Threezing Thriday Threesome and the Thog

Twas the week before Christmas and all on my shift
were barely any assignments for my shutter to click.

To say last week's work schedule was light would be an understatement. Two assignments the whole week. Even my Saturday shift that usually runs til 11pm was done by 11am. Combine that with Miranda being able to stay home with Abby while on winter break and I was finally able to take my time with some photo exploring again.

Really it was the weather to start the week that got my photo juices flowing. Monday and Tuesday mornings had some of the thickest fog I'd ever seen. That was perfect for two reasons. First the fog makes for cool photos. And second it provided me some cover to do a little exploring at places I wasn't sure I'd be allowed at.

I headed towards the yolo bypass wildlife area thinking I could get some of the reed ponds with reflections and horizons that would vanish into white. Along the way I stopped at an old graffiti covered shack that sat alongside I-80. It was another one of those places I'd seen for years but hadn't had the initiative to stop and look. With the fog giving me cover I pulled down the dirt road up to the edge of the freeway. The designs on it now weren't the best I'd seen but now that I know how easy it was to get to I might try going back and working the freeway lights at night into a good photo.



I started down into the wildlife area but barely made it past the main gate. I'd taken quick shots of the pillars under the causeway before but never took the time to set up for a good shot. So this was the perfect time to change that. I set up the tripod over what I'm pretty sure were fresh cougar tracks and lined the camera up for the perfect, symmetrical shot. It took a few minutes of leveling and adjusting everything with the grid on the viewfinder before I finally looked up at the pillars and realized they weren't symmetrical at all. A few of them weren't even straight.



Whoever designed the underside of this bridge clearly wasn't thinking about its photographic qualities. However I'm pretty sure the person who put that old shopping cart there had to have done it for a picture.



I started to drive out into the wetlands to see what else I could get when a big flock of blackbirds sprung up from a field. Fred had taken a photo like this last year in the fog that I thought was one of the coolest photos I'd ever seen. The fog made the more distant birds a lighter shade of grey. His photo is still more awesome than mine but they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery so here you go Fred



Monday's fog was just a primer for Tuesday morning. I couldn't even see the house across the street when I pulled the car out of the garage. I set course for Woodland this time to see a drainage pond near Costco I'd shot in the fog the past two years. But the air was so thick the two islands at the pond 50 feet from shore were just shadows in a sea of white. I was going to have to wait for a little visibility. Not wanting to waste the time, and needing to keep moving to stay warm I did a little exploring. Between the pond and a junkyard were some abandoned and overgrown animal pens. For years I'd thought one shed in back of all the others would make for a good photo but the area had always been fenced off. Now I've been known to wander (some might call it trespassing) into open farm fields or the old cannery site when they used to leave the gates unlocked. But if someone closes off their property I try to respect it. I'd never gone out to this shed because of that. About two months ago the winds brought down a large tree on the edge of the property and that tree took a good twenty feet of barbed wire with it. Surely this was a sign from the photo gods that a picture needed to be taken here. Again under the cover of the fog I worked my way thru the weeds to the shack.



I didn't explore too closely but I think it was actually an old wagon and not a shack. The fog started to loosen and I moved back to the pond. When I shot here last year there were some canada geese living on the islands that made nice little additions to the scene. This year the water was low and the geese were gone. The photos were okay but missing something. Even after getting back home and processing some of them they were still lacking any punch. Then, on a whim I flipped one upside down.



The reflection of a foggy sun in the water became a single point of light in a moody black sky. It figures that my favorite photo from the fog would be the most artificial one. But getting to explore some normally in plain sight subjects under the cover of the fog made it all worth it.

Friday I went in to work at my normal time and there was only one person left in the office. With clear skies, no wind, a new moon, and nothing to do at work it was the perfect time to go back to my newfound subjects for some nightscapes. Back to Woodland I went with an extra work camera, to go along with my two personal cameras, so I could try three different shots at once. I was hoping to shoot due east across the pond for diagonal star trails but the observation deck looking that way was closed. Instead I went to near where I took the previous shot, focused on only one of the islands and composed with a tumbleweed in the water for foreground detail. But looking at the star trails in the finished product I wish I would've shot due south to get them curving over the island instead.



