On my way out for a fun night and...

Life seems to have a bad habit of having random bad things happen when I go out for an evening with the friends. Not bad things happening to me at least, but bad things happening to other people that I then must take photos of.

So I'm driving a few of my friends over to another friend's new apartment for a night of hanging out. We're almost there when we turn onto Lake St. only to have it blocked by fire trucks and cop cars.

At this point I know I'm going to be delayed for a little while. Drop my friends, and take the two block walk over to the scene of the accident.

In photojournalism classes they teach students to always have a camera with them. I use my carry around camera very little it seems, yet it comes in so handy. So I did what I could with my little P&S (Point & Shoot).

What amazed me about this is that the other car, a BMW four door, had the front drivers side knocked in a good foot or so, but was otherwise alright. What I would call major damage, but nothing that would make me think that the accident was all that bad. I apparently don't understand the dynamics of car impacts very well.

At least from what I could see there were no major injuries.

And the joke is....

Let me start by saying that I work long hours, some weeks, and have to be able to handle a whole variety of situations and reliably be able to get images out of any situation.

That said, today I spent an hour and half shooting at one park, then went and spent an hour and a half at another park, then went to dinner. All of these things were work, on a warm sunny high 70s day.

To hell with offices.

The other thing I always wonder about. Guys like this guy. In town for a conference on bio-engineering or something like that. Hard core science stuff. Looks like a hippie. Looks like the devil with his eyes rolled into the back of his head. Very nice. People like this are what make the world so good.

Are scientists just artists with the good sense not to go into the arts?

Predictability

Certain events, actually many events, are pretty predictable. It gets to the point that wondering what is going to happen is a nice change of pace.

In this case local teams Fenwick and OPRF face off in water polo. Fenwick wins the state championship most years and is in the final game almost every year. Suffice it to say, this game wasn't all that competitive and ended at something like 17-2.

Problems with Passion

As an artist, you have to be passionate about your art. Or at least I can't see any way of doing your art and not being passionate about it. The two go hand in hand.

I'm also a strong believer that all things which are strengths are also weakness, it just depends on the situation and how you use a particular trait.

The problem here is that sometimes that passion for a work, the passion that existed when creating a work carries on long after the work is complete. This passion can lead to see with tinted glasses.

As an artist unfortunately you have to see your work as what it is sometimes. You have to divorce yourself from that passion that so motivated the creation of the image in the first place. It's a challenge, or at least it's a challenge for me. Ultimately I see an image and I remember the conversation I had with the person. I remember how I enjoyed their company and laughed with them and enjoyed an exchange of ideas. None of that matters if it doesn't show in the picture, but for me, it always shows in the picture somewhat because I was there.

Unfortunately when you have a piece of art you really like, but the circumstances surronding it are painful, to work on the piece and display the piece you have to feel some of that pain each time you deal with the piece.

For me that's true with my Bed Series. It's a piece of art I'm pretty proud of, I really enjoy the images from it and the ideas behind it. It also came from a relationship that brought a lot of pain into my life. Happily I'm far enough out of that relationship to work on the piece without the remembered pain being all to bad, but it still has it's pin pricks and probably always will. But the series of images, as with some of the other images from that relationship, are images I really enjoy and am happy I created. Pain and happiness walking a path together, maybe that should be the synopsis of that whole relationship?

I don't know how other artists work on pieces that were strongly emotional for them. I just know for me, when I work an image, I feel a little bit of that orginal emotion, the good and the bad. I also know that I can handle that emotion, to a point, and use that emotion to make the work better.

And then at the end of the day I need to set that emotion aside, remember that those days are past days, and go on with today.

My passion has to be there to drive me to create the piece, and edit the piece, and show the piece, but sometimes it also needs to not be there to truly and evaluate the piece, to decide how to use the piece and how to improve it.

Suffice it to say, it's all a big balancing act.

I'd be curious to hear how others handle this conundrum, let me know if you get the chance.

City

I'm always working to capture that image that speaks to how the city feels so often; large, busy, overwhelming, hectic.

This is one of those "corners" in Chicago that almost always has that feel. It's at the intersection of Damen, North, and Milwaukee in the heart of Wicker Park.

This area always has something happening, people moving.

I also just felt like posting a photo.

Because it was a good day

To be honest, this post is about nothing. I just had a good day, so I felt like throwing something up, but I'll spin it a bit and make it about the opening of this new bridge.

