Last night, I waited up till midnight (well, I guess that is a little misleading, sounding like I regularly go to bed before then) to go out and record a sound I wanted on the short experimental video I am working on. I was out at the front gate of the factory here, and saw another story sitting right in front of me, just waiting to be told.
As I said before, I am tired of shooting one-shots day in and day out, disconnected photographs, maybe speaking to an overall theme, but never delving into the story in progress. I want to tell stories. I want to learn how to dig deeper and put together an overall story. And instead of crying about not having enough time (too cliché, anyway), I decided to keep my eyes open to the stories around me and start telling some of them.
So, there I was, not 100 meters from my wife’s parents’ door, at the front gate of my father-in-law’s factory. As I waited for midnight and the sound effect I wanted, I watched dozens of workers coming in the front gate on bicycles and motorcycles for the start of their shift. There was story content everywhere: locals who all know each other, motorcycles, friends punching in friends time cards, the factory dog greeting his favorites, and workers disappearing into the powder-filled air of the factory.
Can you hear it? “Cooper…come…shoot the story.” Yeah. I heard it too.
Now, I may be crazy to pick a project that starts at midnight when I have little ones who will wake up at the same time as always the next morning, but I certainly am not going to be a total fool: video is out. One experimental video at a time. I will just photograph it. There is just something about it that really draws me in, because I am from a small town. Even in the “big town” nearby, I never met anybody on a night shift at a factory. That is just foreign to me.
It has those key elements I figured out before, the ways amateurs can pull of stories without budgets or jobs helping them do so. One, it is close. Shoot, it is right out the front door. Two, timing. I may not have a professional job allowing me to do this, but given it is at midnight, I can still do it. And three, access. Ok, I have not mentioned that before, but it sure helps to be a trusted person. It is my father-in-law’s factory, after all.
That is really good. Maybe I need a rangefinder so I can take it with me easier and then be ready when stories happen 😉 I look forward to seeing how it all comes out.
Ah, sure all the rangefinder crowd say rangefinder cameras are the only way to be discrete, but the SLRs are not all that bad, at least, not if you are using a little prime lens. I shot (as I posted on http://www.twitter.com/CooperStrange ) with my Nikon D100 and my 35mm f/2 lens. That is not a terribly big setup.
Honestly, if I had to say what rangefinders have going for them when it comes to shooting discretely, it is not that they are small, but that they are old looking. The amateur with too much money shooting a Canon 1D or Nikon D3 is “more professional” to the average folk looking on than that guy with grandpa’s camera. Yes, they are smaller, but not excessively so.
Speaking of, I like the Epson R-D1. The LCD is on a hinge and swivel. So, you can turn the screen in, only exposing a metal looking exterior. It looks like a film camera! Now, that really could come in handy.
[…] uploaded the gallery from the midnight factory shift photo story. As I mentioned a few days ago, I really wanted to treat it like a film shoot. I left the photos unseen for several days, trying […]