Tag: Oahu

Not worthy for the wire…

Not worthy for the wire...

A day of shooting election primaries for a wire news agency isn’t loads of fun.  It usually consists of chasing the fake smiles of hopeful candidates and shooting their manicured smiles and prom queen waves.   You drive all around town to different locations where the politicians are doing their last minute sign waving trying to capture that one undecided voter passing by.

So last week’s coverage of the primaries gave me some of the better pictures I’ve taken in some time.  As I drove down Beretania St. on the way to see Ed Case waving down on the Pali Hwy, the traffic slowed down a bit as we neared the Capital.  Several police cars with flashing lights caused just enough rubbernecking to make traffic just that more irritating but I noticed something slightly out of place.

She’s naked!

So I weaved my way through the rubberneckers spinning around the Capital to rush up on the small group of Occupy Wall Streeters turn Honolulu and found a porty protestor, a cop, and a leggy blonde with plenty of tattoos and just enough tape to cover the naughty bits.  With these type of elements forming all around, its hard not to get a great photo.  Her sign of getting screwed bu the politicians works very well.

I had just enough time to capture them waving their signs and cops around them to capture a few pictures and move on. So I hopped back in the car and was driving past the protest when I noticed the large lady in the wheelchair rolling down the cross walk nearing the Occupiers.  I only had my 24-70mm lens at hand and the light was green so I had no other option but to shoot and just crop.  Little did I know I captured a great moment.

So I get back and transmit my take to NYC and sadly found the editors didn’t have the courage to move the “graphic content” or so they say.  They can run headless bodies, blood and guts, and whatnot but no boobs.  Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

A note on pictures…sometimes you can’t plan it.  It just happens.  Looking through past great photographs, it seems most photographers didn’t plan to be at that place at that moment.  Things just unraveled in front of them.  This New York Times piece has a POWERFUL image of a Tibetan protestor who set himself on fire protesting Ju Jintao’s visit to India this year.  Its a powerful moment that could have never been planned.  I can only imagine the photographer, Manish Swarup, never would have thought he have a shot like this.  There was no time to think about composure, f stops, what type of lens is on the camera, filters, iso, etc…nothing.  Absolutely no time to think as its just a reaction. And sometimes those reactions are things that happen out of no where.

My picture is not award winning  nor is it life changing for me and I shouldn’t event mention my name in the same breath as Manish Swarp, but its those moments that are unplanned and just happen.

Funny, AP ran the image of the self-immolation…but they didn’t run mine.

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…

12-7:9-11

12-7:9-11

A Japanese bullet hole remains in a glass windowpane in a Hickam AFB hangar.  The glass has never been changed…a reminder of the Japanese attack on Oahu in 1941.

As the world remembers 9/11 on the tenth anniversary, Hawaiian dreams drift me back towards Pearl Harbor, December 7th.  The surprise roar of motors buzzing over the harbor.  Torpedoes like hornet stingers piercing steel and flesh. Explosions rocking hillside homes around the base.  Smoke filling the skies.  A world changed.

Then silence.  The sound of fire and smoke all around.  Black, billowing clouds of burning oil, flesh and steel.

We were not in NYC when the planes attacked.  In Miami, vacationing of all things.  We argued about the dates.  i wanted to go the following week.  We thought nothing of it as South Beach beckoned us to its sandy embrace that mere mortal Tuesday.  We awoke in a cheap South Beach hotel.  Never figured what laid ahead in the world.  We thought a tourist plane slammed into WTC.  “Eh… fuhgeddaboutit!”  Swam in the green sea.  Rolled in the golden sand.  Though about the afternoon flight back to Newark.  The struggle back on the Path.  The struggle to get back home.  Never thinking much of what would remain.

Once we got back to Manhattan.  We heard silence.  Heard the smoke and ash around the Trade Center.  No honking.  No rudeness.  Not really anything.  Just shock.  What we once romantically looked upon from Exchange Place…was gone.

The hardest part of living in post destruction New York was the reminders all around.  I don’t really remember any pictures I have from that time.  I didn’t rather i tried not to take any.  I just didn’t.  I don’t know why. It just wasn’t in me.  I probably have film somewhere but its something I just don’t really think about or want to see.

……….

Small reminders dot Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.  If you look close enough you can see scars and wounds around the base.   In this one particular hangar, bullet holes glare like angry eyes from the past entwined in the wire-meshed windows of the hangar, it’s crooked eyelashes splitting from the brow.  Blue faced specters stuck in a Mondrianesque monotone malaise.

At first you don’t notice.  You wonder, why don’t they replace those busted windows.  Then you realize what those cracks in the glass are…

Pearl Harbor served as a lesson in history.  Why we didn’t learn enough is a question we should ask ourselves.  Yet past conspiracy theories suggest Roosevelt invited the attack to force the hands of the isolationist into war with Japan.  Many modern conspiracy theories point to a new world order after the Towers collapsed.  Some suggest they were demolished on purpose.  70 years after the attack on Pearl and we still don’t know what they knew then.

Will we ever know what they knew now?

36 Hours in Honolulu

36 Hours in Honolulu

…0r as I’ve said before, Honoruru…

After several weeks of anticipation, the New York Times (find it here) published my travel piece, written by Jocyln Fujii, on 36 Hours in Honolulu.  The piece loads of locations for me to cover but I got to choose the more scenic and most exciting places to photograph.

Of course Masaharu Morimoto, (yes, the Iron Chef…you might remember him from my posting here) made for the most exciting images as his relationship with me allows him to tako…uh…i mean octopus…uh…ham it up (yeah, that’s it) for the camera.  Its always great to photograph someone when they do all the work for you.

I shot all over the East Oahu and Waikiki and had a darn fun time doing it.  As I’ve been told, its not work when you love what you do.

I was sad some of my hotel work from the Edition Waikiki wasn’t used but alas, you can’t publish it all.

The three floaters just lined up perfectly for this shot. I mean who wouldn’t want to swim around in a pool in Honolulu?  Or at least see it on print…