Category: Oahu

wain wumbling reather!

wain wumbling reather!

Around 9pm or so last night, lighting flashed across the sky like an AC/DC song.  A few seconds later, a low in the distance rumble rattled the windows.  It really felt like a bomb.  BOOM.  I saw my lanai windows shake and rattle.  It was awesome.  I figured I’d pull the camera out and snap a few images.

I had a hard time with the lighting as it seemed the storm was actually right above our building or rather, just close enough but not in my camera view.  I can’t go out to the street because there are way too many high rises around me and a late night trip up to Tantalus for a view risks myself and cameras being subjected to a tax by the locals in the name of reparations.  Besides, it was raining.  So, with my limited views, I set up my camera and walked away.  I set up in a few locations in our condo finding the lanai shot was the most graphic and luckily I got a strike.

By far, my favorite shot was from last night through a closed window in the bedroom.  The rain was pouring through so I shut the window but as I did, my camera fired off a frame and I caught the rain drops and purpled lighting sky.  I like this shot.  It doesn’t have a strike but for me, it has all the elements of living in a Honolulu tower at night…during a storm.

NOTE:  I am no longer going to allow discussions or comments on my blog.  In the last year, I’ve gotten over three thousand spam emails offering me everything from viagra, porn, gambling, and dating a nice girl from China.  Its too much to bear, rather wade through just to see what you got to say.  From now on, keep it to yourself.

Lining up just right.

Lining up just right.

In the last few weeks, my cameras have covered everything from hydrogen cars, tennis action, a financial planner at the beach on the Big Island, whale researchers on a boat in Maui, and a party at Chai’s Bistro.  I’m still patiently waiting for the sun to appear as I have another job in which I need to shoot a house and attempt to have some blue skies in the shot.  My head is still spinning with all the variety of images that were flowing out of my computer.  Of course, I can’t publish and of the images I’ve shot (except for some tennis) as a majority of is for future publication.

Oh and I also shot makeovers given at a big name make up shop.

One of the more interesting shots I made last week was of a tennis player at UH serving.  Jamm Aquino told me of the spot to spot a certain type of shot and I did so.  Clean shots and background (dare I say ground) made this a cool moment.

Its not often I shoot sports.  The time, effort, and hassle is sometimes too much to bear for my impatient self.  I really loved it in college as I shot loads of UT football, basketball, swimming, and the likes.  It was great fun.  Now…eh.

But those times when everything just lines up perfectly, a good shot is worth that small paycheck at the end of the day.

 

 

Mix Magazine

Mix Magazine

Ah…its so nice to see your name in all caps when it has Photography By preceding it…I’m not being arrogant but I swell with pride after seeing my work published in a travel piece.  Its not some of my better work but its work…made from nothing.  Well, not exactly but it was made from experience and knowing how to push when nothing is easily seen.

I got commissioned a few months ago by the Oregonian’s Mix Magazine to shoot a travel piece on the best places to dine on Oahu.  I shot (and ate) everything from locally made Ono Pops (Mexican style paletas) to fresh opelu (mackerel) at He’eia Kea Pier General Store & Deli.  Its not all about eating mind you as I have to spend an inordinate amount of time setting up a plate (well…thats mostly the Chef’s call) but having to direct a chef to create a food masterpiece on the fly, sometimes surrounded by styrofoam, in bad lighting, and customers all around.  Its can be pretty tough.

The food shots are very editorial as they are all natural light with fill bumped in from a white bounce or even white table cloths if a proper bounce isn’t around.  But mostly the reason I can somewhat capture food well is from all the years of assisting NYC food photographers back in the day.  Mostly the training was shooting in studios with top food stylists, fake ingredients, big lights, and sometimes big ovens.  You know…the mash potato ice cream or the cooked-with-a-blowtorch-steak.  I remember working on a Pizza Hut job where we shot dozens of pies pulled out of an industrial oven in the City’s West Side.  Yong Yoo, the then photo assistant extroadinare, and I had screaming fight because the neurotic photographer made us load what seem to be his entire studio into a cube truck, unload on location, and reload the truck in the pouring rain.  At the end of the day, we fought about how to roll some immensely large and heavy studio camera stand that was taller than the cube truck up a ramp as the rain poured all around.  Ah how I miss those days yet would never go back.

