Ah…its so nice to see your name in all caps when it has Photography By preceding it…I’m not being arrogant but I swell with pride after seeing my work published in a travel piece.  Its not some of my better work but its work…made from nothing.  Well, not exactly but it was made from experience and knowing how to push when nothing is easily seen.

I got commissioned a few months ago by the Oregonian’s Mix Magazine to shoot a travel piece on the best places to dine on Oahu.  I shot (and ate) everything from locally made Ono Pops (Mexican style paletas) to fresh opelu (mackerel) at He’eia Kea Pier General Store & Deli.  Its not all about eating mind you as I have to spend an inordinate amount of time setting up a plate (well…thats mostly the Chef’s call) but having to direct a chef to create a food masterpiece on the fly, sometimes surrounded by styrofoam, in bad lighting, and customers all around.  Its can be pretty tough.

The food shots are very editorial as they are all natural light with fill bumped in from a white bounce or even white table cloths if a proper bounce isn’t around.  But mostly the reason I can somewhat capture food well is from all the years of assisting NYC food photographers back in the day.  Mostly the training was shooting in studios with top food stylists, fake ingredients, big lights, and sometimes big ovens.  You know…the mash potato ice cream or the cooked-with-a-blowtorch-steak.  I remember working on a Pizza Hut job where we shot dozens of pies pulled out of an industrial oven in the City’s West Side.  Yong Yoo, the then photo assistant extroadinare, and I had screaming fight because the neurotic photographer made us load what seem to be his entire studio into a cube truck, unload on location, and reload the truck in the pouring rain.  At the end of the day, we fought about how to roll some immensely large and heavy studio camera stand that was taller than the cube truck up a ramp as the rain poured all around.  Ah how I miss those days yet would never go back.

There is something very important about being a padawan (apprentice) in the big cities.  I never could have been successful here, especially here in Hawaii without some type of grueling informal training I had in those dreary New York years.  Every conceivable subject that can be photographed I probably helped put a studio light on it, or at least rolled a studio stand close to it.  Everything from Revlon lipstick, to beer bottles, to celebs and rock stars to rain sets, to shooting in the bloody rain.

(How on earth I go from chatting about Mix Mag to get on this subject…I will never know.  Stream of … uhhh…what were we chatting about?)

So in the above picture, the author dances around a rigged rain set with a Fender Strat guitar.  My memory dims on what job we were working on other than it had a Korean model in tight shiny pants that fit her very well.  I remembered I had this piece of chrome somewhere and fumbled through a bunch of old film files finding it next to a bunch of negatives of Trisha, a model who’s sister I knew from Texas.  Funny how I didn’t remember those pictures and funny how I forgot about this chrome.  Not wanting to start up a proper film scanner, I masking taped the chrome to my Mac, opened up a white doc in photoshop and made a few exposure on a make shift light table.  Not the sharpest but a good illustration, nonetheless.  The chrome was lifted from the studio where we worked that week but I just couldn’t resist?  The chrome came from the initial test rolls so no one would have missed it.  Besides, its me dancing in the purple rain!

Back into the Mix.  All those years of New York drudgery made me into the so called photographer I am.  Its not the greatest career but its a great living here in Hawaii.  I get a job like this Mix Mag job and use all my skills from my shooting years all the while reaching back to those “wet behind the ears” days when I held someones camera.

Literally, I was probably wet.  It always seemed like I was…

If that were only the truth!

I just finished my nine day odyssey at the 2012 Sony Open in Hawaii.  I’ve had my complete fill of sun, pollen, sunburn, Old Spice, pesticides, idiot volunteers, and sensitive golfers.  Oh how we marched and humped the flat yet hot course out at the Waialae Country Club chasing Ryo-kun and any golfer who dared to stray into first place for those few 100 yards or so.

I’ve shot the Sony Open in Honolulu for the last several years and it never seems to get any easier with all the running around and struggles of the course and not to mention the hours of being out in the sun.  Every year at the end of the tourney, I get what I call a sun cold…better yet, a golf cold.  I have my face down in the grass for multiple days inhaling all the pollen and pesticides I could ever want in a long drawn out week.  Come wednesday, I get sneezy, congested, and irritable.  The irritability just might be my irascible personality run afoul by the incomprehensible logic of volunteer marshals, the errant golf balls from the Pro Amers, and a weighty 400mm F2.8 lens digging into my neck muscles.

 Golf is one of those sports that just begs to ask why anyone would pursue such a unreasonable game where a putt depends on whether the grains of the grass are facing towards or away from you, or whether your ball will slice or hook on the based on how your hands grip the driver.  How ironic that basketball players get booed and screamed at when doing free throws from the line but golfers can’t take even a bright shirt if its in their eye sight.  A gentleman’s sport, indeed!  Especially when you hear certain golfers swearing like sailors when a ball goes off course or a putt doesn’t fall just like they envisioned.

Regardless of my own prejudice of the game (note…I’ve been know to roam the cloudy cool hills of the Pali golf course so I’ve no real complaints) I truly enjoy shooting the sport.  The anticipation, the surprises, the reactions are all so great.  Its completely boring most of the time as so many of the players possess that calmness the sport demands which doesn’t allow them to showboat or hoot and holler when sinking an eagle.  Sure you get the fist pump but you’ll never get the true “jube” shots you’ll find in other sports.