I left that camera to shoot on its own, retrieved the other two cameras, and took them over to the old wagon. Originally the two cameras were going to be looking in different directions. But many times when I compose photos in the dark I get back and find I wish I would've moved the camera just slightly. So I set the cameras up a few feet apart, one with an ultra wide angle



and the other with a moderate wide.



I'm most proud of the second photo not because of how it looks but because I had three cameras and three tripods but only two cable releases to run the cameras. Anticipating this I picked up a small stone in the parking lot the same size as the shutter button on the camera and used electrical tape to keep it pressed down and continuously shooting. Even though it was a pretty cheap way of doing things I was excited it worked. I was also really happy I anticipated the cold (the outside temp gauge on the car read 29º when I was finished) and brought gloves. There's nothing like carrying a freezing cold tripod with bare hands.

The only thing I didn't anticipate was being so close to the airport. Since all three cameras were facing east or southeast, pretty much directly at Sac Intl, about half my editing time was spent removing trails from airplane lights on all the photos. I'm going to have to foggy exploring looking west next time.

a solitary sunset

So remember how I said Wednesday's sunset was epic? Well maybe that was a bit of an overstatement. It was pretty good but nothing like Friday's sunset. Yep, Friday's show was one for the ages. Epic of epic proportions, if that makes sense. Strong central clouds that dominated the sky as they were lit by the finals rays of the sun were supported by plenty of soft accent clouds to fill the remaining sky. I couldn't have scripted it better, except for the fact it all happened over Winters and Lake Berryessa while I was stuck in Davis where 90% of the sky was clear.

Knowing that the show was going to happen in only a small part of the sky I headed south of town where I knew of a few solitary trees far enough off the road to be able to use a longer lens and fill the photo with as much of the sunset as I could capture. My original thought was a valley oak near the south putah levee. But when I arrived a second tree a few hundred yards away caught my eye. I'd always liked the position of the tree, with a vast, uncluttered view behind it, but didn't care for the tree itself when it had its leaves. Now in its winter bones it looked much more photogenic.

The colors in that photo don't do justice to the real thing but my photoshop color manipulation skills aren't the best.

While the long lens helped condense the tree and clouds into a nice little package it didn't really convey my mood about this sunset. The real beauty of it seemed distant, out of reach. So I put a standard 50mm lens on the camera and recomposed.

This photo is more like the feeling this sunset gave me. The tree and I (as the viewer of this image) alone with a thin ribbon of distant color in an otherwise dark and empty sky and landscape. Not that I feel alone in life. With Abby and Miranda I've never felt more loved. Just that this particular sunset was more someone's else's to enjoy and I was only allowed a peek of what could have been had I been standing atop one of the Vaca hills.

Not wanting to end on such a downer I tried a little positive use of negative space. This was the view looking south of the hills where there were no clouds either.

I love it when the lanscape allows to me to take advantage of the color gradation in a post sunset sky.

Twilight, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn

Tonight's sunset was epic. The kind that only happens a few times a year. And as usual I had only a few minutes between assignments at work to find a foreground to do justice to the show in the sky.
While there are many benefits to living in Davis, idyllic landscapes famous landmarks are not on the list. Certain I didn't have enough time to find a good spot in the fields outside of town I headed to the train station. But the southerly position of the December sun didn't line up well with the old SP depot. I decided to let this one pass and headed home to check up on Abby before my next assignment. As I turned on to Eighth St the sky was an amazing pink. I had to find someplace to shoot at and the cemetery was my only option. A year or so ago they had installed a new fountain structure and I thought I could get a decent reflection in the pools. Unfortunately the water had been turned off for the cold weather. It's too bad because the scene balanced pretty well.



