Photography Archives - Page 20 of 30 - Marco Garcia Photography

A famous camera

I sadly have decided to part with my work horse Canon 1D Mark II as technology has moved quickly and need the larger, faster, and overall better Mark IV model. I placed the add on craigslist the other night and yet to have anyone with any real interest make an offer. I did get the ridiculously fictitious email from some kid in a third world internet cafe asking me if I’d sell my item (they got no clue what I’m selling) to them at a higher price and if I would ship it to their cousin who is attending Oxford. Uh huh…ok.

Funny enough, I spied myself on TV the other night during a news spot on a Japanese real estate developer here in Honolulu filmed about three years ago in Kahala. I was taking pictures with that trusty camera I’m hoping to sell.

The photos were shot for the Associated Press and they went around the nation. The New York Times ran the story on their metro section. That was a big story because this rich Japanese guy was going to let several homeless people of Hawaiian decent live in his multimillion dollar mansions in one of the riches parts of Honolulu. Needless to say he wasn’t too popular with the neighbors.

You can see the story here from the Times.

A bit of reminiscing about days past and time with that camera. It got me through a big portion of my growing career. How that camera got me through tough times and the easy days indeed. The camera has taken pictures of just about anything you can imagine. It has photographed Tiger Woods, Dwane “Dog” the Bounty Hunter, Felicity Huffman, actors on Lost, University of Hawaii football, Kobe Bryant and Michelle Wie. Its shot food, beaches, and girls. Its done everything.

One of the more pungent moments was the depression of Banda Aceh.

The shot above is of a group of Rescue workers organized in Mexico called TOPOS. I met and followed the group around Banda Aceh as they pulled bodies from the remains of that destroyed city. It poured like only a tropical city can at that decisive moment when they carried a body out of a decimated building. The camera rattled away. What a moment. What a time. It was really my loss of innocence at that point. More on the tsunami in the future.

As I researched through my photos for this blog I came across this photo of myself from 2005 while I stood in the mess of Banda Aceh’s destruction…my trusty camera at my side.

Why part with it? Well…its just a tool. Its really how you use it. Cliche, yes but absolutely true. I’ve gone through so many cameras in my relatively short professional career. Yet to depart with this one is like parting with the memories of said picture of me.
Eh…its just a camera.

You wanna buy it? Its a bit famous.

Here is the ad on craigslist.org

the back of a bank envelope…

Last week I was commissioned to shoot a job for a TV client of the participants on a reality show.

I was asked to set up a white seamless background as they wanted a studio shot stuffed into a hotel room as well as shoot a group of about 25 people. Standard stuff to me but as I was chatting with the client, I doodled my lighting set up and different variations of my key lights and options.

I can’t publish the images as they are under an embargo but will publish an unflattering image of Tammy, my assistant for the day. Funny how a scribble of lines can lead to a hotel shoot turned into Pier 59!

By the way, Tammy was not making funny faces for the camera, the client wanted images showing a gamut of emotions.

Friday Night Lights, no wait…Birds? Ho, brah…

Audrey and I went to Kauai a few weeks to work on a story about Friday night football games and how an endangered species of birds has threatened a traditional and community way of life.

The story appeared all over the country and you can read it here or from here. The New York Times ran it on their web page but you have to sign up to see the story.

I won’t repeat what Audrey wrote about but I will mention something she did not. In my opinion, much of the community in Kauai seems split on how outsiders, namely mainlanders and haoles, have come to the Islands pushing their (righteous) ideas of what is good for the state with little regard to what the citizens of the state want. Yet, we surely can’t allow the peoples to just get whatever the majority wants. The birds are endangered and do need some protection from us; however, how far will environmentalist go to ensure we protect the earth from ourselves? Many would advocate such radical policies that we’d go back to the stone age so there has to be a balance. All in all, the County dropped the ball on not placing proper lighting into the existing stadium (the County can’t get a guarantee that the lights will be a solid solution so why spend the money on what might not work–and still be responsible for dead birds) but the county disregarded the feelings of the community.

You sometimes have to wonder who has the smaller brains, us or the birds…

VOTE.

Twins

This is a small post on twins…no nothing about real twins (but on my photo, I can’t be too sure but nevertheless…) its about two girls I found in Shinjuku. Two girls with equally obnoxious bows in their hair. I mean obnoxious…Incarnate Word HS obnoxious. Yet it was fashion…Doublemint Gum fashion yet they are probably not.

What do I know? It was hot. It was a busy day around Shinjuku. Its a moment.

Senator Inouye

A few weeks ago, the Washington Post commissioned me last month to spend the day with US Senator Daniel Inouye from Hawaii.

My memories of the Senator stretch back to eight grade when I first saw this one armed man on TV during the Iran-Contra hearing where he chaired a special committee investigating Reagan’s alleged affair in selling weapons to Iran via Israel to help fund the Contras in Nicaragua. From Wikipedia…Inouye stated the following:

“There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.

How true his statement…

The Post was writing a profile piece on the aging Senator and writer Jason Horowitz and I followed Inouye for day in September. Much of the work was fairly generic…the Senator at a military ceremony, at a ground breaking…etc…nothing earth shattering. But most intriguing was a moment granted to us with the Senator and his wife at their condo in Waikiki.

The immaculately clean (and sterile) condo faced Waikiki with Diamond head towering in the background. I had humped along a sent of lights in the event I were to do a formal portrait but time dictated I needed to snap something very quick and catch a moment instead of formality. In most these cases, writers, especially staff writers, are prone to long interviews giving photographers very little time to take pictures. We only had an hour before the Senator was scheduled to attend a ground breaking ceremony for a project he helped fund federally.

I kept my cool with time as Jason engaged the Senator and got an earful of political history as Inouye “talked story” with us. Being the master politician he is, the Senator side-stepped, hopped, dodged, ignored…whatever you want to call it…any hard questions Jason threw at him. It was a graduate level course in politicking!

When I finally got a chance to capture the Senator’s likenesss, we walked out onto his balcony and I shot him overlooking his kingdom and the blue ocean beyond. Many of my shots I found to canned, rather, just to typical of what the Senator wanted me to see. Forced yet genuine smiles, an innocent man who accidentally had things go his way. I wasn’t too happy but I knew I got what he was going to give me. He knew how to interview and he knew how to control his image. His press aide was pushing us to wrap up and get out of the house. Oddly enough, the Senator, feeling good about the great banter between us and him, decided he wanted to show us around the condo. As the Senator’s wife showed Jason the bedroom, the Senator walked over the piano which sat as an art piece in the corner of his white carpeted condo.

He then sat down and was joking and laughing with us about only having one arm and owing a piano. He tragically lost his arm while fighting the Germans in WWII. He was telling us how back in rehab, the hospital would not let him out until he had mastered the use of his left arm. One of the drills was playing the piano. He masterfully plunked down on the ivory keys to play several songs including the melancholy Danny Boy. He laughed and giggled as a kid as he played tunes from his youth all the while his wife, Irene Hirano, glowed besides him. The eastern facing windows gently filled the room giving me the perfect setting.

Moments like this don’t happen often and I had fired off probably 80 to 100 shots before time was up. As I look back at the shots, I realize how no matter what I had planned with lighting, etc… for my portrait, the best images are never planned. Decisively, as Cartier Bresson might say, I captured a brief moment of a long life.

You can read the article here.