This is a handy dandy (at least for me) new bridge crossing the Des Plaines River from Forest Park to Maywood. It extends the starting point of the Illinois Prairie Path.

Very importantly, to me, it also means that bicyclists don't have to try to bike down Madison, a death defying experience some days, to get to the path.

For the photographers out there, may I humbly suggest, get out of your cars. Cars are wonderful, but not for seeing the world. And if you're going to be a photographer you need to see the world, and get out of the room on wheels that is your car, at least sometimes.

At some point during the spring, I always like to do a few assignments on my bike. I find I can do spring shots better that way. I can see the smaller details, express the feeling of the season better, be more open to the experience of spring because I'm feeling it, because I'm in it.

It's not practical, working on a bike. Who wants to have 10k in equipment on a bicycle? But if the equipment isn't capturing the images, why own it at all?

Anyhow, enough subject matter. I had a good day. I like that.

Plains in the big city

I love the city. Couldn't live without it, but as with many people, some days I can't live with it.

Getting "out of town" requires a bit of effort when you live in Chicago. First you've got to get at least sixty miles from downtown because the city itself stretches a long ways. Then you've usually got to drive at least another hour or so to get past the corn fields. Welcome to the Midwest.

My solution for getting "getting out of town," when I've only got a short a while to do so. Northerly Island.

Northerly Island, isn't really an island, and isn't really north of much of anything, it's pretty central. It is right off of downtown Chicago, it is pretty reasonably large, and has some relation to the plains that this area used to have. Though Northerly Island itself is a man-made island.

For anyone who played with Microsoft's Flight Simulator it was the starting point of that game. It used to be known as Meigs Field. An airport off of downtown Chicago on Lake Michigan.

We're going to ignore the fact that it was 70 degrees and somewhat sunny the other day, and that I felt like being outside.

Northerly Island is also a place where you can have some wide open space, on the lake, but within sight of the city.

It also makes an odd statement being a man made version of the nature that used to exist in this part of the country, while yet overlooking downtown Chicago. All the tall buildings being the first thing you see.

It also to me says something about what we, we as in Americans, have destroyed, reduced and otherwise left behind. It makes me want to get out of Chicago for a few days. Alas, that will have to wait till summer. And that's fine, I'd prefer the nice weather. But for an afternoon hike I'll take Northerly Island.

Also, if you want to buy either of this images as print, go here. There are also a couple more images available for purchase.

More from the cutting room floor

The ongoing complaint of every photojournalist, every photo department, the paper never runs the photos they should run.

I can't change this at my paper, at least not quickly. It doesn't seem most photographers can change this at their papers. So we all end up with piles and files of photos that we, the photographers, think should have run, but never did.

So I'm now going to run them here, at least from time to time.

Having shot basketball for the last few months, you would think my editors would be tired of printing lay-up shots. Nope, not even close. In game that was about stiff defenses, hard fouling, rebounds and turnovers, not a single one of those images ran.

Oh well. At least I've got them, and they make me happy. At the end of the day what else can I ask for?

So just to provide some context for these images.

This was the lowest scoring championship game in Illinois AA Girls basketball history.

Turnovers we're happening left and right, shots weren't sinking very often. Elbows seemed very...let's call it free, under the basket.

This was, as has been widely reported, a game based on defense.

Maybe these shots don't show the victorious Fenwick Friars looking victorious, but they do show the game more as it was. Hard fought, and close till the very end.

This program was modified to fit the time available

Weaknesses are strengths, and strengths are weaknesses. The only difference between the two are how you choose to use the inherent qualities of something. One way makes a quality a strength, one situation makes it a strength, another situation or use makes it a weakness.

Audio slide shows, for the most part, have to be kept pretty short. People just don't watch them for that long. Or at least that's what I'm always told, and that's what I do.

So the rough figure is that you have about 2 minutes of time to keep viewers attention on a website. This means my recent Chiditarod audio slide show had to hit about 2 minutes. This also means some real beauties of quotes got left out.

This includes the winning team captain talking about his various forms of sabotage; replacing race maps with fake race maps, shoving opponents into snow banks, various forms of bribery, taping opponents wheels so they wouldn't roll and tying carts together. Also cut, a good 45 seconds of the judges bragging, outright bragging, about their bribes (transformers, head rubs, 3 shots, cupcakes, chocolates, you get the idea.) And after listing all this off, "It was pretty awesome." I also had to lose a woman saying she was going to get the next round. I really wanted this to get the drinking end across, but alas it had to be surrendered to the time goods.

