Friday, January 7, 2011
When your subjects have a sense of humor portraits are fun
The other day I was assigned the task of photographing a pair of swimmers for the Daily Ambush.Because much of the sports staff is under the impression that they can think visually, they generally get a pre-conceived notion about what they want the photo to look like. The ideas the sports staff comes up with are usually really stupid. Then, for some reason the writer usually wants to be there to oversee the portrait process.
I'm not exactly sure what a sports writer, or any other writer for that matter, is going to do during a portrait photo session other than get in the way and distract the subject. Usually what ends up happening is I try to do it my way and bitch about the writer making it a hassle later.
Good portraits generally take time, something we don't usually get here at the Daily Ambush. Either the person who needs the photo to go with their story doesn't realize they need it and puts in a request pretty late or the person who sends me out to take photos doesn't give me enough notice. When someone comes to you four hours before you need to do something different and creative and says, "you have to make a portrait at this location at this time good luck," you get stuck sometimes.
Fortunately the last few days I've had flashes of creativity. Did you see what I did there? The pun? A photographer with FLASHES of creativity. I digress. Maybe my newfound creativity is due to the new Scotch I've been drinking, who knows.
So I find out I have to photograph these two swimmers and the first thought for me is, "something underwater would be neato." Since I didn't know about this before I came into work I didn't have swim trunks or my water-proof point and shoot. The point and shoot would have worked, but it was at home and probably has a dead battery. If I'd known I was going to be doing this a few days in advance I might have been able to get a fish tank to make some sort of under-water photo. It's a cool trick where you displace the water with the tank, put the camera in it and it looks like you spent a little money on a housing.
Neither option was available to me because of the ambush, so here I am again shooting my way out of it. The only way to do that is to lay down an overwhelming field of suppressive fire. I get killed in ambushes about 50% of the time. My flash of creativity for this assignment was to set up some remote strobes and photograph the guys falling backward into the water off the deck of the pool, firing the shutter as they splashed in.
Amazingly it only took about 25 takes. I really thought it was going to be a lot longer, getting two people to fall at the same rate is harder than it sounds despite what Newton says.
So here was my favorite:
Because on any given day a photo editor can be your best friend or the biggest idiot in the world this is the photo which ran. I think it is anyway I don't read the paper so I can stay sane. I still like it and I don't really care one way or the other which one ends up in the paper, like I said I'll never see it. Having stuff run is mainly for contest requirements now anyway and you can cheat and throw the shit you want to enter on the internet 6 months after the fact and still qualify so who cares really?
The thing that made this shoot cool was when I explained what I wanted to do to my subjects and their coach everyone was stoked. "Yeah, that sounds awesome," was the response I got.
Anytime I get a good idea and the subject gets stoked on it I get very motivated. If everyone were as cool as these guys my job would be awesome everyday.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
12-01 a photo story
Every year at the Daily Ambush the marketing department gets its ginie all tickly in October. That is because October is breast cancer awareness month and a great way for an unethical media outlet to exploit a serious disease while still looking like a good corporate citizen. The Daily Ambush used to call it Pinktober, but because no one in marketing is smart enough to run a simple Google search and discover that Melissa Etheridge and her charity own the copyright on Pinktober a lawyer asked them to change it. Now it's We Think Pink, in XXX (where XXX is the name of the city the Daily Ambush serves). I get the impression that once the lawyers for the We Think Pink charity discover this they will also ask the marketing departement to make a change.So every October we do a story a day about some poor woman who had breast cancer and many other breast cancer-related things. We even print the 10-01 paper on pink paper.
It seems that once October is over cancer disappears. I for one think that is bullshit and I get pretty offended about how everyone only pays attention to breast cancer. There are many other types of cancer out there which are just as deadly and have fewer surgical options. My mother was killed by such a cancer. So every year I celebrate Movember.
Movember is the month of November and men are asked to grow a mustache to raise awareness for prostrate cancer. Did you know that men can get breast cancer? Women can't get prostate cancer.
