Anatomy of a Shot: “Astro Orbiter”

So I’m going to start a series (on at least an annual basis lol) that I’m going to call “Anatomy of a Shot”, where I will talk through my thought process behind a specific image and what went into making it.

For this shot, I saw the Astro Orbiter ride in Disneyland and instantly knew I wanted to capture the motion of the rockets as they flew around the stylized planets.

On this whole trip I unofficially challenged myself to shoot only on film, which definitely made capturing this a challenge since I only saw the final resulting image once I got the film developed, so I wasn’t able to shoot a ton of shots and check how they turned out to guarantee I got the shot I wanted. This is actually something I really love about film photography vs digital; the stakes feel higher, each shot is more precious, and it has forced me to embrace the imperfections in an image which ultimately makes for better art (in my opinion at least).

Anyway, at the time I first saw the ride, it was mid-day and I had Kodak UltraMax ISO 400 film loaded in my Minolta X-700, so I knew it was going to be a bit of a delicate balance getting the motion blur I wanted without wildly overexposing everything. I ended up stopping down to f/22 and used I believe 1/30s or 1/15s for the shutter speed, hoping I would hit the sweet spot with the motion and exposure. Here is the resulting image:

Now you have to remember, I didn’t see this until after we got back from the trip and I was able to get the film developed. I actually really like the way this turned out, the balance between the motion in the foreground and the rockets and the crispness in the rest of the image is pretty much perfect, and my fear of overexposure was unfounded after all.

It turns out that film is far more forgiving of overexposure vs underexposure, which is the opposite of my experience with digital photography where it is usually easier in my experience to recover shadows in underexposed images than highlights in blown out overexposed images.

But because I didn’t know any of this, the idea kept nagging at me all day, simmering in the back of my mind. So when I finished the roll and loaded in some Fujicolor ISO 200 film and the sun went down, I resolved to go back and try again. With the darkness and the new film stock, I ended up shooting more wide open at f/3.5 and used a 1s shutter speed. I took a couple of shots by sitting down and bracing myself against a short fence to stay as steady as possible since I didn’t have a tripod or anything on me, before I realized that the film winder was feeling a little “gritty” and I got worries that it wasn’t advancing properly, so I quickly opened the camera back and sure enough, the sprockets hadn’t caught properly (probably due to the way that I load film as efficiently as possible, trying to get 1-2 extra frames out of a 24 exposure roll, more on that in a later post). So I re-loaded the film and advanced it as best I could then shot a few test shots to get through the now exposed film and tried two more shots. Those results are below:

Notice the heavier image burn on the top of the first exposure, no doubt a product of my overzealous loading technique and subsequent re-load. Also both of these images have a much more noticeable motion blur but at the expense of the overall sharpness of the other elements as well. At first glance, I’m not super happy with either of these images.

The first image is okay, but the burn at the top and the overall shakiness are a little much, though I do like that it feels a little more “artsy” and I’ve grown to like it more than the second — at least in their unedited states!

So the second image is just as shaky, but without the burn that gives the first it’s artsy element, and the framing is a bit off for my liking. But does this mean that the photo is a lost cause? Not so! I decided to tinker with it a bit, and with a good crop the framing was a relatively simple fix, but the real change was the shift from color (as shot) to black and white.

Maybe this says a lot about photography and art or maybe it just says a lot about me as a photographer, but I feel like editing a color image to black and white can oftentimes save an image that I am not particularly fond of. Whether the balance of color is off or the exposure is not balanced or the contrast is too high/low, shifting to black and white seems to cover a multitude of photographic sins. I apologize if I just revealed what is behind the curtain a bit for photography is general, but I feel like its more likely that I just revealed a lot about myself as a photographer instead.

Regardless of which of these is the truth in this situation, here is the result of the crop and the conversion to black and white for the second image from above:

As you can see, this image is much more pleasant and even though the general blu/shakiness in the photo remains unchanged, it almost feels intentional even if flawed.

And there you have it! This is the anatomy of this shot. At the end of the day, I actually really enjoy all three images, and all it took was a little trial and error and a touch of editing.

Let me know what you think of this style of post, I honestly started this as a journal of sorts to collect my own thoughts after getting these rolls back and seeing how these turned out, but if others enjoy this kind of stream of consciousness deep dive into photos and the process behind the idea, the shot, and the edit for an image or set of images, I’d love to do more!

In all honest, I’ll probably write more of these anyway, but I would love any input/praise! Or constructive criticism, too, I guess, if you must haha.

M