Hey Kenny, Thanks for this! ABA was a fun project and I still look back on it with great pride. But it was (for now, at least) a limited thing, like one of those 8-episode series on Netflix. I got to a point where I felt I had nothing left to say, and no time in which to say it. When the pandemic eased off and life began to get back to normalish, I had other things to do that more directly paid the bills and took priority. So consider it a boxed set. It’s got staying power, I think. 
Thanks for the kind words. Much appreciated.
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Hi David. Thanks for this. Great question. Let me see if I can articulate a reply that makes any sense at all.
For me, mood is everything, even before story. I want to feel the image and I want others to feel something too. So I will backlight or sidelight things as a first instinct if I can. Where furry critters are concerned I try very hard not to blow out highlights, but inevitably lose some of them. Specular highlights on water will almost always blow, but rim lit fur can usually be recovered. Sometimes not. So I watch my histogram always, and I keep my blinkies on and pay attention to WHICH highlights I’m blowing. Then I bump the shadows up in development with localized adjustments to bring subtle details back to the face, etc. It’s a bit of a dance because you don’t want to betray the logic of light and make it look unrealistic or “worked on”. So this is where knowing what your camera can do, what development can do, and to some degree, knowing what noise reduction software can do as well to make it the best print, is important.
Another sermonette: we tend to want detail. Information! But at what cost? Losing the mood? Why are we so hell-bent on obliterating the mystery from our photographs just so we can see the details? We KNOW what a bear looks like. We KNOW what an eagle looks like. Our art is not required to be illustrative. Everything is an interpretation, so we need to interpret the scene, not so it looks like what our eyes saw but so it feels the way our heart and mind experienced it. The camera can accomplish both approaches, but the former never satisfied me (and there a millions of people out there showing me in perfect detail what bears and birds look like)
In the words of the French painter Robert Henri: “Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.”
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Well, that was fun. Thanks so much to those who participated. I’m heartened by the thoughtful questions, though disappointed that i didn’t have a chance to drone on and on about my Sony 300/2.8 or my favourite SD cards. LOL. Seeing these kinds of conversations (not the lens and SD cards, the other ones) encourages me. We make photographs from the inside out. We start with our thinking and feeling and when we exchange ideas about that stuff, our work can only get better.
Every couple weeks I send out my Contact Sheet. It’s an article about the art and craft of what we do, the creativity stuff, and sometimes a first peek at my new work. It’s free and it’s a good read, and it is most certainly not a “newsletter” of which no one needs more. But it’s thoughtful and it might help deepen or enrich your inner life with this craft is concerned. You can tell me where to send it at MyContactSheet.com . You can also find an archive of a thousand articles as well as see my work in pictures, at DavidduChemin.com. If I can help you in any way, just reach out. Instagram is a good place to do that. You’ll find me. Take care all. Wishing you wonder and light.
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