Chinatown Ballers-The Miracle on Turf

Some of the regular highlights of my New York existence are the amateur soccer games I play in Chinatown. Some fellow kickers and I started to get together quite a long time ago for a midweek pick-up game on a 7 a side pitch at the edge of Barrio Chino. The game proved to be very robust and survived the cold winters, hot summers, stretches of low popularity, stretches of too much popularity, and many personnel changes for over a decade now. Even though soccer has its fair share of whiners, complainers, braggers, spoiled brats, bullies, people teetering dangerously close to sanity, as well as people that are all of the above, we managed to keep the game clean, competitive, friendly and fair.

Out of this pick-up game a weekend league named Groupstage evolved thanks to the efforts of Matt

and Tomas.

Matt and I have been bouncing the idea of a photo shoot around for quite a while, partly to promote his league, partly to promote my business, but also to do something creative with people we like to hang around with. As a matter of fact we’ve been talking about it for so long that it got kind of embarrassing. So this November I finally got my derriere in gear and picked a date for the shoot. Production becomes much easier with a deadline.

I started off with a location scout. The shoot had to be on a weekend or an evening when people would have a bit more time, and I don’t really like working in the evening, since then’s when I do my deep thinking. Field time on weekends is at a premium with tons of leagues competing for space. We decided on a field in Brooklyn that had good turf and was big enough to claim a corner for the shoot even while people were playing. Since the budget was midgety and since I’m still a bit confused about the (not so)new NYC permit process I decided to chance it and shoot permission free.

Since I was going to take action shots, flash sync speed became an issue. I normally shoot with a RZ67 with a 1/400 sync speed. I usually like to get a little blur, since I’m kind of bored with all the full freeze shots out there (if you can’t do something, it’s usually best to pretend that you wouldn’t want to do it anyway), but at that speed (1/400th that is) it’s sometimes hard to get just the right amount of movement. My pal and fellow photographer Juergen Frank was nice enough to loan me his Phase One 645 body and I rented a new Schneider lens with a sync speed of 1/1600. Beside the lens I rented a Profoto 7b with 2 heads (in addition to the 2 packs and 4 heads that I have), and a ton of sandbags. The rentals this time came from Nucleus in Red Hook.

The right amount of blur.

I worked with Chris as my one and only assistant and we set up a grey muslin backdrop that I had stuck in the dryer twice and ironed (!) the night before just to decide that we didn’t really like the grey for this set-up. Emotionally it was hard for me to let go, since I really don’t like ironing, but eventually I agreed with Chris and we put up a black cloth.

The next problem was surprisingly sync speed. Even though the lens can handle 1/1600, we could only get it to work properly at 1/800th. I’m still not sure why. One theory is that the radio slaves wouldn’t work that fast, but if anybody can think of another explanation, let me know. Luckily 1/800th gave me just the bit of blur I was looking for, so whew.

Bad backdrop, bad sync, good assistant.

Between these two issues we were still in a bit of a scramble by the time the first player showed up. Fortunately nothing else went wrong and we could start to concentrate on taking pictures. I set up 2 cameras, the 645 with the 110 mm and a Phase One P45+ at a distance for the action shots and full portraits and the RZ with a 90mm and my own P25 for close-ups. The RZ is a beautiful camera for tight portrait work and it cut down on time for lens changes.

Shooting action with an unfamiliar camera proved also to be not so easy. The shutter release point was way further back than in the RZ and the ball was often already in the fence when I took the shot. There was definitely a larger than usual blooper reel:

For lighting we set up 2 7B packs with 4 heads with regular reflectors from the front and the sides. We had another 7B with 2 heads coming from behind the models from each side and there was also a bit of sunshine from high and right.

The postproduction was minimal except for darkening the backdrop, and dealing with a bit of glare we sometimes got from the backlights, because the players didn’t always end up in the same place, and removing the shadow of a light or two on the floor, and cropping, and sexyfying the color, contrast and saturation a bit.

au naturel

a la vogue

If you’re thinking about joining a league in New York and playing against some of these handsome devils here, you might want to check out Groupstage.

If you want to read a roaming, eclectic, soccer-inspired blog, with league news thrown in for good measure, check out the Groupstage Blog.

