in that at all.‚ We just played around with very many dif­fer­ent sort of I would say com­po­si­tions because we were within one set­ting, so there was not too much we could do with that and just sort of played.‚ There was no real, again, pre­con­ceived idea of what the final image would be although I had thought that I really wanted to do an image where she was lying on the ground and the smoke was com­ing up towards me, that was one thing that I thought would work.‚ It did not at all.‚ I really found myself to be quite smoked very quickly.‚ It was com­ing into my face.‚ It was hilar­i­ous at the same time because I just could not see any­more.‚ There was so much smoke in my face.‚ Yes, we laughed and then we just con­tin­ued doing dif­fer­ent things and it ended up that after the shoot was over, I did not really know what would result from it.‚ After I processed my negs, I had my proofs I started to see what could be pos­si­ble, that only this idea came out.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ At that point, which is actu­ally how I do all of the por­traits, is that I reviewed all of my shots and started to see how I could make it work towards a final.‚ I worked with sort of low res maque­ttes at first because there were so many images involved that I sort of weed out what does not work and work my way to a final.‚ With the small maque­tte, I was doing in this direc­tion of the final one.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ For those, I am sorry to inter­rupt.‚ For those peo­ple that do not know what a maque­tte is, can you give us a quick def­i­n­i­tion?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Sure.‚ It would just be basi­cally a model to work by.‚ So, what I do is I work dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions, dif­fer­ent small scale mod­els.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Then I weed out the ones that are not work­ing visu­ally or tech­ni­cally and then I start work­ing towards the ones that do.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, they are just like quick work­ing copies, if you will.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Excel­lent.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, this one started to form in front of me.‚ You are ask­ing me how exactly was this one made because so much of the work is post­pro­duc­tion.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.‚ It looks like it might be using more than one pho­to­graph.‚ Is that cor­rect?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.‚ I believe that this one and it is funny, I do not have an exact count for any of them, but this one would be any­where between 8 and 11 images‚¦
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Wow!
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ That were used to make this one.‚ The idea being that it would be seam­less in how it is blended together.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ But not nec­es­sar­ily seam­less that it looks like one sin­gle image.‚ The images that I made after this one are more nar­ra­tive and obvi­ously, they are not always real­is­tic.‚ So, you know that it is not made with one image.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.‚ Are all the images that you used of the same shoot or some can be taken from com­pletely dif­fer­ent times and places?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I started that it would be just one shoot and then got into the mind­set to be a puri­tan, that I had to use it from one, but again, I was reminded by another artist friend of mine to just not limit what you are mak­ing in any way.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, I threw that idea out and I started using images from other shoots with other peo­ple in fact.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I do not do that very often, but some­times it works and some­times I will have some­thing from a year ago that I shot that has been wait­ing to be used and I just do not know in what way and that was partly the case with this one.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.‚ Are these blended using some­thing like Pho­to­shop?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yes.‚ It is all Pho­to­shop.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ How long would it have taken you to cre­ate to this par­tic­u­lar image?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, it is funny because I do not sit down and work at it until I fin­ish.‚ I really need to let them breathe for a while.‚ For this one, what I would have done was I worked on a small maque­tte at first, so maybe that would have been a two-day kind of thing.‚ Scan­ning, clean­ing them, work­ing maque­ttes and then I have to let them sit because I am not sure in what direc­tion to go into.‚ This one I know I left actu­ally for about two months.‚ I just really did not know what to do with it.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ When I started to weed out the ones that did not work and decided this is the one direc­tion I would go in, then it would be about I guess four solid work­ing days of mak­ing the image, but also bro­ken down, not four days in a row because again I will get up to a cer­tain point and not know what to do with it any­more.‚ So, I have worked on the face area and then the back­ground and I do not know what to do with it, so I am just going to let it sit maybe do a lit­tle print­out and hang it on my wall, walk by it for a few days and then sit down at it again and work it again.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Quite the cre­ative jour­ney.‚ If peo­ple were think­ing that it was just like a snap, they are absolutely wrong.‚ Maybe you set it up in a three– or four-hour ses­sion, took a snap and then they are com­pletely wrong.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ There was like sev­eral days of work in this.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, what is funny is that in the begin­ning when I would be show­ing the images, peo­ple would have their reac­tions and com­ment on it and thinks that it is one pic­ture.‚ My reac­tion was always, “Peo­ple, I’m work­ing so hard on this one pic­ture.“
