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the cruise

A Wednesday in the summer. “Um, we need a metro feature” comes the call. OK, I’m on it. Hey, it’s the summer, I can find something without too much worry, me thinks.

After an hour, I’m not overly concerned except for my draining gas tank driving around. The second hour, ok, some self-doubt is starting to creep into my mind. Now, the third hour, I’m going to have to wait something out. I stop at a farmer’s market out of no short amount of desperation. It’s me and a dozen or so people. I look around, there’s nothing here, I’m wasting time here. Fresh flowers come out of the back of a van, a bystander stops for a scent sampling. DONE!

Jul 08, 2011 | Categories: editorial | Comments Off

the holiday weekend shift

 

If you work at a newspaper, you’re going to pull a holiday shift sooner than later. Not including football games, we at the Star get a holiday shift or two every year and while I technically didn’t work on the 4th, I had several shoots on the 2nd and the 3rd that were all about Independence Day. The annual fireworks purchasing photo was made after seeing a hand-painted sign in bright colors that I liked….all I had to do was wait until someone stepped into a shaft of sunlight. Of course, I had to stand in a busy street to make the photo, but you gotta do what you gotta do. A holiday riverfest celebration on the night of the 3rd was assigned specifically for the fireworks photo, but in the event of disaster and the fireworks NOT going off, I needed some deadline backup photos for the metro section.

The published photo of the night, the fireworks over the new Christopher Bond bridge, teased me with a start time of 10:05pm and  a 10:30pm color deadline. My laptop was set up next to my tripod and thanks to the Verizon card, I could send my photo as soon as I imported it into my laptop.

Shooting fireworks is easy, it’s waiting for the show to begin that’s tough. The only wild card was the exposure issue, balancing the fireworks with the light on the bridge, so when the fireworks really started going off at the end of the show, the fireworks were TOO bright for the bridge exposure. I had a little assistance from a passing ambulance running with lights & sirens which gave me a nice horizontal light on the bridge. (Thanks 911 caller!) Deadline made it with 10 minutes to spare, easy as pie.

Jul 08, 2011 | Categories: editorial | Comments Off

world soccer comes to kansas city

Five days after opening Livestrong Sporting Park with a sold-out Sporting Kansas City home opener, the Gold Cup arrived in Kansas City with national teams from the United States, Panama, Canada and Guadeloupe for a doubleheader at the brand new soccer stadium in Kansas City, Kan. I’m starting to feel like soccer will catch on in KC with the new stadium (at least while the newness makes it the place to be.)

The first match between Canada and Panama was your typical soccer match….one goal scored on a penalty kick and it appeared that Canada would win 1-0 when the game entered stoppage time in the second half. Panama went on a blitz around the goal and forced a goal past the Canadian keeper and all hell broke loose with the Panama team literally mobbing their scorer by jumping all over him. A minute later, the game was over in a 1-1 tie.

Over 20,000 flag-waving fans greeted the US team as they entered the pitch (see, I’m getting all the soccer terms now) against Guadeloupe. Four minutes into the match, Guadeloupe nearly scores with a shot that hit the crossbar, which looked like it woke the US team up from its groggy start. The US had a ton of great chances for scoring but only got one goal in, but hey, in soccer, a 1-0 win still works.

The only really odd part of the evening was that security was more strict than I’ve ever seen it in any sport. I know soccer fans can be loco, but photographers weren’t allowed in the main hallway to exit until the team left the building. I’m still scratching my head about that as we had to leave through the loading dock.

Jun 15, 2011 | Categories: editorial, sports | Comments Off

cleaning out the visual fridge

leftovers from the daily, I needed to throw them out on here before the metaphorical visual fridge starts smelling.

Jun 13, 2011 | Categories: editorial | Comments Off

chillin’ with the cool kids

So I get the assignment to photograph the Street League Pro Tour skateboarding championships at the Sprint Center. One of the fun things about shooting sports is getting to see one I’ve never shot before. Boccia, fencing, water polo….shot em. Skateboarding? Only at the park on a sunny day as something for the metro section. Seeing professionals, well, I’ve gotta check this out.

Despite being the oldest person in the arena and feeling like it, I shot a whole bunch of frames from different angles….on the floor, in the stands, long lens, shorter lenses, etc. What I found out is that it gets pretty repetitive pretty quickly. Guys jump, their board flips, they land (or don’t.) Unless you’re the ESPN2 crew with the fisheye lenses in the performance area, it’s pretty snoozy visually. I took a 400mm in with me, which was 10 times longer than all the knit-cap wearin’, DC Shoes stylin’ hipsters seated next to me. After 30 minutes, I figured out the most interesting thing about the whole performance was the board flipping, because all the guys looked exactly the same. I worked on shooting tight for one of the trick sections then shot some action of the winner….done. Rad.

Jun 13, 2011 | Categories: editorial, sports | Comments Off

looking up and to the left, please (portraits)

I really love making portraits. Other than shooting football, it’s my favorite thing about what I do in photojournalism. (Note to self: try to combine football action and portraits every day.) In one week, I had an assignment to shoot a cover photo for the special section the Star put out on the new Livestrong Sporting Park soccer stadium for Sporting Kansas City, our MLS team. The other was a long drive out to Russell, Kansas on a story about former Kansas senator Bob Dole’s homecoming at the age of 87 and in failing health. One of these portraits took less than 5 minutes to shoot, the other took 2 1/2 hours of strobe setup and 5 cases of gear, sandbags, extension cords and light stands. The two couldn’t be more different in what it took to make them.

