Shoot Me Once, Shoot Me Twice…
Shooting the same thing over and over again and finding different ways to make basically the same photo is a challenge. It’s one I like to be honest, it makes me think creatively and get outside of the box, but after a while you start running low on tricks. Sometimes it feels like you’re making the same pictures at sporting events because the games don’t change, and most of the time you’re stuck outside the same boundaries. When it comes to the sandbagging I’ve been shooting for the last four days, I’d pulled out everything in the book. Monday I shot firefighters bagging and got lucky with some nice light in the afternoon as they carried the bags into place. On Tuesday I went to a small town in Illinois (population 95, no joke) and got lucky again with inmates helping with the bagging and guys rolling through foot deep water to deliver the bags. Unfortunately on Wednesday when I ran out to New Harmony, I had already tapped the inmate angle so the ones there weren’t of much help, but the Indiana National Guard had been on the scene for three days setting up what had to be a wall a half-mile long when it was done and made for some different photos.
So today, when I was met with another sandbagging shoot, I was tapping out. I had volunteers, I had inmates, I had soldiers and I had firefighters and all but the inmates would be present today. The one thing that saved me today was a lack of water. We managed to get blue skies and break from the rain for a day, and where the sandbags were being filled was more a distribution point for the rest of the area. Thousands of bags were filled by Civil Air Patrol members as well as local firefighters and volunteers in a large church parking lot. The church itself had water encroaching on it, but wasn’t immediately threatened and I’m sure with the estimated 10,000 sandbags they had on hand, a wall could be built by the 100 plus baggers in no time.
With no water surrounding the mounds of bags though, I could finally move around and get low. Laying down in a parking lot is a lot more feasible than laying down in the Wabash or Ohio River. I could play with patterns and repetition and have a little fun, and a blue sky to shoot into didn’t hurt either.
Brett Schelhorn hauls a sandbag over to a wall of thousands at the Faith Bible Church on Thursday morning where he and dozens of other volunteers and members of the Civic Air Patrol filled and prepped thousands of sandbags to be distributed throughout the area.
When Lightning Strikes
Finally, after hours of blogging this afternoon, I am up to date on this blog! May it never get that backed-up again.
Last night I had had enough of the constant thunderstorms that have kept me up all night every night for a week and dumped almost seven inches of rain on the city since Friday. I’d been mulling over going out to the Casino Aztar parking garage and shooting the skyline in the hopes of catching a lightning strike or two in the background. Finally last night I did it, and last night may have actually been the best time.
It wasn’t quite as windy or chilly as it had been other nights, storms were positioned to provide me with a good hour of lightning filled strikes and a couple days worth of research to see how I should go after it. It wasn’t really beyond what I’d have done on my own, but having a little help with what ISO to start with was a plus. In the first five minutes of shooting I scored this image at ISO 640, f/18 and about a 7-second exposure triggering the BULB setting on the D3s manually. The original image came out a little hot, so I probably would have been fine with a 5-second exposure, but the strike came at the end of the exposure so I let it run for a little longer than I would have otherwise.
I shot for another hour and got eight more frames with lightning, but nothing compared to this. I missed two different strikes where lighting streaked everywhere, but I’m happy with the frame I got, especially considering it’s already hit the AP wire and someone here at the office messaged my editor to tell him they’d made it their desktop background.
Lightning arcs across the sky over Downtown Evansville, Ind. on Tuesday night, April 26, 2011. Severe thunderstorms hit the tri-state for the sixth consecutive night as heavy rains and thunderstorms have already flooded out numerous roads and towns and forced the set-up of a flood wall along the riverfront downtown.
Ten Years and Tens of Thousands of Babies
The Women’s Hospital at the Deaconess Gateway Medical Campus turned ten years old on Sunday. They’re not celebrating the tens of thousands of babies born there until September, but the Courier & Press did a piece last Friday that I had the pleasure of shooting. Nothing for me is much more rewarding that shooting new mothers and fathers. The emotion is so real and the love in the air is infectious.
The hospitals here in Evansville are pretty awesome in my opinion. The Deaconess campus is very impressive and the Women’s Hospital, where I’ve had a chance to shoot a couple times, blows away any hospital I’ve been in before. If you’re going to have a baby, it seems like an incredibly comfortable place to do it. The rooms are private, they’re huge compared to most hospital rooms, and they have great amenities for new mothers and fathers. The technology in the hospital is amazing too. Palm scanners give mothers and fathers access to both the nursery and neonatal intensive care units 24/7. Special radio bands around the babies and mothers legs and wrists respectively chime when mother and baby come together to guarantee you have the right child and the same bands lock down the hospital if someone tries to take the baby out of the wing without clearance. Webcams in the nursery allow mothers and fathers and extended family to view the babies anywhere in the world over the internet, saving costly trips for families far away with new nieces, nephews and grandkids stuck in NICU for weeks. A new milk bank helps get breast milk to babies whose others can’t produce it. It’s just a great place to have a baby, though I’m speaking as someone who will never know the experience firsthand.
