I really really really am excited to see a lot of my former classmates, and more importantly friends, doing great work at great publications. My old roommate and the man who took over for me at the Spartan Daily, Stefan Armijo, is doing an internship I believe with Wired.com. I know he is having a great time and learning a ton. Check out his recent slideshow on IndyCar racing.
It's been a while since I have been blogging, school and work are catching up with me. But I had an interesting assignment not this week for the Spartan Daily. I was assigned to take portraits of two photographers, Valerie Mendoza and Kirkman Amyx. Mendoza is an instructor at SJSU, while Amyx is a graduate student.
I am not always sure what to expect when I am shooting a photo of a fellow photographer. Sometimes I expect them to be picky and kind of like a backseat photographer. But both of my subjects were nothing of the sort. Mendoza didn't really have time, as we had about five minutes to shoot and Amyx was a patient man as we tried to find some kind of shot.
For Mendoza I went in with one SB-24 and bounced it off the wall to the left. I figured since we were not going to have much time I needed to shoot in her office. I wanted soft lighting from the side. Couldn't get any simpler. She was a natural at posing, didn't really have to tell her to do much. The thing I love about her photo, is how she cocks her head slightly at a similar angle to the crow in the photo above her. The Daily ran a different photo than this one.
Amyx's photo, which is different than what ran in the Daily, came right at the end. We had originally planned to shoot in small studio that was displaying his work, but didn't have a way into it. So we went to Plan B, which was to figure out a Plan C. We took several shots in a really ugly room before I took an idea from Strobist Guru David Hobby. Amyx does a lot of his work digitally, inclding the piece behind him in which he compiled 10,000 rolls of dice. I pretty much just used one flash to light his print in the back and computer light to light his face and the light on my cell phone for the front of his computer.
This assignment was all about being resourceful, with limited amount of time.
After spending 4 hours on a Friday morning covering the active shooter training for the Spartan Daily, this is the final product. I was totally stoked to get a bulk of the front page, even though it was a sub par photo. It doesn't upset me or anything like that. I guess it was put to good use in the end.
And who eats in the bathroom?