There is something very important about being a padawan (apprentice) in the big cities.  I never could have been successful here, especially here in Hawaii without some type of grueling informal training I had in those dreary New York years.  Every conceivable subject that can be photographed I probably helped put a studio light on it, or at least rolled a studio stand close to it.  Everything from Revlon lipstick, to beer bottles, to celebs and rock stars to rain sets, to shooting in the bloody rain.

(How on earth I go from chatting about Mix Mag to get on this subject…I will never know.  Stream of … uhhh…what were we chatting about?)

So in the above picture, the author dances around a rigged rain set with a Fender Strat guitar.  My memory dims on what job we were working on other than it had a Korean model in tight shiny pants that fit her very well.  I remembered I had this piece of chrome somewhere and fumbled through a bunch of old film files finding it next to a bunch of negatives of Trisha, a model who’s sister I knew from Texas.  Funny how I didn’t remember those pictures and funny how I forgot about this chrome.  Not wanting to start up a proper film scanner, I masking taped the chrome to my Mac, opened up a white doc in photoshop and made a few exposure on a make shift light table.  Not the sharpest but a good illustration, nonetheless.  The chrome was lifted from the studio where we worked that week but I just couldn’t resist?  The chrome came from the initial test rolls so no one would have missed it.  Besides, its me dancing in the purple rain!

Back into the Mix.  All those years of New York drudgery made me into the so called photographer I am.  Its not the greatest career but its a great living here in Hawaii.  I get a job like this Mix Mag job and use all my skills from my shooting years all the while reaching back to those “wet behind the ears” days when I held someones camera.

Literally, I was probably wet.  It always seemed like I was…

No Still Photography Allowed

No Still Photography Allowed

If that were only the truth!

I just finished my nine day odyssey at the 2012 Sony Open in Hawaii.  I’ve had my complete fill of sun, pollen, sunburn, Old Spice, pesticides, idiot volunteers, and sensitive golfers.  Oh how we marched and humped the flat yet hot course out at the Waialae Country Club chasing Ryo-kun and any golfer who dared to stray into first place for those few 100 yards or so.

I’ve shot the Sony Open in Honolulu for the last several years and it never seems to get any easier with all the running around and struggles of the course and not to mention the hours of being out in the sun.  Every year at the end of the tourney, I get what I call a sun cold…better yet, a golf cold.  I have my face down in the grass for multiple days inhaling all the pollen and pesticides I could ever want in a long drawn out week.  Come wednesday, I get sneezy, congested, and irritable.  The irritability just might be my irascible personality run afoul by the incomprehensible logic of volunteer marshals, the errant golf balls from the Pro Amers, and a weighty 400mm F2.8 lens digging into my neck muscles.

 Golf is one of those sports that just begs to ask why anyone would pursue such a unreasonable game where a putt depends on whether the grains of the grass are facing towards or away from you, or whether your ball will slice or hook on the based on how your hands grip the driver.  How ironic that basketball players get booed and screamed at when doing free throws from the line but golfers can’t take even a bright shirt if its in their eye sight.  A gentleman’s sport, indeed!  Especially when you hear certain golfers swearing like sailors when a ball goes off course or a putt doesn’t fall just like they envisioned.

Regardless of my own prejudice of the game (note…I’ve been know to roam the cloudy cool hills of the Pali golf course so I’ve no real complaints) I truly enjoy shooting the sport.  The anticipation, the surprises, the reactions are all so great.  Its completely boring most of the time as so many of the players possess that calmness the sport demands which doesn’t allow them to showboat or hoot and holler when sinking an eagle.  Sure you get the fist pump but you’ll never get the true “jube” shots you’ll find in other sports.

Whether its pure madness to follow the Japanese sensation Ryo Ishikawa, who I truly think looks like an real life anime character, I’ll never truly understand.  I think its the pack mentality of rushing around with a dozen or so photographers from the US and Japan, all struggling to capture that unique image of the golfer in pure rapture or total disbelief in his ability to make a two inch ball land in just the right spot.  Even though you can’t communicate with each other due to a language barrier or a sensitive golf caddie, we share the same sweat, pain, sunburns, and struggle.  One big unified mass chasing a bunch of dopes chasing a little white ball.

I do have a favorite shot of the week and its of this guy David Hearn hitting out of the bunker on the ninth green.  I just found his expression of fear, worry, hope, and more fear more appealing than most of the stuff I shot that day.  He fizzled at the end of the tournament allowing moustached Johnson Wagner to win all the marbles.  Do I dare say Mr. Wagner’s prowlness is due to his hairy lip?  We’ll never know.