American Cranes and Transport, April 2020 Cover

Trying to capture the scope of a trade show on the scale of ConExpo really requires some height. To tell the story of the size of the show, I’ve shot from parking garages, rooftops, hotel rooms and exhibit scaffolding.

Over the weekend prior to the show, I shot what I hoped would be a cover image from an adjacent parking garage rooftop, after getting permission from the very nice manager of the hotel that owned it (trespassing to get a shot is not advised, especially in Las Vegas). Nice light, most of the crane lot in frame. Only one problem, most of the show was not in nice light and if you attended the show you probably didn’t see the blue skies of the weekend. The image that was actually was chosen by my editor was shot by me out a hotel window of the Sahara Hotel across the street from the crane lot right after one of the rainstorms that confronted us during the first few days of the show. And yes that’s the parking garage in the distance where I shot what I thought would be the cover….

American Cranes and Transport – July Issue

Was excited to see the July issue of American Crane and Transport hit the stands today. I was asked to share my experience covering the largest equipment tradeshow in the world as a photographer and the article includes six pages of images I captured during that week in Munich. The editor also decided to go with one of my abstracts for the cover which made this issue even more special.

Why I keyword

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.

Sometimes its not what you think…

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.

American Cranes and Transport

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.

ACT June 16.pdfACT June 16.pdf

American Cranes and Transport II

I was pleased to learn earlier this month that one of my images made the cover of American Cranes and Transport and resulted in a cover story of the project. A second image was used in the body of the story.

While the image was straight forward using the Df and 18-35,extensive reflections caused from shooting from within the terminal where challenging to remove. Attending Moose Peterson’s Click to Click Workshop in NYC the week after I shot the image opened my eyes to a few techniques that I was able to use separately and in combination.

So after spending over a year with Moose working through his Master of Light Program, why would I spend a weekend at a workshop? Its real simple. I have never, ever, ever attended a Moose Peterson event that I didn’t pick up something that helped move my photography forward. Each Moose Peterson workshop or event is distinct, constantly updated and full of information that can take you to the next level.