Tuesday, May 20, 2008

"That's a three hour shoe"

Once I got home for a little while I shot some baseball and in the midst of it, I learned what a 'three hour shoe' was.  For the Rockies magazine this coming month, they're doing a feature on Samantha Castilla, the wife of former Blake Street Bomber, Vinny Castilla.  
About a year ago, she opened a shoe store in Cherry Creek that sells some wonderfully beautiful shoes from top notch designers.  My assignment was to shoot a portrait of her with Vinny as well as a nice portrait of her.
Both she and Vinny were so easy to work with and extremely nice.  If you're in the neighborhood, drop by and see her little nook on St. Paul.  The shoes are truly works of art.
I mentioned to her that, to this day, I can't understand how women wear shoes with such high heels.  Her response?  "Well, that shoe you're holding there is a three hour shoe."
Ahhh, the female logic...  Fellas, I tried.  We'll never get to the bottom of a women's obsession with shoes, but when I saw these, it did allow me to understand a little more since they're gorgeous.  Additionally, it's a warm shop with some stylish accessories other than shoes.
It was a great shoot since it was something different than the norm and the I was really happy with the photos.
Next up, the Division II National Championships Festival in Houston, TX.
Enjoy the pics...
-TSB2

As you can see, she didn't exactly make life tough for me since she's a very elegant lady...
And good ol' Vinny.  One of the nicest athletes Denver has seen...

Friday, May 16, 2008

Oh, how I love the desert!

Shortly after the Qwest shoot with Tony Peña in Phoenix I returned to Arizona for the Mt. West Conference Men's Golf tournament. Despite my heavy travel schedule, I was actually looking forward to this assignment since the Mt. West puts me up in a nice place and the days aren't too long compared to some of the other assignments that I shoot for them (Baseball, Basketball and Outdoor Track).
I arrived in Tucson on the first day of the tournament without a hitch. My flight left Denver on time (DIA is the best airport on the planet) and once I arrived, I was able to get my super sweet rental classic Chevy Impala from my trusty friends at Thrifty and was on my way. I swear, I think I get an Impala about two-thirds of the time when I am on the road. I will admit, the Impala has gotten better over the years and the ol' 'Sir, we have an Impala for you' has less sting now than it did 4 years ago. Still though, I try to weasel my way into a convertible, or just about anything BUT an Impala whenever I step up to the rental car counter. No Mustangs though...they're just trouble for me. Just ask the Texas Highway Patrol, they know me well.
Anywhoooo, I got to the hotel and checked in and to my surprise, God (or the suits at Omni) actually listened to my prayers from the previous year! The Omni Tucson National Golf Resort and Spa last year was nice, but in dire need of a makeover. When I checked in this year, I was told I would be staying in a brand new room. Excellent! AND, it had a nice balcony that overlooked the driving range and golf course! HOORAY!!! (accompanied by a backflip, of course!) When I got to my room, I realized it was the exact same room from the year before, but much nicer, but still with some of the old furniture...I guess you can't get EVERYTHING your way. However, it was such a drastic improvement that I was totally content with my accommodations. Plus, the pool was totally redesigned and I spent some time that afternoon reading my book next to it before heading to dinner with the Mt. West folks that evening.
This year, they started the tee times at 7am. Let's stop and think about this for a second. At first glance, I thought this was going to be awful. Getting up at 5:45 or so to get ready only to go out and turn into a french fry for the day didn't look so sweet on paper. But after the first day wrapped up around 3pm, I quickly transmitted my photos, checked my e-mail and attended to some biz, then headed for the pool with a beer in hand and a smile on my face! I chilled out there for a couple hours before cleaning up and heading to dinner again with Javan and Carrie, two of my favorites from the MWC.
The second day wasn't much different, just with less pool time since there was an awards ceremony following the tournament. CSU came from nowhere to win the MWC title and represented Colorado, full force. I hope you like the images that I've posted below. They're just a random selection that I liked. It's hard to shoot golf on a desert course since there isn't a lot of color, but I managed to find the little there is and incorporate it into my images.
Lastly, one little tidbit of advice....NEVER EVER, AND I MEAN EVER, FLY US AIRWAYS. If you want the story, call me...I could write an entry longer than War and Peace about how they screwed up my flight home, but I'll refrain. Hopefully one of these days United will use their peanut sized brain and cut ties with them.
Sorry to end it on a sour note with my US Airways mini-rant, but consider yourself warned and please do enjoy the pics!

