The guys over at StudioLighting.net have compiled quite a list of interviews with photographers which are archived on their website in podcast form. The interviews, conducted with Bill Crawford and Ed Hidden, cover lighting techniques, stories and tips from top commercial photographers and others well known for their lighting prowess. These are great fun to listen to and are full of good information.
In addition to me (Episode 33), they have also featured the likes of Michael Grecco, Michael Muller, Chase Jarvis, Tim Tadder, Dave Hill, and David Hobby.
You can check out the entire list here, or by looking for Lightsource Studio Photography Podcast under “podcasts” in itunes.
I was recently contacted by software manufacturer Adobe to be featured on their website as an “Adobe Success Story” in the Customer Showcase section of the Adobe website.
Adobe Success Stories profile photographers, artists, and companies, their work, and the different Adobe products they use in their business. In my case, the article mostly involves the photography workflow program Lightroom, which I’ve used since it became available. Lightroom has greatly streamlined my workflow, client delivery, and archiving system.
On April 17th, my colleague Brad Mangin and I will be presenting a slide show program of our work during the first annual “Photography Education Day” at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.
My good friend Brad is an absolutely stellar action photographer who lives in the Bay Area, and shoots baseball for Sports Illustrated and MLB. For over 20 years, Brad has been making iconic baseball images, and understands the game , players (and good light….) better than any photographer I know. I’m honored to be presenting this program with him.
I, of course worked at The Sporting News from 1996-2006, shooting over 200 covers for them, including many cover portraits of baseball players. I’ve had a couple of winning photos enshrined in the hall from the annual Baseball Hall of Fame Photo contest, so I’m looking forward to finally visiting their vast baseball archive in Cooperstown.
We were invited to give a joint photography presentation, with Brad handling the action photography, and me talking about portraiture. We’ll both tell stories of some of the great games we covered and of course, some behind the scenes stories about the famous (and infamous…) players we’ve both dealt with over the years.
Baseball photography has a rich history, and we’ll also be producing and presenting a short educational program on the History of Photography in Baseball.
Here’s a link to our program on the Hall of Fame website. For more information, please call 888-HALL-OF-FAME
I’m flattered and pleased to announce that I’ve been profiled in the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) Best of 2008. Each year the ASMP chooses 20 photographer’s projects to profile with an interview and photos in this article, which is published in the ASMP Bulletin and on their website.
I’ve done all the covers for the Chronicle’s monthly magazine Health, which usually feature a photo of a prominent Texas athlete or celebrity who share their health or fitness stories. We’ve had a great group of cover subjects, including George Foreman, Mary Lou Retton, and a host of other interesting people, including a pregnant ballerina from the Houston Ballet.
I felt very fortunate to be featured in the same article with legends like Art Wolfe and Rich Clarkson.
You can read the interview and see some of the photographs here:
I get a lot of questions and comments about the shoot with LaDainian Tomlinson from a couple of years ago, so now seems like as good a time as any to revisit that photograph, and talk about the shoot.
I was in San Diego, scouting locations for a cover shoot for the Sporting News. Each year, the magazine publishes their “Top 100” issue, ranking the 100 best players in the NFL. This particular year, San Diego Chargers running back LaDainian Tomlinson was tops in the whole country, so we needed a great, dynamic portrait and inside spread that would convey his athletic prowess, and also give a little local flavor/context to the photo.
I spent some time looking at various locations around Coronado Island……beaches, sand, palm trees, etc….and with the right time of day, any of those elements might have made a usable background for a photo like this. I was trying to think of something better, and I’ve always been a military buff, so my eye kept going back to the Navy ships in the harbor. San Diego is a big Navy town, and there were several big ships, including a couple of aircraft carriers parked in the harbor. This was post 9/11, so I figured the chances of getting a location on one of those great Navy ships would be impossible without a blood sample and 6 months of government paperwork, but I mentioned it anyway while chatting with a good friend of mine, who worked at the Padres. Amazingly enough, my friend hooked me up with a retired high-ranking Navy officer who happened to work a lot with the Padres…..this was the guy who arranged for all sorts of outrageous things on behalf of the club: Blue Angels flyovers, Navy color guards, ship visits, etc. In about an hour, he called me back with “You have a venue on the USS Nimitz tomorrow at 1500.”
Tight portrait of LT with San Diego in the background
Now, all I had to do was convince the Chargers that this was a good idea.