Ya gotta love competitions that encourage cheating.

On the other side of the coin being forced into a tight edit usually makes the piece better overall. It makes the final piece tighter, more focused, which tends to be a good thing. It tells a better story for it's shortness.

Also check out the coverage by Matt Bigelow, good stuff (video also available through Methods Reporter). Always love seeing all the different views of the same event.

A Good Day, or the end of creative constipation

So I think I've mentioned a couple of time over the few weeks that I just haven't found anything, any stories that have really got my blood flowing.

I, like most artists, need a subject to be working on, a piece to be completing. Otherwise I just feel like I'm missing something, and something vital to me.

The advantage to journalism is that different subjects are put in front of me day after day. This means, if for no other reason than the sheer chance of numbers, that one of these assignments will eventually turn into something interesting, into something more than an assignment, and more about me creating something I want to create for my own reasons.

So I got lucky and got one and half of those in one day, and it was a damn long day.

The one, the main one, was covering Chicago's Chiditarod. It's a grocery cart race around Chicago's northwest side with bar hoping interwoven. Basically the competitors run from bar to bar, where they must wait, until they get to the end. The different teams all go with themes; secret service, bunnies, team zissou, etc, and the associated costumes. The grocery carts are usually decorated also.

Basically it's a reason for a bunch of people to act silly, dress silly, and drink. Good time for all. Not to mention very easy to get a fair number of decent photos out of.

For me it's a chance to work on something more interesting than "this week's business feature is..." It's a chance for me to have a story that makes me want to create something cool. A chance to make something longer and with at least a tad more depth. It's not the long-term story I'm still looking for, but it's a nice filler for a while, and I should be proud of it when I'm done.

I'm hoping to turn it into a audio slide show in the next day or two. Just got to do the computer work now.

That was my morning assignment. As soon as I got done with that I got packed and made a two hour drive down state to the girls high school state basketball championship.

Typically sports kind of bore me. They're a bit repetive and we rarely run anything too different photographically. State championships though can be more fun, if for no other reason than there is more energy and emotion.

So I spent the night shooting Fenwick winning state. I got a lot of jube (jubilation) shots out of the deal plus some good action shots. The tighter the game usually the better the action shots.

I've shot state championship many times before, and I've shot losing teams before, and I get good shots out of those, but they're just not as much fun as winning teams. Anything you photographic the emotions of the subject are going to effect your emtions. Does it really need to be said that over-whelming happiness beats saddness?

Now I need to turn all the basketball images into a slide show. The other thing about a good day, is that it tends to be followed by a few long days to get all the back end work done.

A good morning of shooting a fun subject and a night of shooting shooting good sports with good celebration.

A good day, all and all.

Problems, Problems, Problems, or...An Ode to Bitching

Something I've discovered over the last few years is that I love to bitch about things. Most of the time the things I bitch about bother me, but not all that much. I just find joy in the art of bitching. It's fun.

Now, luckily for me, my job gives me ample opportunity to bitch in that something always seems to be either getting messed up or just randomly falling apart. I bitch about these things, pretty much every time. But I've also discovered that I like it when it all falls apart.

It's just no fun when things are working well. There's no challenge. I thrive on the challenge. Put me in a situation where I have every reason to fail, and usually I'll do pretty well, come out with some decent to good images, and have fun doing it. Put me in a situation where everything is alright, or working for me, and I'll do fine, I'll make some good images, but probably not as nice, or at least not to me, and I often won't have as much fun. I love the thought of overwhelming failure, and the ability to succeed in those situations.

Really, who doesn't like a challenge? It brings out the best in all of us, or at least in me. I have to get more creative in my problem solving. I have to look beyond what I've done and I know I'm capable of and find more and go further. If people only grow by pushing their limits and expanding their horizons, aren't the situations I should fail the perfect opportunity to grow?

I really rather wonder how poets, musicians and painters do it, how they grow. They often don't have loads of problems bearing down on them. They don't have to worry about a word not showing up to the party. I guess they might have writers block, and maybe that's the same as the candidate not showing up. I don't know. I just think it helps when artists have obstacles to overcome. It pushes them to find that extra something in themselves to succeed. I'm sure it also builds confidence in themselves as well.

