Mike De Bee, Street Roots Vendor Protests

This is Mike De Bee, he's a (now former) Street Roots vendor protesting a column in Street Roots by the executive director that he feels implies all SR vendors are using the money earned to feed drug and alcohol addictions.

Mike De Bee is also the subject of my first assignment at the Willamette Week. It had been nearly a month since I'd been out shooting photos for a publication. I forgot how great it felt to walk up to a perfect stranger, shake their hand and introduce myself as a photographer from a publication.

I like some of the other pictures from this shoot better. But this one has all of the elements of this story, so I understand why they used it. It just feels a little contrived. Sometimes portraits are destined to have that feeling though.

For this photo, I used a 18-70mm Nikon on the wide end with my D80 set to 100 ISO and the shutter cranked up fast. There is also a sb-600(held by my fantastic colleague Katie Litvin) most likely at full or half power with a 1/4 CTO gel shooting through a stofen cap. Unfortunately my sb-600 is stuck, zoomed out to 24mm so I've got to crank the power up high especially when I'm using the high-speed sync mode.

Tour De Coop: Ruh Roh(think Scooby Doo)

I'm gonna try to find another editing program and redo the Tour De Coop video. I don't think the video is strong enough to support all the other errors--impossibly fast transitions, no sound on the stills, bad audio editing on the video. imovie did as best it could, but I need more. I'm really excited for the concept/gimmick used in the TDC video with the walking flipbook transitions between the coops and I think it'd be a really strong piece if I were able to fix the above mistakes. I have strong audio(from the Zoom H2), I've got some decent nat sound but I'm unable to use this additional content with imovie.

I'm starting to think that this part, the "good enough is never acceptable"part is gonna be the death of me. Or maybe it'll be the reason I'm gonna be just fine? I've got a stack of job listings I have to apply for today. I hope one of them comes through.

Tour De Coop

I shot the Tour De Coop this weekend. Portland's urban farmers opened their doors and coops to the public on Saturday. Here is what I found:

This is the first project I did on my Kodak Zi6 as well as my first time using imovie. I really miss Final Cut Pro.

New Toys! Kodak Zi6

I really should get going out to a shoot, but it's a lazy Saturday. I'm going to be shooting Tour de Coop today, a walking tour of local urban chicken owners/enthusiasts/farmers and their coops! I'll be doing some Avedon'esque portraits of both the chickens and their owners which will later be turned into diptychs. I'll also be shooting video on my new Kodak Zi6
(with supplementary audio from a Zoom H2). I'm hoping to get some good clean audio/video b-roll of the chickens to fill the whole thing out. Also, if I could get the owners to introduce themselves and the chickens as well as do their rendition their chicken's 'voice'(clucks etc) I would be pretty dang happy with my take.

First photos published in the Willamette Week

These are my first four published photos I've done at the Willamette Week. They're all for the Best of Portland edition and should be on the racks until the 28th or 29th I think. Let me know what you think!

I'm still working on the formatting with Blogger. Sorry if things are a little jumbled right now

(Above): This is Randy Archer, he's the owner of Baseball Cards and More on 120th and Stark. He opened it in the early 80's. He's not quite sure how many cards he has, but somewhere in the millions. Floor to ceiling is cards. He's showing off four of his favorites that he has at the shop. I had one speedlight set on 1/4 power(I think) and 200 ISO at about a 15th of a second in this shot. The flash had a lumiquest bounce card on it.

Below is Dr. Al Torres of Portland Industrial and Travel medicine. The section name was jokingly "The Best Place In Portland to Get Shot", so I figured I should call their bluff. Syringes have a really nice kind of icon power to them, but because of that they're also a little much sometimes. Initially we tried a small syringe and that shot didn't work, the one he's holding was pretty much only done as a joke but it's more legible than with the small syringe. Dr. Torres thought this was very funny and so do I.

Next is Julio, who the people at the Audubon Society have come to find is actually a female. Who knew? She's 9 years old and has been living at the Portland facility for 4 years now. I showed up to the shoot with big ideas, quickly my Nikon D80 decided it had other plans and an SD card broke off in the slot. Damn. The springs were stuck and wouldn't hold onto a memory card so I had to hold it in place. I had a 50mm 1.8 on, set to 1.8 at 400 iSO and I'm pretty sure 1/90th of a second.



This is Josh Killingsworth, he owns A Rose and a Song(link). For about $90 he'll deliver a dozen roses and a song. It was about 100 degrees today, I felt bad for Josh in that suit coat. But I had a good time on the shoot. Again, there's an sb-600 with the lumiquest bounce card. Directly to camera left. Unfortunately you can see the flare in there. I wish I'd added a 1/4 CTO gel to the flash so he wasn't so pale/ghosty.