Gavit High School varsity girls basketball team member Hattie Andrews poses during practice at the school in Hammond, Indiana. The 6’3″ sophomore has been playing basketball since the third grade.
As a lighting designer, one of the best things about location film and photography work is the always-challenging task of transforming an everyday space into an attractive environment for the lens. More often than not, I enter new locations flying blind, having never visited the space before. I never know exactly what I’m getting into, which often causes a mixture of excitement and anxiety. Have I brought enough equipment to light the space, and more importantly, the subjects within? For video shoots, is there enough power? Will I be fighting bright light from windows during a daytime shoot? Can I capitalize on any existing fixtures within the building to create something special in an otherwise bland location?
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(From left) INDOT engineer Jim Kaur, Matt Henke with Reith Riley Construction, and Mike Borzych with Borzych Construction, survey a section of the Cline Avenue bridge after it was demolished with explosives in East Chicago, Ind., early Saturday, February 12, 2011. The bridge was closed permanently in late 2009 after major corrosion was found on support cables within the bridge’s structure.
Over my years spent behind cameras, I’ve learned that there’s a few subjects not to be passed up. Photographing the president – or for that matter, a presidential candidate – in your hometown would certainly be one. Significant weather events, such as last week’s Snowpocalypse, would be right up there as well. Or, as was the case this past Saturday, any event where an explosion of any sort is going to predictably occur! Cameras or not, what 20-something year-old guy in their right mind wouldn’t want to watch something light up and collapse into a pile of rubble? After all, that’s just plain cool. Enter Cline Avenue:
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Eight-year-old Tyrese McCray (right) of East Chicago, Ind., works with his step brother and sisters to help Maria Gonzales (background) dig her car out of the snow on the 141st block of Indianapolis Blvd. in East Chicago, Ind., during a winter snow storm, Wednesday, February 2, 2011.
Call me a skeptic, or perhaps a cynic, but I’m usually the one who goes against the grain and doesn’t buy “hype”. I don’t make investments in new gear until I’ve thoroughly researched the product (sometimes for months on end) to make sure it’s right for me. I won’t buy that shiny new car until I’ve taken it for a test drive, including making the salesman uncomfortable by punching the accelerator to see what kind of “get up and go” it has. And, even at age ten, I knew Crystal Pepsi was doomed from the get-go.
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Ice skaters are reflected in a glass ceiling near Robson Square in downtown Vancouver prior to the start of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
As I prepare to enter my 29th year of life on the planet Earth, I’ve become keenly aware of what has become a shocking, yet accepted, ideal of my daily existence: The older I get, the quicker time goes by. 2010 has been a textbook example of this theorem, with the year zipping past me more rapidly than my mental reflexes had time to react to. While lamenting on this accelerated time warp of life to a colleague at a holiday party last weekend (I could have sworn I saw the Grim Reaper smoking a cigarette against a car while looking at his watch outside that place), I was reassured that a year that seemed fleeting was only that way because I’d been busy and completed a lot of work. It wasn’t until I sat down and begin sifting through my photo shoots from 2010 that I realized that I have indeed done quite a bit this year!
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