The Warren Wilson Garden Crew and their Tractor: Swannanoa, North Carolina

This is Joe, Laila, Jenn, Melanie, and Micah, and Arielle in the next shot.  In the summer of 2010, Kacy Spooner and I were working on a project entitled "Stewards: Stories and Perspectives on American Agriculture".  We traveled to 24 states and conducted about 160 oral history interviews and portrait sessions.  We spoke to everyone from agribusiness plant breeders to grassroots farmers, folks with draft horses, tractor salesmen, professors, and, in this case, students.  In Swannanoa, NC, during the Warren Wilson College summer semester, we found this crew of five working on the garden/vegetable production plots.

After a few hours of interviewing members of this crew for the oral history project, it was time for a quick portrait.  Jenn (sitting at the driver's wheel) thought it would be a great idea to pull the tractor out because, hey, people look good with tractors!  The North Carolinian sun was high and bright, a classic bit of trouble for a photographer.  We positioned the tractor so that everybody would face away from the sun.  The camera settings were controlled to expose for the clouds/sky.  The challenge was then to use two small lights to expose the five characters properly.

You can see the sun's position, high, behind, and slightly camera-left, from the shadow cast by the left guy's hat.  See it streak down his chest?  Obviously, this cast his face in shadow, so a bare speedlight was held in my left hand, held at arm's length, to cancel the shadow out.  Another light was set up camera-right; you can see its effect on the right fellow's face and it also served to illuminate the two rear women.  This shot is practically right out-of-camera, with no post-processing.  Probably 8 minutes from parking the tractor to the final shot.

We spent the day with them; we had just come from a series of large-scale commercial chicken, hog, and tobacco operations, and the principled contrast with which this crew was working was stark.  Kacy wrote about them and Warren Wilson College in our blog at the time:

Warren Wilson College is a well known liberal arts school near Asheville that began as an agricultural school in the 19th century. There is still a large agricultural component and we were lucky enough to meet the student farm crew who is running the CSA as well as the market operation this season. It appears as though we have arrived at some kind of farm utopia; everyone is young and beautiful and farm chores in bikini tops is the norm here. Jenn, our main host told us about the origins of Warren Wilson. Agriculture was top priority from the foundation of the school, and in the original mission statement there is even a line about city boys with their "diseases and attitudes" not being welcome on campus.

Another quick shot; this is Arielle, who was working with the herb garden.  Same thing; I set the camera to expose for the building, having her stand with the sun at her back.  Two lights, bare, were used just to counter her hat's shadow and offer some contrast to the darker background. 

We toured around the garden which has an extensive herb section that students harvest to make teas and tinctures for personal use and to sell at the bookstore. The drying shed for the herbs was a small and beautiful log cabin with a kitchen in the downstairs and an attic that had an abundance of different herbs hanging from the rafters. The sweet smell that wafted over us was a mixture of lavender and licorice.

Arielle, pictured above, gave us a tour of that herb area; it really felt great, with herbs in all stages of drying or preservation.   Some more snapshots can be seen on the Stewards blog.

The Barker and Her Characters, Portland, Oregon.

This is the Barker, a canine narrator, part jester, part suspense-builder, exuding emotion and weaving a tale before you.  She keeps her eyes wide and movements quick, subtly telling you when to gasp, when to cower, and when to chuckle.  Her hand rests on the shoulder of a man with a frightening story, and she stands by a gypsy with dark powers.

Cerimon House and its director, Randall Stuart, gave me full freedom in setting up these portraits, which is usually welcome (but sometimes stressful).  Given that The One You Feed was a macabre, eerie play, meant to give chills, I went for a high-contrast, deep-shadow series of images.  Two lights. On the porch outside the playhouse, at night.  Because it was nighttime, I set my aperture and shutter to a level at which the frame would be completely dark, so all light came from two small speedlights on shoot-through umbrellas.  I kept the actors about 5-6 feet away from the wall to minimize shadow-casting and, in this case, chose a narrow aperture to intentionally blur the two background actors.  This is the Barker's portrait,  The other two are props in the story she is telling.

