Solitude

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Solitude.

Canon 5d Mk3
Sigma 85mm f/1.4 HSM.

HTM May be NSFW.

I had the chance to help a friend realise a vision he had. A shoot that meant a lot to him as it is about a part of his life that he doesn't hide but which usually is not spoken about.

This one is going to have a lot of words to be read, but I think it is important that people get an understanding of the why behind this shoot.

All I can say is that we spoke about doing this shoot a couple of months ago and as soon as he told me what he wanted I envisioned the direction the images should take. The images below are just a teaser of the shoot we did and the final product will be added to the main gallery soon.

So without any further ado. Here is Diab Metry telling us about the shoot.

 

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HOT TRANNY MESS.

"The concept of this shoot is a personal one. It stems from my personal life experiences and all that has been said and done to me up until this day and continues to happen. Not a day goes by where I am not harassed, spoken about or attacked for simply living my life as who I am.

I am often approached by other “outsiders” or those who witness this and ask how I live my life so happily, with so much freedom and a lack of awareness toward this hatred that is so blatantly placed upon me.

In my opinion words cannot hurt us. Yes, a physical attack can, but words? …Everybody has an opinion. I decided to take the negativity from those words so generously given to me and celebrate all that is unique within me by adopting the nickname “Hot Tranny Mess”. To my surprise it was quickly embraced as a term of endearment and something synonymous with myself incredibly within the industry in which I work where so many are afraid of exploring, or being defined by gender.

This is by no means a dig at my trans brothers and sisters as I myself am not transgender. It is a major facet of the bullying I have come to live in my daily life and I simply never saw a negative in that. Since childhood I have never seen the divide in gender and for someone to think of me as “female” or having “feminine attributes” despite what is between my legs never came to my mind as something to be frowned upon. Classifying me as one of these tremendously courageous and strong willed individuals who are choosing to live their lives as the person they believe to be is nothing short of a compliment. In that facet we are truly kindred spirits.

The “Hot”? Well it speaks for itself! The “Mess” comes from everyone’s lack of understanding of me. Whilst I am blessed to be embraced by so many, even the majority of those close to me struggle to define who I am.

I approached Will with the concept and he immediately understood. Being a personal friend of mine who also shares an incredibly open mind and sick sense of humour made him the perfect person to present this to. He understood the celebration behind it and the fact that it should also contain an element of filth, almost a sense of a phoenix rising from the ashes. He understood that this was about owning all that is placed upon us. That these differences don’t define us by what others say and are what truly make us special. He understood the importance of support.

This shoot saw me play into sides of myself but obviously to the extreme. The heavier beard as an element of embracing my masculine side, which really brought a sense of “male” to my usually quite feminine features. The female through elements of the glamorous presented in a “trashy” way which also presents the rough idea of bullying. Apart from the shoes, the entire wardrobe was sourced from clothing in my regular rotation! 

I hope to take this work and use it as a way of raising money to support violence toward the LGBT community. No one should live in fear of being who they are, who they were born as, despite many who dispute this. To them I ask, try choosing to be an outsider, try living your life in fear and despair and then tell me it’s a choice. I am aware that I am one of the blessed few to not care about others as I said before, but one more death cannot happen at the hands of others or by an individual at the end of their tether simply for being true to themselves. I say this also as a devout Christian who believes God made all his children the way he wanted.

So for those of you still pondering who I am I leave you with this.

I am a person. I am a soul. I am Diab. I am a “Hot Tranny Mess"

One more down...

My fourth photo is inspired in a photograph by Tina Modotti taken in 1928.

This is my vision of how the same photograph would have look should Modotti have been living these days.

Opinions and comments welcomed.

Another place. Another city.

One of the things that I like the most about my work is having the chance to go to new places quite often. Cities, towns,even countries and with that comes the great experience of meeting new people. 

 It really is a very fulfilling and you learn lots. 

Maybe it sounds cliche but travelling really broaden our horizon. 

And there were two.

This image was a very big headache to replicate it. I did not have anything to be able to focus the light but finally, after hours and hours I got an EUREKA moment and found and easy, yet fiddly solution and managed to control the edge of the light.

The original photo is by Andreas Feininger and it is a portrait of another photographer Dennis Stock, taken in New York City in 1951. I took a photo of my reflexion and flipped it horizontally in Lightroom.