So, I grew a mustache and was impressed by how well I did in just 30 days, I started clean shaven on 11-1. The furry lip got a little old, and makes me look old, so I shaved it off on 12-01. Since I'm a photographer and hadn't cracked a frame in a day or so I felt antsy and made it a photo story with my hipstimatic app.
So here I present 12-01 A Photo Story, partially inspired by Martin Scorsese only less bloody.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Hipper than I used to be
A while ago, after I upgraded to the Iphone4, I actually paid for an app. I don't generally do that, but this one seemed worth it.I bought the Hipstamatic photography app for something like $2. Then I bought a few add-ons for it for probably a total of $6. It's most likely the best $6 I've spent in years.
The point of the Hipstamatic app is to turn your phone into a famous $25 plastic piece-of-crap camera called a Holga. The Holga is the camera that proves it isn't the camera, but the photographer who makes interesting images.
I actually printed a photo I took with the Hipstamatic app and hung it on my wall. I almost never do this with my work. I currently have 4 prints hanging on my wall that are of my photos, including the Hipstamatic one. It's this one of a morning glory in my yard.
I am not really a morning person, so I rarely get to see these flowers. I think they are pretty and really liked the way that lines and wood grain made this photo work so well. The flower itself is over-saturated and that is just fine. This photo is a sort of golden mean in a square composition with sweet color. I love it, and when you love art you should have it.
Then there is this photo of some pumpkins:
What can I say? It's freaking pumpkins, but it's clean and simple and somehow elegant. Sure, it's no Weston, but it looks like film and feels like film and is beautiful. This photo could hang on any gallery wall -- and it came from a dam phone.
Mostly I use the app when I'm bored and want to play, which is what my photography should always be about anyway. It's just with job pressures to get something "runable," whatever the hell that means, I get lost in the stress sometimes. Fortunately I get to go to boring assignments from time to time, like school bond issue election parties, where nothing "runable" happens for a long time and I get to make real photos like this:
Trust me, this was one of my best photos from the event and some papers I've worked at would have run it lede, not the Daily Ambush.
The app works well for portrait photos too:
This is Sarah Jane Nightingale, a plucky Brit with the coolest name in history. She's pretty and smart and will hate me for posting this photo, but you have to admit it's awesome. The bus in the back left and smaller face in on the right add so much, but it feels and looks like a classic black and white medium-format photo. I could have made this with some TRI-X 320 and my Mamiya C33, but I didn't.
Weather you're walking your unbearably cute dachshund; or dackel; or waiting for your portrait subjects to show up and noticing the fall foliage
with this app I have the freedom to see and not give a crap about all of the garbage involved in making a "runable" image.
Seeing is what it is all about and the process of eschewing constraints makes my other work better.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Sometimes the heros do come home.
Today is Veterans Day and here at the Daily Ambush, like nearly every other paper I've worked at, we were tragically messed it up. Although what we did was better than the first plan.We ran a story about several WWII vets and plan A was to just run mugshots of them all. That is a bad idea.
So, I had the privilege of talking with B-17 pilot Rufus Grisham while I made a portrait of him. I never miss a chance to talk to WWII vets. I love these guys and the stories they have to tell. I think I might have about 15hours of recordings of their stories. When it was time for me to leave I thanked Mr. Grisham and told him I always enjoy talking to heros. He replied, "I'm no hero. The heros didn't come home."
That is the portrait I made of Mr. Grisham. He is reflected in his framed citation of the Distinguished Flying Cross he earned by flying his busted-ass aircraft safely home after dropping bombs in the Battle of the Bulge Dec. 27, 1944 . To me, and I'm betting the eight other guys on the mission, this makes him a hero.
According to the citation: Grisham's B-17 was hit by enough flak to knock out engine four, reduce engines one and two to 3/4 power and blow out the left landing gear.
According to Grisham the most he could get out of the engines was about 1800 rpm when the normal speed is around 3700 rpm. This reduced the maximun airspeed to 150 mph. "The B-17's stall speed is 130 mph, so we didn't have much room for error," Grisham tells me.
So, Grisham is flying a blown-open soda can that is a mere 20 mph from becoming a human-filled boulder --2500 feet in the air back to England from Germany. Folks, I can pedal a bike to speeds over 25 mph easily.
