Ron Shoots

Shooting on location has many rewarding moments… in between being stuck in traffic jams. My good luck started at 7am when the security guards at the Air Force Memorial let me in an hour before opening to shoot the sunrise reflecting off the metal spires. The light was perfect for about an hour, then the skies clouded up.

Manifesting models…

Then this afternoon, at sunset, I was shooting at the Tidal Basin across from the Jefferson Memorial. Sometimes there’s a perfect scene that could only be more perfect with a model. I shot a few frames and started walking back to my truck. As I turned, a man was walking towards me. I commented on the sunset and he asked me if I was a photographer and could I shoot a photo of him. “Of course, not a problem” I responded. My model had appeared! So I was able to get a few more images. As we talked, I learned he was from Guinea, West Africa and had written a book of poetry, in French, about love and war and peace. He needed a photo of himself.

I’m shooting in Washington, DC for a few days. Hanging out early this morning at the Washington Monument when George flew by on his way to work. Wonder if he saw me shooting?

Living right!

As I was shooting, a Park Ranger approached me (not usually a good sign) and asked if I would shoot a picture of the Lincoln Memorial with the skyline in the background for him. He just wanted a personal shot to show how much the views have changed and saw me with a professional camera. He gave me his address and I agreed to mail him a photo. He then asked if I was going up to the top of the Washington. Having looked at the 200 people already in line, I asked told him I would love to, but didn’t have the time right then. He said “no worries” and the man in the nice green jacket walked me over to the front of the line. I was at the top within minutes!

Shot some funky cool stuff in Miami! These images were made with the Canon 1Ds MII using the Hensel ringflash. Always fun to delve back into the fashion/conceptual realm. The pictures don’t have to make sense, but there’s always a theme… even if I don’t know what that is when I’m shooting!

The vignette effect is on purpose- really! I like the way the circle works on this composition. I also shot without the circle so our clients will have the choice. The effect is created by seating the wide angle lens “too deep” within the flash unit.

Boyfriends are welcome!

A model is always welcome to bring a boyfriend or friend to my shoots. I can always use extra help carrying gear and holding lights… and in this case, stopping cars while I crouched down in the alleyway. Both the model and her boyfriend are musicians so I’ll have a local music scene to tap into on a future trip. Always love the serendipity that happens during a shoot.

In the Kitchen

The studio I was staying at had a little kitchenette so why not have the model lay on the counter and drink water… in a black dress and fishnet hose. Made sense at the time. Also shot with the ringflash.

Usually, our images are used for magazine ads, brochures or websites. Our work has been published in hundreds of magazines over the years. Many of these are “in-house” so we don’t always get to see the uses. The nature of royalty-free stock photos is a multi-distributor system so we don’t know when to expect to see our images.

Early yesterday morning on my way to a shoot in Miami Beach (patiently waiting for the light to turn green… LOL) and one of my photos pulls up beside me! A moving billboard on top of a taxi. I had just a few seconds to grab this snapshot with my camera phone. We always get a kick out of seeing our work in real life. We make creative decisions way in advance of the actual use and seeing the published work is confirmation that our research and intuition paid off.

Our cool motorcyle dude thought he was in North Dakota, but a little digital artistry from Shelly Greer transformed the landscape to Monument Valley, Utah. We’re always looking for interesting ways to add value to our images, or to maximize the production. The hard part in a comp like this is finding just the right combination of background and foreground. The lighting and angles have to be just right. (Thanks Shelly- great work!)

I can’t resist taking a picture of a great sunset. This is just a few miles outside of Key West on my drive today. While our talented digital team can always create “light rays” its so much easier when they happen in real life!

And a quote from Ernest Hemingway:

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
~ Ernest Hemingway, who owned a home in Key West

The last time I was in Big Cypress National Preserve, there were so many alligators that I had to drive carefully so I didn’t run over their tails! (Credit to Shelly Greer of our digital team for finding this location on one of her many camping trips!) Today, I could barely find one… almost ready to tie a piece of raw meat around my neck and go wading in the swamp. Finally I found a 4-5 footer, just a baby compared to the 12 foot monsters I saw a couple years ago.

