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.