One of personal, favorite, sell imposed limits, and I work so much better when I have this limit than when I don't, is using prime lenses. For the non-photographers out there, that means using lenses that don't have a zoom capability. When I have a zoom lens I can just stand there and select what I want in the frame and be done. With prime lenses I have to figure out how to get the lens to work regardless of the fact that it's just a little to wide, or a little to tight for what I would like. I look at this problem, and compose around it, but I also have to spend time examining the image, thinking about the image, and then finding some way to cope with the limits. Often this leads to making a better image. If for no other reason than I've spent more time thinking about the image and thinking about what else I can get rid of in the image if the lens is to tight, or what else I can add if it's too loose.

Plus there is something that is good for the ego and self-image (I have done the entry on "Don't feed the Ego" yet?) in success in the face of obstacles. Sometimes it's nice to show off and just show, "I'm a bad ass, I'm so good, you can't stop me! Bring it on, I got it, I'm that good." Okay, this wasn't that serious of a situation, but really, this was asking for trouble.

The situation was that we had to cover election night. The other photographer, and my boss, had to bow out of working due to illness. So now instead of two photographer we got one. This meant I had to cover 3 candidates for mayor in Forest Park, plus at least three candidates for alderman in Chicago. The 3 Forest Park mayoral candidate images also had to be in pretty quick as the paper had to be out the door an hour or two later. The aldermanic images didn't need to be in till morning at least, but involved a lot of driving. This just had the potential to fall apart, there is no way to be in six places at once. Three sure, six is a definite stretch though, especially with driving.

Suffice it to say they all got covered, with images to spare. 6 locations, 4 hours, 30 minutes of editing in there, and over an hour of driving. Loads of fun, though not even close to my personal record for number of locations in that amount of time. Now mind you I can't take all the credit. Once we at the paper realized we had one photographer my editors did a great job of narrowing down coverage locations and minimizing drive time. They deserve a lot of credit, but I'm still really, really cool.

I've also discovered when I'm happy, my ego is feeling good, I tend to sing, mostly in the car. I think it's my new sign of happiness. I don't know when it started, but it did, and I like it. Mind you, I don't sing well, but I enjoy doing it. I think it's important to notice those signs, the tells we make when we have different moods. For me it's singing in the car, and singing the song "I'm too sexy for my...." when I'm walking down the street.

Sophomoric Humor and for the Love of Storytelling

Alright, let's be clear about this photo. It has no other point other than dumb humor. Even I think it's ridiculous, sophomoric and juvenile.

I expect no less from anyone looking at it. And just to provide context, this is Jason, at the Illinois Boys State Swimming Championship. I was killing time, he was actually working.

While there I ran into another photographer I've met before, she's becoming something of a friend, but I we're not quite at that point yet. We got to talking about what we enjoy shooting, the need for variety and effort. Maybe the effort part is where Jason comes in, he always puts out a 110%.

Anyhow, my comment to Tracy, and I hope I spelled her name right, was that 75-85% of all assignments are going to be the same repetitive crap and I do it to pay the bills. Thinking about it now I think it came off as a little more negative sounding than I meant, but if you wanted someone good with words you, and she, would be talking to writers and not photographers. The idea behind is that most shoots are pretty much the same as any number of shoots you've done before it. That's fine. You do the job, you do it well, and you move on.

The idea isn't that I don't try hard at my job. The idea is more like what I would imagine it is being a striker in soccer. Whenever you get the chance you walk, or run slowly. You do this to conserve energy. While hustling constantly may help make a difference in any particular play, the difference it makes will probably be small. So instead you save your energy so that when you need to be able to strike hard, move fast, you have the energy for that sudden burst.

It's a similar idea to what I feel I do. I take the day to day assignments, I do them well, but I don't put out that extra energy to take a nice photo and make it very nice. Instead I hold that energy, so when the situation arises I can take a good photo and make it great, take a good photo and turn into a great photo story. I look at as being able to take an image of medium importance and story telling ability, and make it 20% better (yeah, percentages don't really work with are, but work with me here) or take a potentially good story and make it 10 times better.

At the end of the day I don't think artists have an infinite amount of energy; creativity, sure, but not the energy to carry out all those ideas. So decisions have to be made, sacrifices made. Happens in everything we do, it's no different in art.

