I brought in the incomparable Austin Mann to help me shoot during the Feb. 6th game against the Phoenix Coyotes. Because the entirety of the story takes place between the locker room and the ice and we were shooting the players on game night (meaning, no second takes), we only had four opportunities to grab all the images we needed. Logistically it was rather challenging, but also a lot of fun. We had 5 camera bodies, two set up remotely and three that we worked handheld.

For the most part everything was shot between 5 & 8 frames per second in-camera; I then created image sequences at frame rates from 6 to 30 frames per second, which I then edited in Final Cut. The story evolved a bit during the edit process, enabling me to bring in some of the work I shot for the Stars over the last two seasons. For the music, I chose one of my favorite MUTEMATH songs – ‘Reset’ – and am hugely thankful to them and everyone at Teleprompt\Warner Bros. Once we locked picture, I took the whole thing to Defacto Sound, where Dallas Taylor (yes, I only work with people named after Texas cities) did a masterful job on the sound design.

The final edit contains just over 2,200 still images and is being used in the team’s 2010 season seat holder renewal package. They are using variable print technology in the final online delivery, so each seat holder sees their name on the locker at :30. That piece of the puzzle was handled by Channel 1 Media.

photo by Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

In case you hadn’t heard, Animal - the artist formerly known as The Flying Tomato & Shaun White – took gold on Cypress Mountain last night. His performance was inspired, clinching the gold without needing his second run.

And then Lindsey Vonn, limping onto the mountain with a bruised shin only to fly down the hill at over 80 mph, finishing the run on her one good leg – to take the gold. And I think, for me, that’s a huge part of the draw of the Olympic Games. The performances of the athletes are a reminder that we are capable of doing far more than we think.

photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times

One week in and these are three lessons I’ve learned from watching the Vancouver Games:

Lesson 1: Pain (and gravity) be damned.

Life is resistance training. Most of it is lined up in opposition to whatever goals I have set. Watching Lindsey defy her body in pursuit of achieving gold was breathtaking. I wish I had 1/3 the heart, drive and toughness she showed at Whistler. “My leg hurt throughout and it still hurts,” she said after taking gold. ”There was so much going on and so much adrenaline, I just blocked it out.”

But denying physical pain is only half the battle. If you can push through you still must contend with the fear of leaving the mountain. I have to remember not to let natural laws hold you back or keep you grounded.

Lesson 2: Be a Pioneer

Shaun spent time on private half-pipe tucked away on some picturesque mountain inventing tricks. Actually, there were several tricks, but the one in questione they call the Double McTwist 1260. Before he figured out a way to dazzle the world on the Olympic stage, Shaun trained and trained and trained trying to perfect this thing that existed only in his head.

This is what pioneers do. They don’t hang with everyone else and polish up someone else’s creative; pioneers define the future.

Lesson 3: Always Go Big

Shaun White knew the gold was his before he made his final run, but he hadn’t done the Double McTwist. He didn’t need it, but he did it.

In his mind, the decision was a simple one, “I just felt like I didn’t come all the way to Vancouver not to pull out the big guns.”

I want to be like that – pushing myself even when I don’t have to.

So, over the next two weeks, my DVR will be full of hockey, snowboarding, skeleton & speed skating. I love cheering for Team USA, but this year I have a friend from Finland who will be participating in the games, the captain of the Dallas Stars (and my favorite hockey player) is playing for Team Canada and I have no doubt Jimmy will tell a story about someone whose name none of us know – and the story will tug my heart and ask me to cheer for them as well, no matter their homeland.

Jere Lehtinen will be playing in his 5th Winter Olympics for Team Finland.

You can imagine my excitement when the Dallas Stars called two weeks ago, asking me to shoot their four Olympians. I knew immediately that I wanted a simple setup because time – and patience – would be in short supply. But more than anything, I wanted something simple because I wanted the colors of their country (and the pride these guys take in wearing them) to be the focus of the images.

I used a 9′ seamless roll (in the very versatile arctic white) & a couple of mono heads. I love how the white turns gray from lack of exposure. It seemed the perfect way to show off the sweaters & the pride.  Needless to say, these are my favorite images from the day.

