With the help of Nikon to NPS to my friends at Bedfords to Santa’s sleigh, my Z9 arrived with the approach of Christmas. Image edited on my phone in PS Express and uploaded to Instagram. By the way, I think PS Express rocks. If the Nikon Z9 is half the camera as advertised, it will be ground breaking….
Thanks to Bedford Camera and Nikon Professional Services, the new Nikon D6 arrived on my doorstep in the past week. To date, I have been pleased with the results I am getting during my testing. The greater selection of Auto-Focus options has been particularly interesting. Despite a steady downpour of rain, a Black-Crowned Night Heron suddenly appeared out back on the edge of the pond. Shooting with the Nikon D6 and AF-S NIKKOR 500mm f/5.6E PF ED VR lens, I followed him as he went about getting dinner….
The June edition of KHL’s American Cranes and Transport (ACT”) just hit the stands. I was excited to see that an article I finished up in late April was selected for the issue. “Distracted” includes 20 of my images from ConExpo 2020 selected by the editors at ACT, as well as my take on the show and shooting with the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding before our eyes in Las Vegas. While all this took place in the first week of March, it seems such a long time ago at this point in time. Besides COVID-19, the biggest challenge was really bad weather for largely an outdoor trade show.
I have to say that my new Nikon Z6 consistently performed alongside what would be my last serious shooting with the Nikon D5 before moving to the new Nikon D6. When you have small windows of time to capture images, you can’t be worrying about your equipment. Nikon camera bodies and lenses came through again.
A quick thank you to Bedford Camera for consistently amazing service and great prices. Thanks to them, I am presently shooting the heck out of my new Nikon D-6
Check them out at Bedford Camera. You won’t be disappointed.
ConExpo is the largest equipment trade show in the United States. Held every three years, in open lots around the Las Vegas Convention Center, it normally draws visitors from all over the world. I have attended ConExpo for almost three decades and shot the last four shows for American Cranes and Transport. Going into the show, the big challenge was that the old lot where most of the cranes were displayed had been sacrificed for the Convention Center expansion. Having shot three shows at the old location, I had a pretty good idea how the light moved throughout the day across the lot and where I needed to be to make the best use of it with the various exhibits. And I had my shooting notes from the previous shows. All that went out the window as the cranes moved to a new “temporary” lot about 1/4 mile away.
With COVID-19 at its infancy in the U.S., I arrived on March 6th and spent the weekend prior to the show, watching the light while avoiding being flattened by the flurry of forklifts and activity as the last minute preparations were made to the exhibits. The weekend was beautiful and had great light. Then for the first time that I can remember at a ConExpo, the weather went downhill fast and we opened the show to rain. Over the course of the week, the COVID-19 count in the U.S. climbed rapidly and ConExpo made the national news as the “last trade show being held in the U.S”. Most of the shooting opportunities were crammed into the last two of five show days because of weather and the show ended up closing a day early as the seriousness of the COVID-19 crisis became apparent.
I love the challenge of shooting trade shows of this magnitude and telling the story. With poor weather and COVID-19, I found the challenge amped up to an extreme. This is the scene that greeted me in the first 5 minutes of the show walking onto the crane lot.
A shout out to the New Possibilities Youth Program of Edmundite Missions, Selma Alabama. New Possibilities seeks to expose young people to new experiences that would not typically part of the usual academic program. This summer’s experiences will include lacrosse, ballet, photography and cooking to name a few. I was asked to speak about my passion for photography and ways to improve your images as a kick-off to the Program’s photography section. We used Zoom and simulcast to classes in Selma, Mosses and Vredenburgh Alabama. With the help of a small exhibit of my work on-site and a couple of slideshows and powerpoint, we looked at a lot of images and talked about taking control as a photographer and not simply clicking when everyone else does; understanding what your subject is and looking for ways to enhance it through looking at light, background, color and more, as well as ways to avoid distracting the viewer as you frame your image. And as we learned, a lot of this comes down to simply moving your feet to get to the best position for your image. They’re off to shoot for the rest of the week and will be submitting their best images next week for review. Thanks again for the opportunity to speak!