And mind you, I'm not saying this is necessarily the right choice. I'm saying that this is the choice I've discovered that works best for me, at this point in my life. It may be different for me in a year, or a decade, and it's probably different for you.

Now I just need to find a story that lights my fire. It's been a few months, I'm in the mood, but nothing has appeared that has really screamed "I need to do a story on this." I've already got one planned for the fall, and some ideas of where I want to go for summer, but the season of the moment, spring, I've got nothing. At moments like this I count on the strangeness of the world and serendipity, and a story shall appear. I just hope it's soon.

Work or Play?

I've been debating what the difference is between work and play for me.

The question on it's face is pretty simple. Work is what you do for money, play is what you do for fun. The problem is that in my case what I do for fun that is the most fun, is often identical to what I do to put food on my table.

Examples, this photo is from a multimedia story I did for the Wednesday Journal. I followed the production of a feature movie , "Love. Blood. Kryptonite." that was written and largely done by local high school students. The story itself was totally self-generated. The audio was recorded and processed by me. In the end I was pretty happy with the piece, and fairly proud of it. But regardless of my good feelings, it was still definitely work, no way about that. When I was done with it all I wanted to do was collapse for week.

Now while I was working on the LBK piece for the paper I took "a week long weekend." For this mini-vacation I flew out to Rhode Island and joined my friend Peter (aka George) while a group of his friends and cohorts worked on a play for a group they run called TENT.

My "job" during this production was to make a record of them working on it and to a more limited degree of the piece itself. Basically this involved shooting from 9am till 1am for four days straight, with a little bit of editing packed in the middle. The woman who was kind enough to house a few of us I didn't even meet till the last day because we got back every night after she had gone to bed and left before she woke. We're talking four straight 16 hour days.

The end result of this piece for TENT was also a mutlimedia slideshow.

This was the best vacation I had had in years. I came back recharged and feeling great. The problem I'm having is figuring out where the difference is between these two events. One is work, the other is not. Both we're done because I wanted to. Yet, again, one was work, the other a vacation, and they both felt like that. But I "worked" more on the vacation.

This post doesn't have an answer. It just has the question when is it work? When is it play? And what is essence of the difference? I don't know. Some days I just wonder about this a lot.

It's also a good problem to have I guess.

Contest Entries

I hate entering contests. Mostly because it just feels like doing paperwork. I'm going through old work, at most doing minor toning, and otherwise rewriting captions, renaming and getting images to the requested specs.

Booooooooring.

But it's good to do also. One, there is always the chance I could win something. Though past experience has taught me that that chance is pretty small. On the other hand if you don't shoot you don't score, so take the shot.

Second, if I do win, it gets me some points in the newsroom which will hopefully get me something in need, space maybe, down the line.

Third, it looks good on the resume. I don't know why I care about that as I haven't updated it in years, but it sounds like a good reason.

The above image is from a foundry on the south side of Chicago where the owner (pictured) wants to convert this room for blacksmithing. I love people who love a craft.

Also, note the redesign of the site. Okay, I'll note the redesign of the site and you'll read and not know what I'm talking about.

A Gala I wasn't working

I get to attend formal events somewhat regularly. I almost never get to attend formal events as a guest. It's a nice change of pace.

Maybe the word "formal" is wrong in this situation, but technically it was a gala, and a fund raiser, so I'm going to call it a formal event.

So these are from Chicago Tap Theatre's Unmasked Gala. They are a joy watch, and fun to help.


It's also nice to be complimented on your work. It's really nice when it happens repeatedly, with a fair amount of energy, and from beautiful women. If only every night were so nice.

As with many artists in this world, it's rare to get much feedback much less a lot of reinforcement. Personally I don't need it much (or I tell myself that) but every once and a while, it's damn nice. And I think to varying degrees that's true with just about every artist.

Art is world that typically involves a lot of work, sometime solitary, or fairly solo, and it's nice to know that there's something on the other side of that silent void that your energy goes into. It's one thing to feel good about what you're doing, but we all need some feedback from others on occasion.

Now this isn't why I went to this event. I went to this event because they are a damn cool dance group. So it's just cool to be able to support them. It's also nice to get to put names, voices and personalities to faces which I've seen over and over in my photos.