The soccer portrait was the complex one with waiting on two players to come onto my set following the night practice. I was stressing a little as the light was fading fast and in 20 more minutes, I was going to have a black sky to struggle with. I had to compose the photo to leave room for type and a headline at the top and the picture had to be a vertical (despite the fact the stadium is quite horizontal). My visual concept was that the players would be looking in awe of their new $200 million stadium. Two players showed up in the nick of time for the shoot and despite the promise of three players, I did what I could do as fast as I could. Ryan Smith and Omar Bravo were very easy to work with, always a blessing in making a “sportrait” of a pro athlete. With tons of pre-testing of the strobe lighting, in less than 10 minutes of shooting time, it was all over. Except for the hour-long tear down of the gear.

The portrait of Bob Dole was the polar opposite. After a very long tedious drive to Russell, Kansas, I pulled into the hotel where Dole was greeting locals in an hour. Dole was sitting down for some local television news interviews while waiting for the meet-and-greet to begin. I asked Dole’s aide if I could get 5 minutes with the former senator. She sort of hemmed and hawed and said I could, maybe, after the TV crews did their thing…if he felt like it. With Dole’s failing health, I knew I couldn’t get him out of the hotel conference room we were in. In fact, I wasn’t sure if he could make it across the room itself. I had a strobe kit with me but I decided just to use window light. I drew the shades tight, leaving just a crack of indirect sunlight coming through. I moved a chair for Dole to sit in and we had a couple of minutes of small talk, I asked him to look right. Focus, click 20 times, thank you Senator for your time. I shot a lot of other stuff of Dole the next day, but this was clearly my favorite out of the weekend.

Jun 13, 2011 | Categories: editorial, portrait | Comments Off

soccer gets a new home in Kansas City

After 15 years of Kansas City’s MLS soccer team (first as the brutally-monikered “Wiz”, then the Wizards and now rebranded into Sporting Kansas City) playing at a variety of temporary and ill-conceived stadiums around town, including a minor-league baseball stadium (that is not a joke), Sporting KC opened their brand new $200 million state-of-the-art stadium in Kansas City, Kansas on June 9th, playing to a capacity crowd of 19,980 against the Chicago Fire.

Along with Star staffers Mike Ransdell and Shane Keyser, our trio covered everything that moved on opening night and a lot of things that didn’t. I played photo editor during the game as a 9pm ESPN2 telecast pushed us up against our deadline, so I made pictures during pre-game of the new stadium and got on the field during the final 10 minutes of the game action which ended in a very un-American 0-0 tie. The 10 minutes I shot at the end of the game ended up being the most interesting as a man dressed as a cow ran on the field (and kicked in the game’s only goal) before he was udderly detained by Kansas City’s finest boys in blue. Sporting KC’s Omar Bravo was undercut in the final minutes in what I couldn’t comprehend wasn’t called a foul. The resulting beer-laden fans ended up covering the field with trash in protest, which made the game all the more European in my book. Still, the stadium is beautiful and a jewel in Kansas City’s sports landscape, designed by KC’s Populous architecture firm. Most importantly, the photo workroom internet connection is blazing fast.

Jun 13, 2011 | Categories: editorial, sports | Comments Off

the cutting room floor

There’s not a single newspaper photographer that gets everything good published in the paper. Space keeps shrinking, page design gets more complex with more ads, more design elements, all of those issues come up on a daily basis. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work out for some reason and if it doesn’t have anything to do with the photograph, that can be pretty frustrating. I’ve become better at letting such things go, but hey, not all the time. I had two such pictures that hit the cutting room floor in the past two weeks.

I was happy with both of these photos, the first, a portrait of a cancer researcher for a story about the same. Turns out that the reporter who interviewed him while I was setting up didn’t end up using much of what he said, so this picture got dropped. (Plus, someone higher than the photo editors thought it was weird….of course, I was going for weird, but there you go.)

The second was much more frustrating. For a story on a nonprofit that donates mattresses to homes where children don’t have a bed of their own, I spent two days following these good folks around, photographing their deliveries. I was invited in to all of the houses when I explained why a photographer suddenly appeared along with the mattresses. I was on the ninth house delivery and I saw this little girl sleeping on the floor and immediately focused on her, getting off three frames as the mattress came in the door. Unfortunately for me, the girl’s mother wasn’t at home and when I contacted her later, she was adamant about her girl not being in the paper. I explained, a lot of people will donate mattresses after seeing this story, but I didn’t even get that sentence out of my mouth. No name on the girl, no publication. We used another less effective photo for the Sunday paper but it wasn’t the same. One more for the cutting room floor.

Mar 25, 2011 | Categories: personal work | Comments Off

the winter’s mix tape

Man, I wonder why David Eulitt hasn’t updated his blog in forever? Well, coming off of football season, I get back into the staff schedule rotation of shifts, including the night picture desk in February, so for those three days a week, I’m helping assemble pictures from others and the wire services into the daily paper. In February, I’m not grousing about desk duty since I hate being cold, so I figure I save on hand warmers and extra $4 lattes at Starbucks.

Most of what I’ve been shooting have been individual assignments for metro, the bread and butter of newspaper work. One day I’m making a studio portrait of a couple in their 63rd year of marriage. Then I’m convincing a national teen singer to pose on top of her high school’s lockers for a portrait when the bell rings (highly embarrassing, as I didn’t predict the level of shouting and ribbing she got in under two minutes from her classmates, when I said, “ok, my bad, I’m sorry, let’s get you down.”) One day it’s looking for a surprise morning snowfall feature in March, then a ceremony to honor the final World War I veteran to pass. On a particularly slow day, I saw a brightly painted wall and worked the shadows for an hour. The dog show, that’s as easy as it gets there. Very rarely, geese will walk in single file right in front of your car and make the day easy. Nothing here to treasure long term but every day is about making pictures….here’s the proof of that.

Mar 25, 2011 | Categories: editorial, portrait | Comments Off