January 19th, 2012
The deal is that if you send me to Kentucky on assignment, I will buy you (and myself) bourbon. (There are other deals in place for Napa, Mexico, Barbados/Jamaica/DR/Haiti/Cuba, Scotland, and Russia). Amazingly
Men's Journal didn't really care about the bourbon, but they sent me to Kentucky anyway to photograph
sportscaster and former Cincinnati Bengals star WR Cris Collinsworth. Cris had just flown back home from his Sunday night gig, and we met up with him at high school football practice where he is a assistant/receivers coach (his son Jack is on the team).
It was tough going early on (it's always hard to shoot coaching during an actual practice, unless its linebackers and the coach is right up in there) but eventually we got some beautiful light and Cris was great to be around despite being tired (he reminded me a lot of my Uncle Eric actually). I brought plenty of strobes not knowing what I would find, but of course we ended up barely using any of them, especially in a final portrait of Cris and his son up in the "home" section of the stands, which felt like a nice metaphor for how it might feel for Cris to return to his family after his constant traveling. You just don't mess with beautiful light when you've gifted it like that.
Afterwards we went back to the Collinsworth home and photographed Cris watching the weekend games and making notes (down in his "man cave" office) for his matchup the following week (can't remember exactly but it was the Vikings vs. someone). I was already a fan of Cris' analysis and I really like his distinctive voice, but I had no clue how much tape and research he puts in all year long. He told me he watches more tape now than he ever did as a player. And for those who are also fans of America's native spirit... my final tally was around $600, including 6 bottles of my absolute favorite:
Vintage 17 year.
Posted in Action, New Work, Portraits | No Comments
January 18th, 2012
My favorite new client of 2011 was
Golf Digest -- Christian, Kerry, & Matt you all rawk -- and one of the most challenging things I've shot for them are cars for their "Long Drives" feature. And wouldn't you know, the only thing in common about two automotive shoots completed near year's end was the bad weather... the rides themselves were worlds apart: the 2012 Chevy Volt and the 2012 Jaguar XJL Supersport (roughly $90,000 difference in sticker price).
Having worked with cars a handful of times in the past I know that they aren't easy to shoot well... especially within the normal compromised environments/obstacles of editorial photography. For one, it's truly impossible to have enough lights for a car shoot... unless you sort of approach it like I did and focus on finding interesting locations and going from there. Then hopefully, even if each wheel is not lit just right, a story and a context trump pure, chromed-up aesthetics.
Though we had to hustle around in Sarasota, FL for the Jaguar (featured in the Feb. 2012 issue out now), shooting the Volt in Washington D.C. was a nutty late-night affair that found us all alone in an underpass dodging cops wondering what in the hell we were thinking. The weather of our actual shoot day went from bad to worse and so we decided to give it a rip late the night before and were rewarded with a really nice vibe.
Golf Digest subscribers can check out a sweet new aspect to these shoots in the iPad edition of the magazine as I've started to do some motion of the cars as well. Nothing ground breaking but it adds even more challenge to these gigs.
Posted in Automotive, New Work, Travel | No Comments
January 4th, 2012
Hey why not kick off 2012 with a story I shot for ESPN's annual NEXT issue (out now, Jan. 9). Having become one of the most popular sports in the world's largest country (China), the NBA has set it's gaze on #2 and around the same time an extremely tall farmer's son in Punjab named Satnam, who had never worn shoes that actually fit his already giant feet, had a basketball placed in his huge hands. The rest of that story is now in a 80's style montage that will slow down only momentarily in a few years when Satnam Singh Bhamara hoists up a NBA lottery jersey and flashes a huge smile while shaking David Stern's hand before it speeds up again with images of him blocking shots.
I flew down to FL to catch up with Satnam Singh Bhamara, who though he doesn't speak much English (we had a translator) is a pretty normal, very sweet and quick to laugh kid who likes the internet, basketball, and chicken. Is he a really great baller yet?... well not really, he's only still just learning the game and how to run his massive frame up and down the floor and all of the fundamentals and strength training that he never had access to before in India. Will he be a great basketball player? Yes, he's that big and will be given coaching from the best and there is just too much money to make for the NBA to not seize the moment and help find Yao Ming 2.0.
As is often the case for ESPN my shoot broke down to two parts, reportage and lit portraits. Getting the lit portraits pushed our day from really long to marathon levels (6:30 a.m. call time) as his schedule is so full that he didn't have an open block of time until something like 8 p.m. In addition to focusing on how big Satnam is I wanted to capture his warm personality and the surreal world he's stepped into. On the plane ride down I had 2 fantasies of my own that led into my lit set-ups; the first was that (having read the great article by Mark Winegardner) he suddenly had hundreds of pairs of shoes that all fit him (he's up to a size 20) for once in his life, and secondly that Satnam would continue to grow so tall that he would come up right through the basketball hoop. The 2nd one ended up being the winner even though Satnam, only a couple of feet off the ground to get him in that position on a ladder, was extremely nervous. A seven-footer mildly afraid of heights... love it.
It was a good, challenging day down in FL and a fascinating story about the would-be future king of Indian basketball. I kept thinking about
a This American Life piece from years ago about Yao Ming's translator (Colin Pine) who was asked to show up one day to translate mandarin for this guy and it turns out to be Yao's first NBA press conference (afterwards Colin & Yao end up becoming really close friends). I don't think the same thing is in the cards for Satnam and I (he mostly just thought I was crazy... which isn't so uncommon from my subjects). Many thanks to deputy picture slinger Jim Surber for getting me involved - here are a bunch more.