But the Florida Everglades are beautiful with the still water reflecting the cypress trees. Just give me a few more alligators!

I’m in Charlotte for the day before heading towards Florida for 3 days of stock industry meetings in Key West and then a few days of production in the Miami area. Worked with our awesome digital team on color today. We look at images on calibrated monitors and compare to the laptop I use while shooting on location. With digital and using FlexColor with the Hasselblad H2D-39 camera, the process can start from the time of capture. We’re always trying to improve our workflow so we can spend the maximum brain time being creative.

Fun = creativity = great images!

And the creativity was flowing today if the amount of laughter is any indication! I’m a firm believer that having fun at work and during shoots optimizes creativity.

Here’s what the studio part of the studio looks like:

The quantum leap in connectivity over the past few years is amazing. I remember reading, and being profoundly affected, by a 1995 book “On Being Digital” by Nicholas Negroponte. My take-away premise at that time was if your business can be digital then it should be digital. In 1995, the internet was only a few years old and most of us connected via dial-up. I remember asking Rob Norris, a much more tech-savvy guy than me, what was this “WWW” thing? Photography, of course, could easily be an entirely digital process. In fact, our company had just begun to experiment with digital the previous year. Reading the book accelerated my enthusiasm for transforming our studio.

Today, jets really don’t travel much faster, but the data sure does. I’m at the DFW airport, checking email and updating this blog on a high-speed T-Mobile wireless connection. If I wanted, I could have a 50Mb file on my laptop in 13 minutes. I left Maui 7 hours ago, and I’ll be at our Charlotte, NC studio in another 2 hours.

Our studio now, and for the last 6 or 7 years, has been 100% digital. F-I-L-M is a 4-letter word. Sometimes we also have 4-letter words for digital, but those days are now few and far between. Computers rarely crash and software tends to work most of the time. Yes, hard drives still fail but now we have a solid back-up process so our workflow hits nothing more than a small speed bump.

Digital has completed transformed the stock photo business and the rate of change is growing as high resolution cameras and high speed connections are now available to any aspiring photographer anywhere in the world.

Today, almost 12 years after “On Being Digital” was published, 80+ million people have a MySpace page and 70,000 new blogs are created every day. We rarely buy software in a box and transfer gigabytes without a second thought.

Can’t wait to see what’s next!

Hawaii experienced a 6.6 earthquake at 7:08am Sunday morning. Sunday was also my youngest son’s thirteenth birthday! We live about 50 miles from the epi-center.

WOW! I have never felt anything like that before. I was in the garage with my son Alex when stuff started shaking. My Excursion parked on the concrete driveway was rocking a foot from side to side. (thought my Ford was a jumpin’ low-rider for a minute…) We ran into the house to get Debi and Josh out and they were already standing in the doorways which is the safest place. Josh said “Does this mean a tsunami is coming?” so in 2 minutes we were in the truck. When we got up to higher ground, a hundred other cars were already in the same parking lot. We could not get a single radio station on the radio and there were no tsunami sirens going off. All power was out as well- no traffic lights, etc. After 20 minutes, one local radio station finally came on and said there was no tsunami generated so we headed home.

Here’s a map of the epicenter- we live at the orange dot…

Seeking information

I called Sara who was at the studio and there was no info available online for the first 30 minutes or so, then talked to Nicole who was watching the TV and I listened over my cellphone. There was surprising little info for the first hour or so. (Thanks Sara! Thanks Nicole!)

Power back on about 4 hrs later, we only lost a couple pieces of art glass that fell off the shelves. Sounds like the Big Island had significant damage with hotels and hospitals evacuated.

What a way to start Alex’s birthday!