The scene is from a play, performed last Halloween in Portland, about a werewolf and a small village full of frightened and distorted townsfolk. The One You Feed was written by J. Pizarro and performed as a partial-play, partial-salon-reading at Cerimon House, a fantastic small theater and troupe in NE Portland.  The Barker was played by Gretchen Rumbaugh, the man/werewolf is David Buttaro, and the gypsy is Cecily Overman. 

Cerimon House has hired me a few times to photograph their rehearsals and do some portraits; this was one of my favorites, with elaborate masks created by Portland artist Jane Clugston. There's nothing quite like taking portraits of actors who are not only in costume, but in character.  While a business portrait often takes some work to get the subject to emote, an actor often just needs to be told, "you're sad."  And then they're sad.

A few more shots of the townsfolk.  I love this series!

As you can see, the light on camera-left is brighter than the one on camera-right.  The right light is directly to the side of the actor, while the camera-left light is closer to my camera.  This allowed a shadow to be cast on the one of the actor's eyes, but the right light gives highlights to separate her from the background.  The sticks were already on the porch in a pot, and I thought, "cool, maybe that will look neat in the background!"

One of my favorites, but this one was a misfire.  Note that the camera-right light (on an optical slave) did not fire, probably due to me shooting too quickly, and it not recharging in time.  Compare the dark side of this actor with the actor in the previous image.  All dark, no highlights.  So, this image is lit with a single shoot-through umbrella, which darkened the background and made it even more eerie, as a nighttime shot should be in a town haunted by werewolves and gypsies.  I did adjust shutter speed slightly to record the candle flame.

The Sheriff. Cool masks, hm?  Lights were lowered a bit to match the level of his hat brim, so I could get light both onto his eyes and onto the top of the hat. 

Our hero/villain, the werewolf, cursed by a jealous gypsy.  A dapper man, a frightful beast, full of seriousness and nervousness.  That's not to say he was an innocent saint.  As with the first village person image, note the faint bit of light on his ear, just enough to keep a little separation from the dark background.  In post-processing, I did add a vignette to all the images, to keep in line with the over-the-top rough-and-tumble times in which the play was set.

The gypsy lives in a tree, and the town drunk has seen her.  He tries to convince the townsfolk that she's out there, but none believe him.  She is standing on a tree here, next to the porch.  I adjusted lights to that none would be shed on her feet, by feathering the camera-left light up towards her face.  Another light on the right is high up, angled down to catch the tops of their heads.  He is on his knees to make it look as if she is even higher up, but of course we had to keep them close for image integrity.  It's like a fable, an image like this, trying to convey a scene of a story by exaggerating some aspect of the tale.

Jesse and His Typewriters: Berkeley, California

This is Jesse. He has worked for over twenty years at Berkeley Typewriter on University Avenue, though has been a typewriter technician for twice that. His brother, Joe, owns the shop. I was looking for props for a nearby photo shoot one day last year, and simply wandered in.

An unplanned photo; a portrait photographer needs to always be ready to create a good image, despite zero planning, and without the expensive, complex setups needed for studio or commercial shots.  After spending a half hour with Jesse, exploring the shop, I asked for his portrait, and to choose a couple of typewriters important to him.  I did not choose pretty red ones that I thought looked nice; he knows what's important in his own life.  Two speedlights were used.  One was set on the counter, camera right, facing the ceiling and tilted to feather some light on his face.  It had no modifications on it.  The other was held by me and aimed at the wall behind me, to create some bounce that would fill the room.  Too much highlight on the right typewriter?  Yup.  Shadows visible behind the typewriters in the background?  Sure.  But to make this shot perfect would not only take too long, but would ruin the moment of spontaneity.  Use what you can in the time that you have.  Shot with a Nikon D3, at around 25mm.  In post-processing, I muted the colors and split-toned to create a bit of a sepia tint without going overboard.  Shooting time, from proposal to packing up: 4 minutes.  Processing: 30 minutes.

 This was an example of excellent cultural and visual serendipity.  I was photographing a big event nearby, The Nonprofit Technology Conference, where I was planning to build a photo booth for attendee portraits.  My concept for a creative backdrop was this: these people are inundated daily with the very latest in technology...what if I photographed them with "obsolete tech", such as Nintendo machines, old IBM printers, Laserdiscs, and, yes, maybe a typewriter or two.