If you want to read ( and I mean read) a roaming, eclectic, mildly melancholic, soccer-inspired blog, without league news but in German ( I know you Germans are out there), check out Freitagsspiel.

If you want to see the entire Chinatown Ballers series, click here.

Hope you all have a high scoring 2012.

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Chinatown Ballers

There’s a new gallery on my website with portraits and action shots of some of my NYC soccer colleagues. A more in depth post will follow shortly. In the meantime a big “thumbs up” to Matt Penrose at Groupstage who helped organize the shoot, posted it on his blog, and runs a terrific league, in case you’re looking for a game.

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Over The Bridge

As I have mentioned in an earlier post, the Missus and I recently made a trip to the left coast of Amurrrica so I could finally relax from my mediterranean lifestyle. As usual I decided to bring the shabang (2 7bs, 4 heads, and the Mamiya RZ) on our road trip from San Francisco to LA and back.

The project I had in mind originally was to find and photograph motocross riders in the hilly desert of Southern California. It would have worked out great, if only they were there. Even though I found plenty of tracks, I could not rustle up one single rider in the time we were there. Maybe they needed a vacation, too.

So faced with the depressing possibility of schlepping (and paying extra luggage charges for) all my gear without getting anything noteworthy out of it, I sent an SOS call to my good friends Jerry and Laurel in SF. J & L worked already on several other bay area shoots of mine, one of them detailed in great detail in an earlier post here.

Laurel told me about her friend Isabella, who is a passionate mountain biker, though injured at the moment, who could hook me up with other riders. It was very short notice, unpaid, and the shoot was happening on Monday afternoon. Somewhat close to ideal conditions.

After a location scout in different parts of the city, the tourist in me won, and I decided to shoot on the Marin side of the Golden Gate. Obviously it’s one of the mostest oftenest photographed locations ever, but the beauty of the span is just too damn hard to resist. During the scout, we went to some of the military installations in that area and the one closest to the bridge had some interesting structures that provided for good riding and angles without tourists in the background. I tried out different lenses and liked the slightly abstract (safari) look I got from the 250mm tele.

On Monday we started setting up for a one o’clock shoot. We didn’t know how many models would come, but we knew that they wouldn’t have a lot of time. When three riders finally arrived an hour late, the fog rolled in. Initially I was ready to kick something small and innocent, but the fog turned out to be not really solid. Every so often the veil would lift and the bridge would appear in highly attractive half-visibility. Laurel was standing on a little hill, telling us to get ready when a hole in the mist would blow our way. When we got the timing right it looked like this:

…and when we got the timing wrong it looked like that:

The rider in this picture is Remy, who is not just an all around good guy and very skilled rider, but also the owner of the tip-top Mojo Bicycle Cafe in San Francisco. A very nice combo of bike shop and cafe.

We did a quick group portrait (Ralph, Remy, and Isabella),…

…and moved up the hill for a second location. This is how our first spot looked from above:

The second location was on the other side of the hill and had a little patch of spectacular trees. We placed two lights amongst the trees behind the rider, one head pretty much from the front and left of camera and one head from the sharp right aimed at the rider but skimming the gnarly tree next to her. The rider had to start in the background, get some speed, duck under that big branch, get photographed, and roll down a sharp little hill while avoiding the camera. The two guys went first, but then Isabella’s competitive side kicked in and she went for it, too, freshly surgically repaired knee or not, giving me the best image in this spot (and possibly the day).

It was a short little shoot, but more than justified the schlepp.

If you’re into bikes or coffee or both I highly recommend to check out Mojo if you should find yourself (or lose yourself) in San Francisco (with flowers in your hair).

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Honorable Don’t Mention It

So the good news is that that image above from my Dead Indian Pass series received an honorable mention at the International Photo Awards (the Lucies), but the bad news is that nobody mentioned it to me. I had to find that out all by my poor pitiful self. The same thing happened already last year. My Giddy Up series placed second and I was definitely told about that. I even received an official certificate that I could frame or fold up and keep in my wallet in case I’d ever run into an art director. So last year I was checking out the winners’ gallery and, still basking in my own glory (even though my old coach said placing second only makes you the first loser), moved on to the honorable mentions gallery just to stumble upon The Sultans there.

