One reason
Last week, I discovered yet another reason I’m a photographer: because I’m not cut out to be a ball player.
I’m starting on a story about the players of the Yakima Bears and the life of a minor-league ball player. During the team’s second practice, the hitting coach was warming up his players and evaluating their hitting skills by having them hit ground balls. When everyone had had a turn he pointed to me and told me I was up. I set my gear down and picked up a bat.
Sad to say, I hit one of maybe six tries. Enlightening, yes. A surprise? Nope. Just another confirmation that my hand-eye coordination is best used in the service of photography! And gave me even more appreciation of the skills of the young men I’ll be documenting this summer as they play baseball and reach for the major leagues.
Seeing two sides
I just finished – and had published online and in print – a photo project documenting the first season of the Yakima Valley Community College women’s wrestling team. To see the audio slideshows (nine of ‘em!) go here.
As with any long-term project I was really (a) glad it was done (b) sad it was done (c) tired of looking at the same images over and over as I edited the thousands of images (d) disappointed at some of the gaps in the images (e) happy that my employer still sees the value of such projects and allows us to pursue long-term projects and (d) feeling privileged to have met such a hard-working, dedicated group of women.
There were lots of memorable times and images for me as I followed the team from September, 2008 through Mar, 2009 but one image stands out, an image that wasn’t even published (until now). It’s an image that didn’t contribute to the storytelling of this team’s first season and really a pretty ordinary photograph. But the contrast presented by the image is, to me, amazing.
Throughout the season, this is how I saw the team:
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This is how I saw the team throughout the season, clad in t-shirts, shorts, maybe sweats and wrestling singlets. Here, the team is introduced at a Feb. 5, 2009 wrestling match.
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But at an end-of-the-season get-together, the team showed me a side I hadn’t seen before.
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The YVCC women's wrestling team poses for a group photo before going out to a local restaurant for supper at an end-of-the-season get-together.
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The contrast was amazing and I was glad I could see ‘em all dressed up.
By the way, this was the first year for the team, the first-ever women’s intercollegiate wrestling team in Washington state. The team started with three wrestlers and picked up a few more wrestlers (and lost a few) throughout the season and went on to win the national women’s collegiate wrestling title.
–Gordon King
* Getting your photo fix *
For all you photo junkies out there, I’ve found another great photo Web site to spend time at each day. Go here:
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/good-morning/
This is the New York Times photo department Web site titled Lens. It’s a great site.
When you want to get right down to business, scroll down just a little ways to the
to the underlined link which says “let’s start looking at pictures.” That link takes
you to the pictures of the day and photo editors’ comments about those
photos. There’s tons more stuff on the site. Take a look. A long look.
–Gordon King
Flower arranging
I got an assignment last week to come up with a cover for our upcoming Summer Music Guide edition of ON magazine. It a challenge that comes up every year, and one that gets a little harder every year, as we don’t want to repeat ideas and there have been some good ones in past years. I’ve done a sunset landscape through the hole in a guitar and another staffer did a sandy beach scene with a bikinied guitar. After sleeping on the idea (one of the better ways I’ve found to come up with illustration ideas) I decided to construct a guitar out of flowers. Originally I wanted to make the guitar entirely out of dandelions, since they are ubiquitous and I didn’t think any one would mind if I “harvested” their little gold blooms from the side of the road or along a sidewalk. They also say “summer” to me in a way no other flower does.
I ran into a couple of snags with this idea, mainly it was hot the day I worked on my illustration, and the dandelions I picked mid-day were shriveled and dead when I had time to work on my illustration later in the afternoon. I went out to harvest more, but my prime picking location (beside The Seasons) had been mowed in the three hour window I had been out shooting something else. I picked as many as I could and headed to my back yard. I decided to work in my garden, because the dandelions are kind of cone shaped on the bottom where I’d plucked them off their stems and wobbled around when I put them on cardboard. With dirt, I could poke little holes in the ground and set them in there. I gathered some other plant materials, flattened a nice empty part of the garden (luckily, I haven’t gotten around to planting the beans) and drew my guitar.
Then I started filling in my outline with flowers. Turns out I didn’t have enough dandelions to fill out the whole guitar (a disappointment) so I ended up using these little seeds that the neighbor’s tree drops all over my yard instead. I used big flat leaves beside the dandelions to provide a good contrast so the shape of the guitar really popped out, then tried to make the background colorful.
Lastly, I stood on the edge of the raised bed and photographed my creation straight down. If I had to do it again, I’d figure out some way to keep the flowers fresher and work on it earlier in the day. Here’s the final image:
