A black and white graphic of crane booms that I shot at ConExpo was selected by American Cranes and Transport for their June 2023 cover. Not typical for a cover – a graphic or a black and white, but it supported their lead story “Booming” quite nicely.
Am excited to see the release of the new coffee table book, “Legendary!:Legendary People, Jobs and Equipment” celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association and published by KHL Group. The book features notable crane lifts, companies and people that have made a difference in the crane industry over the past 75 years. As a Contributing Photographer to the Editorial Board, it was interesting to go back through my files for iconic images to tell the story of the crane industry. My image of the historic Tappan Zee Bridge construction is featured on the cover collage and a number of other images have been reproduced as full page section dividers: cranes at sunset (shown below), a crane working on Cinderella’s castle at DisneyWorld, graphic of crane booms, and a tower crane working in NYC as well as to highlight the story in other sections of the book. Glad to be part of such a significant work in this industry.
The editors of American Cranes selected this image for the August cover. Walking down a narrow side street in NYC, the white tower crane stood out against the buildings on both sides of the street, drawing the eye to the subject of this month’s issue.
Hard to believe this is Cover #20 for American Cranes and Transport. Very simple shot at dawn, isolating the subject of their feature story.
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.
After two days of miserable weather at ConExpo 2020, the sky began to clear and for a time we were treated to a blue sky with great clouds. Walking by a Kobelco Crawler Crane, I highlighted the yellow boom against what was going on above. Keeping it simple and at the same time creating a lot of space for text if it were to be chosen from my cover submissions.
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….
It’s always fun to get a call for an image that will tell a story. In this case, I was asked if I could capture some images for a feature story on wire rope. Yes, a spool of wire rope would represent the story line but capturing the application of the product opens up the possibilities for far more interesting images that hopefully draws the reader into explore the story.
The August edition of American Cranes & Transport features an image of a tower crane that was operating in Germany. Love those clouds!
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.
