To Zoom or Not to Zoom- Portraits with Primes

(A slightly different version of this post originally appeared on the Sigma lens site. You can see it here.)

As a photographer who specializes in environmental portraiture, lens selection is critical to the look of my work. Much of the time I choose to shoot with prime lenses. Let me explain why I made that decision for one of my projects.

In 2014, I was given an artist residency at The Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences in Rabun, Georgia.  For two weeks that year and again in 2015 and 2016, I was given a cabin tucked away in the mountains, dinner prepared for me four nights a week, and encouragement to do whatever I wanted. I had driven through the area around Hambidge a number of times when my wife and I had gone to the Great Smokie Mountains of North Carolina from our home in Atlanta on camping trips. We often stopped at flea markets along the way and the faces I saw at these rural stops struck me. There was an extraordinary range of types and ages and looks. I knew there was a project here waiting for me to photograph. That idea became American Flea.

Mary-Lynn Starkey runs a small flea market near Franklin, NC with her husband Roger. They told me they decided to open their store because they needed some way to get rid of the stuff they had accumulated by going to auction. 

 For me, shooting portraits takes time, primarily because I need to talk to my subjects to get them to relax and trust me. The flea market portraits were no different- in fact, talking to people became an integral part of the process. Many of the vendors and customers will tell you that making money or finding bargains isn’t the thing they enjoy most about the experience. What they really love is the chance to meet and talk to the people they encounter. I found that everyone had a story and they wanted to share it with me.

Charles Brank, AKA Chuck B, sells his woodcarvings at the Franklin Flea and Craft Market in Franklin, NC.

When I work in this way, I think of portraiture as an active process. I’m not a passive observer as when I’m doing a story that requires a more candid approach. I’m actively engaged with my subjects when we’re talking before I start photographing and as the shooting begins, that engagement continues. I set up strobes and I rarely work from a tripod.

Peggy Hines, Randy Hines, and Randy’s mother, Christine Duncan sell odds and ends at the Woodpecker Wood Works Flea Market in Franklin, NC.

Primes, that is non-zoom lenses, were perfect for this style. I don’t want to hang back, zooming in and out to alter my compositions. I want to be actively moving around the space, closer, farther away, higher, lower. I sometimes think of myself dancing when I shoot like this. It’s a metaphoric dance as I try to elicit the best expression or pose from someone, but it almost becomes a literal dance as I change the scene in my viewfinder. The focal lengths of 24mm, 35mm, and 50mm are perfect for showing the environments that are so important to this work. I may even try a 20mm for some of them when I’m in particularly tight spaces and want to see even more if the environment in the frame.

Dodie Allen was helping a friend out by working in his vegetable stand at Uncle Bill’s Flea Market in Whittier, NC.

 All the photographs in this post were taken with a Nikon D600. The lenses were The Sigma Art Series primes specifically 24mm f1.4 DG | Art, 35mm f1.4 DG | Art, and 50mm f1.4 DG | Art Series. All were lit using an Elinchrom ELB with a 17 inch silver beauty dish. Most were shot utilizing Hi-Sync technology which let me synchronize my Nikon at speeds up to 1/4000 of a second. Stay tuned to my blog (or better yet subscribe to it) for an upcoming post that explains Hi-Sync in detail.

You can see more from American Flea on my web site.

Why social media matters and excerpts from an article about Day & Night

If you've been following this blog or watching my other social media outlets, you know that I've been getting a lot of press lately. I thought it might be useful to understand why that's happening.

Back in January, I was invited to join a web site called Lens Culture. I was only slightly aware of them, but after going to the site and realizing it wouldn't cost me anything, I joined and posted a couple of my projects there.

In June, I was lucky enough to spend two weeks at an artist residency in the north Georgia mountains. I wrote about it here. When I returned I posted a number of pictures from a new project called American Flea on my Lens Culture page. Then on August 6, Lens Culture posted American Flea in the Spotlight position on their home page as one of their Editors Picks.

