#13 - Austin Harter - June 25, 2017 - Manassas, Virginia
Thursday, June 29, 2017
I met Austin Harter just a few weeks ago when I was out for a jog a few blocks from my house. Austin was making a photograph with a camera on a tripod on a street corner and I stopped to comment. We struck up and conversation later decided to meet up for coffee. Austin is quite a talented photographer and filmmaker. Check out his work here.
Austin grew up in the Southern Pines area of North Carolina - just 75 miles from where I grew up. His mother was a dancer and his father is a director, actor, and writer. His parents met during a performance of the musical Carousel. He was raised in an entertainment household so he naturally went to college at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem and studied drama. After college, he worked on a slew of different productions over the years for film and TV. He worked on the crew for the TV series One Tree Hill, Drop Dead Diva, East Bound & Down, and movies Death Sentence, Wreckage, Cabin Fever 2, and Bolden! just to name a few.
During the production of Death Sentence starring Kevin Bacon some of the crew members shaved their heads in solidarity with Bacon's character who shaves his head. Austin told me he was one of the crew members to shave their head. There is an idea called six degrees of separation that states that all living things and everything else in the world is six or fewer steps away from each other so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. There is a popular game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It rests on the assumption that anyone involved in the Hollywood film industry can be linked through their film roles to Bacon within six steps. I told Austin that I once photographed Kevin Bacon for USA Today as he performed music as part of his Bacon Brothers music tour. Austin worked on a movie with him, so I postulated that we both have low "Bacon numbers" despite the fact that we never actually acted with him.
For this shoot, Austin and I walked around within a few blocks of my home in Manassas. I used all natural light and did not rely on any sort of light modifiers or fill cards. I used a tripod, a light meter, and a normal focal length lens. I commented to Austin that often it is a shame to just shoot ten frames for a portrait session, but that was part of the challenge of doing this project. In a way, it is a huge step back from digital photography. I would have probably shot 20-30 times more images if I had a digital camera on the shoot. Would the digital shots have been better? I think so in some instances - but would I work as hard to "see" when photographing digitally? Perhaps - it is debatable for me.
Austin grew up in the Southern Pines area of North Carolina - just 75 miles from where I grew up. His mother was a dancer and his father is a director, actor, and writer. His parents met during a performance of the musical Carousel. He was raised in an entertainment household so he naturally went to college at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem and studied drama. After college, he worked on a slew of different productions over the years for film and TV. He worked on the crew for the TV series One Tree Hill, Drop Dead Diva, East Bound & Down, and movies Death Sentence, Wreckage, Cabin Fever 2, and Bolden! just to name a few.
During the production of Death Sentence starring Kevin Bacon some of the crew members shaved their heads in solidarity with Bacon's character who shaves his head. Austin told me he was one of the crew members to shave their head. There is an idea called six degrees of separation that states that all living things and everything else in the world is six or fewer steps away from each other so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. There is a popular game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It rests on the assumption that anyone involved in the Hollywood film industry can be linked through their film roles to Bacon within six steps. I told Austin that I once photographed Kevin Bacon for USA Today as he performed music as part of his Bacon Brothers music tour. Austin worked on a movie with him, so I postulated that we both have low "Bacon numbers" despite the fact that we never actually acted with him.
For this shoot, Austin and I walked around within a few blocks of my home in Manassas. I used all natural light and did not rely on any sort of light modifiers or fill cards. I used a tripod, a light meter, and a normal focal length lens. I commented to Austin that often it is a shame to just shoot ten frames for a portrait session, but that was part of the challenge of doing this project. In a way, it is a huge step back from digital photography. I would have probably shot 20-30 times more images if I had a digital camera on the shoot. Would the digital shots have been better? I think so in some instances - but would I work as hard to "see" when photographing digitally? Perhaps - it is debatable for me.
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