I had a very small budget, so "cheap to free" was my range for props.  When I stumbled into Berkeley Typewriter, I quickly learned that the word "obsolete" should never be uttered in a shop like that.  "We have no parts to spare," I was told.  After all, in a world dealing with machines that are no longer manufactured, every single key, ribbon, and body needs to be saved in case it is needed.

However, showing an interest in the process and story of the business, Jesse invited me on a tour of the place.  From the showroom out front, full of gorgeous machines from the 20's through 60's, to the back rooms, he told me of the resurgence of interest in typewriters.  They're hot.  People buy them for their offices as props, for their kids as gifts, for their weddings as creative guestbook-writers.  They are rented for Hollywood films (need an authentic typewriter for a 1940's office scene?  Here's your place!).

In the back, there are tool chests and drawers everywhere full of parts.  Keys are organized by style, brand, and font (remember when you were stuck with just one font?), and he told me about his favorite styles, and about the cultural upswings in the business.  

"You can take photos of any of these," he said, thinking that my primary interest was in the equipment.  

"Actually," I said, "I'd love to take a quick portrait of you."

"Me?  No, you want the typewriters," he said, with a combination of pride in the restored machines and shyness.

What we did was wrangle up two typewriters from behind him...ones with a story, some of the oldest ones in the shop that he has been restoring.  Both are from the same era (late 1800's), the very first generations of typewriters.  If I recall the story, both were made in the same city, but the one on the left became a model of standard design, and the one on the right lost ground in the market quickly.  One reason, said Jesse, was the names of the companies.  The late 1800's and early 1900's were times of great patriotism, and people were supporting American companies.  Unfortunately for the typewriter on the right, the designer chose to name the company after himself.  While both manufactured in America, one company used its decidedly common name (Smith, on the left), and the other used its own: Blickensderfer.

I will be in Berkeley next week, nearly a year after taking this photo, and will drop in to give him a copy.

Nick and His Instruments: Anchorage, Alaska

This is Nick.  While on assignment in Anchorage recently, I stayed with an old friend of mine in town.  One night, during my visit, she took me out to dinner at a pizza joint in Anchorage; her friend was there, she said, participating in a ukelele jam.  Pizza and ukeleles?  Yes please!

She introduced me to Nick "The Dream" Weaver, a co-worker of hers.  He was a tall man with a big presence and gentle smile; he was holding a steel resonator ukelele and sitting amongst a dozen and a half other tiny-instrument players. 

In my head I thought, "I want to photograph these people." I had my camera with me.  Why didn't I pull it out and ask?  I don't know.  A resolution for the new year is this: when I see a person that I want to photograph...ask them!

This was the first portrait that I took with my new Pentax K-01, a camera purchased to be a backup to my more professional equipment.  I used just two flashes for the image; at ISO 100, 1/160th of a second, and f/5.0, I was able to remove all ambient light and maintain a satisfying depth of field to keep most instruments in focus.  I arranged some of the instruments behind Nick to maintain interest, and experimented with chair position while he happily entertained us with songs.  The biggest challenge: controlling shadows from all of the guitars to make the lighting look relatively natural.  One speedlight was propped up on a chair camera right, aimed at the white, angled ceiling.  This cast a general diffuse light over the whole scene from above.  Another flash was held by my friend, camera left, and aimed straight at Nick's face. It had to be angled carefully to avoid a shadow cast by Nick on the wall.  Finally, I had to be careful to watch sharp reflections in the shiny instruments (the ukelele, bottom right, is a little hot for my taste) and angled the camera upward to avoid the pea-soup-green carpet in the photo (nothing says "rock star!" like shaggy carpet).

Luckily, I saw Nick again a couple of nights later, and he invited my friend and I over to his house, where he had (proudly) gotten most of his guitars hung up on the wall.  "Sure," I said. "Can I take your portrait with them?"

When we showed up, it was a billion degrees below zero outside (Alaska in December...there are reasons that tourism plummets!), but warm in his house, a space he was still moving into.  There was very little there...a couple of changes of clothes, some cookware, a table, a few chairs...and piles of beautiful instruments.

While arranging the room for the portrait, Nick played endlessly entertaining songs; people like him remind me how many wonderful musicians there are in this world who I will never hear.  Every time I'm at a campfire, wedding, potluck, street corner, and hear a talented person pushing music out through their voice or instrument, I'm simultaneously thrilled at the experience and saddened that relatively few people will ever give them credit for their art.