I didn’t make much of it. I figured it was an honest mistake or maybe they didn’t think I could handle two successes at the same contest without my head swelling up to a grotesque size and exploding and soiling that nicely framed certificate on my wall.

But this year they did it again, not mentioning my honorable mention that is, and now I think they might be doing it on purpose.

I know, it’s not exactly earth shattering news (to be the 7th loser in the 32nd category) and they would have to send out a lot of emails (my picture is about # 1487 from the top) but still, every little bit counts and that’s why we enter contests:  To brag about winning (or being mentioned, honorably at that), to go to an editor or art buyer and proudly proclaim: I’m not just something the cat dragged in, no sir, I’m an award winner, you can trust me with your multi-dollar shoot.

For every photo contest already out there, there are 3 new ones springing up, blunting the effect of all of them.  Generally they charge quite a bit of money and it’s becoming very questionable if entering (and winning in some fashion) any of these is actually worth it, but what’s not questionable to me is this:  If you decide to have honorable mentions in your contest than you should put in the effort to let the mentionees know.  You’re welcome, don’t mention it.

You can check out the winners and honorable mentions here.

 

 

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Dead Indian Pass

During a short and sweet road trip with the missus through Wyoming last year I noticed that there were a lot of bikers out and about and after a while it dawned on me that they were on their way to the big yearly meet-up in Sturgis, South Dakota. Most of them have been on their bikes for days and you could see in their faces the effects of the wind and the sun. It seemed like we could do a nice little portrait series.

The first day we wanted to do the shoot was too rainy and we decided to use the time for a thorough location scout. We drove out of Cody and took the Chief Joseph Byway to the Beartooth Highway, which took us all the way up into Montana. One road was more spectacular than the next. We decided to set up shop the next morning at a place called Dead Indian Pass.
The spot overlooked a beautiful valley where Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce faked out a pursuing US Army on their (painfully close but unsuccessful) run towards the Canadian border.

We set up lights at a pull-out and asked the bikers that stopped there if they wanted to sit for a portrait. I think we got a nice collection of Amurrrican (and a few Canadian) archetypes.

To check out the entire series, click here.

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At the Races

There is a new gallery called “At the Races” on my website.  I spent a day at a messenger track race in Kissena, Queens which has a velodrome (what doesn’t New York have?).  The images were taken last year on the glorious, glorious day when Germany whooped Argentina 4:0 at the World Cup which might explain why it took me so long to post them (I’ve just stopped celebrating).  In any case there will be a longer post about the nuts and bolts of the shoot soon.

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Closing Shots

As I might have mentioned 20 or 30 times before, I had a show with the Upstream series at Intermedia Arts gallery in Minneapolis recently, and as I am working my way out of the post-show laziness I thought it would be nice to share a few snaps of my Minnesota adventure.  The closing of the show coincided with the 5th year anniversary party (and fundraiser) of Upstream Arts, the fab non-profit I produced the images with.

Leaving New York in miserable weather.

As a difficult New York artist I demanded a VIP lounge (aka guest bedroom)…

and VIP transportation (btw that color is salmon and not pink, I’ll have you know).  I also demanded lots of snow, since I developed a habit for the white powder over the winter in NY.

Then I had a look at the show, that was printed, mounted and hung in Minneapolis with me sitting in NYC and hoping for the best:

That’s how it looked.  Apart from a few minor details it turned out great and I was one happy camper.  Then it was time for the big party, which I deemed to be one of my biannual suit wearing occasions.

A suit always helps make me look better nervous.

Final doll-up in the Green Room.

Whew, a few people showed up.

Double whew, quite a few people showed up.

Triple whew, it was packed…

probably because there was beer…

and cake…

and an expressive performance…

and… uh… stuff by the great Upstream Arts’ artists that were on hand.

It was absolutely awesome to see a good number of the models come, like Ben to give me shit positive feedback and constructive criticism….

and to see old friends, who should have visited me in New York a long time ago, but instead always lure me to their snowed-in neck of the woods.

It was a great experience and I want to thank again the people that made it possible with all their help:  The good people at Upstream Arts and Intermedia Gallery, Susie Green, Janet and Joe Green, Sabine Scheckel for help with the retouching,  Jeff Cords and 8th Street Studio for the printing, Joe Besasie for the mounting, Dave Luke for hanging the show, Simone Mueller for designing the postcard, Raoul Duke from Flashlight Rentals for overall goodness and niceness, Mike Garr for general advice and living room basket ball clinics, Stella Kramer for doing an interview with me about this work on her blog, Amber Terranova for showing the series on PDN Photo of the Day, Matt and Lillian Guidry for their hospitality, and most of all Julie Guidry for being the driving force behind this project.

