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Randy Duchaine |
| Randy Duchaine enjoys the challenge and variety of working with clients ranging from Advertising, Multi-national Corporations, Design Firms, Editorial & Publishing projects.
He earned an A.A in Liberal Arts along with a B.S. and an Honorary Master of Photography from Brooks Institute of Photography. He has taught, lectured, and given seminars at Brooks, F.I.T., PS 51 in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and other arts instutions. His awards include the New York Art Directors Club, Connecticut Art Directors Club, Society of Publication Designers, Graphic Design USA, Graphis, Maggie Award, How Magazine, Desi Awards, etc. To visit Randy's site: www.randyduchaine.com |
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On Location with the Lowel Rifa. |
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Bread and Puppets founder Peter Schuman |
From the road the Bread and Puppet museum looks like an ordinary Vermont dairy barn until you enter it and experience 30 + rooms filled with masks and mythical characters up to twenty feet tall and some as small as a persons face. The light is rather dim created by energy efficient compact lights strung from the ceiling every 50 feet or so. The mood is a silent haunting quality of figures that on occasion come to exude life for performance. My task is to photograph the displays and create a portrait of Bread and Puppets founder Peter Schuman for their promotional use.
The hard part is to decide where to photograph Peter in this labyrinth of characters. The display I choose to photograph him in is 15 feet across, about 20 feet deep, and about 30 feet high. There is a permanent wooden rail in front of the display so I am limited as to where I can place the camera and set up a Lowel Rifa-lite. The light is on camera left side to illuminate Peter and light the masks, faces and characters. The light is soft and directional - perfect for creating the environmental portrait of the founder of this creative venue. At asa 400 my exposures are around 1/4 second at f8. Peter shows up barefoot and allows me the pleasures of 12 exposures and then I am off to shoot 20 + displays of the Bread & Puppet family all illuminated with the Lowel Rifa-lite and an occasional reflector. The Rifa is simple, compact and a good compliment to a location photographers' kit.
On to the next creative encounter!