I put in three long days in the Sierras above Bishop this week working with one of my past photo students Dave Sanchez, photographing a Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) documentation of some hydro-electric power plants. In a way it was peaceful. Not because of the beautiful surroundings, the yellow aspens, the clean air and the snow-capped peaks, because that did indeed make lunchtime attractive. No, the peaceful part was in our head. Because the generators and turbines were spinning the entire time, we had both the constant hum of the machinery and earplugs to avoid the din, forcing all communication to take the form of lip reading (short words) pointing and impromptu sign language (double peace-sign means f22); it gave us a lot of time to think.
I tried turning on the room lights to find the brushed aluminum behind the switch panel reflected the lights right back into the lens. The dark corner of the control room stubbornly wanted to stay dark, which forced Dave to exercise his hand-lighting technique. There was little room to move, and less room to set up lights, so, changing gears, we broke out two new LED flashlights I had brought, allowing the light to be focused into the old switchboard while avoiding the reflections back into the lens. This mitigated confusing shadows that might make it hard to understand the various gauges and buttons on the panel by using the "lightpainting" technique, allowing the movement of the lights to erase the edges of the shadows. While the dark corner would be easy to fix in Photoshop on a digital image, the 5×7 film negatives need to be properly exposed because there is very little manipulation done in the darkroom, and only a little lightening up of shadowy areas is possible. The unretouched result is shown above.
The video may be a little loud… it was inside the Powerhouse after all…
Here we are making the final photos, after we finished the large format views and the 5×7 camera was put away, we were doing the duplicate digital views from the same tripod position. The 5×7 film views required ten second exposures and the digital only three seconds each, but this is why assistants never gain weight on my projects.