With that in my mind, I set about coming up with a concept for our shoot. In the end I chose to shoot at Angels Flight, a funicular tram in downtown LA. The idea being that Paul can play the bass anywhere, even in a tiny rail car. He was willing to try it, so we met at the Watercourt at California Plaza. Before trying Angles Flight, we took a couple portraits of Paul playing outside.
Due to the space constraints I was going to face on this shoot, I decided to use my Canon 1Ds MkII rather than the Hasslblad H3D I used for all the other classical musician portraits. This late afternoon shot was taken with the EF 135mm F2.0L
lens almost wide open at 1/100 sec, ISO 100.Moving on to the tram, I switched to a Nikon 50mm f1.2 AIS
that I'm using with a adapter on my Canon. Shooting inside, nearly wide open at ISO 320, the best I was able to get was 1/60 sec for this shot.
Fortunately very few people chose to ride that day and I was able to keep shooting as we rode back and forth in the little car. I paid the conductor for 10 trips for each of us and he let us stay on the car without debarking.
One of my favorite shots of the day was near the very end. It was after 7pm, and my shutter speed was down dropping to 1/25 sec, but I kept shooting and got this shot from the "top" of the car looking back. Paul was several steps down from me and I was shooting parallel to the ground so the roof filled the frame behind him.