TB

I liked the layering that I got in this photo with the trees....
I always try to shoot through trees and bushes when shooting golf.  It provides a nice layering effect, plus an intimate feeling like you're spying on the golfer after they've hit a crummy shot...
The early morning tee times brought with them long, cross-fairway shadows on the holes that ran North-South...
There wasn't much color on this desert course, but these yellow trees were in a few places and really lent themselves to making nice pictures...
He must be drawing a smiley face on his ball...
Backgrounds, backgrounds, backgrounds...the key to good golf photos is clean backgrounds...
You can always get good emotions and reactions in golf on close putts...


Tuesday, May 6, 2008

All Day, Every Day - Part 2 of 2

Once the Frozen Four ended, I had about three days to catch my breath, then headed out of town again. Since I can't seem to get enough of Arizona, I took another trip down there for a shoot with Qwest, this time featuring Tony Peña of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Since I have already been on a few of these shoots and know the drill, I was asked to be the photographer on this one and my colleague Brett was my assistant.
We arrived at the stadium at about 2pm on Wednesday the 16th for the initial walk through. Since we wanted some of the scenes to look as if they were shot at Tony's house, we took a look at a couple of different suites at the stadium to find the right one for the shoot.  The first one was fairly bland and didn't lend itself to looking like a living room.  It would have been very difficult to make it NOT look like it was a suite in a stadium.  So, we checked out another suite, directly beneath the first and WOW!  What a difference!  As you'll see from the pics below, it was exactly what we needed for the shoot!  Once we finished the walk through, we headed out for a drink and dinner at Kincaids, a steakhouse near our hotel.
Dinner at a steakhouse is always awesome, but it's even more awesome when it's paid for BY THE DIAMONDBACKS!  Apparently, there was a little misunderstanding/miscommunication when Qwest was reserving the spaces at the stadium for the shoot and it was the D-Backs fault, so they felt obligated to pay for our dinner!  Woohoo!  The conversation was great all night and the entire crew felt great about the shoot the next day, despite a couple of us being under the weather (I had a cold, Dave the art director was getting over one).
The shoot on Thursday went really well, despite a couple of unexpected miscues such as 1) Tony's english not being nearly as strong as the ad company thought/hoped and 2) him showing up in mesh shorts, when we needed him in jeans.  The result of this second little mishap was that we basically threw out the plan for the first half of the shoot up in the suite.  We had a couple people run to get him some jeans which took about an hour.  Now, I've been on enough of these shoots, large and small, to know that just about every time you can pretty much count on tossing what you deem to be vital parts of the plan of attack.  You just have to wing it and make it look good.  The one benefit of these experiences is that you get good at thinking on your feet and can react quickly to little fires and other unexpected hurdles.
Anyway, we finished the stuff up in the suite and broke for lunch, then had Tony put on a uniform so we could get some action photos of him and some other stuff down on the field and in the dugout.
One of the lighting techniques that I have learned while going on these shoots is using large reflectors to capture nicely lit action photos of the athletes we shoot.  By using ambient light, modified with reflectors (Yes, I'm about to photo-geek out on you) we're able to keep our shutter speeds high, thus stopping the action.  At the same time, the reflectors provide a nice accent to the standard action photo, in this case adding some nice fill light under Tony's hat in the pitching photo below.  I've also included a photo of the video guys and Brett aiming their reflectors at Tony so you can see how we're making some of these photos.  Without the light under his hat, his face would be in the shadows from the brim of his hat and you wouldn't be able to see very many of his facial features.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the pics.  They're not the most exciting pics by any means, but I think they're technically done very well and Brett and I put together a nice group of images for our client.
Next up, the Mt. West Men's Golf Championship in....YOU GUESSED IT!.....ARIZONA!!!
Enjoy the pics!

-TSB2

You should have seen the first suite we looked at for the shoot.  Compared to this, it was horrible!
The nice thing about this was that we actually had a live phone and he was able to call some friends.  So we got some pretty genuine smiles from him.  I wonder what they talked about...it was all in Spanish, so I didn't understand a lick of it.  He probably said something like 'These suits are paying me so much cash to just sit here and smile while I talk to you!  How sweet is that?'
Okay, so here is the pitching photo.  Take a look at the nice light on his face...
Here's how we got that nice light under his face.  That's Brett on the left with the big white reflector...
I told Brett I was disappointed he didn't have some grapes to feed him...
This was the last scene we shot in the dugout...I was so happy to be shooting this since it meant we were done.  It was a great shoot, but it was definitely long.