Whether its pure madness to follow the Japanese sensation Ryo Ishikawa, who I truly think looks like an real life anime character, I’ll never truly understand.  I think its the pack mentality of rushing around with a dozen or so photographers from the US and Japan, all struggling to capture that unique image of the golfer in pure rapture or total disbelief in his ability to make a two inch ball land in just the right spot.  Even though you can’t communicate with each other due to a language barrier or a sensitive golf caddie, we share the same sweat, pain, sunburns, and struggle.  One big unified mass chasing a bunch of dopes chasing a little white ball.

I do have a favorite shot of the week and its of this guy David Hearn hitting out of the bunker on the ninth green.  I just found his expression of fear, worry, hope, and more fear more appealing than most of the stuff I shot that day.  He fizzled at the end of the tournament allowing moustached Johnson Wagner to win all the marbles.  Do I dare say Mr. Wagner’s prowlness is due to his hairy lip?  We’ll never know.

It wasn’t anything special other than having a camera at hand and a Nikon adapted 500mm lens.  I quick burst and an interesting shot for the 2nd day of 2012.

Look!  Up in the sky!  Its a bird!  Its a plane!  Its…uh…wait a minute…its…its…its just a guy in a helicopter with a camera.

I wasn’t superman for the day but it sure felt like it!  September proved to be pretty exciting as I was commissioned to shoot for Hemispheres Magazine, United Airlines In-flight magazine,  and cover the Big Island for their Three Perfect Days section.  In three days, I drove (and flew) across the Big Island shooting the lushness of Hilo, the cold stars of Mauna Kea, the blackness of Kilauea, and the resorts of the Kohala Coast…all the while fighting rain, clouds, chill, and vog.  What a mess those three perfect days!

Perhaps the most exciting bit had me floating over lava and sea in a chartered helicopter.  How exciting to ride up in a the sky with no doors and only a buckle and God to keep me from becoming part of the aina!

We took off from the Hilo airport with little introduction to what lay ahead.  We walked straight out onto the runway, buckled in, and away we went.  Jersey Rob of Paradise Helicopters said fuggitaboutit as it was routine and I had nuthin to worry about.  I’ve flown several times in military Blackhawks for work here and there but this was one of those small four seaters that doesn’t offer any imagination to what lies just beyond the seatbelts.  As we levitated off the ground and shot across the green lush areas around Hilo, you immediately sense the uniqueness of being in a small bubble, no bigger than a Hyndai’s car cabin, spinning through the cotton.  Yet just outside that doorless portal gushed propeller wash and streaming jets of air.  I stuck my head and arms out a bit too far and found the wind nearly tearing me and my cameras out into the abyss.

Our first hover was directly over Honolii surf spot just north of Hilo.  A group of early morning surfers, who were not to keen to having a helicopter disturbing their morning sets, awaited their anticipated breaks and I perfectly captured the lone girl and the rocks below.  If you look close enough, you can actually see tropical fish swimming around her.  Unbelievable!

After a quick hover over the beach and surf spots, we zoomed back over Hilo and flew to the volcanic rift zone.  Green gave away to the mesmerizing black volcanic landscape.  Black lava rock.  Endless.  As if life first started.  It all appears like death but its actually life giving as the eruptions create new land.  Since 1983, the lava flows from Kilauea produced hundreds of acres of new land but has also destroyed entire communities and covered many once beautiful beaches and landscapes.  My pictures and words can’t describe what is out in Volcano, HI.  Every time I go out there, I stare and get lost in what once was…endless lava fields of blackness and life.

The pilot few us over Kilauea and directly over Pu’u Oo cone, where the lava is currently flowing.  Now this is the exciting part. Magma…as Dr. Evil would say.  Loads of magma flowing like a river.  Lava poured and bubbled all over making for a SPECTACULAR show.  National Geographic ain’t got nothing on what’s out there.  A river of lava oozed down the ridge like glowing hot toothpaste gurgling from the depths.  We probably hovered no more than 30 or more stories above the lava but it felt as if a portal to the underworld lay below.

Just mesmerizing!  Lava.  Magma.  Darkness.  Red. Black.  A little grey.  Amazing.

If you can’t fly the month of December on United, please download the spread from here.  Its a small pdf file which should easily download.

A big thank you to the guys at Paradise Helicopter in Hawaii for helping me get the shot.  Thanks Rob.  Another big mahalo to the BIBV for providing so much to make this impossible trip happen.  Thanks Jessica.

But no thanks to the crappy weather.  No thanks to the grey clouds and the congestive vog.  Couldn’t make perfect this time but you just wait.

I’ve written plenty about my Pearl Harbor project so there’s not much to blog about other than the Smithsonian is featuring my work for the 70th anniversary of the surprise Japanese attack.

You can see the link here or go to www.smithsonian.com.

Nothing comes without hard work.

Thank you Erica and Jamm.  Without you, this project wouldn’t have gone anywhere.