Busted Fareless Square

Last week I was assigned to shoot some photos featuring Busted magazine, which shows mugshots from around the Portland area(but it's also a national publication so you can find the convicts wherever you are!). Initially kind of a boring assignment right? Brittany Moody(a design intern at WW) initially posed for some 'anonymous reader' pictures but I needed something more. I asked a few different people to pose like they were reading it. I also put it into a newsstand at the Lovejoy Market. I like this one the best(and I'm glad the ADs did too). His name is Casey Enns and he was waiting for the street car when I showed up. It was about 101 degrees that day, terrible weather and light. I think this was probably around 1-2pm. I was trying to focus on the magazine so I hit it with a full power burst from my sb-600 on hi-speed sync and then brought the ambient down, this also really brought out the colors in his shirt and the sky which I'm stoked for. I wish this would have run in color but it looks pretty good in BW too. For what could have been a scanned in copy of Busted, I think this adds something to the page even in BW. It might be posed and maybe not the most journalistic photo, but essentially Casey is a prop for the real subject of the photo and so in that way I'm okay with posing him.

Yesterday, I was running a bit late and got a call from Tom Humphrey saying they had a story for me to shoot if I wanted. It was about how Tri-Met is going to cut buses from the. Fareless Square Service, beginning in January(here's the story). Again, not a terribly exciting visual right? I got my bread and butter shot of two buses and a bicycle, with heavy pedestrian traffic somewhere on 5th. It would've told the story just fine, but didn't really add anything visually. Then I got some panning photos of buses, but they were just bus pictures kinda neat but nothing terribly special. I had 10 minutes to get the shot I wanted and walk 8 blocks back to my car before the parking meter expired. I was looking for a parking structure that had windows looking out over 5th or 6th Avenue, easy. But the view from the street couldn't be obscured by trees, ruh roh this might be a bit more difficult. I found a decent spot at the Metropolitan Garage on 5th and Taylor, 6 floors up, with lots of windows and a really cool old elevator with a gate instead of the solid doors so you can see the inside of the elevator shaft as you're going up.



I got up there and I had my tripod but it wasn't able to lean far enough out over the ledge to get the view I wanted so I super clamped the camera to the railing (initially I wanted to use ND gels to allow for a blur in the people, buses, cars and keep all the buildings and signs sharp). I thought the ND blurred shots were pretty cool and showed the story better than an image with a sharp bus. I thought that blurring out the busses into soft blobs(still very recognizable blobs) would underline the fact that something about downtown bus service is changing.

Either way though, I was very happy to try some high angle/aerial stuff. I don't know why but I love aerial photos. Even from this low height, but if I could have been another 100 feet in the air, directly above the streets/buses, everything that would have been amazing. I really hope my kite is able to lift this my video camera when the winds pick up this fall. It feels a bit lighter than the P&S camera I was using(which was way way way too heavy for this kite).

Gonna try to do a multimedia story on Chess players this weekend and hopefully will also get some athlete portraits done as well!