Trent Parke captured “Minutes to Midnight” during a two-year journey across Australia at the end of which his son was born. It is both a document of a nation mourning the loss of a perceived innocence and a man’s vision and evolution.
Admittedly, I’m a nervous, nay-saying photographer when it comes to envisioning potential problems, and my assignment to shoot stills & video of the WSU crew on the Little Arkansas river had the potential for failure written all over it.
First off, there’s not much light at 7:00 AM, and the crew team packs up by 7:45 to make their first classes at WSU. If I want to shoot them from a bridge or the river bank I need to be in position as they approach because those skinny little boats scoot along at about 30 miles an hour, or so it seems, then they’re gone; there’s usually just one chance.
But crew coach Calvin Cupp offered me the front seat of his motor boat so I scampered down the bank and wobbled precariously into position on the bow. It was perfect.
Because I drive to work along the Little Ark river, I have photographed the crew teams over the years during their morning practices. It always struck me as a graceful sport, and seemed even more so watching them at water level, perfectly synchronized, to see the oars skim across the water’s surface, then dig into the river in perfect unison.
Petra Vasquez rushes her partially-made pinatas inside as an afternoon thunderstorm approaches near 21st and Waco in Wichita. (Methinks there may be an interesting story here.)
Forget any mental images you may have of the swashbuckling fashion photographer.
Sean Cunningham experiments with a new lighting technique backstage at a 2005 fashion show in Milan. Photo ©Dave Yoder.
The fairly new New York Times photography blog, Lens, has an excellent post by Kristen Joy Watts titled Behind the Scenes: On and Off the Catwalk, a compilation of images by Dave Yoder from fashion shows over the past several years.
I highly recommend subscribing to the Lens blog’s RSS feed. Here’s what they say:
“Lens is the photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web.”
We’ll post some of our other photography favorites in coming weeks.
When serious weather hits, the Eagle photo staff is Johnny (or Jaime)-on-the-spot. Lord knows, we certainly get our fair share of floods, ice, tornados, hail, blizzards and scorching heat to tell our readers about.
But too often we pass up those routine weather photos like you used to see when we had more pages in the paper, more photographers on the street and less of a reluctance to run pictures without stories attached. In the newsroom vernacular, those pics are called “stand-alone” or “lines only” or “enterprise” with the word “art” tagged onto the end.
Frankly I enjoy spotting, shooting & publishing weather related “wild art.”
So long as I can stay dry.
Does spelling count if you’re really passionate about your cause?
(source)
Contrary to what most many Gringos may think, Mexico’s Independence Day is celebrated as 16 de Septembre (comparable to the US holiday of July 4), not Cinco de Mayo.
Today I met Manuel Lopez, a charro from the state of Jalisco, Mexico, living and working in Wichita today. He was joining a small, local parade on 21st street to celebrate with other Mexicans their country’s independence from Spain.
It would be hard to celebrate my home country’s independence while living in another country. I know many expats living and working in other countries who have said holidays like Independence Day and Thanksgiving are lonely times.
So, feliz dia de independencia de Mexico, amigos….
Eagle photographers get our daily assignments from other departments in our newsroom, but we are also encouraged to develop our own self-assignments: those photo stories we think could be of interest to our readers and also be interesting to photograph.
Circo Osorio was a self-assignment.
A nice thing about self-assignments, particularly of the feature variety, is that we can approach them any way we like. We can allow the story to unfold and respond accordingly. We can make every effort to create something of value, or we have the freedom to fail. Color or black and white? Stills, video or a combination of the two? All options are on the table.
Due to unfortunate timing, there wasn’t much chance of this particular story making the newspaper because of tight space, a very tight deadline, and I was photographing the final performance before the circus left town.
Although it was the last of a four-day show, I still thought it would make interesting photographs plus allow me to polish my Espanol.
A big part of our work for the Wichita Eagle is to give our readers information about the goings-on in Wichita that they may not know about. We have the honor of showing our readers things they may have missed or may have not noticed.
Circo Osorio gave Wichita residents a taste of one of the last traveling big tops with Latino performers and acrobats.
Special thanks to Kevin MacLeod for his music, Netherworld Shanty.
A poster in a grocery store lead me to El Coloso de las Americas Circo Osorio’s final performance Monday. I wish I had spent the weekend with them.
Here are a few teasers…. Expect more here and a video on kansas.com within a few days.
Master of ceremonies Roberto Osorio waits backstage Monday, Sep. 14, for a clown act to end before announcing the motorcycle daredevil “Globe of Death” act during El Coloso de las Americas Circo Osorio’s final performance in Wichita.
Osorio is the fourth generation of circus performers with roots deep in Mexico. Currently based in Las Vegas, Nevada, the troop of fifteen performers are on the road from March through October. They arrived in Wichita from Ponca City, Oklahoma and head to Garden City and Dodge City afterwards.
Vicky Alegria paints Yisea Rosas’s face while Yisea’s sister Liliana watches.
Popcorn.
I was only introduced to French photographer Willy Ronis just this year by my emergency backup daughter Marijana Rayl, who is destined to be a top curator for a prestigious international art museum with a French, or at least foreign, sounding name.
Mari gave me a book of his photographs and I was enthralled.
Ronis died Saturday after 99 years years of productivity as a draftsman, musician and photographer.
“Ronis, along with friend Robert Doisneau and photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, were among France’s great photographers who emerged after World War II. The three along with two other photographers [Izis and Brassai] were honored as early as 1953 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York,” reads an AP article posted Sunday.
I liked this:
“I never took a mean photo,” Ronis said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2005. ”I never wanted to make people look ridiculous. I always had a lot of respect for the people I photographed.”