"I forget my wife's birthday sometimes, but I'll never forget Dec. 27, 1944," Grisham told me.
Aside from the printer in the right corner, I really like this porttrait. Sure, it's a bit of a gimmick with the reflection and all, but I was able to get so much in the frame that explains who this man is that I don't need to say much about him. There is the model B-17, a photo of him flying a plane, and photo of him and his crew in England and a photo of the only guys left from that crew and oh yeah that impressive medal.
Mr. Grisham is one of those guys who you talk to and think after, "man, I haven't done crap in my life." All these WWII vets seem to be like that for me.
I appreciate everything these guys did and what military people are doing now. The military is a difficult, dangerous job requiring you to put up with a lot of bull.
 |
| From left Pvt. Eric Flores, Spc. Andrew Chavez and Sgt. Patrick Miller sit in the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle during a live-fire training exercise at training table 12 on Fort Hood. Sitting in a Bradley fighting vehicle for hours in central Texas in July is bull. All Chavez wanted to do was get done with training and get home to his girlfriend so he could propose marriage to her on the 4th of July. All Flores wanted was to find his gloves so Miller would stop yelling at him about not having them. All I wanted was a little more light, some fresh air and the 10 pounds I sweated off back. |
 | ||
| First Cavalry Division helicopter pilot CW2 Derek Hudson hugs his 8-month-old daughter, Allora, for the first time while his wife, Tish, holds his glasses and his 2 year-old daughter, Larissa, plays with a toy airplane behind them on the grass at Cooper Field at 1st Cavalry Headquarters on Fort Hood. Meeting your daughter for the first time in person when she is eight months old is bull. It's pretty obvious that CW2 Hudson doesn't care about anything else in the world at all at this precise moment. I waited a long time before I went to talk to him and his family.  This is Jesse Peralez, he joined the Marine Corps right from high school. I was hoping to follow him through training and document his life, but I messed it up and our contact wasn't really as good as it should have been. Here he is getting a taste of what Boot Camp will be like. Having some guy scream in your ear about discipline through pain is bull.
And what Veterans Day blog post would be complete without talking about those who sacrificed everything? Getting killed when you are on a Military Transition Team is extreme bull. No person deserves to be killed by the people he is trying to help. Nothing speaks to how much respect I have for veterans more than how Cpt. Inman's life ended. He died in a firefight, fighting along side Iraqi soldiers. An internal investigation found one of the Iraqi soldiers in the unit Inman was training and fighting with had ties to local militia groups. I didn't know Inman, never met him. I do wish he could have died an old man, after telling some newspaper photographer 50 years his junior about how he earned the bronze star. I wish all service personal could die of old age, but when we remove the human cost from war we also remove the consequences and turn it into nothing more than a video game. If that happens our leaders will be able to commit even more atrocities and it is for that reason that a military death is never in vain. |
Monday, November 8, 2010
They are called broadcast rights, not sideline rights
Sometimes I am tasked with covering high-profile events like NCAA sports events. Sometimes the teams I cover find themselves in the national spotlight. Regardless of that spotlight there are always people who don't belong at the event pretending they are a big-time sports photographer.Let's imagine you are an insurance adjuster. You go off to work and look at shit to determine how little money your company will give the poor sap who's been paying you for the last 30 years for exactly this moment. Let's also say jewing people out of what they rightly deserve is also a hobby of mine. I think that I'm just as good, if not better, at insurance adjusting than you are and I've been to a few seminars, so I obviously have enough training to be dangerous. Now let's say you head off to work to do some insurance adjusting and there are 65 other idiots just like me there to look at some guy's crashed car with you.
There is no doubt someone is going to get in your way. It's all good though, you are a professional and you know how to carry yourself and move around so you don't have to be a prick to too many people and can still do your job well.
Now, let's say it's Jay Leno's wrecked Bugatti Veyron and there are twice as many people as usual and a team of high-profile national idiots. This was Saturday's NCAA football game for me.