Within a few days, apparently after seeing my work on Lens Culture, a number of widely read blogs ran pieces about another project of mine, Day & Night. These included Beautiful Decay, Dark Silence in Suburbia, Design Taxi, and USvsTH3M. These stories were re-posted dozens, possibly hundreds of time, all over the world, in a variety of languages.

Then came the two big ones. About August 22, Distractify and Huffington Post each ran stories. Distractify's was about American Flea and Huff Post's was about Day & Night. These sites get millions of hits a month. I immediately saw the hits on both my blog and my Lens Culture profile page skyrocket. This in turn has generated a number of inquiries from web publications asking permission to run various projects of mine.

The big question is (or should be), that's nice, but is there any income involved in all this? Well, I've just signed with a picture agency in the UK to syndicate Day & Night worldwide. They're confident that there will be print sales to magazines internationally. So that's a good thing.

Most of the pictures in Day & Night were taken in 2009 and 2010. I've had them exhibited in a number of shows in Atlanta, Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC. Now I'm hoping, after all this publicity, some curators will take notice. I'd like to show this work again.

Another nice result was the posting this week of Day & Night on the web site, Feature Shoot. Their writer, Ellyn Ruddick-Sunstein did an e-mail interview with me and I'm especially pleased with her insightful comments at the beginning. Below is an excerpt, posted with her permission.

"For Day and Night, Atlanta-based photographer Forest McMullin explores sexual desire and its relationship to human identity, photographing individuals and couples once throughout their daytime routine and again in the privacy of their own bedrooms. On the left, we find a standard vision of middle-class American men and women, enjoying the conventional activities of daily life; in the righthand frame, we discover the same subjects adopting nighttime fantasy roles, morphing into dominatrixes, bondage players, cross-dressers, swingers, and furries.

"In arresting diptychs, we are presented with two sides of the same human coin, the easily accessible public self set against the vulnerable sexual self. In these stolen moments of intimacy, in which the protagonists radiate a palpable sense of confidence, the gap between what we consider to be ordinary and atypical is diminished, reduced to the space as narrow the thin white border that separates the images. Here, we are asked to abandon judgements for a deeper understanding of human erotic diversity. McMullin’s sitters are remarkable for their perceived eccentricity, but they ultimately become surrogates for us all, boldly bringing to light private yearnings that most keep in darkness."

I have no idea how long this will last. But it sure is fun for now.

My Residency

Dan McInturff, Rabun Flea Market, Rabun Gap, Georgia

My two weeks at The Hambidge Center was the most intense period of creative energy I can remember having. It was the first artist residency I've ever had and I certainly hope it isn't the last.

I started on a new project called American Flea. I traveled to four different flea markets in rural North Carolina and Georgia shooting portraits of vendors and customers. I'm very excited about the results and plan to continue the project for the foreseeable future. I met unusual and interesting people and recording their faces and hearing their stories is a great experience.

Shannon Pyle, Uncle Bill's Flea Market, Whittier, North Carolina

 I read over six hundred pages. The new memoir from Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie, was a delight and I burned through that in three days. Then I dove into The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. I last read this masterpiece forty years ago or so. It's massive and brilliant and I hope to finish it soon.

The biggest surprise to me is that, at the urging of my wife and daughter, I started writing again. Fifteen years ago I started writing a novel. I got fifty or sixty pages into it before life got in the way and I put it down. While at Hambidge, I went at it again and wrote over forty new pages. I figured out several important plot points and I hope to be able to continue on it in a more timely fashion now.

It's kind of amazing what you can accomplish when you have no cell service or television and the only internet connection is a quarter of a mile away. And it's great fun to be reminded that I still have something to say.

Oh, one more thing. Today is my birthday. I've realized that being in my sixties doesn't suck.

"Uncle" Bill Seay, Uncle Bill's Flea Market, Whittier, North Carolina