Photo by Corey DeGuia (thanks Corey).

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Upstream

Sometime late 2009 Julie Guidry called me up and asked me if I was interested in applying for a “Getty Grant for Good” to shoot an image library for Upstream Arts.

Upstream Arts is a Minneapolis based non-profit whose mission is to “enhance the lives of adults and youth with disabilities by fostering creative communication and social independence through the power of arts education”. The classes are taught by working artists including painters, sculptors, actors and dancers, who help their young clients explore different ways of expressing themselves. A pretty big deal for the participants, as it turns out.

Well, we didn’t get the grant, but filing the application started a thought process about how to portray people with disabilities. Most of the images we found out there were of sporty triumphs or happy-happy family moments, but almost nothing showed the complex human beings behind the disabilities. There was a need for straight-on portraiture. The more we talked about the project, the more interested I became, and eventually we decided to go ahead with the shoot. Grant money be damned.

So in the summer of 2010 the Misses and I loaded up our late Volvo with a large amount of gear

and headed to the Twin cities on the mighty Mississippi (4s, 4i, 2p, 1m).

On the way we stopped in Cleveland, since we’ve never been there. After we unloaded at the hotel, we went straight to Jacobs Field where we watched the Indians beat the Red Sox in convincing fashion. A very good omen for the trip. In my function as a semi-professional travel adviser, I’d like to recommend:  If you ever find yourself in Cleveland in the summer, try to go to a baseball game there. It’s really what baseball should be like in my opinion. A nice, smallish stadium, relaxed atmosphere, borderline affordable beers and sausages, and no $1500 seat in sight (and I’m saying this as a Yankee fan)

.

We made another stop in Chicago and then it was onwards to Minneapolis with only a few hours lost due to a little automotive health issue.

Once in Minneapolis we started working at the shoot which was going to happen at the Jewish Community Center in St. Paul (which is the Twin in the Twin Cities). We went there for a quick location scout and requested one of their rooms large enough to set up our studio and provide space for models and their caretakers to hang out. The library fit the bill.

Julie Guidry did a great job finding our models and arranging the time table for the shoot.

I needed a few more pieces of equipment like c-stands and sandbags and we borrowed them from Jeff Cords, a local photographer at 8th Street Studio. Jeff beside being a great still life shooter, is a regular supporter of Upstream Arts and an all around good guy.

For the lighting we used Profotos Acutes and 7bs (plugged in).  There was a head with a beauty dish to the right of the camera and a head with a grid on the left.  There were also one head with a grid on each side behind and above the model.

The camera was a Mamiya RZ 67 (which really shines during close up portraiture) with a Phase One P25 back.

The entire shoot happened in one afternoon.  Our first model was Caleb, Julie’s stepson. He was also our toughest customer, since he was a bit under the weather and in a bad mood. He had a hard time sitting still in front of the camera. We took our time, showed him the entire set up from the camera to the lights, and how everything worked. Whenever we did that Caleb gave us between 45 seconds to a minute in front of the camera. The images turned out pretty well though and Caleb wound up on the cover of our Magcloud Magazine and the postcard of our exhibition.

Caleb

After that the other models and their caretakers started showing up and to my relief the other shoots were easier than the first one. Most of the participants were really into the shoot.  Since I was shooting digitally, I was able to immediately show them the images on a monitor, which helped a lot with the collaboration.  The models had a wide range of disabilities and our interactions reflected that.  Quite a bit of the communication between the models and me happened non-verbally and many creative decisions were based on gut feelings.  There was a pretty high energy on the set, but most of the models managed only about ten minutes in front of the camera before they were exhausted.

Every good portrait is a collaboration between the photographer and the model. It takes a bit of courage to really look hard at somebody but it takes quite a bit more courage to show yourself when somebody is staring at you through a lens. Looking now at the finished images I feel fortunate about the openness and sense of generosity with which these young people approached the shoot.

