A little while back, I spent a couple hours on two separate weekends visiting Occupy Wall St. I went for two reasons: to see what it was really all about/gain a bit of a different perspective, and to take some pictures. Obviously everyone’s entitled to their own opinion on the movement, but I will say that I was thoroughly amazed to witness such a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm coming from participants from literally all walks of life. Everyone from students to full-time activists to authors to lawyers were present, all with a message.
Aside from having conversations with a bunch of the participants, I brought a camera along, in hopes of capturing some of what I saw…
This was the weekend just before the one-month anniversary of Occupy. The living situation was pretty insane, with tarps, cardboard, and sleeping bags just about everywhere you stepped. The next weekend, a stronger “sanitation department” (literally) was started, and there was a noticeable difference from one weekend to the next.
The canned goods rack in the kitchen- which was full of donated food, from restaurants and individuals all over the city.
This is Bobby Steele, a former employee (of what, I’m not exactly sure) on Wall St.
I’m very happy to say that all of the above was shot on film (yep). If there’s one thing I’ve always truly missed since going digital, it’s most certainly black & white film, and film grain. With a little bit of brainwashing from co-worker, Mike Cali (http://www.michaelcaliblog.com/), I decided to take a leap backwards, and pick up a film camera i’ve always wanted. Did my research, and scored a Leica M6 w/a 35mm f2.0 Summicron lens…everything here was shot on that with Ilford HP5, pushed to 800.
Man is it tough going from nine frames a second to one every few seconds (at best)…but that’s the point. I felt like I wanted a new challenge- and I most certainly got it. Really happy to be messing around with it, and hope to have a bunch more posted soon.
Back in September, Joe got contacted by Runner’s World to shoot a portrait, but was unfortunately out of the country. Our studio manager, Lynn, was kind enough to talk me up to the photo editor, and in turn, got me the gig. They initially made contact with us on a Thursday afternoon, and the shoot was to happen on Saturday…whew. Having not shot for them before, I knew I had to jump on the opportunity- and it ended up being a pretty cool gig.
The assignment was to take a portrait of a 69-year-old runner by the name of Julia Chase, who broke the gender barrier of the running world back in 1961 at the Manchester Road Race in CT. Now, 50 years later, she made a full circle, and ran that very same race once again.
Though the above photo is what’s actually in this month’s Runner’s World, I much prefer this one…
This photo represents a great deal of history…she’s wearing the original dress (yes, dress) that she ran the Manchester Road Race in, way back in 1961. In one hand is the medal presented to her to mark her achievements in the running world, and in the other, the shoes she wore soon after that race when she competed in the U.S. Olympic Trials.
We had to move quite fast to accomplish several setups, so I shot the above with small flash. We used a Lastolite Tri-flash adapter, into a Westcott 6′Parabolic Umbrella. The gold trigrip was used to open up the right side of her face just a bit. I was lucky to have Lynda Peckham assisting on the shoot, as she not only worked her ass off all day lugging gear, but was up with me at something like 3:45AM to head up to Northeastern CT. I also lucked out in having Julia’s son there with us for the day, as he was a pretty great grip, and even helped by pre-scouting some locations (kinda wish that was the case on every shoot).
Also shot a few setups of tracking shots, while we still had nice light.
Our final setup of the day was shot on a trail she used to train on (and still occasionally does). She tends to like to run barefoot when the surface allows for it, even at the age of 69.
Our setup for this was a large Elinchrom Octa, with a Ranger head, as well as another head used as a floor bounce, into a large silver trigrip. Though the first setup worked well, even with early morning light, the three small flashes were struggling to keep up. Later in the morning, when we had even more sunlight, and needed to saturate the background, using larger flash was a sure bet.
A huge thanks to Julia for being one of the easiest portrait subjects one could ever ask for. She was quite the trooper, and really helped us to achieve some pretty cool photos.