Flying

I love flying. The smaller the plane the better. There’s something exhilarating and scary as hell about floating around in a two-seated lawnmower with wings, feeling every bump in the air. Did I also say I love the pilots? I love the pilots. They’re the best.

I was fortunate to get to shoot aerials twice last week. I was also fortunate that after the assignment the pilot, Chuck, obliged my request to waste his time and circle around the shore for a while to see what was going on. A few of those photos are below. People look great from 1000 feet.

All Photographs Copyright (c) 2008 Alex Boerner All Rights Reserved

George Steinmetz has some incredible aerials, as does Vincent Laforet who says “You see the world from a different perspective, and you start to appreciate a different dimension,” in an OLD interview on Rob Galbraith’s site. 

I’m hoping to get to a chance to look through Richard Misrach’s latest LARGE book, On The Beach in which he uses an aerial perspective to explore our relationship with the environment (discussed here).

In it, Misrach writes:

The photographs that appear in On the Beach were made between January 2002 and November 2005. I was drawn to the frailty and grace of the human figure in the landscape. My thinking about this work was influenced by the events of 9/11, particularly by the images of individuals and couples falling from the World Trade Towers, as well as by the 1950’s Cold War novel and film, On The Beach. Paradise has become an uneasy dwelling place; the sublime sea frames our vulnerability, the precarious nature of life itself.

A steal at $375 in the packaging. ugh.

One Night With A Bastard

About a year ago I got to spend the evening on a road trip with Fancy Bastard, a Minneapolis based band of which my brother, Mitch, happens to be a part. They played at a place called the L-Cove in Minnesota City, MN.

It was certainly a small bar in a small town, and we weren’t sure whether the band would be welcomed by the locals or not, but the show went on.

The first half of the show was pretty subdued. People were still trying to have their own conversations over the music. But between sets the whole joint loosened up and it turned out to be what the owner called “the best night we’ve had since I’ve owned the place.”

All Photographs Copyright (c) 2007 Alex Boerner All Rights Reserved

 

All-Area: Baseball

This is the final photo of the high school all-area spring season portraits. It features pitcher T.J. Mullins, a graduating senior at John Carroll High School in Fort Pierce, FL.

It was cross-lit with two beauty dishes, the one on the right being a stop hotter than the left. There was also a Nikon SB-800dx in his glove connected to a Pocket Wizard transceiver to light his face, and a damn fine south Florida sunset.

Choice, MN

Copyright (c) 2007 Alex Boerner All Rights Reserved

Interrupted phone call – Melbourne, FL

Copyright (c) 2007 Alex Boerner All Rights Reserved

The 300 Challenge

I used to work Sundays at the newspaper, which were typically pretty slow. We’d usually get one assignment, MAYBE two, sometimes none. The nice thing about those light weekend days is that we could actually spend a good amount of time at one assignment. On most Sundays I’d try to change things up a bit by taking a camera with a 300 mm lens and shooting an assignment only with that setup. For me it was a good way to be forced to look at things a little differently, and sometimes it would help shake me out of one of those ruts where I felt like every photo I shot looked the same.

I haven’t done that in a while, but I tried it again at a graduation ceremony last night. We had an early deadline, but we only needed one photo so I figured it was alright to give it another shot.

All-Area: Track

I’ve been shooting all the all-area athlete portraits lately (one more to go). It’s been good practice. Most of the time I’m not completely happy with the results, and I find some little things I wish I had done differently, but I like how this portrait of Lincoln Park Academy hurdler Andrew Robinson turned out. It was done with two 22-inch beauty dishes, one up high and one down low. 1/200 sec at F16, ISO 50.