Julie Guidry organized a show of this portrait series at Intermedia Arts Gallery  in Minneapolis and tonight is the closing reception (and Upstream Arts fundraiser).  It’ll be interesting to see the reactions and hear the opinions of the models first hand.

On a last (and own horn tooting) note:  I just found out that four of the images made it into American Photography 27.

Intermedia Arts
2822 Lyndale Ave. South
Minneapolis, MN 55408
612.871.4444

Home

April 5th through April 18th, 2011
Monday-Friday 10AM to 6PM, Saturdays 12PM to 5PM

Closing Reception and Upstream Arts Benefit:
Monday, April 18th, 6:30-8:30 PM

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Giddy Up-Antelope Island

Antelope Island is, as I mentioned before, one of my all time favorite places. It sits in the Great Salt Lake and looks pretty Lord-of-the-Ringish. It has a healthy fauna with plenty of antelopes and buffalo roaming around. The way to get there is by a long very straight road that traverses the lake.

On the second day of our Giddy Up shoot we met again at my hotel downtown Salt Lake City. Again we had three riders, Tate and Cameron from the day before and as a new addition David Orion Thompson. We also had hired Hillary, a female model from Craigslist, her though for only half a day.

Once we got to the island, we ran into some problems. We had called a few days earlier about a permit and were told to just get it on the day of the shoot, that it would be a matter of minutes. I confirmed this again the day before, but of course once we got there nobody knew nothin’ and we had to make a slow march through state park bureaucracy. It would have been pretty frustrating except for the fact that the van with all the BMX’ers had broken down along the way and we wouldn’t have had anybody to photograph anyway. In the time it took us to get the permit, the boys somehow managed to get the broken heap off the road and to organize a new vehicle. When we all finally made it to the location we decided to play it like rock stars. Who really starts working before 11 o’clock anyway? In any case it helped my nerves considerably that the shoot the day before had worked out so well.

For the first set-up we picked a little dirt road at the south side of the island and started with Hillary since we would only have her for one more hour thanks to our earlier adventures. She and David definitely looked like they could be a couple and we tried to create a shoot that was half hipster, half Norman Rockwell.

After that we went to a patch of reeds near the lake. I always loved playing in these things as a child since this was probably the closest a German kid would come to a Tarzanesque environment.

After the girl left we went back to the dirt road with the riders. I had told them before the shoot that I wanted to incorporate Western iconography into the images of them riding. Cam didn’t need much prodding, he had an extensive collection of old time country music on his i-pod and a fine variety of cowboy shirts, but he went far beyond the call of duty by bringing a bona-fide bullwhip to the shoot.
He was very good at making the bike ride by itself even on a bumpy dirt road, and so here he gave it a push towards the camera, grabbed the whip and and gave it a good smack at precisely the right moment. Yeeh-haw!

After the dirt road shoots we broke for lunch at a few nearby picnic tables and noticed a small plane circling low and slow overhead as if looking for something.

After lunch we moved to the next location where David performed a bit of rodeo inspired riding. As with the other set-ups, we shot everything on a Mamiya RZ with a P25 Phase One back and lit the scenes with Profotos 7b’s. We usually arranged the heads with regular reflectors in as much of a circle as we could get away with.

For the last set-up of the day we moved to the access road to the island. Usually a sleepy stretch of blacktop were you can see oncoming traffic for miles. On that day it was far from sleepy though. We had set up our lights and had just started shooting when we saw police lights flashing in the distance. After a few minutes a huge Suburban police truck came flying by at 90 miles an hour, a few minutes later another police car with lights and sirens shot by followed by fire trucks, ambulances and more police cars. We kept shooting through the whole parade because even at their break neck speed, we had minutes to get out of the way. Cameron was manning the radio and finally found out that a private plane with a lone pilot went down on a remote part of the island earlier in the day. The plane we saw at lunch must have been looking for the missing aircraft.

Despite a bit of nervous energy on the set from all the racing emergency vehicles the shoot turned out very nicely. We had Cam (who also brought some nice suits beside the bullwhip) jump “over” the rental car. The image is a simple composite to get both the bike and the car in focus, I didn’t change the height of the bike at all. Cameron really could jump.

