Tiffany Helms for Temperance

I'm sitting in Seattle listening to the rain outside of our new place, editing the final days of Temperance, imagining how I can bring it all together, and what I do next.  The past month has been a whirlwind, not a super productive one in making art, but we have a new place, and basically that means a blank canvas to work with.  

I always let the place influence my work, and I'm excited about the opportunities and ideas I have for this little craftsman we are renting.  There is a big back yard, and garage that I can put a small dark room in for wet plates, and lots of window light indoors.  The next couple months maybe even year will be lots of experimenting until I figure out what story to tell here.  Its an overwhelming thought.  By the end of Temperance I had a ton of ways to shoot in that small room, all things I had figured out over the three years living there.  Now I have to edit down over a thousand images, and translate it into a physical thing...that too is overwhelming.  

My shoot with Tiffany happened a few days before I left for my road trip to California that also took us over seas to Australia and Asia for We Were Wanderers.  I had this amazing string of shoots the last few days before that trip, and even still I'm working through images from then.  I shot a lot more when I'm shooting for Temperance than I do outdoors.  There is all the tiny adjustments that go into making each photo as perfect as I can.  Moving mirrors to just the right spot.  Lights, the model, and myself, everything needs tweaked, so that I don't appear in the photo, the model does, and is lit properly for how I edit.  It means taking the same photo sometimes one time sometimes twenty.  

It also means going through all of those photos and finding the one where I figured it out.  The whole editing process once I dig through and find the photo is fast, but its not especially fun.  I love the moment I take the photo, and I love the moment it is finished and being printed/posted, but that in between part, the part that is really just me alone with a computer, it can be boring.I think one of the best parts about photography as an art form is how social and collaborative it is as a process.