I'll keep it in mind next time I'm looking for a nearby landmark.

On Saturday my favorite landmark within a short drive of Davis was in the perfect position for the last lunar eclipse til 2014. I checked the US Navy's moon data site and figured out what time I needed to get up to shoot the alignment of the Sacramento Tower Bridge and the moon. I woke up early, ate breakfast, and headed up to Sac. As drove across the bridge towards The Capitol I realized I'd calculated something wrong. The moon was already dead center on the towers. By the time I parked and ran out to the Capitol Mall with the camera the moon had moved north of the bridge. To add insult to injury I managed to get the three other photographers dedicated enough to get up at 5 am on a winter Saturday who actually got the shot in my shot.

As the moon headed behind the Drexel college building and the sun started to light up the sky I turned around to catch the sunrise over the Capitol building. A light rail train passed by at just the same time.

I packed up the gear and headed back home. As I crossed the bridge the water on the river was so still it was almost a mirror. I pulled off and took a quick walk along the West Sac riverfront. The sky was too bright and plain for a good photo of the bridge. But considering I already had a Breaking Dawn and Eclipse photo I figured I needed a good Twilight photo to go along with them.
The forecast for Tuesday's sunset was clear skies and no wind. So before sunset I drove back across the causeway hoping for smooth water. When I saw the waves rippling across the river I was pretty disappointed. But since I was already there I had to give my shutter finger its dues. I scrambled down to the water's edge and set up the camera. As the sun disappeared so did the waves. When the twilight sky turned that perfect blue I got the shot I was hoping for.

Now that I have three parts of the Twilight saga complete around the bridge in Sac I'm going to need to come back around the New Moon and finish it off.

Right Place, Right TIME, for an iconic moment

So there it is, the iconic, infamous or whatever you want to call it image of the pepper spraying at UC Davis. At the time I really didn't feel it was that great of a shot. My shutter speed was too slow. There was too much dead space behind the protesters. Part of the jacket of a girl to my left worked its way into the photo. When I got back to the office and put together a photo gallery I didn't even pick it as my lead photo. Boy was I wrong. Within hours this single image had more than three times as many views as our entire website gets in a day. And in the two weeks since I've had more people, friends, family, and strangers alike congratulate me on this photo than probably every other photo I've taken in my 13 years as a photojournalist.

Even though I usually reserve this blog for my photo adventures outside of work, I feel the process leading to and following this photo deserves an explanation.

My shift on Fridays starts around 2:30 and I had only two assignments on the books as I was getting ready to head in to work that day; a group of seniors using iPads to supplement their hearing aids and children making pottery at the Art Center for holiday charity sale. That was the normal, exciting stuff we get to cover here in Davis. Then Cory Golden, our UCD beat writer at The Enterprise, called to suggest we bring a photographer to the Quad within an hour to cover the Occupy UC Davis encampment. While I usually ride my bike to campus I decided to drive thinking I might have to speed over to the other assignments after this proved to be nothing exciting. I mention that because on my bike I usually have a big, bulky backpack for my gear but instead I was able to use a smaller shoulder bag that proved much easier to maneuver thru the crowds that eventually formed.

I arrived on campus just at the police chief was preparing to tell the protesters their tents needed to be removed in an hour or they could be arrested. Some of the students suggested moving to another part of campus, trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities and keep the movement going, an idea I thought sounded the smartest. Again, I was waaayyyy wrong. The vast majority wanted to take a stand there and prove their point. About 4 of the 29 tents were taken down, mostly because they were being borrowed and the borrowers didn't want them confiscated. As the deadline approached the scene became a little more frantic. One of the lead protesters was running around asking where all the media was. "You're looking at it" I told him. He didn't look too pleased. I probably should've told him The Aggie did have two photographers, Jasna Hodzic and Brian Nguyen, there as well.

News came in of riot clad officers lining up down the road and the tents were moved into the center of the quad. The protesters formed a human chain around the tents, ready to force the police arrest them if they wanted the tents gone. It was here I thought I had the shot.

It was one of the rare times when a fisheye lens perfectly matched the subject. I held the camera above my head in live view mode and composed a shot with the most passionate looking students in the foreground. With the nice color, soft lighting, and good subject and background composition it would have made great lead art for the Sunday paper. Then the police marched in.

Why they timed it around the hour when students would be filtering out of classes is beyond me. So as twenty or so officers with helmets, pepper ball guns, and batons marched onto the Quad the crowd of onlookers quickly multiplied. The student-police ratio went from 3:1 to probably 10:1 by the time they left the scene. Bad news for the police but good news for me.

I'm not the stereotypical shove-my-way-to-the-front type of photojournalist. So when the police line only covered one quarter of the circle of protesters I was able to set up at the end of their line and get both police and protesters in my photos. At first it seemed a bad move as the initial arrests were made out of my line of sight, including one protester who had to be carried out by his hands and feet. That would've made a great photo. As police moved into the tent area

the protesters at the back of the circle broke apart and allowed others to come in and take down the tents before the police could. With the tents coming down I figured the excitement was mostly over and moved around the crowd looking to get a final shot of the police leaving with their last few arrestees. I was wrong yet again.

The protesters, buoyed by chants of support from the growing crowd of onlookers, moved to encircle the officers as they had done the tents and force the police to make more unpopular arrests on their way out. The majority of the crowd filtered into the area the police had just vacated. I followed, too, and watched as one of the arrestees was led thru the crowd.

I mention this photo for two reasons. First off the officer's last name is Beerman and at the time I could only think about how much crap he probably had to put up with from drunk college students over the years. The second, which only became obvious in hindsight, is how easy it was for police to exit the circle even at the most crowded spot.

I noticed the lead officers were forming up on the other side of the group so I moved around to that side and positioned myself directly in front of the protesters.

During the whole protest I had been switching between shooting still photos and video. Just after I took the above photo I switched to video as Lt. John Pike approached the group in front of me and said something to the three men seated on the left.

You could see here how the officer's mood changed as the protester turned his warning into a joke. We're all human. We all have emotions. And the look on his face told me things were about to get more serious. A few more officers came in from behind me and I quickly tried to position myself in a spot where police wouldn't ask me to leave but I would still be close to the protesters who were blocking the walkway. This was a time when I knew I had to do everything I could to stay as close as possible to the frontline. I was lucky that the crowd control officer on my side, who was assisting from the City of Davis PD, was happy that I had moved back before he had to ask and so he let me to stay at the very edge of the path. I try to be kind and respectful as much as possible when I shoot and I really believe that mild attitude was key getting myself in the best possible spot to capture this moment.

The whole spraying seemed to happen very quickly. In unpredictable situations like that composing a photograph becomes instinctual. Looking now at the tilted horizon I think my thought was to have the protesters flow from the bottom corner and middle thru the center of the image and into the crowd with Pike as close to a rule of thirds position as possible while the other riot police filled in the top right corner. Really, though, I don't remember what I was thinking other than to keep shooting.


Two casual passes of pepper spray were followed by officers moving in to clear protesters from the walkway.

I liked the action of that photo better than the spraying. And as protesters were moved off the path I captured the photo I thought best summarized what had just happened.

I went low to try and show readers the protesters' point of view, blinded and helpless on the ground as the almost faceless riot police towered over them. The photo, at least so I thought, was much more dramatic and when I put together a photo gallery I initially chose this as our lead photo. I later learned it was the action, not the reaction, that had the most impact.
Another shot of the same protester having his face rinsed

With their path clear the police made their way off the Quad. Many of the students who had only been watching were now chanting against the police as well. I liked that it was a girl in a Raiders jacket who was acting as a barrier between angry students and the police.

It was here where I made another smart decision. I really wanted our readers to know these were real people in our photo. I snapped a quick photo of Lt Pike's name badge and Cory then confirmed with the Chief of Police his full name and rank. I found the protester who was face up in the spraying photo and had later been down pushed in front of me,

and as he was being led towards the waiting fire truck I said to him "I am from the Davis Enterprise newspaper. I understand if you do not want to be identified but it adds a human element to the ..." Before I could finish he replied "David Bucsho, B U S C H O." I immediately recognized the name. I had taken his photo just a week earlier when he and his girlfriend were volunteering to help restore the Domes co-housing. We had had a short but happy conversation at the time and I think that may have persuaded him to offer up his name to me. Both Fred and Sue, who had covered the protests earlier in the week for us, and the Aggie photogs had complained to me earlier that most protesters were reluctant to give their names to media. It was this tiny and very lucky little victory that gave me the most satisfaction of all the work I had done that day.

I went back to the office hoping to get up a photo gallery online before heading over to the UCD-Stanford men's basketball game. Just the previous week we had started having all editorial staff set up Twitter accounts to try and drive more traffic to the paper's website. The timing couldn't have been better. Though the only followers I had were other people at the Enterprise Cory had built up quite a following. After a brief discussion as to wether we should identify Lt. Pike (we decided to do so since he had a name badge that anyone could have read and the chief praised his work that day) I tweeted and Cory re-tweeted the link to the photo gallery.

I went off to the basketball game and got a couple of nice dunking photos of the Aggies. Of course the Ags were overmatched by the bigger Cardinal so these photos didn't tell the story of the game.

Since we don't have a Saturday paper I usually head home after late Friday night games since I can make a quick gallery there. But, curious about our new tweeting, I decided to head back to the office to check on the protest story and maybe add another tweet about the game. Cory was still in the office monitoring the growing amount of reaction to the pepper spraying. He said a big name blogger from across the country had already called the spray photo THE iconic image of the Occupy movement. And Dean Royal, our internet editor, said the photos were dominating our web traffic. I followed Cory's advice and changed the lead photo. We also discussed sending the photo on to the AP. But not wanting the Bee or Chronicle to take advantage of us being the only professional print media there we decided to hold it til Sunday. I completely forgot about the basketball tweet.

By Saturday a couple shaky videos surfaced on YouTube and helped the story spread across the world. As the main video racked up 100's of 1000's of views I began kicking myself for not shooting video during the spraying. Still captures from a good 1080p camera like mine would've been good enough for four column photos in the paper. I also regretted not shooting RAW and not minding my shutter speed as the sun was going down. Even worse I deleted probably a third to a half of my photos that night not realizing the magnitude of the story. So many things a professional like myself should have done better, not just in a historic moment such as this but in any shooting situation. To top it all off, my decision to upload only low resolution photos looked bad when an amateur photographer opposite my position put out a higher resolution photo and her image of Lt Pike became the one used in so many internet memes.

Soon I realized my decision to stick to stills was the right one. Fred had sent four photos to the AP on Sunday. I heard some had been printed in the Bee, Chronicle, and Seattle Times that Monday though I didn't get to see any of those. Then the following Friday I got a call from the McKillop family whom I had shot family portraits fora couple hours earlier. They had just received the new edition of TIME and told me I had a two page spread in the front of the magazine.

At first I didn't think much of it. After all I'd had three photos in my pinnacle publication, Sports Illustrated (even if those three combined were only printed about 4 inches total across.) And I'd already had a nationally published double truck spread in Volleyball magazine with this photo from the 2003 Volleyball Festival that I thought really looked like the work of a professional.

But I have to admit that when I walked into Newsbeat five days later and opened up the magazine to see it was my photo alone leading off their news section I was pretty jazzed. And when they emailed a few days ago letting me know they were going to use it in their Ten Best Photos of the Year edition the excitement really set it.

I still don't think the purely photographic aspects of the photo are all that good. But given the gravity of the subject matter and its effect on people in town and around the nation I guess it's safe to say this is my best photo yet. Yes Miranda, even better than Kitten Dexter in the bathtub