These two images are the only ones we really used photoshop on (besides color, contrast, blah, blah, blah) to showcase a bit of the different riding styles. Where Cam could really get high (aw, c’mon, you know what I mean) Tate could really go low. His ability to dip the bike and pop it back up was a thing of beauty. We had to hurry up with these images because at the end of the day the light was changing fast and we needed consistency for the composites.

After that we turned the set-up around to get a shot of the three of them with a nice sunset.

The images we produced during the two shoot days were pretty well received. Fab Julie Grahame picked the Bonneville pics for a feature on aCurator.com, David’s bucking bike made it on the American Photography contest website (and, as I just realized, disappeared again thanks to their low notch web maintenance), and the series placed second at the Internation Photography Awards (the Lucies) in the self-promo category, also clearly visible to an archaeologist on their engaging winner’s gallery.

Unfortunately at the same time the whole market for stock photography turned to and I decided to hold back with submitting the images until they have a better chance to make money. Hopefully the market for stock images as well as photography in general will rebound, but I do have a queasy feeling that the last pic of the day might have been a premonition.

Giddy Up-Bonneville
Giddy up-Intro

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Giddy Up-Bonneville

The Bonneville salt flats near the Utah/Nevada border are so eerily beautiful and spectacular that I’ve wanted to shoot there for years.  Me and 10 million other shutterbugs.

The salt flats are one of the most used locations in the US.  Everything gets shot on the white flat surface from cars to cellphones to pantyhose.  It makes sense of course, you can add immediate natural grandeur to even the boringest of products and it’s practically not possible to make anything look bad out there no matter how large the lack of talent might be in the creative team. And that’s just the bad stuff. There is also a lot of really good photography going on in that spot. Kind of intimidating, really.

So, for quite a while I was mulling over what project I could do here and what my approach would be. I checked out Bonneville the Winter before (during another ski trip) and it had an inch or two of water on it. It looked great and different from most of the pictures I’d seen before. I kept that in mind and when the possibility of shooting BMX riders came up I started wondering what they could do with this place.

I went for a location scout and found (to my relief) that the water was back. The salt underneath was surprisingly firm. I asked Jordan Utley, our local fixer and BMX videographer extraordinaire, if his friends would be willing to ride their bikes in the shallow saltwater and he assured me that they would be up for anything.  Nice.

On the first day of our Giddy Up project Jordan brought along his friends Matt Beringer, Cameron Wood, and Tate Roskelley.  Fine riders, one and all.  We also booked a female model from Craigslist to go lifestyle-y in case the bike pics fell flat.  Her day would turn out to be pretty uneventful.

We met up at our hotel in SLC and started the two hour drive West. The location was incredibly easy. There is a rest stop on Interstate 80 that’s architecturally cool and just steps from where the water started. We parked, walked 15 yards, and set up the lights. By the time we were ready the guys were already in the lake hopping around like frogs on payday.

For the next image we moved to the picnic area (another 15 steps) and set up the Profoto 7b’s in a 3/4 circle.  We had to rehearse this shoot a bit since the timing was crucial to everybody’s health.  First Cameron made a run and hopped on the table with his front wheel up (that’s called a “manual” or “Manuel” if you’re from Mexico), then Matt rode in and jumped on the bench with another Manuel and then Tate came screeching around the corner with his bike dipped low.  Everything had to happen right on time and at a fairly high speed.  It was amazing how quickly the three guys figured it out and how consistently they could repeat it.

After that shot we moved along to use the striking architecture of the rest stop.  The first two pictures I shot with a 250 mm lens on the Mamya RZ from across the parking lot.  I liked the look but every communication with the riders involved a 30 yard sprint, then jog, then walk to and fro.

The image with the 3 of them was basically them improvising on their marks.  It was amazing how high Cam could pop his bike of the ground.

Here’s a little aside:  a while ago a German BMX’er crashed pretty badly during a shoot of mine, breaking his hand and a bunch of bike parts in the process.  When I bought him replacements parts he requested pieces from S & M Bikes that had names like “Beringer fork” or the “Beringer stem”.  So it was funny to meet the “Beringer” himself on this shoot.

The last set up of the shoot was at the end of a little road that led out into the middle of the flats.  While we shot some portraits by the edge of the water the unoccupied talent rode way out into the middle of the lake.  In the fading evening light it had all the creamy dreamy quality that I had hoped for from Bonneville.

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