I will start by saying I don't have anything against ABC tv, I have EVERYTHING against them. I was pissed with how they treated Adam Lambert and I don't really like their parent company, Disney, very much. In fact ABC is locked out of my cable box.
Now to Saturday's NCAA football contest against the Yosemite Sam Ripoffs and the Yellow Bellied Pussy Cats.
The Ripoffs' home sidelines are crowded with what I call NEPs (Non-Essential Personnel). There are people standing around with their hands in their pockets on the sidelines just watching football. Generally these people get out of your way because they realize you have a job to do. I also kneel most of the time, so I don't really block many people's views. Then there are myriad people who have other careers which pay them well enough to buy VERY expensive camera equipment so they can shoot NCAA sports on weekends and give the photos to two-bit wire services and drive down the price of high-value photography. After that there are straight-up hobbiests who just give the photos back to the team for the right to clog up space on the sidelines. Neither of the people in these groups knows there is a sideline on the other side of the field. Next time you watch a football game on tv and you see a whole wide shot on the field, look at the home sidelines from the first-down marker to the endzone. You will see a large crowd, 5-10% of those dipshits you see in the crowd are actually doing something productive.
Because the contest between the Ripoffs and the Pussy Cats was so high profile, ABC tv bought the broadcast rights to the game. ABC came in early and put fixed pan cameras all over the place and also had a crew of mobile, shoulder mounted cameras roving quadrants on the sidelines. These shoulder-mounted cameras are tethered to a live-broadcast semi truck with a ton of broadcast equipment and an asshole director watching a wall of televisions showing what every camera sees and yelling like an idiot at everyone. The director is usually a badass, and a total prick during the broadcast. I started in tv when I was 11, so I know what I'm talking about here.
One of the guys toting his shoulder-mounted camera happened to be so insecure in his manhood that he needed a Sheriff's deputy to escort him around the field. I'm sorry, but if you're so much of a pussy that you need a cop to help you do your job, maybe you're doing something wrong.
I move a lot during games and listen to the game on the radio for another perspective, so I'm generally in a bit of an adrenaline-clouded tunnel. At some point during the second half I moved myself to the corner of the endzone because it looked like the Ripoffs were going to score. Well, Mr. Vagasaurus Rex shoulder-mount camera douche and Deputy Dan all of a sudden figure this out and rush to get into position. Turns out my position was one of the best. Funny how your insight gets so good when you cover a team playing and practicing for 2 years. So the Vagasaur decides he wants my spot and instructs Deputy Dan to move me.
I don't know what fantasy land Dan lives in, but where I come from police have no authority to move me from a football sideline if I'm minding my own business. He taps me on the shoulder, I ignore him. One is frequently bumped on sidelines. Dan tries to talk to me, something about, "you need to move so this guy can get your spot." Without looking up from the field, I reply that I am less concerned about performing a penetrative sexual act than I am about who Vagasaurus Rex works for. If the Vagasaur would like my spot, he better get there first next time. The ball is snapped and heavy guys smash into each other in a padded testosterone-fueled quasi homo-erotic symphony of flying man meat.
After the play is dead a very angry Deputy Dan rushes over to me to explain to me how things work in the poorly-educated La-La Village he comes from. I interject here that I have a minor in criminology and extensive training in police and media interactions and other than the fact that I'm not sadly overweight I am more qualified to be a police officer than Dan is.Dan tells me that since the Vagasaur's company paid millions of dollars for the right to be at this event I should place is Mickey-Mouse penis in my mouth at every request and if I'd rather not have the "privilege" of being on the sidelines he can make that happen.
I explained to Deputy Dan that I was there doing a job, just like he was, and so were many of the people around me and what did he think about them being there. The only thing I did wrong was utter an expletive and last I checked using harsh language was not something which is frowned upon at a football game.
So, to Deputy Dan I apologize: I'm sorry I put you in a situation where you felt you had to act, yet were powerless. I'm sorry you are poorly trained and highly paid from my pocket, you're welcome for the overtime pay. Face it, Sometimes people have more knowledge about what is allowed than you do and using intimidation tactics won't always work.
To the Vagasaurus Rex and ABC tv: I still "Don't give a FUCK who you are."
