Jay P: So what do you get when you got a dry lake bed, a Spaceman, some smoke, and a dead
fish?
Man: I think you get "The Slanted Lens."
Jay P: I think that's what you get, yeah.
You know, after working in this business for 25 plus years, I really understand the things
that photographers and videographers face.
I know the industry.
I know what you need to overcome the problems that you face.
Sit down with me in a mentoring session and I'll help you overcome the problems that you're
facing.
Sometimes you just hit a wall and you need some help.
I can definitely do that for you.
So go to theslantedlens.com.
Click on the mentoring button and set up a time when we can Skype together and I can
help you solve your problems.
Man: Whoever finds the longest fish skeleton wins.
Jay P: Absolutely.
You win the skeleton.
That's a dead fish next to me.
Hi.
This is Jay P Morgan.
Today on "The Slanted Lens", we are out at the Salton Sea.
We're taking a picture of our Spaceman with his suitcases with these weird kind of, little
pier posts that are calcified over.
Today, we're gonna talk a little bit about the creative process.
It's not a destination, you know exactly where you're going.
It's a flow, like flowing down a river, and you've got to kind of accept the stream and
the current and some of the things that life gives you, and make it into a great image.
Now, we're going to do some smoke with some smoke bombs and our smoke machine in the background.
Though it's a little smoke machine, it's a huge area, not really covering what we need
to cover, so we're gonna shoe the way here and see what we got.
The sun has just gotten into that kind of warmer stage, where it's dropped down, and
we're now not shooting direct sun but we got kind of a nice warm luminance around us.
And so it looks pretty good.
Because we came, thinking there was this, like, pool of orange waters that look like
toxic waste, and we could put our smoke behind it.
But when we get here, the water is all gone.
And so, we're just making something happen with the pillars, you know?
We wanted to frame him with that background element to give us a sense of, "I'm lost on
this planet and I'm trying to go home, or I'm traveling or something."
So people ask me all the time how I come up with the ideas we do.
You know, it's just a matter of...a lot of the times, it's just like you pull things
out of a bag.
We had this spacesuit from another shot we did, the colored smoke grenades, and I had
these left over from when we shot Abraham Lincoln.
You can check that lesson out, when we shot Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg.
And I'm going, "Hey.
We're going down to Bombay Beach.
It's kind of weird down there, and so we're just gonna try doing Spaceman."
So we've got Spaceman out in the desert, we've got the Spaceman down here with these formations.
It's just a matter of using what we've got and kind of making something out of it.
We have another red?
Man: Uh-huh.
Jay P: Look at that last one.
Let's see what we learn from that.
Man: Oh, that's cool.
I just love that color.
I love that one.
Jay P: Mm-hmm.
Sometimes that creative process is a matter of just taking the elements in front of you,
and trying to come up with a different slant to use them.
I do love the suitcase that he has, actually.
Okay, Kurt, taking a step for me.
That's good.
Hold it right there.
So this creative process becomes such a journey because we're trying different gels, different
smoke colors, and the light's changing out here.
It's getting more and more blue all the time.
So it's definitely a journey trying to figure it out.
But you stay at it.
You know, long after you think the shot's done, we're gonna get some really beautiful
stuff because I just keep dragging my shutter.
My aperture's set at 7 or 6.1.
So I'm just gonna let that shutter drag longer and longer.
Right now, I'm at 13th of a second, and I'll probably get up to a second, or even longer
before we call it a day.
So you can shoot...I love this time of day to shoot because the light is soft.
I can control things with my strobes.
I can control the ambient with the shutter.
It's just a great time of day to shoot for me.
So there you have it.
We're shooting outside in that setting sun, looking at those different combinations of
smoke and of light and of colors.
And it looked very cool.
I love doing this kind of stuff because it's just great and fun.
You kind of let the wind blow you where you're gonna go, and I think we got some great images.
So keep those cameras going, keep on clicking.
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They want an estimate."
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