Zombie Chill

I finally made my way onto the set of a zombie movie. I’ve had several opportunities over the years, but last weekend the planets were finally in alignment. My friend Frank, who works at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, rung me up to tell me that a movie company was filming zombie scenes that night in the graveyard. Would I want to come by? Do zombies feast on human flesh?

Demons and Zombies

When I arrived, the actors were getting their makeup applied – fake brains oozing out of the top of baseball caps, torn clothes, fake blood spattered over flesh. After a bit of this fascinating scene, Frank  and I walked through the cemetery to the place where the scenes would be shot. A generator was running, power cables lay in the grass and a few barn door movie lights were on. This part of the cemetery looked quite eerie with the tombstones lit up white and the background pitch black.

Laurel Hill at Dusk

We chatted a bit about his previous night’s work – on Friday the Thirteenth – helping to set up for an outdoor screening of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space and a 1937 court-ordered exhumation film made at Laurel Hill Cemetery. The latter a fascinating story involving a will valued at twenty million dollars that was thought to be buried inside a woman's coffin, which you can read about here (someone had actually found the film at a local flea market!). Believe it or not, nearly a thousand people showed up for movie night at the cemetery! (Read this if you think I'm exaggerating!)

Evening, Laurel Hill Cemetery

In comparison, this mid-July zombie evening was very quiet. It was also quite warm, about eighty degrees. The sky was cloudy, and their reflection of the distant city lights gave a luster of midday to objects below … well, maybe not quite that bright. It was light enough at 10 p.m., however, that you didn’t need a flashlight to navigate your way around the cemetery.

Frank, about to be demonized

Frank is Laurel Hill’s night man – he’s the guy called upon to do all the night work at the cemetery. Night work? There are many people who request night access (when the gates are locked) to do model shoots, music videos, movies, and paranormal investigations. Frank lets them in, shows them around, helps get them set up, and is available for any issues that might come up. He also lives on the grounds (well, in a house on the grounds) and serves as night watchman for the cemetery. So he’s seen a lot.

As we chatted, waiting for the film crew and actors to arrive, I was thinking I should’ve brought of few beers, it was so hot. About that moment, I felt an unmistakable coldness on my left elbow. It was brief, about two seconds, but I felt it. There were no breezes that night. I stopped Frank in mid-sentence and told him, after which he replied, “The paranormal investigators always say this is the most active part of the cemetery.” Out of seventy-eight acres, odd that the zombie folk chose this spot. In all my cemetery travels, this is the first time I ever experienced the “ghostly chill,”  which I did not feel again that evening. I've looked up the "rational" explanations for the cold sensation, and none of them wholly explains what I felt. I had no goosebumps, and I wasn't scared (consciously or subconsciously).

Film makers at Laurel Hill Cemetery

The rest of the evening was uneventful, as far as ghosts were concerned. I was intrigued by the fact that the cinematographer (videographer?) was using a professional-grade DSLR with video capability, which seems to be the equipment of choice for even some high-budget motion picture projects (see link to read more on this technology). After my initial fascination with being on a movie set and seeing zombies wore off, it was all rather tedious. Multiple takes of every scene kind of wears on you, as an observer, anyway. Still, it was a bit weird having zombies come up to me in a graveyard asking if I was afraid …. I was actually afraid they would continue telling me bad zombie jokes.

Beetle incineration

The more interesting part of the experience was seeing parts of the cemetery artificially lit with movie lights (of a temperature balanced for daylight, by the way), which made it apparent to a photographer (me) how cinematographers use light to create mood. The kind of creepy thing was seeing all the night beetles crawling up the marble obelisks all around us. Every once in a while, one would land on a hot light and be slowly incinerated. The first time I saw this, I thought the light was burning up, there was that much smoke! I alerted a member of the crew, who went over to examine the burning hot surface of the light. He picked it up by its stand, shook out the beetle parts, and the show continued on.

I shot a few of the scenes that were being filmed, being careful not to click my shutter after the “Quiet on the set!” proclamation was made. Some of those images you see here. Having my camera with me made me feel somewhat official, like it was a press pass or something. It’s interesting how the camera, as writer Susan Sontag puts it, can make everyone a tourist in other people’s reality – and eventually in one’s own.