I got to shoot Jackie Monroe, who I later learned is a fellow journalist on the broadcast side here in Evansville, as she saw her newborn twins for just the second time. She had given birth just 10 hours beforehand to the twins who came seven weeks early and weighed about 4.9 pounds each, but by the time I was there to shoot, both were breathing on their own and had a positive outlook. Jackie and her husband Nate where great to shoot and as excited as you’d expect new parents to be. Of course, everyone on the website was most concerned with when Jackie would be heading back to the airwaves at NBC-14.
Jackie Monroe, a WFIE-NBC 14 news anchor, sees her newborn son Jude Monroe who was born at 12:24am on Thursday, April 21, 2011 with his twin sister Ava, who is younger by a whole three minutes, for just the second time. The twins were born seven weeks early and are each about four pounds and nine ounces. The twins will have to stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Deaconess Gateway Women's Hospital until they are strong enough to leave, but new technology allows the Monroes and Jackie's family in Minnesota to watch the babies on webcam.
Guns and Hoses
Sarah left for home on Saturday, April 15th, and I found myself mired in my usual post-airport funk all day. Saying goodbye never gets easier. You’d think it would and that you’d be used to watching the person you love walk away and board a plane to fly thousands of miles away, but it only gets harder. I cannot imagine what it’s like to watch a loved one leave you for a year to serve in the military knowing you may never see them again. A few months is hard, a year, must be insane.
Stuck in this funk I turned to photography. Like any good creative mind, misery only fuels it. What better way, then, to satisfy my inner frustration and aggression at saying goodbye to my girlfriend than to shoot a couple dozen sweaty men beat the snot out of each other?
Guns & Hoses is an annual charity event put on in Evansville by local firefighters and police officers four the last four years to benefit 911 Gives Hope. You’d think they’d do it to upgrade their equipment, but they don’t see a dime. The “Guns” won the first event handily but lost the next two to the “Hoses.” The Hoses were projected to dominate again, but anything but that happened. While the Hoses took the first bout in a unanimous decision, the Guns won the next seven bouts straight recording two TKO’s in the process. There were 15 matches on the bill and after three hours of coverage, intermission came between matches eight and nine, which were enough for me.
The event was awesome and had record attendance. Next year it will undoubtedly be held at the new Downtown Arena. Here’s hoping I’m around to shoot it. Some overhead shots would be awesome from this.
Firefighter Shane Onstott falls backward from the cross of policeman Jared Whitney in the eighth match of the 2011 Guns and Hoses boxing event held at Roberts Stadium on Saturday, April 16, 2011.
Over Some Streams and Through Some Woods…
On Sunday April 10 I woke up earlier than any human being should have to. I don’t care what you do for a living, unless it’s putting out fires or corralling bad guys or something else for the general human good, no one should be awake at 5:30am. I though, rolled out of bed at the crack of still dark outside and found some way to motivate myself. I was off to the Northern reaches of Evansville to cover the 2011 Southern Indiana Classic Marathon and Half-Marathon and needed to be in position on the course by 6:30 to get volunteers setting up and the first runners coming through. I had a map, a general gameplan for covering certain mileage points and the morning to shoot. I actually spent as much time editing and posting the gallery as I did shooting, getting 1,500 images down to about 30 to be merged with freelancer Dan Patmore’s in a gallery on the website. I was lucky Dan was taking care of the start/finish line so I could roam the course freely. I was even luckier that the full-marathon was cancelled due to heat concerns.
It turned out to be a gorgeous morning… once I was coherent enough to appreciate it. The clouds let me play with the sky and the color of early morning light make it pretty easy for any photographer to get over the sleep they’ve lost. That and Red Bull.
I probably walked a good five miles of the course myself hauling a 400 on a monopod, 70-200, two bodies and 24-70. Racers joked as they jogged by that they’d gladly carry some gear a mile up the course for me, or that I needed to keep up the pace because I was falling back. You have to love anyone who has a sense of humor after running for 8 miles non-stop. The effort and determination of many of the racers, young and old, was awesome and was what pushed me through the grind of an edit. If they can run 13 miles in two hours, I could stare at a computer screen for three from my air-conditioned office.
Southern Indiana Classic Half-Marathon Gallery
Runners pass each other on Princeton Road as they approach the eight and nine-mile markers in the Southern Indiana Classic Half-Marathon on Sunday morning.
