When Is Familiarity Important? Three Part Series - Part TWO

Concert photography is like gambling in a casino - the odds are mostly against you. However, there are those times that if you know the game well enough and see an opportunity to come up and have the nerve to follow through - the payoff is huge.

My favorite band to shoot is Roger Clyne and The Peacemakers. Local act gone national, great rock-n-roll and it's always a good time. I've seen RCPM tons of time but I have just started photographing them seriously.

Although I've seem them a lot it wasn't until I saw them as a photographer did I realize how hard this band was to photograph. With every shoot I started to realize how the stage presence and gestures were dictated by the song or tempo. Roger has a great stage presence and is very energetic (someone commented on a photo of mine and said it was trying to photograph a moth in a bright light.) After a while and after watching and after missing shots - it all clicks. Ok here comes the song (Mekong) ok he's probably going to do this...ok here's this song (Counterclockwise) I should be positioned over here a little.  Believe me it makes getting shots like this one (taken on 11/21 in Tempe, AZ) a little easier. Going back to the initial gambling analogy - you're able to stack the deck in your favor a little.

I've never shot soccer before - let alone kids soccer (or kids for that matter.) I was bored one day and I wanted to take photos and I ended up in Snedigar Park in Chandler, AZ. It was hot that day and I decided on setting up in a corner under a tree with a telephoto lens. (Truth be told I never use my telephoto lense - I don't know why.) After reviewing my action shots which were good - not great I saw this photo. A picture of a bunch of kids waiting for play to start. 7, 8 and 9 all in a row. That's what makes the shot. If I was little more familiar with kids soccer or more specifically I may have shot a great action photo - but this is what I came away with. A numeric composition.

Next post will deal with something that I briefly familiarized myself with a left with making a great photograph.

Evolution as a Photographer : Part THREE

Carl's photo of the Vermont lanscape really opened my eyes up to what else what out there. I was no longer a one dimensional photographer (or really picture taker at this point.)

After that I traveled a lot. Everywhere I went I brought my camera. Concerts, Sporting Events, Scenic Drives through our surrounding areas etc. Still I took tons of skateboard photos and the like but I had no limits. I felt like Carl's photo gave me permission to expand beyond the boundaries I had been constraining myself to.

Truth be told, I didn't seize every opportunity presented to me to take photos. Some trips were just too long and our travel plans were too sketchy to worry about a camera - not to mention the cost of film and processing.

I learned at an early age that taking concert photos (when anyone could bring a camera into a concert and there were no silly "no professional cameras" rules) was a difficult task. Sian Proctor at PodCampAZ, reminded me of the days of getting back a role of black prints. I learned that with a high ISO there was a substantial amount of noise in the print. I learned that when using a telephoto lens you need to stabilize it from shake or nothing will be in focus. Theses principles learned at 19 or 20 are still rules that apply today to a game that has greatly changed.

It's amazing how thinking back on my evolution as a photographer how many people were instrumental in this journey. Someone was always around me that knew a lot more than me and they were willing to share their knowledge. There are still so many great photographers around me today helping me out - it's an amazing community of sharing knowlege and exchanging ideas.

I enjoyed the art so much at this point - I don't know why I put the camera down (for the first time...)

Part FOUR: Life Without the Camera Before Arizona

Evolution as a Photographer : Part TWO

In high school my interest in photography expanded. I grew up as a skateboarder and a graphic arts student. What a combination. My parents bought me a Canon camera - just a simple point and shoot 35mm unit. Also, available to us was a Canon AE-1 on loan from the Graphics Dept. (Thanks Mr. Goetsch) at Watchung Hills Regional High School (WHRHS).

We would shoot everything. Portraits, skateboard action shots and other interesting items. My real interest in photography came at about 16 when I learned how to develop and process black and white film. This was earthshattering. We could go out - shoot a role of film and for little or no cost we'd have prints. Amazing...

So the cobinationof access to cameras and the availability of processing our own images made my interest explode. Nothing was left unshot.

My friend Ben Cornish was the best out of all of us. (Today, Ben is a filmmaker in Denver but is still one of my favorite photographers.) Some of his photos are iconic images of my younger days. (Weepee Portrait) His eye was better, his tech skills more advances and his willingness to share the knowledge was amazing. To say Ben had an influence on my photography is an understatement.

And so it went - we took music photos, skateboard photos and hanging out shots until one day...

...a bunch of us were in Vermont right before our senior year at WHRHS and our friend Carl Gulbish took some landscape shots. So simply, so cool yet opened so many avenues of creativity. I remember the B&W photo of the running stream with the trees and shadows from Killington - that photo changed the game for us...

Here's a link to Ben's Flickr Photostream

Part THREE: Beyond High School and before Arizona

Evolution as a Photographer : Part ONE

I spent a better part of last weekend at PodcampAZ. (The Relevant Media Unconference) The last session I sat in was The Evolution of Travel Photography by Sian Proctor (http://sianproctor.com/) We come a long way in the last 40 years of photography and I started thinking about my own evolution as a photographer.

I grew up in a lower middle class family in NJ. We valued time with each other, family gatherings and sports. I always seem to remember a camera laying around somewhere. The first one I vividly remember was at my grandmother's house. I don't even know what it was. All I remember is that it had the cool flash cubes that you had to place on the camera and would turn after every shot. I remember making the cubes flash but never any of the resulting images.

After that we stepped our game up to the POLAROID. Photos were taken all over - just don't let your subject move. [Sian reminded us of shaking the photo to make it developed (I thought of Outkast) and actually to this day Polaroid insists that shaking the piece of film had nothing to do with how fast the photo developed.] I think we're talking about 1979-1980 roughly. This was huge to our family. "Hey stand there..." FLASH goes off - the noise happens and the photo gets shaken and then it's instantly posted to the refrigerator.

Our family photo album was my grandmother's 'frige! Funny how my first memories of photography bring me back to my Grandmother's refrigerator on Tuttle St. in Green Brook, NJ. Photography always takes me back to a time and place that seems like it was yesterday.

Part TWO: My first camera and High School Photography