Further Reading and References:
Secret Cinema at Laurel Hill Cemetery
Graveside Movies Draw 900+ to Laurel Hill Cemetery
 

Ed Wood's Film

Stuck in a Photographic Rut

I was in the supermarket a couple weeks ago with my wife and child when we bumped into a friend of ours. Maria is a photography professor at one of Philadelphia’s art colleges. We’ve been friends for several years and I greatly admire her work as well as the historical retrospective photography exhibits (link at end) she has produced and curated.

She told me how much she enjoys reading this blog. I was grateful, a bit embarrassed, and curiously, I began to feel guilty for not spending much time writing about photography. (I also feel guilty about not updating my PhotographerCoach.com website in forever!) 

"Rocky's" deceased wife, Adrian

I started thinking about the fact that in my blog, I’ve gravitated toward using photography as a means of documenting things, to prove I was there – the real world. Originally, I would write about a particular fine art photograph that I made, how I made it or perhaps the details related to my bringing it into existence. Now, the photographs at times do no more than punctuate my words. As a result, my photography recently has become more journalistic than fine art. The images are not exactly snap-shoddy, but they have veered off my intended path. While it’s true that I’ve continued to enter some juried art shows and attend events to sell my work, these mainly involve older images.

Available at Amazon.com

I suppose I could just continue the documentary-style photography and hope someone will archive it all into a book like Michael Lesy did with Charles Van Schaick’s Wisconsin Death Trip. But I REALLY like making fine art photographs! It’s a way of creating fantasy out of reality for me. So how do I get back on track with what I truly like to do? Or better yet, achieve a better balance between the fine art images and the documentary photos?

I began thinking about a presentation that my friend Maria made a few years ago to the Photographic Society of Philadelphia. The presentation was a slide show and lecture about her recent trip to Italy. Maria creates wonderful fine art photography. Her images in the presentation, however, were travelogue photos of the Italian countryside and its people. Hers are the type of travel snapshots you would expect a seasoned professional photographer to take. Maybe I need to hone this skill.

"Death" in the English Cemetery

Travel, of course, is a great way to get your creative juices flowing. I was in Italy too, a few years ago, but only came back with tombstone photographs! While the English Cemetery in Florence was beautiful, perhaps I should have looked at the rest of the beauty around me. (If you’re a cemetery photographer, by the way, Italian sculpture has everything else beat!)

Get Out of Your Element

Making photographs outside your usual stomping grounds is certainly a good way to get your creative juices flowing. However, you don’t need to travel all the way to another country for a change of scenery – often such new experiences appear in your own back yard. For example, I attended the Kinetic Sculpture Race in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood recently to enjoy the festival and take photographs. Even if a certain kind of art is not your forte (e.g. building bicycle-powered vehicles), you can still get ideas from other people’s creativity. After seeing the Amish buggy, I realized that I should make a trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to see what Amish graves look like. Hmmm. Never even thought about that! In addition to the wonderful vehicles, the woman standing next to me in the crowd was a member of the Dumpster Divers of Philadelphia, a group of artists who create art out of trash (I’d always wondered what those people looked like!). When you talk with artists who work in a different medium, your own creativity can be stimulated.

If you feel like you’re in a rut and want to get out, there are all sorts of catalysts standing by, waiting for your call. Travel is just one of them. A photographer can learn things by hanging out with other photographers, but why limit yourself? While I certainly expect to learn some new things when I attend the AGS (Association for Gravestone Studies) conference next month, I already live in this world. It’s useful to jump the rails and land in an entirely different sphere every so often. You can learn things from wildly disparate sources, like seeing how the arts and crafters display their wares at art shows and talking with painters and sculptors about how they create. Such experiences help you see things from a different perspective. Everyone has artistic skills to share – for instance, I’ve gotten useful get tips about marketing my work from a friend who is a competitive BBQ chef.

Amish zombies at Kinetic Sculpture Race

Not being an academically-trained artist, I need all the help I can get. In my quest to create more of a balance between my documentary photography and my fine art work, I like to refer to those who have gone before me, to learn from their experience as well as my own. A reference I recently stumbled upon is Deanna Wood’s “Emerging Artist” blog. She has an archive called “Helpful Posts” which covers many of the anxiety-producing details that artists find themselves dealing with. Topics include “Hanging Artwork,” “Writing an Artist’s Statement,” “How Galleries Choose Artists,” and my personal favorite, “Rejection.” Since you REALLY would like nothing more than to just create your art, it’s helpful to have these essential things laid bare in front of you. Eliminating the guess-work of the real world helps me to concentrate more on my make-believe world.

Related Readings:

Maria DiElsi's "Artway Project"
Dumpster Divers of Philadelphia
Deanna Wood’s “Emerging Artist” blog
Ed Snyder's Photographercoach.com 
Ed book, Digital Photography for the Impatient:

Available from Amazon.com

"Tell Me They're Not Zombies...."

Somewhere in 2009, my friend Frank, who works for Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, invited me to do some night shooting with him. Now, I would never pass up an opportunity to be in a cemetery at night--as long as I wasn't alone!

I met Frank on the appointed day at the solemn hour of 10 pm at the cemetery. He unlocked the gate and I entered. We'd planned on Harvest-moon lighting, but there were some drifting clouds which occasionally plunged us into near-darkness. Even by moonlight, its kind of dangerous to step off the roads or paths for a number of reasons--you could fall into a sunken grave or trip over a knee-high tombstone. I've experienced the latter and I must say, its neither good for one's knees nor one's camera equipment.

The celestial light was amazingly eerie, and Frank took great advantage of it with his new Nikon DSLR (which seems to respond to color in a much livlier fashion that my Canon DSLR). The image you see here of the monuments silouetted against the night sky is one of the few useable ones I made. While composing the scene, Frank ambled off to find other scenes to photograph, leaving me alone. I'm a big boy, I can do this. So what if the cemetery exit is a quarter mile away. Just concentrate on my work....nothing to be afraid of--except maybe the five silhouettes of people walking slowly, very slowly, in single-file across the cemetery ridge about a hundred yards away. Gulp.

Frank had locked the main gate behind me after I'd arrived--no one else could've gotten in. I called Frank on his cell phone and asked where he was; he said "Off to your right down by the mausoleums." I told him to come back. He came up alongside me a few minutes later, and with the slowly moving figures outlined against the moonlight, I said to him, "Just tell me they're not zombies."

This photo must have been what I looked like when I saw them! Frank laughed and said "They're ghost hunters, people from the South Jersey Paranormal Research group! They've been here a few hours." He never mentioned there was anyone else on the grounds--I could've killed him. After I got over this business of having the bejesus scared out of me, it occurred to me that we should  scare the bejesus out of the ghosthunters! I mean, their sophisticated video and audio recording devices are not tuned to detect live people, right? Not being cruel, we decided just to go and meet up with them.

The South Jersey Paranormal Research group amounted to about five members, all of whom had devices of some sort to sense and document paranormal activity. They told us about the energy they measured in various areas of the cemetery and the audio recordings of "human" voices they made. A very serious group of people, who have made their findings available to anyone with an open mind about such things. They had visited Laurel Hill prior to us meeting them that night, and you can go to their site and see what they found in 2007. Apparently, this particular cemetery is rife with spiritual activity: http://www.sjpr.org/index.php?page=2&cs=1&art=48

So we never came upon any actual zombies, but we did learn a bit about a different kind of fascination some people have with cemeteries. If you're afraid of going into a cemetery at night, the whole 'scarey ghost' thing can handily be put in perspective with a comment a friend of mine once made. She worked for a cemetery and believed that if a person died under some horrible circumstance, the unruly spirit must hang around the particular site of demise--not the cemetery in which the person's body was laid to rest. Someday maybe I'll believe that, but my imagination still paints too vivid a picture of werewolves with chainsaws for me to venture into any cemetery alone at night!

Cemetery Book Recommendation!