Earth, Wind and Fire
While the popular band from the 60′s and 70′s go together fantastically, the real elements themselves are a horrible combination. It’s mostly the wind and fire that ruin the party for Earth, who does pretty fine on her own. Earth is always having to bring in water to cool fire off when wind gets it riled up. But seriously…
On April 3rd I was enjoying a relaxing Sunday morning before I had to head into the office with Sarah when I got a phone call from Ryan Reynolds, the breaking news editor in the office. A three-alarm fire had broken out about 30 minutes away. The relaxing morning quickly changed to frantic rush to figure out where this place was and how best to get there. I had a slight advantage starting from home, but the blaze was still a few miles past the airport, so it would take a while for me to get there. Generally the number of alarms that are related to a single fire correspond to the number of fire stations that have been asked to respond to a fire. In a major city, what may be a one-alarm fire for a major station with tons of trucks could be a five-alarm fire in a smaller community. While this was a three-alarm blaze, at least five different companies were represented when I finally arrived on scene.
The home owner was apparently trying to burn something in his back yard… during a “code red” burn advisory, which means no burning should be occurring because of dry conditions and the potential for spread of fire… and on a day where winds were sustained around 20 miles per hour. As I documented above, high winds, dry grass and fire don’t mix at all, and quickly what was just a couple of sticks on fire jumped to several nearby automobiles in this man’s yard and eventually to the back of his home. Firefighters worked for hours in 80-degree temperatures to get the cars to stop burning. No one was injured, but the potential for disaster was extremely high. As the cars, which all had flammable liquids in them, burned one by one toward the house, firefighters reported mini explosions coming from each as parts of the cars combusted. The potential for a catastrophic explosion existed had the garage caught fire where the cars led to as several gas containers sat full by the back wall.
One thing about a windy fire, you always leave smelling like barbecue.
Firefighters try to extinguish a lingering fire in one of several old Volkswagen Beetles that were destroyed in a three alarm fire in the back yard of Thomas Wilson's home at 9301 Old State Road on Sunday afternoon. Wilson was apparently burning something in his back yard when high winds caused the fire to burn out of control and leap to several automobiles and eventually to his home.
A Fire in Perspective
On March 30th I was sorting through photos from shoots I can’t even remember on the day when a familiar tone came across the scanner of a house fire on College Highway in Evansville. I have no idea why it’s called College Highway to be honest with you. The road is several blocks from UE and it’s just a normal city side road a few blocks from U.S. 41 in what is a very nice looking neighborhood next to a large church – but I digress.
To avoid a lot of false alarms, we usually listen to the scanner long enough to hear the firefighter’s first impressions of the situation. The words “smoke visible” are always a good start. The words “fully involved” lead you to a dead sprint to your car and the possibility of a slew of traffic violations. This was more of the former situation, but when you hear “smoke pouring from multiple windows,” it almost means a perfect situation for a photographer. It’s not gotten bad yet, but it’s close.
Luckily this house was only about a mile from the office and when I got there, firefighters were on the roof ripping out holes and insulation to vent the smoke. The home owners arrived and looked awestruck at their home surrounded by firefighters. Jim and Heather King were both at work when the fire broke out on the second floor of their home, and their five kids were at school. It wasn’t long, though, before Heather turned to Jim and realized their dog was unaccounted for. Moments later Maggie, their five-year-old golden doodle came bounding out of the first floor of the home, firefighters walking out behind her.
The dog put the blaze in perspective for Jim as he walked the extremely well behaved dog without her leash down to his car and loaded her in. “My expectation of what my house would look like when I got here didn’t match (reality),” said King. “My family’s alive. My dog’s alive. The rest of the stuff is just stuff. I feel blessed.”
Jim and Heather King are greeted by their five-year-old golden-doodle, Maggie, after firefighters rescued her from the King's burning home on Wednesday afternoon. A fire broke out on the second floor of the King's home at 604 College Highway while no one was home but Maggie.
Washington’s Road to Indianapolis
So a week ago I planned to rapid fire publish about a dozen updates in a day or so after taking a month off of the blog while Sarah was in Evansville. That was before the rains came, which I’ll get to, but I finally got a break today to get some work done on catching back up. This post takes us way back to March 19, the day Sarah came to town, but also the day Washington High School in Washington, Ind. started their run to an eventual Class 3A State Title.