Luckily, it's the age of the Internet, and people have the option of playing the street corner of the web.  Nick is on ReverbNation and YouTube. 

This was a photo done for fun, and I'll be sending him a copy.  Most people are quickly willing to sit for a portrait, especially when in the context of their own passions and things they identify with.  Ask to take portraits!  Often you're offering a gift to the subject, not the other way around.  Remember that.

Alanna and her Hoop: Bali, Indonesia

This is Alanna.  We met in Ubud, a city on the island of Bali in Indonesia.  I spent a few months living just outside of Ubud in 2009, where I spent most of my time doing things related to photography, agriculture, potlucks, and acro-yoga (not too very different from my life right now).

We had a photo shoot in the tiered outdoor amphitheater behind the Yoga Barn in Ubud.  As you can see, the immaculate grass blends wonderfully with the wooden inset steps, and I had been looking for somebody to shoot in that environment.  We were in a shaded area, and I used only natural light for these images; I was not traveling with any flashes or studio lights at that time.  She needed nearly no instruction besides where to stand, and it was as simple as saying, "Okay...go!"  She hooped, I shot.  Shot with a Nikon D40 (a relatively cheap DSLR, bought in Indonesia) at F-2.8 to blur the background.  I found that shooting at 1/500th of a second blurred the hoop just enough to show motion, but froze it enough to give some great framing effects.

 Alanna and her partner, Atom, had moved to the island around the same time as myself with the intention of focusing on their professional development while living in a gorgeous place.  They were doing their best to pull out of congested places like Los Angeles, while maintaining an income from afar.  This is not an uncommon endeavor.  You'll meet folks looking for that all over the world, expatriates crossing borders to find less a travel experience and more a new home.  I met many of them in Bali.

Alanna and I became fast friends, sharing, among other things, a love of the camera.  At some point in our friendship, she began teaching a hooping class at a local hub, called The Yoga Barn.  As you could probably surmise, The Yoga Barn, set near downtown Ubud and surrounded by rice paddies, was a popular spot for yoga practitioners.  Her hoop classes were popular at the time that I experienced them, and I very much wanted a portrait of Alanna with one of her many arts.

These shots are pretty much out-of-camera, with only some color adjustments on the first image.  As you can see, pumping the vibrance (in the first shot) and slightly tweaking the saturation of the greens makes a huge difference when compared to this out-of-camera version.

It's been a few years now, and we've kept in touch.  She and Atom left Bali around the same time that I did.  Personal and professional issues limited them in ways that were unexpected (or in ways that they had hoped to escape), and they currently reside in the Los Angeles area.  While I visit California for work and play fairly frequently, I almost never get as far south as LA.

But a few months ago, when I scheduled a flight to North Carolina for work, I saw one of my flight options routed through southern California.  With the option of a long layover, I booked a flight with a 5-hour pause in LA, hoping that Alanna was free.  She picked me up an shuttled me far down the freeway, where we found time to have lunch, catch up on life, and then shoot back to get me on a plane.

She now produces remarkable branding and marketing work in LA with her company, Co-Creative Media,  and photography-that-makes-me-wish-I-were-a-model-just-so-she-would-photograph-me at 2nd Chakra Studio.

And it's not a Hula Hoop.  Just a hoop!

Paul on the Ridge: Rifle, Colorado

This is Paul.  The former president of the Colorado Cattlemen's Association, I met him in 2009 in the town of Rifle.  He was being interviewed by myself and Kacy Spooner for the "Stewards: Stories and Perspectives on American Agriculture" project.  Offhand, I do not recall who it was that gave us Paul's number, but when we called around to the regional agricultural organizations, somebody said, "You want history about farmin' and ranchin'?  I got a guy for you..."

This portrait took about 8 minutes and two small handheld speedlights.  Working on a budget, the lights were a LumoPro 160 and a cheap 30-year-old Vivitar, bought at a thrifty camera store.  Expressing that I wanted a good photo, Paul drove us up to this point.  He is talking to Kacy (he just liked to stand this way, and needed little direction).  I used manual settings on a Nikon D300 to get a good exposure for the sky (the sun is directly above us, as seen by the shadow on his chest), and made sure his hat totally shaded his face from the sun.  With radio slaves, I hand-held a flash aimed at his face, while Kacy stood to camera left and aimed a vertical beam at his body.  The photo took very minimal retouching later, mostly just to bring some detail out in the clouds.

