Wednesday

Hanging Out With Bernice McFadden

Just a quick check in more for a friend than for me. As many of you know I'm friends with author, Bernice McFadden. We've known each other since the late 90's back when people answered landline phones, having a cell was a commodity (not to mention the phone was huge) and everyone had a pager either hooked onto their belt or at the bottom of their bag.

I was beyond honored when Bernice asked me to shoot her for the back cover of her new book, Glorious. She told me, "I need something different, something new," with a blahze sigh as she's prone to do.

I remember being excited and then immediately scared. How am I supposed to do this? I'm just snapping pics of my baby. What if I screw up? Instead of caving to these fears I focused them and began reading up on lighting and portraiture and practiced on my daughter, my most willing and able subject (I am creating a monster, by the way).

Good thing, because Bernice's Brooklyn brownstone is a dark and sensual place, best for writing and other unmentionable activity --- not so much snapping photos. But I set up as best I could, I struggled for sure trying to make it work and after three hours I saw it in her eyes that she was done.

It took me a couple of weeks to pick the best shots out of the 400 or so that I took, but I got it done. This morning, I put together what I thought was a really nice Flash presentation with clickable links and etc., etc., until I watched it and saw that it looked like crap. Not willing to spend anymore hours sitting in front of the screen I whipped up the following slideshow (that I'm not too thrilled with) of a couple of my favorites. I wanted to shoot her coming out of the shadows/darkness as it's been that kind or road for her for the past year or so. Also she's a force to be reckoned with like light, one of the strongest forces that I'm aware of. Light always overpowers darkness even if it's the size of a pinhole.