Golf Portrait

The shoot with Pablo Martin, OSU's biggest hot shot golfer, took about an hour, and 45 minutes of that was waiting for him to arrive. Laying in bed the night after I got the assignment, three ideas came to me. The most promising one ended up working out, which is unusual.



I slapped on my polarizer to get a decent sky and had the reporter hold the flash. Once I got Pablo posed correctly, it took about 10 shots to get everything right. I was lying flat on my stomach in the middle of the green - it must have looked pretty comical.

Anyway, all in all it was a quick and easy shoot. My only complaint was my lens - it's a little tight sometimes. I was at 20mm, and wished I had a 14mm. Oh well.

Space Muffins

Some students at OSU won a grant from NASA after creating muffins specially geared for astronauts to make in space.



The test kitchen was a little drab, but I made due. I would have liked to use the stoves in the background - they looked cool - but could never get a good shot with one of the guys near them. The lighting was also terrible: fluorescent lights that came out yellow even with the right color balance.

On a side note, I got a call from the Oklahoma AP office. Their normal shooter was at the Big XII baseball tournament and they needed someone to cover the wrap-up of the state legislature. This could have been an awesome opportunity but I had to turn it down because I had just gotten a root canal. Very unfortunate.

Anyhoo, I'm off to shoot a sports portrait of Pablo Martin, OSU's bigshot golfer. It should be fun, I've got some cool ideas. Will post it later.

A Shoot With the Suttons

I shot Eddie Sutton and his wife Patsy yesterday for the OSU mortarboard cover. After coming up with several ideas, which all fell through, we decided to simply shoot them in front of a big OSU logo at the Gallager-Iba concourse. It was clean, simple and told the message we wanted.



The mortarboard theme was "Reaching for Greatness." Hokey, I know. Anyway, the shoot took about 30 minutes, half of which was just setting up. I didn't use any complicated lighting, just one off-camera flash.

There are quibbles I have, though. Patsy's shoulder cuts off part of the big "S" in State, Eddie's feet are cut off and there are some noticeable shadows behind both of them. They were simple, easy things to fix, which makes it that much worse. If I would have put Patsy half a step to the left and stepped up one more rung on my ladder, the two major things would have been avoided.

Another 5-column shot

Decided to dig up a money shot from the archives.

OSU vs. Kansas basketball game at Lawrence - a really big deal. The lighting at Allen Fieldhouse is the absolute worst I've ever worked in. We're talking elementary-school gym quality here. So anyway, I was shooting at like 1/250th 2.8 at 1600 ISO and just barely getting exposure anywhere near acceptable.

All game long, I knew the money shot would come from post-game celebration/devastation. During the last few minutes or so I switch to my wide angle and get ready for action. KU holds on to win and the place goes nuts. I sprint onto the court, knowing the best shot will be from the KU bench - across the court from where I am.

So after I get over there, I see a KU player going nuts.



It's a media clusterfuck, naturally, so I hold my camera up over my head and PRAY that my autofocus tracks on the right spot.

My prayers were answered and we got the 5-column front page photo.

Summer Work

So I had another assignment from the World today. The Summer Special Olympics are going on right now in Stillwater, and they're doing a story on the woman who was awarded coach of the year. I got a call yesterday afternoon to shoot it.

I had more difficulty with this assignment than I thought I would. The Special Olympics is a photo-rich environment, right? Not this time. The woman was hard to work with: bustling around taking care of administrative stuff and hardly spending any time at all with the kids. I kept hoping to get a great shot of her hugging someone or giving them some tips, whathaveya, but didn't get it.

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This is probably the best looking photo I got. Sadly, I made a rookie mistake - I didn't get the name of the guy on the right. Shit.

The few I got of her actually DOING SOMETHING weren't very interesting: just another woman playing bocce.

So anyway, it sucked. I found myself in a familiar situation. Whenever I'm dealing with a large event with no real focal point, like this one, I choke. Nothing seems good enough, and I can never find a photo that will be. I try to get the ONE shot that encompasses everything, but that never happens. So I end up shooting a bunch of mediocre crap. I really need to ask a pro what to do in this situation.

Otherwise, things are going good. I'm shooting the cover of OSU's mortarboard calendar on my ex-boss's recommendation. So I'll get to meet with Eddie Sutton, the OSU basketball coach, and take a bunch of photos. It should be fun. I've got some good ideas in mind. I'm also working a little freelance for a new sports magazine called Conference Call. It's a mag dedicated only to the Big XII conference. I've got an assignment for a profile portrait of Donovan and D'Juan Woods, arguably the two best players on the team. Ideas, anyone?