My thanks to Jere, Brenden, Karlis & Loui – and to the Stars who are graciously allowing me provide you with the following desktops. Just click on the size you want and enjoy.

Brenden Morrow – Team Canada

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Karlis Skrastins – Team Latvia

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Jere Lehtinen – Team Finland

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Loui Eriksson – Team Sweden

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Dallas Stars – The Olympians

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EDIT: It seems that people using Internet Explorer were having some issues. I have made a few changes to the images & the links. Please let me know if there are still any issues.

Just before the holidays, I completed the first of many projects that I shot in Sudan.

I was commissioned by Seed Effect, a microfinance initiative, to tell their story & articulate their mission. It seemed like a daunting task, to be honest. How do you get to the heart of what prompted Missy & David to start Seed Effect in an intimate way and wade through the minutia of microfinance, for those unfamiliar with the idea? The answer, it turns out, started with a sewing machine.

In one of our initial creative meetings, Missy offhandedly told the story of how a few women called her aside & asked for a sewing machine so they could make & sell clothes in the local market. With that request on her heart, Missy came home & she and her husband launched Seed Effect. It was a powerful story and, to me, the sewing machine became an icon of hope and the story is such a clear picture of how microfinance works – small loans for practical items that have a tremendous impact on lives, families and communities.

That is the Seed Effect.

i hope your holiday’s were incredible.

it’s been a whirlwind few weeks since returning from Sudan – old work needed attention, new work needed bidding, the blog needed blogging, videos needed editing, family needed loving, thanks needed giving. you get the idea. life didn’t stop just because i had a life affirming experience in Africa. and in the hustle & bustle, something fairly momentous almost passed without my notice. almost.

one year and three days ago, i celebrated the first anniversary of going full-time with my photography business. what started with the panic inducing “we have to let you go” has turned into one of the bigger blessings of my life.

that’s how it goes, i think. bailout rarely produces success, but have-to almost always does. wife, two kids, mortgage, the potential for “i told you so” from those whose opinion i value most – moving forward was my only option and because of that (and a lot of grace) my business took off after getting put on the runway by a layoff in a terrible economy.

that’s my story. and i don’t know all the details behind the birth of Pictory, but i followed the JPG magazine thing pretty closely and i think Laura Brunow Miner & I may have a few things in common. so, when i received an email from her about the new online magazine she was launching, i got very excited.

from the the near death experience that was\is JPG magazine & it’s user generated model, comes something new. maybe it’s the future, maybe it’s just the best one girl can do from her living room; whatever it is, i think it’s exciting.

things are changing – everyday seems to bring news of another magazine closing its doors and chicken little cries, foretelling the death of print, litter our RSS readers. if i were sane, i’d be wondering if i picked the wrong business at the wrong time. i mean, who would pick to start a photography business on Dec. 1, 2008, when the economy was crashing down around us, unemployment daily reached new highs and one of the main avenues for photographers to sell their work (print media) was dying?

failure is good for the soul. it forces you to take stock of what’s important, dig down to find your inner Ben Franklin and get to work. necessity is truly the mother of invention and i couldn’t be any more thankful for the @lbm’s of the world, who see the failure of one thing as an open door to the future.

kudos to you Laura & to all the others like you who, when arriving at the Brink of the Unknown, jumped barefoot into the abyss, so that those of us who find ourselves at the Brink find a bridge and not a void. oh, and thanks for including my image in Overseas & Overwhelmed – I’m honored.

of course, there’s more to the story than the 140 or so words on pictorymag.com. if you’re interested, you can read more on waterisbasic.org.

Her name is Alice, a 5 year old orphan who lost her mother to HIV several years earlier. The kind man at the ward desk explains that her body is struggling to fight off a respiratory infection – likely pneumonia, TB or both – because HIV, contracted from her mother, has left her fragile immune system in shambles.

Without the machine, her body won’t be able to breathe on its own. Thankfully, the hospital has electricity… for now. However, all that changes at midnight – if she makes it that long.