I picked Sarah up from the airport that day and after a quick swing by the apartment to let her freshen up from her full day of travel from Buenos Aires to Evansville, we hit the road across the state to Seymour, Ind. where the semi-finals of the 2A and 3A games where being played. I had to cover both Forest Park High School and Washington as they continued their runs. Forest Park, a 2A school, was undefeated on the season and had even beaten Washington during the regular season, but weren’t expected to beat Park Tudor High School. Washington on the other hand, lead by eventual Indiana Mr. Basketball winner, Cody Zeller (who is also an Indiana University commit), were heavy favorites to beat Batesville High School. The evening went just as it was planned too.
Forest Park hung around for a little while, but couldn’t keep up as the first half came to a close and once Park Tudor stretched their lead to double digits, they never looked back. Washington’s win came in a similar fashion, though the game was close for much of the first half, the Hatchets ran away in the second half and out-hustled Batesville all the way to a win. I didn’t get a chance to cover the team at States, we went with AP. I had to stay back to cover something that must not have been all that thrilling because I can’t remember what it was, but like his brother Tyler Zeller (UNC forward), Cody led Washington to a state title in Indianapolis.
Washington's Kurtis Anthony corral's a loose ball as Batesville's Chris Giesting (40) dives for it in the second half of Washington's 66-48 win on Saturday, March 19, 2011 in their semi-state basketball game held at Seymour High School in Seymour, Ind.
War Games
It’s been over a month since I last posted, and that’s because for the last four weeks my wonderful girlfriend of over four and a half years had been visiting. Sarah left in February for Argentina to spend a month exploring with her sister and then arrived on March 19th to spend another exploring Evansville with me. There was far less to explore here, but I like to think I made the trip somewhat worthwhile. Working all day five days a week and leaving Sarah at home to do just about nothing left me little time to devote to the blog as the last thing I wanted to do was have her sit around while I spent time on here. Sarah left for home on Saturday and as my life returns to it’s boring routine without her here everyday, it’s time I showed my blog and my readers (however few you may be) some love. While I didn’t have the most exciting assignments while Sarah was here, going back and looking over the last month, I actually did have some assignments worth writing about and the following posts will give you all what I can remember from each. So, without further ado…
Back on March 16th, I went up to the Evansville F.O.P.A.L camp to shoot the University of Evansville and University of Southern Indiana ROTC groups participating in a military tactical simulation exercise. The cadets each received specially made paintball guns that were made to replicate M-16 rifles and broken in to two squads, Alpha and Bravo. The ROTC commanders from the schools created a battle plan for each group. All the cadets knew was they were to head to opposite ends of the wooded camp and after a certain amount of time for the two groups to get into position, they were to seek each other out and engage. What they didn’t know was the commanders had planned for things to go differently than either expected. One squad had orders to seek out the other at a certain position and attack in a certain manner, but what they didn’t know was that the commanders had instructed the other squad to set up an ambush.
I can’t remember which was which at this point, but for the sake of the story we’ll say Alpha was the ambushers and Bravo was getting ambushed.
As Bravo squad made their way through the bush, the reporters and I hung back with the commanders who had a position set up to view the eventual combat. What they didn’t plan for was Bravo squad’s leaders having the eyes of a hawk. From at least 300 yards away and through thick brush and trees the Bravo squad commanders spotted the Alpha squad troops setting up their ambush positions. They thought on their feet and circled around to attack them from the side, something the commanders applauded, but readily admitted they hadn’t planned for. The biggest problem now was that were were dead in the middle of the battlefield.
We hung back as Bravo moved in, but they were too loud. The Alpha squad heard their hurried movement through the bushes and before we knew it paintballs were flying everywhere. The commanders assured us we could move up closer to get better stills and video, but they hadn’t accounted for a few Alpha squad cadets that were waiting to pick off stragglers from Bravo. As we went to hide behind a few trees closer to the action, we found paintballs flying past us from hidden cadets. One cadet standing no more than two feet from me looked over to say something and took a paintball directly to the face. A few seconds later the tree I was behind took a peppering of five to six paintballs as a Bravo cadet tried to make his way over the trail and went down in the middle of it.
When all was said and done all but two cadets suffered kill shots and the two that didn’t had still been hit. In the heat of the moment many found themselves standing with no cover and firing away. Their battle plans went out the window and it looked a lot more like live action Call of Duty. The commanders critiqued their efforts afterward when they all gathered back at the main camp building, but a few took the media aside to have a little fun. With a ton of bulk paintball ammo left, and nothing to do with it, we had the fun of firing off the remaining rounds into the woods while cadets were critiqued. All and all, one of the more fun assignments I’ve ever had.
Here’sa link to the story with more photos as it ran on the 21st: ROTC members train at FOP camp for live combat
An ROTC cadet sets up in a parameter position as part of a joint University of Evansville and University of Southern Indiana ROTC training exercise at the Evansville F.O.P.A.L. camp on Wednesday afternoon, March 16, 2011.
