Denny Henry

The gallery space in the Corcoran can be a fun and challenging environment to shoot in. The main challenge of shooting in the galleries is that the light levels are kept very low to protect the artwork.   The conditions give me a welcome excuse to shoot with my fast prime lenses.  

The image below is from a gallery talk that coincided with the annual all-senior show.  For the talk, a group of about 9 students spoke to gallery visitors about the work that they had in the show.  The talk was interesting for me because I  had seen and photographed all of the work in the weeks an months leading up to the show, but had never heard anything more about it than what was in the artists statements.  

Corcoran Students talking about their work in the gallery.

The Corcoran re-designed their gallery and college websites about a year ago, and their image needs changed with the new website.  The new layout of the website use a lot of narrow horizonal images, and I've been shooting with that in mind. 

The clip below is from the Corcoran's monthly newsletter that has a similar need for long horizontal images. The image is a panorama of the 2010 Corcoran Ball.  If you look close you can see the video camera for the Time lapse , clamped on the right side of the second floor railing. 

I spent half of last week teaching photography to kids at Camp Innabah in Pennsylvania. I didn't have much time to go into great depths about photography, but my goal for the week was to get them interested in taking pictures.  At the begining of the week, it took a little coaxing to get them to shoot even 10 frames.  Fortunatly they got the swing of things pretty quick, and were shooting wildly by the end. 

Photo Campers taking pictures Photo Campers at Innabah in Pennsylvania

Campers learning about nature

Triptych panorama of Luray CavernsLast weekend I drove with Jackie to meet her parents at Luray caverns in Virginia.  They were there while traveling along Skyline Drive on a motorcycle for vacation. 

I've been carrying a small film camera with a 50mm lens on weekends as a way to separate shooting for work, and shooting for fun.  The 50mm F/1.4 lens was great for the low lighting of the cave, but the focal length wasn't great for getting images of the large rock formations. In order to overcome the limits of the lens, I decided to make a panorama in the camera.  I shot three images, and tried to line them up so when the film was viewed un-cut it would read like a panorama.  I didn't line up the frames exactly, but overall I think the effect worked well. 

It seems like every other night this week in Washington, we've had lightning storms. 

During each storm (after I unplug all my hard drives and other photo equipment) I set up a my camera on a windowsill to capture photos of the lightning.  The way our apartment is situated in the building, we have a limited view of the skyline.  We could see the flash from lots of lightning strikes, but most of the lighting bolts themselves were obscured by buildings. 

Lightning strike in Washington DC