We met Paul at a local gas station, where we parked our car and hopped up into his pickup truck.  He took us to his favorite restaurant, which happened to be located on a golf course on the edge of town; sitting on the veranda, the server brought him his usual and we made observations of the incredible geologic formations ringing the golfing green.

We spoke in deep detail about farming and ranching issues...the finer points of which will someday be transcribed on the Stewards blog...as well as about other local problems, such as the fracking going on in the local shale deposits.  But the story that stuck with me the most was the one about his pack horse, lost decades earlier on the ridge that you can see here in the distance.

When Paul (pictured here in his 70's) was a teenager, on one of his earlier herd-tending treks in which he had heavy responsibility, he was tasked with directing a number of cattle up a winding trail on a shale-based slope.  Back then and, to a lesser extent, sill today, cattlemen set their herds loose on public lands for the grazing season, sometimes with a worker to live out there and check in on them..  Months later, the rancher and team would return for the roundup, tracking the cattle by brands.

On this particular journey, pushing those cows upward, one of Paul's pack horses hit a loose spot of shale.  Even a horse, known for quick recovery, is not immune to gravity, and Paul saw/heard the animal fall to its death.  He then dealt with the grisly need to get himself down the hill again and recover his belongings and goods from the horse, as well as deal with the fact of the body and his emotional attachment.  A classic cowboy, respect and appreciation for his animals ran deeply through our conversation and through the story that he has been telling for fifty-odd years.

Photography on a budget: you can do it!  The two flashes used here cost just around $140 (new) and about $25 (used), respectively.  I was using Cactus Radio Triggers and a Nikon D300, with (believe it or not) a kit lens.  It's all about understanding light.  And about figuring out your subject as fast as possible.  From exiting the truck at this previously-unseen location to calibrating my settings and getting these shots, only around 8 minutes passed, leaving the rest of the day for conversation and story.

Brent and his Dreadlocks: Portland, Oregon

This is Brent.  We met in Bend, Oregon sometime in 2005 or 2006, when we were both attending Central Oregon Community College.  I was living in my van on campus.  Between classes one day, while I was killing time in my vehicle, possibly playing the banjo, he and another friend poked their heads in and introduced themselves.

This was just a couple of months ago, in late 2012.  After 7 years, Brent was considering cutting off his dreadlocks, and asked me to take a series of photos highlighting his hair.  He looks much tougher here than he really is.  

This shot was taken with a digital Pentax K-5 using three speedlights; two are at equal distance, camera right and left, with shoot-through umbrellas, at about a 30-degree angle.  The third light is above him, bare, and on a low setting to highlight and outline the blond dreads.

We became fast friends; less than a year later, he, I, and a few other friends rented a house together, named it The Goodness Collective, and began an epic phase of potluck-hosting, musical jams, and general community-on-a-budget living.

When we met, his dreadlocks were relatively short.  We've shared many experiences together, including a week at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada in 2007.  Look at those short dreads.  This is from Burning Man in 2007, five years before the first photo.  He still has this hat. 

This image was shot with an old Pentax K1000 film camera, on ISO 200 film.  The negatives were scanned in and digitized at a very high resolution.  As you can see, this image hasn't been touched up and still contains dust specks from the festival.  Scanning negatives in like this allows me to zoom in several hundred percent and see film grain long before I see pixels.

 Brent now lives in Portland, Oregon, not too far from me.  He fishes commercially for salmon in Alaska during his summers, and studies political science the rest of the time.  While he is contemplating the next step in his life, I sincerely hope that we will remain close at heart.  He was married this year, and I had the serious honor, after all these years of friendship, of documenting his wedding.

Also taken with a Pentax K-5 at about 21mm; I chose to render many of Brent's wedding photos in black and white, partially because of our history.  He has been a subject many times as I've developed my portraiture skills, which were born of black and white film photography.

When introducing yourself to a stranger, as he did to me years ago, you never know how long and serious the resulting relationship will be.  Take that risk, and say hello.