"Transition..."

Approximately 25 years ago when I was a student in Ryerson's Photographic Technology Program I started working with very long exposures that required my subjects to pose without moving for variously challenging lengths of time. My best friend Pete, from the Film program, who went on to great success as a music video director, and then TV commercial director, suffered through a number of these experiences (I've grown more patient and worked some flexibility into the process over the years), so it was a total trip to find myself shooting him again all these years later with yet another long exposure process. 

We've kept in touch on and off and when I found out he was moving his family out of his downtown home I leaped at the chance to photograph him in "Transition..." with not much more than a day to go before the moving truck's arrival. Just about to wrap up post production on one project and getting ready to travel briefly before diving into his next commitment, while simultaneously changing his home base, he was in a resonantly transitional phase (even if only briefly in his case), something that has become a huge theme in the lives of many of my friends and colleagues in recent years, and which I wanted to capture creatively.

Technically, the main capture was not far from complete, as will be apparent from the images above. I just needed some window area that was a little darker and uncontaminated by stray light streaks, and I needed the light to be on, which it couldn't be during the long main exposure, because it would have contaminated the primary lighting.