Free Drinks and Light Leaks

A (Stress) Dream Come True

Most people have recurring stress dreams, maybe something embarrassing happens at your old high school, you forget to wear pants or whatever, or maybe you realize you have a college final coming up for a class you thought you’d dropped (which actually happened to my brother-in-law). I don’t have those dreams, but I do have one recurring stress dream. Mine usually goes back to my days as a photo assistant.

The dream plays out in two ways. In the first version, I’m assisting a new photographer, someone I haven’t worked with before. When I walk onto the set, I see that they are using a film camera I’ve never worked with. It usually looks like a Hasselblad of some kind, sort of like this:

Elvis Costello by Chris Gabrin

I think it’s this camera because I can’t recall a single photographer I assisted ever using one. Later on, they worked with digital Hasselblads plenty, and I became comfortable enough with those to rent them for my own shoots, but the camera like the one Elvis has here, those haunt my dreams. In them, the slides won’t fit back in, the backs fall off, film spills across the set in front of everyone, and sometimes, I drop a lens. Annoyingly the dreams usually just go on and on, with me fucking up the whole shoot for what seams like forever.

The closest I ever got to this happening in real life was on a shoot with a photographer I’d never worked with before. He was in town for the job and an art director I knew had recommended me, and when that would happen, I’d feel a lot of pressure not to make them look bad.

I was smart, I thought, and checked that they weren’t shooting with Hasselblads from 1976.

The good news? It was a camera I was very familiar with.

The bad news? The next day at the studio, I realized I wasn’t just the photo assistant, I was also the digital tech. Normally, I could handle that, but I wasn’t nearly as confident in it. Unlike my dream, where I struggled to load a film camera I’d never used, this time, I had to work with software I had never even heard of. I don’t remember what it was called, so it clearly wasn’t anything widely used. It never occurred to me to ask about it beforehand. I spent most of the day quietly watching how-to videos on the software’s website, trying to keep up. It wasn’t great, but I got through it.

In the other version of my dream, I am later in my career. This time, I’m the photographer. I’m on set, and my assistant hands me a camera I’ve never used, and don’t recognize. Now I have to pretend I’m one of those photographers whose assistants do 90% of the work. I hand it back, casually saying “get me F16” or whatever, while I go take an important “call”, all while trying to hide the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing. Even in the dream, it doesn’t work, and everyone knows I’m full of shit. Somehow it never occurs to me that it was a terrible idea to use a camera I’ve never shot with on a job. I’m so relieved when I wake up.

The closest real-life experience I had to this nightmare happened when I showed up to a shoot with three cameras I did know how to use, two real ones, and one plastic one I kept in a side pocket of my bag. Both of my usual cameras failed. I don’t remember exactly how, but neither worked. On most shoots, this would have been embarrassing, but fixable, I’d rent something and we’d start with a delay. But this wasn’t a typical shoot. I was photographing the band The National at the bar inside The Bowery Ballroom where they were performing that night. By the time I arrived, after their soundcheck, they had already started drinking.

I spent about 20 minutes desperately trying to get my cameras working, but it wasn’t happening. The band, and their team, had clearly planned on giving me about 15 minutes before moving on, they weren’t going to spend the rest of their pre-show downtime with me, no matter how drunk they were. They weren’t rude, but it was obvious what was happening: I was blowing it.

So, I did the only thing I could think of. I loaded a roll of film into my Holga, threw in some fresh batteries, and shot the entire thing with a toy camera, acting as if it was a bold creative choice rather than an effort to salvage the shoot.

In the end, I think people responded well to the film, but I was never happy with it, and maybe they were just being nice. I had envisioned something completely different, and I could never quite shake that version of the shoot from my mind. I was once asked if I ever had a shoot I’d like another crack at, my answer was this one.

That said, I did start testing my cameras before every job, no matter how many I was bringing, so at least some good came of it.

Free Drinks and Light Leaks with The National

I later heard from a friend that the band actually enjoyed the shoot and the photos, but I suspect that had a lot more to do with the open bar than with me or my pictures.

Thanks, Travis

While writing this I started listening to The National but it was kind of bumming me out so I switched to: