B&W underground

A year ago this coming weekend Greensburg, Kansas was hit with one of the most powerful tornados ever recorded. It leveled most of the town.

As part of my work with the Kansas Press Association (KPA) I went in two days later to help the local paper with photography and production. I spent two afternoons shooting in Greensburg then and have been back a few times since to shoot.

It was tough jumping back into shooting news with something like Greensburg, it took a few days to get it out of my head afterwards. It also made me appreciate the job that news photographers do on a daily basis.

This Friday, May, 2 at Studio 2131 in Kansas City is the opening of Greensburg After Nature’s EF-5. It is a collection of photographs from news photographers from Kansas and Missouri.

Here are the four photos that I have in the exhibit. Yes they are in color but this was a news assignment.

This last image was taken a few months afterwards and for most people it doesn’t mean much. For Greensburg tree leaves and street signs are major signs of the progress being made in rebuilding.

Later in May I will be going back for two weeks as part of a joint Wichita State University/KPA project where students will spend two weeks there writing stories and I will be doing some of the photography. The stories and photos will be available for KPA member papers.

If you would like to see more images you can find them on my site.

cort

no music this evening, just the ac in the studio

This afternoon Linda and I attended the wedding and reception of a close friends daughter. When I saw that the wedding photographer was not shooting anything other than the standard staged shots at the reception I went out to the car and got my camera.

Since this is not something I was planning on shooting I just used the pop-up flash on the camera and shot the best I could. When I started shooting my friend Clark, the father of the bride, immediately said, “I don’t want to see these on the Internet tomorrow,” that was all it took.

The first shot is Clark during a dance warning me in his best school teacher voice about seeing his picture on the Internet.

The next shot is from the one thing that has sent more wedding photographers to mental institutions than anything else, the Chicken Dance.

Last, grandpa Clark discovers a dirty.

Help me make Clark famous, grab the Chicken dance picture and email it to a friend and ask them to send it on their friends and on and on. Let’s make this the hottest thing on the Web.

cort

no music, just bad late night tv

Something different for the people that are into soft & fuzzy and warm & cuddly.

Here are a couple of shots of the latest additions to our family, Callie and George. The plan was just to get Callie but when I saw George and my wife Linda asked if we could take both I broke down and said yes. They have learned that my legs make great climbing poles and when I am in the house working they like to try and help.

Callie

George

I believe this fulfills my warm and fuzzy obligations for the next several months, maybe longer, they are kittens after all.

cort

no music this afternoon, just leg climbing kittens

Photographs like this don’t happen in studios or exotic locales, they happen in bars in Ft. Wayne, Indiana and on back roads in Kansas. You can’t create them, you can’t even really look for them, you have to go out with open eyes and let them find you.

Although I was shooting something else, I got this shot because I was paying attention to what was going on around me, I had my eyes open. Not only to notice her but to see a spot where the light was better to shoot her.

One of the hardest things for me is approaching people I don’t know and asking if I can shoot them. This was easier because she knew the people I was with and I had a couple of bottles of liquid courage earlier.

It still took me some time to get up the nerve to ask her. It was not until I had thought about it for twenty minutes while making a mad dash back to my friends house to get the camera battery I had left on the charger that I finally did it.

When I got back the band was on break and I introduced myself and asked if I could photograph her. When she said yes I started worrying about how I was going to explain that I didn’t want to include her face in the shot. As we were walking over to the area where I wanted to shoot, she said she didn’t want her face in the shot and I was relieved.

I got her positioned in the light and with her arms crossed the right way to show off the tattoos and snapped 4-5 frames. I showed her what I had shot on the camera LCD so she could see I didn’t include her face. From the time I asked until we were done was less than five minutes and I had a great shot.

cort

tonight’s music, joe bonamassa

For the past few years I have been trying to shoot the perfect photograph. Everything in it’s place, no extraneous distractions, everything perfect. The harder I tried the more frustrated I got.

Some of you are probably going why does it have to be perfect in the camera? You can fix anything you don’t like in Photoshop. I was raised photographically as a newspaper photographer and that kind of image manipulation just goes against everything I was ever taught.

For my fine art B&W I use Photoshop to do my conversions, adjust contrast and density via a Curves layer, sharpen with USM and then print from. For news assignments, it is color and density corrections in Lightroom then out to whatever file format is needed.

Some where in the air between Tulsa and Ft. Wayne while doing my best sardine impression and reading Henri Cartier-Bresson it hit me. His photographs are great but they weren’t perfect in the way I was trying to achieve. I realized his photographs show real life and life isn’t perfect and what I needed to do was concentrate more on shooting real life and worry much less about perfect photographs.

Friday while I was importing the images from Thursday night’s band shoot into Lightroom I remembered this image and went looking for it.

From the time I saw this woman walk by in the bar I had imagined this shot, it was perfect. After I shot it, I knew it was perfect, I even chimped, something I rarely do and there it was on the camera LCD, perfection. When I found it in Lightroom I was crushed, it wasn’t the perfect image I had imagined. There was this ugly pool table with an obnoxious white cue ball in the background. My dream of the perfect photograph went up in smoke before my eyes.

Then my brain went, airplane, sardine, Bresson, aha moment.

I opened the image in Photoshop, did my normal B&W conversion, curves tweak and took a second look at the image with a different set of eyes. I had done better than perfect, I had captured a slice of life, better than that I had captured a glimpse of who this person is.

The ugly pool table and obnoxious cue ball suddenly became integral parts of the photograph, they helped set the stage. The B&W version leads you to the t-shirt first, then the tattoos and finally the piercings, the pool table in the background helps tie it all together. A photographer on a forum where I posted this image suggested it would be better without the scarf. To me that is just another clue to who she is, what she is like.

Now I am spending less time worrying about perfect photographs and more time working on getting up the nerve to approach people I don’t know and asking if I can shoot them.

cort

tonight’s music, Sling Blade and Lyle Lovett

One of the things that I want to do with the B&W Underground is to take a deeper look into photographs, to take them apart, to see what makes them tick and to see what separates the outstanding from the average.

Recently while shooting the Matthew Strum Band at Mid City Grill in Ft Wayne I noticed this woman and knew immediately not just that I wanted to shoot her but exactly what the shot was I wanted. After getting up the courage to ask her she said fine as long as I didn’t include her face. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I wasn’t planning on including it.

After moving over to an area by the pool tables where there was more light I grabbed a few frames and showed them to her. She was happy with them and I went back to shooting the band. This has turned out to be one of my favorite shots of the trip.

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After posting this shot on the Mpix forum in B&W a member asked to see it in color. When I looked at the two versions I saw that they really told different stories.

Take a look at the color version, what do you see first? Where do your eyes go next? What kind of feeling do you get? What story does it tell?

Now look at the B&W version, what do you see first? Where do your eyes go next? What kind of feeling do you get? What story does it tell?

Take a few moments to let us know what you think about the differences between the two.

cort

no music tonight, just late night tv

For the past few years I have had an idea rattling around in my head, it mutated several times until it finally congealed into something I felt comfortable with and thought would work.

The result is the Black & White Underground, a place where those few remaining renegade photographers that refuse to give up B & W photography can hang out, share ideas and techniques with others. It is a place where everyone is welcome, film and digital alike, it is a place for passing on the passion of B & W photography from one generation to the next.

This is the starting point for the Black & White Underground, a simple blog that I hope over the next several months will transform into a Web site with a forum for sharing ideas, critiques, online classes and more.

If you are one of those few crazy types that people keep asking “Don’t you do color?” then stop by, leave a comment and join up. Who knows where it will lead, but ask anyone that knows me, they will tell you it will be a hell of a ride.

thanks to andy, lowry, scootie, pat, the late night garage crew and my wife linda for helping get this started

cort

p.s. I am new to the blog thing so please give me some time to get it all figured out, the music for tonight is the Matthew Sturm Band live at Mid City Grill.