Really, it’s a hopeless situation and, on the surface, Alice’s story seems to parallel the story of Sudan.

On the day before my departure I learned the government closed all public offices making it impossible for me to get the proper permissions, permits and escorts to do photography in the hospital as I’d planned. So, Costanza – a medical doctor and missionary from Germany – and I went the evening before to ask questions and get an understanding of what Yei’s only hospital was up against so I can focus on shooting before heading to the airport.

We sat in the same children’s ward visiting with a Ugandan trained Sudanese nurse named Cecilia. She explained that the hospital was underfunded and understaffed – in most cases, patients are admitted, diagnosed and then their escort is asked to go to a local pharmacy to get basic supplies, like IV fluids, syringes and medications – things the hospital can’t afford to keep in stock – before they begin treatment.

Cecilia earns about $100 a month & at present the hospital is about four months behind on paying her.

I asked why she keeps coming and she looked down at her hands – a typically giant Sudanese smile crossed her face, “because this is my profession,” she looks at me, “and if I don’t come, who will?”

I’m just a few hours removed from Alice’s bedside – it’s 9pm and I know that in three hours Yei hospital won’t have power. On the surface, Sudan’s situation, like Alice’s, seems hopeless, but under the surface, this is a country full of people like Cecilia and that gives me hope for their future.

several 20L jerrycans waiting to be filled | a Ugandan telecom ad on the floor of Entebbe airport

We arrived in Entebbe, Uganda on Wednesday night and left for Kajo Keji (I’ve yet to get a definitive one word or two answer) early Thursday morning. We chartered a plane and our Pilot was a German missionary named Achim – a hebrew name that means “the one God lifts up”, perfect for a pilot – and he did a masterful job navigating Ugandan airspace. I had the opportunity to ride shotgun, which meant I had headphones. He did an incredible job of navigating the tour toward the border & talked at length about the political situation facing the region. We touched down on a wide, dirt airstrip at the Ugandan border and passed through immigration and then headed on to KK.

We are staying at the home of E3 Sudan’s Sudan-side country director – David Kaya. He has a three acre compound with several tukels as well as rooms where short term mission teams stay. The hospitality of the people here is amazing, the food is incredible & so far, every shower has been a warm one – all of which are incredible luxuries. After a day of napping, relaxing and adjusting to the pace of African life, we went out into the field. We walked from tukel to tukel visiting with families in the village of Joru for most of the afternoon. I was able to shoot a ton of video (the reason I’m here) as well as a handful of stills.

Kaya’s Toyota Land Cruiser – the only reliable mode of transportation

traditional Sudanese homes, known as tukels

The day ended up being incredibly difficult, both physically & spiritually exhausting. I was doing photos of the woman who lives in the tukels above, I was fighting an incredible headache in the unrelenting Sudan sun feeling like I didn’t have much more in me to give creatively, when across the field I hear the familiar sound of One Republic’s Apologize. Not kidding. It was as surreal an experience as you can imagine; I just started laughing.

We made a run into Wudu (where the market is) last night to scout locations for a video I’m shooting this afternoon… and avocados. But these aren’t your dinky Kroger avocados. The small ones are the size of grapefruit and some are as big as cantaloupe. And they’re SO good.

I went to bed last night on the ragged edge. On the one hand, I was giddy with excitement about being here, encouraged by the day (and a skype conversation with my wife), but nearly in tears for no apparent reason… Sudan really is a study in contrast.

When I first visited Africa (in January of 1999) I contracted a tape worm through drinking unclean water. When I returned to the states, I’d lost a significant amount of weight & felt very weak but, unlike so many people there I was able to make a simple phone call and get the medication I needed. I can’t express how incredibly honored I am to have the opportunity to return to Africa & engage the mission of Water Is Basic in a personal way.

I honestly have no idea what to expect this time around, but I hope to return with dozens of stories that I can share – stories of hope & of need – and that those stories will inspire others to join the mission of making sure that every village in Sudan has daily access to clean water.