In October, I received an e-mail from an editor looking for an image of a crane operator to support a story they were doing on operator training. Usually, in the assignments I have shot, the crane is the subject and due to the size of the crane the operator is a very tiny part of the image…if he/she can be seen at all. I had till the next morning to get back to the editor so that evening I filtered my images and from 10,000 plus finished images of cranes I had two featuring crane operators where I had releases. I found them in about 5 minutes and had them off to the editor that night. Four weeks later, the image was published. I never would have found those two images from 10,000 plus shot over the past decade had it not been that I had attached some basic keywords to those images. If you keyword when you input your images from your cards, it soon becomes a habit. A habit that just got reenforced by this experience.
In shooting the cover for the August issue of American Crane and Transport, I had what I thought was a slam dunk idea for a cover. Literally outside my 16th floor office was a 51 story building going up. I started shooting the building from the time the tower crane was assembled. What a unique shot I thought. Straight down on a Tower Crane, a perspective most people don’t see or get to shoot. Up 2,3,8,12 stories and I shot all the way, along with the conventional from the ground up shot. When it came time to submit, in went the “unique perspective shots” along with the traditional. Then the call came from the editor. “We are really struggling to select one from several we like, would you like to be the tie-breaker?” So I selected my favorites and had a couple of hours to get back to them. In the end, I picked the traditional shot. Why not the “unique perspective”. The image was to highlight the magazine’s lead story, key word “story”. The more I looked at the tower crane below me in the “unique perspective” shots, the more I realized that they just didn’t have the impact of standing under a 12 story tower crane in operation – that’s what your mind expects to see and if it doesn’t see that it doesn’t scream Tower Crane. So in supporting the magazine’s lead story, we needed to make the reader’s mind identify quickly that this was the tower crane issue, not struggle to figure out why we were looking down on the crane. It was an important lesson for me and a reminder that its about telling the story, not just about capturing what was a unique perspective. In the end the story won out, as it should have.
The June issue of American Cranes and Transport is out.
June is their Annual ACT 100 issue and I was excited to have had the image I posted a while back, the “ass-shot” of the Terex AC-250, selected for the cover.
It’s also the culmination of quite a bit of work that I completed for them relating to Bauma, the largest construction equipment tradeshow in the world, held every three years in Munich. Even with all-access photo credentials, it was a challenge to shoot Bauma for a number of reasons. The weather certainly did not cooperate all the time, although the changing weather patterns created great clouds. Further, the show is BIG. The location of tradeshow booths can take up to a half hour to walk from one to another given the size of the show. And like any tradeshow, the amount of equipment packed into the show presents constant challenges in isolating specific manufacturers or products. And of course, with cranes being outside, time of day to take advantage of available light (when there was available light) created a shooting schedule in the morning and afternoon and, of course, the booths were never near each other. I set my personal best on my Fitbit the first day and then blew threw that on Day Three. Balancing between other commitments at the show and shooting added to the fun as well as the need to have all images processed within three days of the show ending – thank you Photo Mechanic and Adobe.
In addition to images that were selected for articles related to Bauma that appear in the June issue, “Dimmitt’s Bauma” is a 4-page selection of images from my submissions that were selected by the editor of American Crane and Transport to tell the story of Bauma from a photographer’s point of view. The article also includes a short article that I was asked to write as to how I approach a show of that size as a photographer. While I was aware that an article was in the works, the proofs arrived on my birthday and it was a great present to view what had been selected and how the article was laid out.
My recent time in Munich reminded me of a great trip that I took to Germany two years ago during Octoberfest. First to the northern city of Lubeck and then down to Munich.
I think travel photography is a great way to enhance a trip. A little preparation pre-trip goes a long way to make sure you are ready to capture those images and that they get safely back home with you – something I wrote about a couple of years back for Currents Magazine and am happy to share if you contact me.
Travel photography gives you the chance to visually tell the story, creating memories you can look back on for years. But to tell the story its more than a simple click. Trying to tie in elements that can visually express your experience in a simple image can be daunting.
To illustrate, the light and sky were great for the first image of the fountain at Munich’s Karlsplatz, just outside of the ancient gate, Karlstor, and the pedestrian area leading to Marienplatz. But if you don’t know Munich, it could be a fountain anywhere in Europe. I like the second one a lot better. It helps tell the story and certainly the time of year that we were in Munich.
