The start of the holiday season is always that learning time of year for us, where we slow down (a little) and catch up on readings. Just in time for Black Friday, here are a few recommendations from our library and our friends at Peachpit Press.
Also, this weekend the folks over at Kelby training are offering some extra help.
On Monday, we will be posting our list of favorite photo books for the year. Be sure to check back with us.
The Second Life of Jeff Lukas Tim Layden is the writer I work with the most often, and he is a close friend. To say he is intense, driven and immensely talented is an understatement.
Laura and I were fortunate to be asked to shoot video and still portraits, to accompany Tim's incredibly moving, powerfully written essay about Jeff Lukas. I've been reading SI for many years and this long form essay is one of the best.
As usual, Laura and I had to work fast. We had just a few days from start to finish to get to Kentucky to interview D. Wayne Lukas and then move on to tiny Atoka, Oklahoma to complete our part of the Lukas project with Jeff Lukas and David Barrage.
Unusual for us, we sent the footage raw to New York where Collin Orcutt and his team did all of the edits.
I learned a long time ago to let Tim tell the story with his words.
Please spend some time with this piece, you won't regret it: Out of Darkness.
This is one of the smartest, nicest, kindest people I know, posing with her husband Joel.
One of the pleasures of my professional world is the wonderful colleagues I get to spend time with.
Many of them I have known for decades, and I'm never disappointed in their generosity and friendship. Whenever I reach out one of them is always there providing support, counsel and guidance.
My buddy Joel Sartore, grinning here because as always I bought lunch, is a brilliant and committed photographer and environmentalist. In addition to being one of the best and brightest photographers working today, he is an incredibly funny man.
His massive ongoing project, The Photo Ark, is a display not only of his genius, but also his dedication.
A Life magazine writer, Richard Woodley, called me today to ask some questions, and we talked and talked. His books and movies are part of our national collective conscience.
But what fascinated me was listening to him talk about the magazine he wrote for during the decade of the 1960s. It was a different time in print journalism. Globe trotting photographers and writers brought us stories with panache, adventure, and style. Fueled by seemingly endless budgets, a loving and devoted readership and an enthusiasm for getting it perfect, every time. If it needed to be covered, they were there in force.
For those of you too young to remember, Life magazine was once the gold standard among journalistic publications.
I really should have gotten moving and cut the call short, what with needing to pack for a five day road trip to do five portrait shoots -- including one for a magazine cover and two unrelated new video projects. A trip that would require twelve cases of gear to get through the different setups.
We spoke for an hour and it was delightful.
He called to ask about an old friend of ours, the great Bill Epperidge who passed last week.
But we talked about all kinds of things, as one story about Bill spun off into another.
I learned a lot, shared some, and did I mention, just had a great time.
Storytelling, done just right, is a huge treat.
A few weeks ago, I was at Kent State participating as a panelist for the Media Ethics Workshop they do in combination with the Poynter Institute. Dave LaBelle is a professor at KSU and a longtime friend. We left his office in the journalism school and started up the stairs. I saw the light, borrowed his camera to make a handful of frames of him before giving his camera back.
Dave's wife, Erin, posted it to Facebook and Don Winslow saw it. An hour later it was on the cover of News Photographer Magazine.
I've been an NPPA member since college, and one of the major draws is that incredible magazine.
LaBelle has been a hero of mine since I was a student at the University of Kansas and heard him speak.
One of the first times I thought about the power of photojournalism was reading The Kent State report by James Michener, where he wrote about the Pulitzer Prize winning image taken with a borrowed camera, by a 20-year-old journalism student named John Paul Filo just steps from the Kent State journalism school.
As I did with LaBelle, I met Filo when I was a student at KU. John was working for the AP in Kansas City. He was later one of my editors at SI. We've been friends for many years.
This was a nice tidy circle. I made a picture of a friend, in a place that started my photographic recognition -- although I didn't really understand that at the time -- and another friend saw it and put it on the cover of a publication that has been integral to my understanding of my profession.
Strange circles.
Fun walking into a bookstore and seeing a cover on a book I shot, and honestly forgot about. Thanks Marguerite Schropp Lucarelli at SI For Kids!
Todd Korol. Great friend for many years. No bigger lover of photography exists.
Seeing his fine cover image this morning made my day. I'll buy the CD simply for his photography, although I have it on excellent authority the music is superb as well.
Since he is Canadian through and through, he'll likely apologize for my blogging this.
The most difficult thing I have ever done as a photographer was to follow Missy Koch into the operating room where she was facing the amputation of her leg.
We were friends before the surgery and have stayed that way in the ensuing three decades.
Missy's husband Todd Billingsley has written a book about Missy's life, Run to Win.
Last week, I talked with writer Josh McCauliffe about Missy, stirring up old emotions and remembering old stories.
In November 1990, I flew to Oakland to meet SI writer Peter King for a trip across America with John Madden. A unique experience to say the least, and by unique I mean crazy. I climbed onto the top of a moving truck to shoot the Madden Bus rolling through the desert, changed a flat tire like a NASCAR pit crew in Western Nebraska (although in fairness, they are about 1,000 times faster, it just felt like being on a NASCAR pit crew), talked football through Ohio, and watched Madden put his head in a hippopotamus drinking fountain in a small Pennsylvania town.
Sports Illustrated published the story across a multi-page layout. Now I think, the story would be told not only in the classic great SI style, but also through video and multimedia both on SI.com and on the iPad edition of the magazine.
Last Friday, I was in Oxnard at the Dallas Cowboys Training Camp again with Peter King for the start of another journey. This time I was there to do some video projects with Peter for the launch of his great new SI branded Website mmqb.si.com.