Nice layout, nice photos, nice story…nice.

http://lexeyswallbobay.blogspot.com/2008/08/jesus-would-be-like-thrilled.html

School is starting. Time to get vaccinated.

It’s like that scene in Independence Day when the aliens are about to blow up the LA skyscraper. She would run if she could.

Fishing camp on the Pier.

This kid hooked a jack, but a dolphin ate it before he could reel it in.

I drove to Miami yesterday to go to a climbing gym. Here are some things you could see from the road.

This could have been a really cool frame if I had stopped, but I wanted to go climbing, damnit.

I passed these guys on my way home. They were having a roping competition.

I’m pretty disappointed that I didn’t come away with a portfolio picture. There were definitely some to be had. I will admit that I was a little nervous, especially since I don’t speak Spanish. Most people were pretty receptive of me, but it I could tell some didn’t want me there.

Florida has some interesting clouds. I had an assignment in Immokalee the other day, so I shot a time lapse while I drove under the clouds for an hour on the way back to the paper.

I did it by wedging my camera between the dashboard and windshield, putting the motor drive on two second delay, and just holding down the shutter button for an hour (it would have been easier if I hadn’t knocked a wire loose in my cable release) . I think there are something like 1,800 images in the video, which were imported into FCP at 2 frames per image.

I’m going to try another one for my drive back to Ky.

I read a really good quote today. It went something like this:

“Emotion is the language of documentary photography. Without it, a picture has little value, except possibly as evidence in court. Most of us look for a different kid of evidence: the evidence of life and living.”

Torsten Kjellstrand

This isn’t Torsten Kjellstrand, it’s Fannie Gloster. I hope I look this good at 93.

And how could I pass this up?

Do I look tan? It’s probably because I am.

This girl is going to the Olympics. In fact, she’s already in Beijing. She’s swimming for Libya, her father’s home country, since there isn’t a women’s swim team there. She’s 18-years-old.

My co-worker Greg Kahn let me borrow his underwater bag. Now all I want to do is hang out at the bottom of pools. I’m just thankful this one was outside.

Also, LCD sucks. My images look properly toned, but then I sit up, changing my eye level by three inches, and they look like shit all of a sudden. CRT is the way to go.

The other days I shot some pictures of a storage unit auction. That’s where the renters of the unit can’t pay the money they owe for rent, usually for several months, so their stuff is auctioned off. The rules of the auction are simple: the buyers aren’t allowed to enter the unit or touch anything inside. They can only look in from the threshold to try and judge what’s inside. Even a knock on the side of a piece of furniture could determine whether it’s fake. People buy units hoping to find buried treasure. Antiques, collectibles, art, tools, whatever they can turn around and sell to make a profit.

These two guys make a living going to various auctions, buying things, then re-selling them on Craigslist or eBay, or at flea markets. They say that 90 percent of the time all they come away with is crap. Baby pictures, old clothes, furniture, nothing that people will really buy if they try to re-sell it. The men will take pots and pans to the scrap yard instead of trying to sell them because they make more money that way.

But even when they think they’ve got a great find, it might be a false hope. Gary Holmes said he was once up $1,500 on a unit because he saw two steel-guitar cases in the back. He backed out of the auction, though because he was afraid they would be empty, and they were.

That’s another problem the buyers have to deal with. The men told me sometimes the owners of the storage lots will enter the units before the auction and go through boxes and take things of value. L.V. McNall said one unit he bought had a couple gun cases in it. When he opened them up the guns were gone but the foam still had impressions in it.

Originally written on 6/23/2008

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I’m an intern. If my boss tells me to stand in a parking lot for an hour in 95 degree heat, I’ll do it with a skip in my step because I know that I’m the bottom of the food chain and that’s what I’m there to do. My job is to take the menial tasks from the staffers so they can a) have a break and b) focus on the more important assignments.

But sometimes doing what my boss assigns me is hard to do with so much as a smile.

I don’t think disappointment aptly describes what I felt on Friday. Here’s why:

It had been known since Monday (or even sooner) that the President would be coming to Naples on Friday and every staffer was expecting to be on duty. The President doesn’t come to Naples often.

On Wednesday, I got an assignment to shoot photos of a high school girl at the beach. The girl had recently injured her ACL and the paper had decided to do a story on her that would follow her from before her injury all the way through recovery. My job was to get photos of the girl just being a normal teenager hanging out with friends. Easy.

I didn’t really expect to be involved with the story much since it was scheduled to run sometime in November, after Casey had made her recovery and was playing soccer again. Since I’m only supposed to be here until August, I would definitely be missing a big chunk of the images necessary to tell her story. So imagine my surprise when I got back to the paper and my assignment editor approached me and told me I would be going into surgery wither her on Friday.

Surgery. I was going to shoot in surgery. With all the red tape associated with hospitals and patients, many photographers go their entire career without having the opportunity to shoot in an operating room.

I can’t describe how excited I was. Sure, it was a simple ACL surgery and it was going to be performed arthroscopically, but just the thought of shooting in that environment got my heart racing.

But something I’ve learned over the years is that if I say anything I will do something, and I say it with certainty, it won’t happen. In fact, the more excited or passionate I am about said event, the less likely it is to occur. This theory has been proven time and time again, each time with results as depressing as the last.

For the surgery I ran over scenarios in my head trying to find weaknesses in the plan. The longer I thought, the more likely it seemed that it would go off without a hitch. My presence was already cleared with the hospital, cleared with the surgeon, cleared with the family. I thought nothing could go wrong. But the more certain I became, the more I damned myself.

Friday morning I woke up and drove to the hospital. Surgery was scheduled to start at 8:30 a.m., but I arrived at 7 to talk things over with the nurse to figure out what it was I was and wasn’t supposed to do in the O.R.

Casey showed up at 7:30 and I introduced myself to her parents, we talked for a while, then Casey was taken back to be prepped for the procedure. The reporter and I were asked to wait in the lobby until she was changed into her gown and was in bed. We complied. Soon, however, 8:30 came and I got worried. “Hey, surgery was supposed to start soon, so I just wanted to make sure they didn’t forget about us’” I told the receptionist.

“I’m sure they didn’t forget about you,” she said.

I took a seat back in the lobby, and after a few more minutes a nurse came out and walked us back to the pre-op rooms. The family chatted with us for a while, I shot a bit, and before long I was changing into scrubs. The nurse showed the reporter and I the operating room so we would be know where to stand and to point out the table full of shiny and presumably sharp surgical tools we were supposed to stay the hell away from.

Sh walked us back to the pre-op room, where we hung out for a few more minutes until it was time for Casey to go into surgery. The plan was for us to wait in the lounge until the surgeons got Casey ready to go, then we’d pop in and hang out for a bit (and hopefully not pass out in my case).

When we walked into the lounge I glanced at the digital clock hanging on the wall.

9:30.

Shit.

In all my excitement I forgot all about the time. I was supposed to leave at 9:30 to head back to the paper and get ready for the president. I called my boss in a panic.

“She just went into surgery. I need 20 more minutes.”

He agreed. “But if you aren’t in there in 20 minutes, then we just won’t have it.”

I paced around the floor, hoping that someone would come and get us and take us into the operating room.

At 10:00, nobody had. Defeated and very pissed off, I went back into the locker room to change. I threw the scrubs on the floor and walked back out into the lounge, where a nurse was waiting with the reporter. “What are you doing,” she asked?

I didn’t even want to talk about it. I left the hospital and drove my car back to the paper.

—–

I got to the newsroom and received my first president-related assignment: The Collier County Democrats would be painting their building blue (using environmentally safe paint) in protest, and when the president’s helicopter few over they were going to wave the paint brushes (also blue) at it.

I show up and there are four people inside the small office which, to my surprise, was still being built. See, I thought that they would be painting the outside of the building blue, you know, in protest. Instead, they were painting the inside, which is what they would have been doing even if the president hadn’t been coming to town.

The crowd in the small office quickly grew to 7, but then fell back to three after someone suggested that they all go protest at the president’s landing spot at a nearby school. But it didn’t matter how many people were there because they weren’t even painting. The walls didn’t even have primer on them yet.

So I called my editor and told him what was up and he told me to leave. So I did. I then began working on my other assignment for the day: Working the motorcade route and looking for people out holding signs, waving flags, etc. I rode my bike along the route and found a street corner where a couple families were gathered. I stopped and hung out with them. I figured out where I was going to shoot from and basically got ready for the motorcade to pass. I waited there for about a half an hour and finally the time came for the prez to roll by. The cops shut down the street and, to my dismay (although I should have seen it coming), moved everyone back from the street 500 feet.

Well, there goes my photo. Now there was a 500 foot gap between the people and the motorcade, something a 16-35 can’t compress very well. I figured I would just roll with it and focus mainly on the people. So I did. Then the motorcade rolled by at 45 mph and it was over and I didn’t get shit.The president was in town for one hour while attending a private luncheon, didn’t make any kind of speech and didn’t make any appearance at all except for getting off the plane. He didn’t even stick his hand out the window to wave as the motorcade passed.

One of the staff photographers here said he heard some guy telling his son that the president coming here was “like us going to eat at McDonald’s.”… and we had every staff photographer covering it. I don’t even think my photos ran except for online, and we had plenty of far better crowd pictures from the other intern.

In summation, I left an one-time opportunity… to take pictures of a 10 second motorcade.

From this:

Photo by Casey Dunphy

To this: