Supply and Demand

It’s summer. For Naples, that means the population has flown back north. Summer also means kids and camps. I’ve shot a couple of those in the past week and will probably soot many more. Here’s a science camp I visited yesterday.

We dissected crawfish.

They smelled bad.

Pin the tail on the lobster was fun too.

The Art Of American Football

The other day I shot some guys laying down artificial turf on one of the local high schools.

Self Helpless

Someone stop me before I take another one of these.

In other news, the clouds that never rain… finally did.

Wartime Prayers

For the past two years I’ve been shooting for myself. As photo editor, I knew which pictures I liked. When I was on assignment, I only shot pictures I knew wold run, and I knew they would run because I was going to pick them.

Now things are different. Now I’m only a shooter. As a shooter, I can only hope the editor will agree with me when they look at the pictures I made to satisfy myself.

Case and point: my first assignment.

I was to go with a reporter to interview George Sabb Sr., a WWII veteran who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day. I was told he had a case of medals and other items that might make for a nice portrait, so I was to shoot just that.

I shot some photos while the reporter was interviewing him, and stuck around afterward to make some pictures that were more controlled.

Here are my selects:

Here are my editor’s:

Will I agree with my editor? Probably not too often, but that’s where I take our differing opinions and learn from them. Being a good photographer isn’t about just making the pictures you like. It’s about making pictures that you like that simultaneously make other people feel the same way.

Talk to Strangers

After sitting in the office all day I needed to shoot something. Here is the result:

Every afternoon these really huge and often dark clouds start rolling in (at least they have in the two days I’ve been here). After they arrive, they either rain, or produce lots of lightning with no thunder or rain. I should capitalize on both.

The grass is bluer here than in Kentucky.

–

I was waiting to turn right out of the apartment complex parking lot to go shoot in good light when a semi truck passed by. In the cab a man and his son were playfully hitting each other.

I had to have it, so I sped off after them. I was hoping they would pull in to a parking lot soon, but I was prepared to follow them to their destination no matter how far it was.

Their destination turned out to be Wal Mart. They parked. I parked. I walked over and asked the man getting out of the drivers seat if he wouldn’t mind letting me take a picture of him and his son in front of the truck. “Well sure you can,” said Randall Clark. “That’s my baby boy.”

I didn’t really have a game plan, but I knew I wanted to capture more interaction between the two. I figured I had learned enough about trucking from Jim and Carla to hold a halfway decent conversation with the guy. And I did, but my blessing turned out to be my curse.

Good photojournalism is as much about talking as it is shooting, and once he and I got started, there was no stopping. Talking is great if you’re trying to build rapport with your subject and get them comfortable with you, and I was. But there also come a point where your talking gets in the way of your shooting, just like tonight.

So while Randall’s son, Lane, and girlfriend, Angel, played with toys in Wal Mart, I was stuck at the other end of the isle talking to Randall, who says he’s giving his trucking job up this week to spend more time with his son.