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ That is not obvi­ous at all.‚ How­ever, now, I guess I see that that is a com­pli­ment if seen as a one shot.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I think it is a com­pli­ment.‚ It is a tes­ta­ment to the good blend­ing and post­pro­duc­tion skills that you have def­i­nitely.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Some­thing like that.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Def­i­nitely.‚ The image at least from my per­spec­tive is so strong and so unusual tech­ni­cally because the eyes are sharp and the hands are sharp as well, which for some­one more in the know will just obvi­ate the fact that it is more than one image, but for some­one less in the know or some­one just pass­ing it by quickly to see and feel that it is one image taken on the spot, I guess it really is a great com­pli­ment to the work that you did to it.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I think in par­tic­u­lar with this image as well, it has a lot of spir­i­tual sug­ges­tion.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Def­i­nitely.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Not that even that was my inten­tion in the begin­ning although incense I think for every­one has some sort of a spir­i­tual asso­ci­a­tion.‚ This woman in par­tic­u­lar, she is from the States, but her fam­ily comes from Bangladesh area.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ The incense bowls were a gift to me from a friend of mine who went to India about five years ago on a big long trip and he had got­ten me these incense lit­tle burn­ers from Agra from a cre­ma­tory.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Wow!
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Brought back four of them for me and I had always thought that they would be so won­der­ful to use in a shoot, but I never what or how and I had just kept them think­ing that one day I am going to pho­to­graph some­one with incense, with them, so it just kind of came together when I met Soma and after I found my smoky lady.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ It def­i­nitely, def­i­nitely worked out.‚
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Thank you.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.‚ So, mov­ing on.‚ I know a lot of our lis­ten­ers, they are also fine art pho­tog­ra­phers and they kind of like to pro­duce art and some of the ques­tions for peo­ple that are just start­ing is “Can I live off my art?‚ Is this some­thing that is going to sus­tain me?”‚ You are def­i­nitely a fine art pho­tog­ra­pher your­self, so I guess we would like to ask you‚¦
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.‚ Do I ask myself the same ques­tion?
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Do you ask your­self the same ques­tion?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Every­day.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Every­day.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ How dif­fi­cult is it to let us say sell fine art pho­tog­ra­phy and make a liv­ing from sell­ing your art­work?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, I sup­pose it is dif­fer­ent in North Amer­ica than it would be in other places in the world.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Such as places in Europe per­haps?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Europe def­i­nitely embraces their artists more, not that I have any first hand knowl­edge, but I do have other artist friends who have said that to me, but also I do come from East­ern Europe and I would have thought it would have been eas­ier here to go that route, but I do not even think it is so much geo­graph­i­cal.‚ I just find that peo­ple in gen­eral are not very sup­ported to do art in a very sort of a life career kind of way.‚ I know very few, for instance, friends whose fam­i­lies have sup­ported them in that route.‚ There is always this pro­jected fear of not being able to sur­vive in it.‚ So, already in want­ing to go into art, we have that pro­jected fear on us which we project on our­selves and on to oth­ers as well.‚ That def­i­nitely does not help peo­ple mak­ing the deci­sion to go into art­work.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ That is some­thing that I prob­a­bly still do strug­gle with on some level in my life, but there did come a point where I just could not do all the other stuff that I did not want to be doing in life and I knew that this is what I wanted to be doing now.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, I find that hav­ing made that deci­sion, the rest — it is really just mak­ing that one deci­sion.‚ The momen­tum after that one deci­sion starts to go for­ward and things start to come to you once you have made that deci­sion, but being in a inde­ci­sive place does not‚¦
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ It does not now.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Offer oppor­tu­ni­ties for you to go there and do that.‚ So, back to your ques­tion.‚ It is dif­fi­cult to sur­vive in this.‚ See, I think that it is not, but it has been made to be that way.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I find that it is a lit­tle bit eas­ier now than it was two or three years ago for myself.‚ That is also in the early stages of you doing art.‚ Your art is not worth as much as it would be in the future.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ For sure.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ That is a part of it.‚ Peo­ple are buy­ing it just because they like it for them­selves or as gifts for other peo­ple.‚ There is no fur­ther com­mer­cial value unit in that.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.‚ Right.‚ Are you find­ing you are able to sell more pieces as months go on, as peo­ple see your work?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Absolutely.‚ Absolutely.‚ Maybe that is the thing that has sur­prised me.‚ I know that that is how it would work, but again, hav­ing the fears‚¦
