Ever since joining the San Jose Sharks two years ago, I’ve looked for different ways to photograph hockey and showcase our athletes. There was one specific photo that I had been thinking about for a while. The concept would be to create a photo from below the ice, as if looking up at a Sharks player inside SAP Center.
As a portrait photographer, it can often be difficult to keep thing interesting in the studio. Adding a unique element to your images can help them stand out while also allowing you to have little fun. The unique element that I added for my most recent shoot was just a simple piece of plexiglass. Here are three ways you can use a sheet of plexiglass and some simple household supplies to unleash your inner creative.
For her project "The Big Bang", photographer Deborah Bay captured macro photographs of plexiglass sheets that had various types of firearms fired at them. After having professional law enforcement officers fire bullets into the glass, she brought the sheets into a studio and "shot" them again with a Contax 645 and a 120 macro lens. She writes,
I began thinking about "The Big Bang" after seeing a sales display of bullet-proof plexiglas that had projectiles embedded in it. The plexiglas captured the fragmentation of the bullets and provided a visual record of the energy released on impact. As I began to explore this concept further, I also was intrigued by the psychological tension created between the jewel-like beauty and the inherent destructiveness of the fragmented projectiles. Many of the images resemble exploding galaxies, and visions of intergalactic bling sublimate the horror of bullets meeting muscle and bone. In fact, Susan Sontag described the camera as "a sublimation of the gun" -- load, aim and shoot.
Polaroid instant photographs are fun to make and look at, but displaying them (or selling them) in a nice and formal way can be difficult. Grant Hamilton came up with a fantastic way of selling his Polaroid prints -- he makes high resolution scans of the photographs, prints them on Fuji Crystal Archive Polyester, and then encapsulates the print in Plexiglas. The resulting 1:1 scale shiny photo-clones are thick enough to stand on their own, and are a great way to show off your best Polaroid photos.