Fire, a race to the flames!

I have one major complaint when it comes to covering structure (or grass, or car) fires here in Pueblo, Colo.

The Pueblo Fire Department is just too damned fast! And not only are they fast, but they are so efficient that when they arrive on scene they knock down a fire and reduce it to wet ash and smoke before you can say "Hunka-hunka burnin' love!"

Recently I responded to a fire call that was about a 10 minute drive from the office. It was for a stucture fire where the home was completely involved and there were a lot of visible flames according to the fire dispatcher.

I no longer drive wildly through the streets of Pueblo chasing fire trucks like I did in my younger days. Now I listen to the scanner as I drive and try to take shortcuts and think about the easiest way to be able to drive right up to the fire. I have had many a fire photo extinguished by police who have blocked the road to keep looky-lous away and fire hoses safe.

Everyone must have been moving in slow motion at this fire as I made it through all of the intersections along the way before Pueblo's finest shut them down. I saw the pumper trucks in the road and smoke in the sky as I came around the final corner and then, there it was, Fire.

The house was still burning and not just little flames either. I pulled over and got out of my truck about 100 yards from the scene. I was loading my camera with a disk as I walked toward the flames and then I realized something. The house was still burning and there were great flames, but there wasn't a single person near the fire.

I waited and hoped and hoped and waited until finally a curious ambulance emt walked up the driveway toward the fire, pulled out his point-and-shoot camera and started taking pictures. BINGO! I started shooting him shooting the fire. Hey, you gotta go with what you find, and I wasn't finding much else at that point.

I had several frames of the back of this guy's head before he turned to look back at the road when I shot the image above. I think he was feeling a bit guilty for just standing their taking pictures of this fire. He wasn't running to save anyone, he was just a spectator.

That is supposed to be my job. I consider myself a professional spectator. I am also a story-teller, but I have to see it first before I can make a story-telling image. So I am not much different than this guy with his point and shoot. I just don't know how to start an IV or use those cool electric defibulator paddles.

About 2 minutes after I made this photo a pumper truck drove up the driveway, parked, and the crew of the truck lept into action. The fire was just wet ashes and smoke shortly after that. But this time it happened when I was ready to leave instead of when I had just showed up.

Thanks Pueblo Fire Department for lettin' that one burn a bit before you put it out. Just don't do that if my house ever burns, okay?

Get low to shoot a sweet chariot.

I was recently given an assignment to photograph an automobile race. Turns out it was a race like no other that I had ever covered. I have been to the Indy 500, small track races, and even jeep races on a frozen lake, but none of them were like this.

It was the "One Lap of America" race. The race where not only do the racers square off on the track, but they have to drive the same vehicle on the road to the next track. How cool is that? You may have heard of the first incarnation of this race it was called the "Cannon Ball Run". Yep, that race.

There were no souped-up stock cars, or big race crowds. The cars I saw ranged from Dodge Vipers and Corvettes to VW bugs, all taking their turns getting in their laps on the road course at the Pueblo Motorsports Park.

The Pueblo Motorsports Park unfortunately isn't the most scenic of tracks. The backgrounds consist of outbuildings, powerlines and less than photogenic prairie. When I got to the track I looked around and realized that the other photographers that were there were just interested in the cars and not the surroundings.

After watching a few of the cars go by the place where I had been allowed to cross the track into the infield I noticed that one section of track had Pike's Peak behind it. It also had some construction, a group of homes and a porta-potty there too. After a few minutes of moving around I realized that there was a way to make the photo without including all of the distracting background.

I backed off, got as low as I could and shot the photo with a 70-200mm f2.8 lens. I was able to not only eliminate most of the bad background, but I was also able to compress the image and give the illusion of the car being much closer to Pike's Peak (which was actually more than 40 miles away). When the car shooters saw what I was doing they all came over to have a look at the image on the back of my camera.

I heard one of them say "That's cool, I wish I had thought of that." It really wasn't that big of a deal but I smiled and thought to myself, "That's the nicest thing anyone had said to me all day."

And all because I was trying to avoid the porta-potty. Go figure.

WINTER PLAYMAKERS

It is nearly time for me to start shooting the "Playmaker" feature again. This time I will be shooting the high school athletes chosen by Chieftain sportswriters for the spring sports season.

I figured that it was a good time to share some of the photos I made for the winter sports season.

This first photo was one of the easiest and most definitely got the most attention. To make this photo of a high school basketball player I went to the school gymnasium and started by putting black background paper on the floor of the gym. I then asked my subject to collect as many basketballs as possible for the photo. She returned with several balls at which point I explained that I wanted her to lie down and I would then surround her with the balls.

I placed my subject, the paper and the balls on the floor beneath a press box that is attached to the wall more than 10 feet above the gym floor. I also placed two SB-800 strobes on stands and bounced the light from the strobe on to my subject with two white umbrellas. I then climbed into the box to shoot straight down to make the photo I had composed. The resulting image is the one above.

The high school hockey player was a fun image to make, at least for me. I didn't have to jump on skates a dozen times or more, so I was just fine after this shoot. Ha!

I am sure that my subject was just fine too as he is in very good condition.
To shoot this image I placed two SB-800 strobes on stands and placed snoots on then to direct the light as I cross lit the place on the ice where I told the play to leap.

I was actually very lucky when I went to shoot this photo as the staff of the ice arena had turned most of the lights over the rink off to save on energy while the ice was empty. This allowed me to photograph the hockey player without worrying about the background. I also took advantage of the ability of the strobes to fire with a faster shutter speed when the Nikon controller was used. I shot this one at a 500th of a second to freeze the hockey player in mid-air without any blur.

After several jumps and showing the player how I wanted him to position his body in the air I made this photo.

The photo of the wrestler was an idea I came up with while watching one of my many favorite "Law & Order" episodes on television. The athlete finished the season as one of the top wrestlers in the state and I wanted to illustrate that fact in the photo.

The tape job on the mat was very entertaining to both the wrestler and his coach as we taped the mat around the body of a teammate in the school's wrestling room. The coach was the one who suggested that we tape it in such a way as to look like the body on the mat had a leg bent back underneath it. I thought it was a nice touch.

After taping an extra mat to the wall over a window in the room to block out some sunlight, I set up two strobes reflecting light into white umbrellas and shot the image while standing on a small platform. All in all a very simple set up and a fun image to shoot with one exception. Have you ever smelled a wrestling room?

In this case I wanted to show what the view that opposing teams had as this basketball player brought the ball up court. More often than not this kind of a move would lead to a basket for this player's team.

There is a moment when a basketball player is running up the floor when both feet leave the ground and that was the moment I wanted to capture. I set up to strobes on stands cross lighting a place on the court where the white practice hoop would be directly behind the player as he ran toward the camera. I explained what I wanted him to do and he did exactly what I was hoping he would do.

I originally had a third head pointed at the hoop in the background but I wasn't able to get it to fire, so I just lightened the backboard a bit in photoshop and was able to get the desired result. This was another time when I made use of the Nikon controller to get the strobes to fire at a 500th of a second to freeze the atlete in motion. I sure do like that feature!