"David Saffir is an internationally recognized, award winning portrait, commercial, and fine art photographer and printmaker. He lives near Los Angeles, in Santa Clarita, California. He is past President of the Santa Clarita Valley Professional Photographers Association. He is the author of the book Mastering Digital Color: A Photographer's and Artist's Guide to Controlling Color, published by Thomson."
Discovering new things is one of my primary joys in life. I felt this way even as a toddler (long ago, but still remembered!). It is also one of the key elements that drive my personal photography.
We all know that the camera can show us things that we might not, or cannot see with our unaided eyes. Some of the obvious things are stopping motion, macro/close-up photography, and astronomy. The camera can also preserve a moment or a gesture that is fleeting and perishable – a feeling that perhaps lasts a minute or two, and is gone. The camera can also gather light over time, and reveal things in the shadows that we might never see otherwise.
During the past year I must have driven up and down Highland Ave (here in LA) about 50 times – on my way to a camera store I like in that part of town. And when I go down that way, I usually have to park the car unattended, so I leave the big camera at home, and take my peanut point-and-shoot with me. Image quality, at 8mp, is just good enough for an 8x10, if the planets line up and I hold the camera steady.
Waiting at a traffic signal, I noticed this man sitting on a bench at a bus stop. The combination of his posture, the ad on the bench, and the surroundings make for an image that tells a story – perhaps many stories. A few seconds after I shot the photo the signal changed, and I drove on.
The little camera I used is all beat up, the screen is cracked, it's scratched, it's been rained on and stepped on – and some of my most memorable candid shots still come from using it. The old cliché “f/8 and be there” still applies.
In a completely different situation, I had an opportunity to go to Horseshoe Bend, which is on the Colorado River. I had seen many photographs of this place, all taken in daylight. I wondered what it would look like under the moon.
So around 4 in the morning I went across the flatland with some friends, and came to this unbelievable precipice at the edge of Horseshoe Bend. The nearly full moon, which was on its way to setting, cast some light, but there was not enough to illuminate the entire scene.
Long story short, I set up the camera on a tripod and in a great example of the triumph of hope over practicality, I began shooting some frames of the scene. Using a wide-angle lens, I really couldn’t see much through the viewfinder. I set focus at infinity, guessed at the exposure, and took several frames ranging from a few seconds exposure to almost a minute. I didn’t really expect a good result.
I was just amazed when we got back to our motel, and I had a chance to see these on my laptop. Around frame three, the entire scene came to life in a blue glow. Every detail could be seen, from small boats on the river, to campers’ tents, to a line of clouds on the horizon. Whenever I show this image to a friend or colleague, they start looking deep into the image – the strong blues, and the other subtle colors in the scene are quite unusual.
In both cases, I didn’t pre-plan all that much. As often happens, I was looking for that new angle, time of day, or story that’s maybe gone unnoticed until now. And if I can capture it with my camera, and it speaks to me or someone else – well, that makes my day.
- David Saffir's website
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