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ That we can­not sur­vive.‚ How are you going to live?‚ When it does hap­pen, I am always sur­prise that some­body would want to pay for it.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Then I am not sur­prise.‚ Yeah, of course, that is why I have been work­ing‚¦
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So hard on that and on other things.‚ So, it makes sense to me.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, it is def­i­nitely nice to hear and I sus­pect that a lot of our lis­ten­ers will be happy to hear that as well.‚ I think you are absolutely right.‚ It is a mat­ter of pas­sion really in say­ing, “This is what I want to do.‚ This is what I’m going to do.‚ Let me go full force at it.”‚ I guess some­one can try it and fail.‚ Every­one does fail occa­sion­ally, but if you do not give it your all and you do not give it a shot, then you will never know.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Sure.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Espe­cially when you have kind of devel­oped a cer­tain style for your­self and you really appre­ci­ate that style and you explore it, I guess if you put your heart and soul into it, it is going to work.‚ Just do not quit.‚ If you quit, it is def­i­nitely going to fail.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I think the other thing is the moti­va­tion behind doing our work.‚ I have met peo­ple who are moti­vated to do it for fame and money.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Right.‚ Right.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Or even let us just say fame or recog­ni­tion or to leave some kind of a legacy behind.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I find that when­ever that has been my motive, it never works out.‚ In fact, when the motive is sim­ply to express that thing that you have to express inside, that is when things hap­pen.‚ Yeah, in the art mak­ing process and also in what you get out of it in return.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, back to our orig­i­nal ques­tion.‚ Do you do any other pho­to­graphic work as well or is it always work­ing on your art­work?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ No.‚ I am doing a lit­tle bit of com­mer­cial pho­tog­ra­phy.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I would say very lit­tle.‚ I never look for it, so only when I get called to do some­thing and then it has to sort of fit in with what I am doing in gen­eral then I would do it like let us say pri­vate por­traits for peo­ple.‚ I pretty much do not do any kind of adver­tis­ing work at all.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah, so it is pretty much pri­vate, pri­vate por­trai­ture.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Another impor­tant ques­tion that we like to ask.‚ I always get this by e-mail.‚ What equip­ment do you use?‚ So, for all the gear­heads out there who are dying to ask you this ques­tion, what gear do you use, Dita?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Sure.‚ What­ever I can keep my hands on.‚
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Are you shoot­ing mostly tra­di­tional pho­tog­ra­phy?‚ Are you shoot­ing more dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy at the out­set before pro­cess­ing it?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ No.‚ Every­thing is shot on film.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ In fact, I find myself to be very for­tu­nate that I am still from the old school photo world.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, every­thing is wet lab.‚ I process my own black and white at home, send the color out, but basi­cally I do shoot on almost any­thing I can.‚ The series that the image of Soma came from was shot on 35 with F90x Nikon cam­era.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I would like to say I have that cam­era and it is amaz­ing.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.‚ It is pretty good.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ We did not dis­cuss this in advance, but I love that cam­era.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.‚ I really do as well and I came upon it because it was actu­ally one of the cam­eras they used on a film set as a prop.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ They have pur­chased 10 of them and then they were sell­ing them off, so I really came in to a very good deal and that is why I bought it.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Excel­lent.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ It is also a cam­era that for instance I let one of my other pho­tog­ra­phy friends use, so she is work­ing with it all the time.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I am very much into lend­ing and help­ing each other out in that sense.‚ So, this series was also shot on Agfa, Agfa film.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ For me, I had wanted to do some­thing like this for about six years.‚ I have applied for grants, always got rejected and I took it per­son­ally at first and then I just thought, “Well, that’s ridicu­lous.‚ I’m not gonna let some­thing like that get in the way of me work­ing on a project.”‚ So, I decided that I would fund it myself.‚ So, what is the cheap­est way that I could do it?‚ What is the cheap­est film I could buy?‚ What is the cheap­est way I could process it, scan it and work on it?