After several phone calls, a lot of schmoozing, and descriptive selling….”Just think of the headline on the cover….”Top Gun!”, and promising to send a limo for LaDainian to pick him up, we finally got a commitment about four hours later from LT and the Chargers.
Now, I absolutely had to pull this off.
I lined up a limo service, and secured directions to LaDainian’s house, leaving careful instructions, to load up the back of the limo with his favorite beverages, and securing the uniform and pads from the team.
My assistant on the shoot, Shawn Cullen (a stellar, former SI assistant who has worked with great San Diego photographers like Andy Hayt, Tim Tadder, Tim Mantoani), and I arrived at the naval base that afternoon for security screening, which was very similar to an airport. After they checked out all of our equipment, we headed towards the carrier, where I assumed the large aircraft elevator would promptly whisk us up to the top deck.
Wrong! Most of the crew was on shore leave, and the key people who could operate the elevator were not there. I guess we’ll be taking the stairs.
Shawn is a strong, strapping young dude….but lugging each Lightware case up an M.C. Escher maze of ladders and hatches up I don’t know how many levels of stairs was excruciating for both of us. There were more stairs leading to that deck than to the top of the Empire State Building! We were so worn out, we figured we would just throw the gear over the side after the shoot….or launch it off the catapult into the harbor.
Strangely enough, once on deck, with help from the crew, we found power outlets all over the place, and we didn’t have to use any of our battery packs. We ran power cables and began setting up lighting.
We found a great spot where we could see the bridge…and framed it up with the impending sunset. LaDainian’s car was on the way…we shot some tests and anxiously awaited his arrival, along with staff from the Chargers.
Sending a car for an athlete or other celebrity is always a good idea on a location shoot.
LT during one of the earlier shots, prior to sunset
Relying on the subject to find the location and get there on time (especially with something critical like a sunset) is never a good idea. Having a car and driver go to retrieve the talent allows the photo crew to set up on set well ahead of time, prepare and test the shoot, and be ready to go at the appointed time.
We were tested and ready when LaDainian arrived…..he was into the idea, and actually brought his wife with him as well. As always, I began with some pretty straightforward portraits before trying the more athletic poses that we eventually ended up with.
He was actually a bit early, and we also had some built in time in case there was a problem getting him there, so it now became critical to stall a bit. We knew the sunset would be beautiful during the magic hour, and it was just a matter of keeping him there, and keeping him interested long enough to finish the shoot in the optimum light of the day.
We moved on, after the straightforward stuff to some athletic poses, including some leaping and jumping. No trampoline here, just LaDainian’s insane vertical leap. Putting the camera all the way down on the deck gave us an extremely low angle, which accentuates the feeling that he’s high in the sky.
Shooting on board the USS Nimitz
We shot another series of tight pictures….faces, with San Diego shoreline in the background to pass the time…..stalling his departure until about 20 more minutes until the light was a classic ROYGBIV spectrum sunset.
People have asked me about whetether we used rear-sync on these. Actually, we were using Dyna-Lite studio strobes with a Hasselblad at the time…..so there was no rear sync. I have found, over time….while shooting with slow-sync speed exposures with strobe, that if you have people leap into the air, and if you fire the exposure (and strobe) right at the apex of the leap, that the blur falls below the subject…making it appear that it is a rear-sync picture. It is sort of like panning backwards…it gives you the same look as a rear-sync, but you can precisely control the moment that you want strobed. Personally, I think rear-sync, unless the exposure is very short, leaves too much to chance.
We bracketed the shutter speeds to get different looks from the sky, but the final pick was shot on a Hasseleblad 40mm lens, at around ¼ second at F11.
This turned out to be one of my favorite photographs, incorporating many elements that I like: beautiful twilight sunset background, nice big soft light on the subject, an athletic action pose, and a strange location with conceptual context) into one photo.
In the end, as much as we wanted to, we didn’t launch the gear off the deck……but we thought long and hard about it when we had to face all those stairs again.
I was recently contacted by software manufacturer 
My good friend Brad is an absolutely stellar action photographer who lives in the Bay Area, and shoots baseball for Sports Illustrated and MLB. For over 20 years, Brad has been making iconic baseball images, and understands the game , players (and good light….) better than any photographer I know. I’m honored to be presenting this program with him.
