Archive for February 15th, 2010

Typical photo shoot set up in confined area

I spent much of today getting my camera equipment ready for a photo shoot coming up soon for a good friend, Keith Rocco, a fine historical artist.  This means making certain cameras are clean, loaded, and with charged batteries.  It also involves cleaning and checking out lenses, exposure meters, lights, backdrop stands, and various other photographic paraphernalia.

This may sound strange, but doing so invariably reminds me of the cleaning and checking out process with weapons and the equipment needed for a military operation or a law enforcement raid of some kind.  In my past I’ve done both.

I find guns and cameras a captivating contrast, with interesting similarities.  When I was in the military, and later in law enforcement, checking your weapons and equipment was essential to survival. They had to be checked and checked again to be certain, if needed, they would be available and properly functioning.  If you had to use a gun, however, the outcome was hardly creative.  The results were more distructive.

In photography, your equipment still has to be available and functioning, but the end result is quite different.  Rather than possibly destroying something or hurting someone, you are creating images people might enjoy or use productively.

It is the professional tasks of cleaning and functionally checking the tools of your trade where I find interesting contrasts and similitudes.  In the long run, I find what I am doing now in photography a more personally satisfying end result – - – but, then, in the past, I wouldn’t have wanted to run into a bad guy in a dark alley when all I had was a camera