Ellen Hummel // San Francisco, CA
My brother lives right outside of San Francisco, which is home to one of the better ballet companies in the United States. Although I had visited SF once for this project, that trip was towards the beginning of this project, and my style has drastically changed since then. The fact that my brother lives there gave me as good an excuse as any to add more ballerinas to this project.
Once I booked a flight, I reached out to a local photographer who I’ve become friends with over Instagram to see if he knows of any ballerinas that might be interested in participating in this project. One of the ballerinas Nathan graciously connected me with was Ellen, a soloist at SF Ballet.
After agreeing on a time frame to shoot, which in of itself was a hassle, trying to dance around with her company’s Covid-19 testing requirements (and at the same time leave my days schedule sufficiently open to make the trip to visit my brother worthwhile and spend time with family), we agreed on shooting at Cypress Tree Tunnel, about an hour north of San Francisco. To my surprise, there was minimal pushback (“you know it’s an hour drive from San Francisco…? Ok, cool, see you then”) when I suggested we arrive by 6:30 in the morning, to capture that morning light.
Upon arrival, my jaw dropped, and I’m pretty sure I squealed like a little kid, because Ellen commented on how excited I sounded,; waking up at 4:30am was so worth while. Ellen braved the 45° windy weather like the champ that she is, too.
I normally shoot 12 frames per ballerina, one roll of HP5 film, which takes about 90 minutes. I always want to be respectful of the ballerina’s time, and not take more than I need. This already is a slow process. When we finished, we realized we didn’t even get the chance to shoot at our second location, which we thought was close by. Thanks to the help of Mike, a local photographer who “shows up to the same location once a week to photograph it for years”, we found out we were just a few minutes away drive from the Lone Tree we had wanted to shoot at.
We jumped into the car and drove off, aware of our limited time, but figured since we had driven all this way, we might as well go the extra mile, or five miles. Turns out we didn’t go far enough. After almost driving for 10 minutes and - quite literally - off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean, we pulled over at a spot, bummed we could’t find the tree. With no cell service, we couldn’t look for the tree’s coordinates, and both our maps suggested we had driven to essentially the end of the road. We get out, shoot a quick roll, and end up returning home, quite satisfied with our day’s work.
April 10, 2021
For this lighting - and having such a beautiful location all to myself with a ballerina for more than an hour - I’ll wake up at 4:30am any day. Just don’t ask me to move to California, home of the $5 gas prices (twice that of Texas) and exorbitant real estate prices. I’ll be back, though: I’m already planning a followup trip out there, to shoot with the lone tree I missed.
