About the Image(s)

: Tree Cutters
This is probably the last of my tree cutter shots for a while. I just had some major work done in my yard, so I asked Juan and his team to pose with their equipment when they finished work today. I am trying to emulate Irving Penn’s famous Small Trades photographs. Google that if you are not familiar with it. They are great images. Penn invited trade workers to his studio and asked them to bring their working artifacts with them. Therefore, I asked the tree cutters to pose with their tools in front of the big tree from which they had just removed one of the branching trunks that had suddenly died this summer. One man, at my request, is holding a slice of the trunk that was cut today, reminiscent of Penn’s image of a firefighter holding a coil of fire hose.
I shot this with flash on in hopes of getting sufficient light on their faces. At the distance I shot, I think that worked. I converted to monochrome with a preset called Landscape that yielded their faces with good light but did not have excessive brightness behind. If I had one of the more advanced editing products, I would have copied the leafy background from the left side over to the right side to replace the view of my neighbor’s house. If I had noticed it when shooting, I would have asked the middle two men to put their left feet flat on the ground.