I will be doing my best to update how things are going, post images & twitter about the journey. I will be uploading iPhone images via Twitter to WiB’s twitter feed, so if you’re not following them you’ll definitely want to. Also, take a minute to check out what Water is Basic is up to – after two years of planning, drilling began in a significant way this spring & in that short amount of time we’ve been able to drill nearly 100 wells. You can read more about that here.

reynaldo. september 2009. dallas, tx.

i have excuses. we all have excuses. but i came across something today that stopped me in my tracks and forced my hand.

sometimes we’re left without an excuse.

for what it’s worth, i believe that Maria Kalman was right about the 19th century:

and the thing is – it was exploding with inventiveness and they hadn’t even gotten to the automobile or the airplane or open heart surgery or cloned sheep or broadcast or video or the internet or twitter or video on twitter. i sincerely believe that the world is – today as in 1838 – exploding with inventiveness.

i have to think that Ben Franklin – a well documented bad-ass – occasionally found himself with to-do lists that were too long to actually do. but that didn’t stop him:

…a little thing known as the United States of America.

he believed in doing good & still found a way to invent more things than any other person in this country ever has – and he slept seven hours a night. all without computers!

wow.

hopefully, at this point, you feel like me – utterly without excuse. Ben Franklin set the bar pretty dang high. or, as one brilliant comment on the blog from which i was first learned of this NY Times piece put it – “For his time [Ben Franklin was] a renaissance man. For our time, given the tools and opportunities we all have, he’d be a certified legend.”

let me leave you with a simple benediction:

go forth. make a chart. set a goal. read Maria’s piece, “Can Do”, & be inspired to stop sitting on your A doing absolutely nothing. invent something wonderful. and tonight, ask yourself “What good have I done today?” then smile just a little when the answer is finally an admirable one.

In one of my screenwriting classes, we looked at the set up in The Usual Suspects. Do you remember it? The mealy mouthed cripple, Verbal Kint, in the detective’s office, says of Keyser Soze, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

That line haunts you the rest of the film. That is a great set up. And the genius of the line is it takes a complicated theme and puts it into incredibly simple terms.

This same idea can be used, to great effect, in photography as well.

This is a subject I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately and I’m not sure where I first encountered it in practice (the only place I can think to point to is Dan Winters, who does it infinitely better than anyone), but simplicity – simple light, simple composition, simple posture – is the best way I’ve found to expose for honest emotion.

I recently did portraits for Need Him, a non-profit whose mission is to give people a chance to hear the story of God’s love for mankind as it was personified in Jesus. They wanted their story to be told with authenticity, so early on, the decision was made to cast ordinary people instead of models.

However, people are a complicated tangle of story lines and emotions and most put up high walls that hide the honest, authentic emotion from strangers. Putting a camera in their face or being placed under a bunch of lights while being told what to do only adds to their discomfort.

So, as excited as I was about the opportunity to explore some of the complexity that real people bring with them, I knew that in order to create an environment where that could happen, I would need a simple set up.

I used a single head, camera left, as my key & outfitted it with a 1×4 strip box placed just in front of the subject & the spill from that strobe gave me just enough exposure on the background. For a bit of fill, I placed my 5-in-1 reflector, the translucent white part, on a light stand opposite the key. Occasionally I threw in a stool or a posing table for my subject to interact with. Each person ended up needing a subtle tweak to the positions of the key & reflector, but the simplicity of the set up helped me take down the walls and created a comfortable, relaxed atmosphere for exploring a range of emotion.

Going back to The Usual Suspects, you don’t fully understand the power of Verbal’s line from the first of the film until he reprises it at the end, in voice over, as the detective scrambles out to the street, having put all the details together and we see the cripple lose his limp and transform into Keyzer Soze – the Devil himself. It’s one of the most rewarding film endings I can think of and not because you are aware of the story telling technique being used. It’s rewarding because of what you’re seeing happen on the screen.

Just like in the movies, a simple photography set up isn’t effective because it’s simple; it’s effective because the resulting photographs make the viewer feel what you want them to feel – in this case, to feel a connection with the universal human longings for purpose, meaning, hope and joy.

On a related note, Need Him has been running a really great television spot that touches on these themes & they also launched their new website. If you have a minute, check them out.