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ When they were finally printed, were they printed via inkjet, from a lab, what is the final result?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.‚ They are inkjet prints using the most archival inks that are out there and also printed on archival paper.‚ That would be the lim­ited series edi­tion that I have.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I have really decided to go that route and limit the pro­duc­tion of it.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ For those that are think­ing of pos­si­bly doing some­thing sim­i­lar with their own projects, would you be able to sug­gest what paper you are using?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ You know what?‚ I would not because every­one likes some­thing else and I have gone through it like for instance I bought the most expen­sive paper you can pos­si­bly buy on earth.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ After start­ing to print, I really did not like it.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Which other peo­ple swear by that paper, so it is not for me, but it works for other peo­ple and I am now still in the process of find­ing some­thing that I really want to stay with.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, the papers that you use vary from image to image?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, they vary not too much.‚ They vary a lit­tle bit because I am still in the process of try­ing to find the best route for me, but that is also talk­ing about black and white images.‚ I really like a paper that has a very pure white in it.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Yeah.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I find that a lot of dig­i­tal papers out there are a lit­tle bit creamy.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Which low­ers the con­trast of your image and for me, I need to have my whites to be white.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, that would be the per­fec­tion­ist in me that does not like the most expen­sive paper on earth.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.‚ I guess we have taken a lot of your time.‚ I do not want to con­tinue too much longer.‚ So, I guess I just like to ask you at the end, are you hav­ing any upcom­ing exhi­bi­tions or besides Phudge.ca, where else could peo­ple see some more of your work?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Well, at the present moment, I had just fin­ished an exhi­bi­tion in Novem­ber and I packed it up and I am now look­ing for other places to exhibit in.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ This would be the series, the Rec­ol­lec­tion.‚ So, I am at the place now where I am send­ing out my dossier to other artists and gal­leries and what-nots and start­ing my new series.‚ So, at the moment, I do not have it up any­where.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I am look­ing and as soon as I find a place, I will have it up on my web­site.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Excel­lent.‚ Excel­lent.‚ If you send me a link once you do have it done maybe I will be able to put that in the show notes as well.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ A lit­tle bit of a sneak peek maybe.‚ Are we able to?‚ What will the next set of work be ded­i­cated to?
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Actu­ally, I think that it is going to be — there are two things that I am very inter­ested to work on and one will be a con­tin­u­a­tion of this project.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Okay.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ But in color.‚ I am sure it is what that has to tell me.‚ The other one is I am look­ing to go travel, to get out of town for a lit­tle bit and to con­tinue a lit­tle bit of a sort of a series of squares that I have been work­ing on that actu­ally are very abstract and has new peo­ple in them and are just sort of almost abstract col­ors, hori­zons, that kind of thing.‚ So, I am curi­ous.‚ That one I have not really worked out very much.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Excel­lent.‚ Excel­lent.‚ Well, we will look for­ward to it def­i­nitely.‚ So, I guess I would like to take this moment to thank you, Dita, for agree­ing to do this pod­cast with us.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Thank you very much, Marko.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ It was totally a plea­sure and I know a lot of our vis­i­tors are going to get a lot out of it.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Thank you very much.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, thanks again and we do hope that you will send us an update as well.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ I will.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Thanks, Dita.
Dita Kubin:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ Thank you.
Marko Kulik:‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ So, that was our inter­view with Mon­treal fine art pho­tog­ra­pher, Dita Kubin.‚ I cer­tainly hope you enjoyed that inter­view.‚ I hope you learned a few inter­est­ing things.‚ I know I did.‚ We intend to do more inter­views in the new year.‚ I would like to take this oppor­tu­nity once again to wish every­one Happy hol­i­days and Happy New Year.‚ I hope every­one is healthy and well and gets what­ever they want.‚ Please, as always, leave some com­ments in the blog or on the bul­letin board or you can shoot me e-mails at photography.ca@gmail.com.‚ It is my plea­sure to hear from you.‚ So, take care every­one.‚ Be well and we will be putting more stuff out in 2007.‚ Bye for now.
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