Blessing of the Clowns

Heads up to anyone reading this regularly (I know there are a very few of you) I haven't been updating lately, and it will be a few weeks before I probably start again. I've been absorbed with updating my website. It's getting close, but I've still got a lot of finishing touches to take care of. You may want to head over there and take a look.

This is just a quick pair of images from the Blessing of the Clowns. I know people talk about how something was "like in the movies," but personally, I think the movies lack an understanding of the surreality of daily life.

Before the clowns started performing while the Reverend was talking, I had a clown telling me masturbation and incest jokes in the back of the church. Yep, during church service I was being told dirty jokes by a clown in the back of a church. If you put that in a movie they include drugs to make it "believable," when in reality this stuff just happens.

Sometimes in life it's best just to accept the strangeness of life and move on. Anymore will just screw with your world view too much.

When it's all against you

I love situations where there is every reason you shouldn't get a photo. I actually love situations where you should lose and are expected to lose. I love them because there is nothing to lose and everything to gain.

In this case this was the second group to come up and sings carols. I knew I was at least covered with the first group. This group came up and stood in front of the Christmas tree, the previous group stood behind it. Where this created a problem was that there was virtually no other light except for the Christmas tree. Any street lights that were around this park were a long ways off and pretty dim to start with. For the photographers out there this exposure was made at 1/50th of second, f1.2, at 3200iso, for the non-photographers, pushing everything to the max. I really liked how the lighting turned out, has a nice ethereal quality to it, and for a situation where I probably should have got nothing, it gives me a smile that I got something. Now to see if it runs, it is a bit noisy so it'll have a tough time going big, but should hold up fine small.

The Other Side of Life

Well I'm not a generally extroverted person, I do enjoy the company of good people and meeting good people for work. Most of the time when I meet people for work it's a quick association and I'm off again, sometimes I have the time and interest or the need to spend more time on a shoot. So currently I'm working a piece for parenting magazine about the softer side of the Bears. We're showing the good family man side of some of the players. Alright, nice enough little feature piece.

So I spent a few hours with the Maynard family on Tuesday (for those who don't know Brad Maynard is the Bears punter and very good at it). Obviously Brad is very into football, but he's two sons were also very into football. Football games were a common theme throughout the day. Near the end of my time with them they started playing Madden. It's always the little things that give stories life, and that make the world a brighter place in my world. In this case it was watching the Bears punter being forced by his 7-year-old son to play as the Packers against the Bears. It's probably the only time you'll hear a Bears player in Bears vs. Packers game complaining the Brett Favre can't complete a pass and is throwing too many interceptions.

The part that I always enjoy about these longer shots is that you get to see a little bit more into the quirky side of people, the unexpected parts. Those are the parts I always enjoy, and to me, the part of them that makes people interesting. I always wonder why people don't show their quirks a little more and the face they try to put on to fit in and be like everyone else and the ideal a little less. The ideal is so dull if you ask me, the quirks are so fun. Oh well.

Better, but still leaves some room for improvement

So I wanted to try something a bit different for the wrestling preview I needed to shot. It's better than a straight action shot, but it leaves room for improvement. Need to do better prep on site and remember that atheletes don't always make for cooperative models (my first idea rather fell apart because the subject had trouble doing anything but laughing his ass off, which is personally the kind of attitude I love, just not great for the particular photo), but the ideas are a move in the direction I'd like to go.

To the bigger boat

The problem and blessing of journalism is the time frame. Every story you report has a time frame and it has to be done come hell or high water. This royally sucks because you don't have the time you want to work on a project, and you don't have any time to get any distance from a project before it needs to be done. The blessing is that it gets done, there is no putting a project on the back burner.

So a few months back I took a "vacation" to see a friend of mine at a theater company he works with, Tent. Basically I spent 4 doors, 16 hours a day taking photos. It was the break I needed. Seriously, it was, it helped make my flame for photography burn brighter, plus I met some cool people. Over time I've thrown up a couple of web pages for the particapants to look at the images, but I've never really been close to done. I had some time this weekend, so I decided to work on this and I think I'm much closer to a finished product. Anyhow, you can see the audio-slide show in a large version here. Also, I should mention, the part of the show I used for audio was a wee bit on the disturbed side, on the other hand, half the show was on the disturbed side.

The Joy of Dance

It may be a little tough to tell in this case, but this is from a dance performance a few weeks back. In this case The Strange Tree Theater Group at Aloft Aerial Dance. Think experimental dance mixed with trapeze. Right up my alley.

