Being on the road isn’t the ordeal it used to be. With email, internet access, smart phones, Kinko’s, fax machines (Remember them? We’ve actually been required to fax something in the past year!), digital cameras and Flip cams, the miles between where you are and where you live don’t matter as much as they once did. Once in a while, however, even with all the technology, a jam occurs.
We were staying at the Nassau Inn in Wildwood Crest, NJ, last week, laying low between engagements here on the east coast, when we got an email from Vegas saying that the pics we had provided to the folks at the Orleans (for use in “collateral material” to promote our upcoming monthlong gig there) were unusable. Something about having an inadequately high resolution. What to do? The deadline for the pics was near, so there was no way we could be home to dig up proper pics, so…
We figured we had three options, with a deadline approaching in hours: 1) Use the pics, no matter how lo-res they might be, 2) Go to a Walmart Portrait center and have “formal portraits” taken, 2a) find a local photographer and studio or 3) Use our Fuji FinePix S2950 “bridge” camera to shoot some sort of provisional headshots, using the built-in flash and/or existing light. The pics would be used for everything from table tents to signs over the slot machines and billboards, so we were panicked
We opted for number three.
Wildwood in the off-season is… abandoned. So much so that it seems eerie. In fact, for the first four days of our stay at the Nassau, we were the only occupants. Friday saw an influx of visitors, but the town was still pretty much empty. So we had our pick of any one of dozens of walls to use as backdrops, many of them painted in muted, mid-century groovy colors and some having offbeat textures. After a hurried survey of websites offering portrait-taking tips (“shoot in open shade,” “clouds make a good softbox,” “shoot with the sun at your back… unless the sun’s behind a cloud,” etc.), we set out to find the perfect backdrop.
We shot TFHOTS against an aqua wall, but the exiting storm front kicked up winds that made like an eggbeater on her carefully arranged hair. When a light rain started to fall, we retreated back to the Nassau to wait for the sun to reappear.
When the clouds moved on, TFHOTS suggested we use the front door of our unit as a backdrop (see below). She also suggested we both wear black-and-white clothing, so that, together with the backdrop, the pics would be a matching set.
Since we had only recently purchased the Fuji, we were not as familiar with the equipment as we would have liked. We downloaded the owner’s manual from the Fuji site, skimmed the important parts, and, after we gave the Fuji tech support line a call and got the answers to a couple of pertinent questions, we were ready to shoot.
Brian: f-stop: 4.2, 1/50 sec., ISO-200 and no flash. Traci: f-stop: 5, 1/30 sec, ISO-200 and no flash. We FTP’ed the files to up to the folks in Vegas and eventually got word that the images would be included in all the necessary materials.
Are we 100 per cent happy with the results? No. But it was crucial that we provide some sort of workable image. And, considering that we did so with little notice and a looming deadline, we think that the final result was pretty good. Had it been 1999, we would have been totally screwed.