Opinions and critiques are welcomed.

Find the original below.

Welcome to my new site

Hello all.

Welcome to my new webpage.

In this space I will keep you updated with my current, ongoing and past projects.

I decided to open this website today as a beginning in a new chapter of my career.

After a few years, much experience and a lot of effort today is the opening of the End of Year Diploma students exhibition at Tafe. Which means that as of today I am no longer a student, but it does not mean that learning stops here.

My portfolio for this exhibition consists of what has now officially become one of my ongoing projects. Big World.

I hope to hear from you. Please enjoy here a couple of images and visit the web gallery often to see what is new in this big world that has just started.

Please click here to access the Big World gallery

Reversed lens update

I kept playing with the reversed lens setup and I have found some interesting stuff that help getting more interesting images, but then you have to trade the image quality for the amount of light going through the lens.

What I am trying to say is that the way to gain a better deep of field when using this setup is not by stopping down the aperture in the lens mounted in camera, as all it does is creating more vigneting and giving you less of a photographic area, the solution is to stop down the reversed mounted lens. It is not as if you are going to gain an infinite deep of field, but what was only 1mm or less of area in focus becomes two or three times as wide, letting you have more of the subject matter in focus.

Now the challenge is that by stopping down the reversed lens the light going through the lens starts falling rapidly and by the time you get to f/16 in the reversed lens it is almost pitch dark and it becomes very very hard to try to focus. It also makes you require extra lighting, at least a flashgun, to light the subject matter.

The light fall is not an isolated phenomenon of this lens configuration, all those people that have worked with a view camera have witnessed how their scene becomes darker and darker when they stop down the lens. In the modern DSLRs it is not noticeable because of their design. In your DSLR the aperture stays wide open to help you focus quicker and the lens only stops down when you click on the shutter release button and before the shutter actually runs from one side of your camera to the other.

We are really fortunate in that with digital cameras we are able to see instantly if we were able to capture the image or not. With film cameras you have to actually calculate your exposure before you capture and it is not as easy as it sounds, because with two lenses you have to apply belows exposure compensation to your raw exposure and f/16 in the reversed lens is not exactly that when two lenses are stacked together.

The other challenge then is with the flash gun. You need to be able to have it in front of the lens, but then remember that your lens is just centimetres or millimetres away from your subject. Also it is important to avoid the light to go into the lens causing flare and loss of contrast. Today I was holding the camera with that heavy lens setup in one hand and using my other hand to rest the front barrel of the lens and hold the flash close to the end of the lens. I can tell you that it gets really tiring after a short while. I will have to look into one of those DIY solutions to hold the flashgun and maybe add a little reflector or another flashgun.

Depending on what you are shooting it may be a good addition a micro-metric focusing rail, like the ones in the view camera standards. That would allow you to prefocus with the reversed lens wide open and then stop down, just as you do with the view cameras, but it depends on your subject matter, insects are not known for taking modelling instructions very well, they just walk or fly out of the frame without caring, just as some spoilt famous models.

Enjoy the photos and please don’t be shy, let us know your thoughts and your experience with this technique.

So here is the whole setup that I have been using.

Canon 70-200 f/2.8 (77mm filter thread)

Step down ring 77mm to 52mm (not ideal as it causes a lot of vigneting but most L series lenses are 77mm.

Reverse ring adapter 52mm male to 52mm male.

Sigma 28mm f/2.8 with manual aperture ring (52mm filter thread).

Basically every piece couples with the following in the order I listed them.

I could go about all the technical stuff but there are people that had already published this information and explained better than I could. So here are two of the links that I have checked:

http://www.dpnotes.com/macros-with-stacked-lenses/

http://photo.net/nature-photography-forum/000aUM?start=0

Have fun.

I have been trying a new (for me) technique for Macro photography and I am quite pleased with the results.

This is done by connecting two lenses by the filter thread effectively using one of the lenses in reverse. Focusing becomes really hard as the deep of field is so shallow that even one millimetre of movement changes the focus in a very dramatic way.

A friend asked me to photograph the lens setup so he can have a look at how are the lens mounted and attached. That will be the following post in English. I have to repost this in Spanish for all my other friends.

Let us know what do you think of the fly’s face.