Over the past few years I've come to discover that I love watching dance performances. My favorites though are the more experimental dance groups. I don't quite know what it is about dance, but story telling through dance just appeals to me. I guess in a way it makes sense, dance being visual, me being a visual artist. Regardless of that being the source of my interest or not, I enjoy a good dance performance.

So far I've found these groups through work assignments and I want to find more, alas this means I'm going to have to start searching. I'd love to get to the point where I can go to one good dance performance every month. That may be a bit optimistic, but worth a good try. So if anyone should know a good dance group in the Chicago area, feel free to live a comment with some info about them, I'd love to know. Also, I tend to enjoy helping these groups out by taking photos of their performances for some sort of trade, so you might be able to help them and me.

And if you're looking for a good show, another company worth a good, long, and enjoyable look is Chicago Tap Theater.

Last Minute

Apparently I'm in a mood to complain of late. More on that later. On Monday I was contact by my designers and editors all in somewhat of a panic because they had no page 1 image. So Monday night I hunt up a page 1 feature, a dance class, spend about 3 hours getting it shot and edited, only to find out Tuesday it wasn't needed. Rather annoying.

On the good side though, the dance company I was photographing were very nice people. In fact one of the reasons I choose to contact them was because they've always been nice to me in the past and I knew on short notice they'd work with me. The class itself was filled with kind people, who knew how to dance pretty darn well, and they were a joy to talk to. One photo did run, so I was glad I could help them even if just a little. This one didn't run, but that's for another day.

And I really do know I have nothing that I should complain about, but somedays it feels good.

Later.

The Joys and Problems of Previews

Tis the time of year for winter sports previews. We have recently decided to try and switch from practice images to portrait images. I'm all down for this, assuming we can plan for it. Suffice it to say, when you're given the photo request mid-day Friday, with times for the Friday afternoon practice and Friday night scrimmage, there is a limited amount you can do. When in doubt, work what you can, and don't sweat the rest. On the other hand next week's image hopefully will be what I'm looking for, and more than my editors expect.

Late Night Ideas

Usually I'm a pretty sound sleeper, sometimes though I just get too caught up in ideas, usually new ideas. Lately it has been QuickTime Virtual Reality Movies. If you don't know what I'm talking about they are set of image which are merged together to create a 360 degree image. Usually you click on them and then move your mouse around to view the whole image. If you want to check some out head over to http://www.panoramas.dk/ (I'll turn it into a link a when I learn how). Very neat stuff. I'm hoping to incorporate it into some of my journalism work in the near future, the question has been how?

Over the past several week I've been fairly obsessive compulsive about figuring how to shot these, and how shot them right. So far I've figured out that small problems when you take the pictures turn in huge problems when you process the pictures to deal with the problems up front. The main problem I've seen so far is getting all my shots level. After much reading I've found that it seems to be easiest to use a panoramic head on top of my tripod head. I'm close to done with my home made version of this. Hopefully that will help out in the more scenic and interior shots, but tripods just aren't friendly for most photojournalism.

To that end for some reason tonight it unlocked in my head that well I may not have a fisheye lens, a common solution to getting 360 degree panoramic, I could at least try my 14mm. I'll give it a run tomorrow, hand held, see how badly it goes, and work from there. I wish I could understand why certain ways of doing things get locked in peoples heads, mainly mine, and why obvious, if not potentially problem wrought solutions, take so long to come to mind. I guess I should be happy that the different ideas pop into my head at all, whether they be little things or big things. We all need to have a little late night, and somewhat ridiculous inspiration on occasion.

And at some point during this whole process I'll start spelling panoramic correctly without a spell checker instead of my "panaromic". Guess there was a reason I wasn't a writer.

Blackout

I've always been a fan of a challenge. They're the main thing that keeps life interesting. Now, a challenge is one thing, taking a photograph of a moving person, sometimes pretty quickly moving, in a pitch black room, that's just brutal. One of my assignments today was to shot firefighters doing night training. Basically the firefighters would wear something over their visors to reduce visibility then enter a room that was pitch black. This was all to simulate a smoke filled house or building. This left me hand holding 2 second exposures that I couldn't even see well enough to vaguely focus. It was actually kind of fun. I love a situation wear failure is expected and all you can do is take the chances and see what you can get. And well I wouldn't call it a great success, I'll take it considering.