Two Places at Once
Have you ever been in two places at once and been able to prove it? Oh sure I’ve been places physically and mentally off in another world. I’m not sure that was good for either of us. Or is it either of me? Either way I was probably just mentally off.
Tuesday during Central Catholic’s district soccer game in York I tempted the natural laws by trying to be in two places at once. For the second time in two weeks I set up a remote camera to try and capture an image without being behind the camera. This time, I’m glad to say, worked out much better than the last.
I started off with a wide angle lens attched to a camera I set up on a stand behind the net where the Crusaders would be shooting. To trigger the camera I had a remote trigger attached to a radio recevier that picked up a signal from the transmitter I held in my hand. Whenever the action got good around the net, I’d hit the button and hope I wasn’t too far away. Meanwhile I could still shoot with my other camera that I had in hand. The results weren’t too good after the first half. The wide angle lens made the players too small in the frame and most of the time I was a touch too far away for the radio signal to get picked up by the receiver. I’m pretty sure the latter problem was because the receiver was close to the ground.
So I switched things up. I replaced the lens with a longer lens, moved the camera back and raised it up about a foot off the ground. Back to work I went, but this time I was shooting Central Catholic’s Zach Karn defend his goal. There weren’t many chances for good frames, but I did get one I liked.
The best parts are the lessons learned which I’ll apply next time I try to be in two places at once.
Mike George—MMA Fighter
I had the pleasure of meeting Mike George this week. He’s a native of Grand Island, now living in Hastings, who has become a professional MMA fighter. We shot this portrait after he worked out at the Hard Knock’s Gym. This weekend he’s on the Tri-State Cagefighting card at the Heartland Events Center. Here you can read about Mike and see a couple of other images.
Track Meet
I love shooting track. No more hot and smelly gymnasiums from basketball. I get to be outside in the sun. Soaking up Vitamin D. Feeling the cool breeze blow around me, and sneezing at the pollen. There is usually plenty of sun which means I can shoot with lots of depth of field. It’s great! But there is always a downside. Lately whenever I’ve had to cover a track meet, I have also had to cover something afterwards. This forces me to focus on the early events. These are the field events from the long jump, triple jump, and high jump to the shot put the discus and pole vault. Add to that the longer races where runners don’t need to compete for the finals and it sounds like an easy day. Up until your third or fourth meet of the year. I’ve been finding myself shooting the same events like the long jump. We’ve got talented kids competing in it, but one shot of sand flying is very similar to another. Last Saturday I was finishing up at the Aurora Invitational and wandered over to the boys high jump competition. They were no where close to done, but I needed to get a shot or two. Needing a different way to shoot it from my previous meets I noticed the red mat and blue sky complemented each other. Toss in Aurora’s Sam Shaw in his red uniform and we’ve got something interesting. Clean background, nice shape to Sam’s jump, simple composition and simple color all adds up to a nice way to end the meet and show the same event in a new way.
Crane Season
Every year the sandhill cranes arrive on their annual migration from the southern U.S. and Mexico to the northern tiers of Canada and Alaska. And every year I trudge out to find out if I’m any sort of wildlife photographer. Turns out I’m not.
It’s not that I can’t get a good shot of cranes. But the most interesting pictures are when they’re on the roost in the middle of the Platte River. I’ve only ever awoken at 4 a.m. to crawl into a blind once. I took some decent photographs, but nothing that really stands out as something interesting and different. So most years I drive around trying to photograph them while the feed in the area fields, mostly amidst the corn stalk stubble, where they forrage for leftover corn from the previous year’s harvest. And I get acceptable shots.
For this one picture I was able to drive up on the shoulder of the road to where the cranes were pretty close, seeing as I was carrying a 400mm lens with a doubler. The lines of the field created nice backdrop and the crane in the middle kept looking up while walking away from me with his buddies. Not too bad, but it doesn’t match the work done by Michael Forsberg or my friend Rick Rasmussen.
Maggie Fields
After the basketball tournament I came back to my first assignment: photograph Maggie Fields using an eye tracking system to communicate. The day was pretty open so I was able to spend more than two hours with the precocious youngster during speech, occupational, and physical therapy. She has an infectious personality, great big smile and brigth blue eyes. You can’t visit her without smiling.
Maggie, 4, choked on a bug when she was eight months old, cutting off oxygen to her brain. The result was various therapies to help her re-learn everything. But communication was tough. Last September Maggie started using the DynaVox Vmax with EyeMax system. The system has a camera that tracks her eye movement. When she holds her gaze over an icon it speaks the word for her. As Mark Coddington said in the story: “It’s opened up a whole new world of communication and personality that even her family members had never seen — all through those huge, bright blue eyes.”