Posted in Action, New Work, Portraits, Reportage | No Comments
December 28th, 2011
Found in the latest issue of
Der Spiegel is my mini coverage of the post-Zuccotti Park efforts of the Occupy movement in New York City. Writer Georg Diez and I tracked all over Brooklyn and downtown over a couple of soggy days meeting with activists and journalists connected to the protests which has now shifted gears "from Wall Street to Main Street." Most of what we did was pretty run and gun and good pictures were scant, but it was incredibly enlightening to meet a bunch of smart, engaged people with no shortage of big ideas.
The story was highlighted by an action in East New York to move a family into a bank foreclosed home (illegally of course), and I enjoyed the block party that was thrown in celebration (above). It's pretty rare for me to work cheek to jowl with a large group of daily media, and it was fun to slide back into that role though the many well meaning citizen journalists covering the OWS were certainly frustrating. I was impressed by the way the police, who had a huge presence, contained the situation... keeping everyone safe but really not interfering at all.
As a liberal and a business owner, the Occupy movement fills with me a whole lot of conflicting emotions. I'm proud of these activists taking a stand and engaging in the process (who among us are not angry at the collapse), demanding attention be paid to such incredible greed and stupidity which created a system in which the banks could so deeply fuck so many lives of hard working Americans. On the other hand the OWS movement pisses me off in its silliness, pretension, and total lack of momentum towards a national policy initiative that balances the Tea Party (OWS had a window to get involved in the primaries and they totally missed it). I get that the point is that there are no leaders and no focused message, but I also see the movement as a mirror image of ineffective bureaucracy with the system they are against. Also I grew very tired of the word "horizontal." Below: N+1 founder, journalist and activist Keith Gesson, left, and protestor/architect Evan Wagner, right.
Posted in New Work, New York, Portraits, Reportage | No Comments
December 27th, 2011
I hope that everyone is having a wonderful holiday... to serve as distraction from my accountant's voicemails to get my taxes in order, here is a new clip found in the Jan/Feb issue of
Mother Jones. I got a call from PE Mark Murrmann to go learn about fracking and to meet Crystal Stroud, a mother and hairdresser near Towanda, PA. Chief Oil & Gas signed a lease with the Strouds and began drilling a well 400-yards behind her home... not long after Crystal got really sick. Hmm, I wonder if there's a connection?
You can guess at the rest of the story... a water test of the Stroud's well showed incredible levels of barium, the state's department of environmental protection investigated but sided with the gas company (most of the regulators are either formerly employees at the companies they are supposed to keep in check; or will be soon). Crystal and her family had to move away from their home because they couldn't afford to truck in water they could drink and bathe in every week; and to add insult to injury shortly after she got sick the tiny creek along their home flooded at the worst levels in history and destroyed their house anyway (many residents believe the flooding is also related as the gas companies dump chemicals and their backfill into the rivers which run through this part of PA; hard to say, but historically they've never seen flooding like this before).
I didn't know that much about fracking before but did know that it has been used for dozens of years in other parts of the U.S. without such incredible impact. Now I know that the reason fracking is so dangerous in the NE is that deep in the earth, coal, and shale of PA and NY there are a lot of heavy metals which the fracking process releases, poisoning wells and spoiling the watershed of farms and communities down river. It's one of these issues (akin to abortion in Kansas) that is ripping apart these small towns, especially in such a bad economy where the additional income is seen as worth the risk for some people.
Crystal and her son were incredibly gracious with their time and a joy to meet. We shot at her now abandoned home, and it was especially sad because they lived on a really beautiful spot. Here are a couple of more, including the one (bottom right) that they magazine published.
Posted in New Work, Portraits | No Comments
The deal is that if you send me to Kentucky on assignment, I will buy you (and myself) bourbon. (There are other deals in place for Napa, Mexico, Barbados/Jamaica/DR/Haiti/Cuba, Scotland, and Russia). Amazingly Men's Journal didn't really care about the bourbon, but they sent me to Kentucky anyway to photograph sportscaster and former Cincinnati Bengals star WR Cris Collinsworth. Cris had just flown back home from his Sunday night gig, and we met up with him at high school football practice where he is a assistant/receivers coach (his son Jack is on the team).
It was tough going early on (it's always hard to shoot coaching during an actual practice, unless its linebackers and the coach is right up in there) but eventually we got some beautiful light and Cris was great to be around despite being tired (he reminded me a lot of my Uncle Eric actually). I brought plenty of strobes not knowing what I would find, but of course we ended up barely using any of them, especially in a final portrait of Cris and his son up in the "home" section of the stands, which felt like a nice metaphor for how it might feel for Cris to return to his family after his constant traveling. You just don't mess with beautiful light when you've gifted it like that.
Afterwards we went back to the Collinsworth home and photographed Cris watching the weekend games and making notes (down in his "man cave" office) for his matchup the following week (can't remember exactly but it was the Vikings vs. someone). I was already a fan of Cris' analysis and I really like his distinctive voice, but I had no clue how much tape and research he puts in all year long. He told me he watches more tape now than he ever did as a player. And for those who are also fans of America's native spirit... my final tally was around $600, including 6 bottles of my absolute favorite: Vintage 17 year. 
