Inessential Stuff

Pullman isn’t THAT far away. Still, when traveling across the Palouse to do a shoot, I figure we might as well make it worth it and go all out. Fortunately, this was exactly Courtney’s thinking as well. So we made a day of it. Indoor shots. Outdoor shots. Industrial shots. Landscape shots. We shot for about four hours, with only a coffee break in the middle to warm up.

And yes, it was fairly cold, which makes Courtney’s effort all the more spectacular. Some shots seem quite summery, with a cotton dress and bare feet, but that is misleading. While she was moving gracefully in bare feet, I was blowing on my hands and bundled in a bulky sherpa fleece. She insisted it wasn’t that cold if you just put your mind elsewhere.

Oh, by the way, she’s also proof that beauty and brains go together: she’s a doctoral student in engineering at Washington State University. Anyway, here are about fifty images from the day.

For some reason, this shoot sort of slipped through the cracks.  Kylie and I did our third shoot together back in July, and I’ve had these images sorted out and ready to post, and then they never got posted.  So I’ll post them now.

It was, as usual with Kylie, a fun, relaxed shoot.  She chose the wardrobe thinking blue would go well with the green of the fields.  We stopped by an abandoned building on the way to the fields, then shot until after dark.  We also lucked into some noctilucent clouds.  So productive was the shoot, that the image you see at the right now is in my home studio.  Click this way to see the rest of the shoot.

I have driven past Ritzville, Washington too many times to count.  It sits 60 miles west of Spokane, just far enough off Interstate 90 to be easily ignored, either as I head on toward Seattle or as I turn off onto US Route 395 toward the Tri-Cities.  I have, on several occasions, gotten off the eastern exit of Ritzville (it is a two exit town), sometimes as a place to launch off onto back roads, and once to stop at a highway mini-mart.  But I had never been past that mini-mart, down the road, into Ritzville itself.

It was never ritzy—it derives its name from its founder, Philip Ritz, not from monuments of glamour and glitter.  Even so, I had heard it was a fine little town, with a picturesque, though deteriorating, downtown. So one evening this week, I drove off the first eastern Ritzville exit, and continued down the road past the mini-mart, to see what I had been passing by all these years.

I take pictures here and there all the time–at Marcus’ t-ball games, on the way back from weddings, on photoshoots. It gets to be an odd assortment of photographs that aren’t easy to categorize and, therefore, don’t usually end up in a gallery on my blog. So I decided to lump them all together into a category of their own, and here they are. Will notice a rural theme, and an acute interest in hay bales.

I met Amy on the day of our shoot.  Within the first few minutes, she told me, “I’ve been sick all my life.”

She is 23 years old, and has been in and out of hospitals all her life. She has fought cancer twice. She has had open-heart surgery. She has had countless images taken of her body—–MRIs, CAT scans, X-Rays.

But she’s been in good health for a while now, and, as if to remind herself of who she really is, she wanted some pictures of the outside of her body, pictures that showed a healthy woman.

She told me beforehand she didn’t want me to photoshop out the scar on her sternum from the surgery, but that she really wanted me to make her look pretty.

That was not difficult to do.

It so happens that her boyfriend is a motorcross rider, so she wanted pictures of her with his bike and gear, and she found a great farm location.  I met her and her friend downtown, and they led me to the farm.  We did some shots around the barn at first, and then moved out to the field, which was much better.

She was very nervous at first, skitter-ish, and reluctant to look into the camera for more than an instant.  But with a bit of coaching and encouragement, she became more and more relaxed.

We tried a bit of this (some shots by the barn) and that (shots in the field), and by the end, not only was she anticipating what I wanted her to do next, and posing beautifully, but she was actually enjoying it

We finished up.  I packed up my gear, and she put away the bike equipment.  And as we were heading back across the field to the barn, she said, to no one in particular, “This has been the best day of my life.”

That makes for a pretty gratifying day of shooting.

We had scheduled a shoot a couple weeks in advance, so we simply lucked out on the weather.  It had been 0ver 90 that day, but a storm was rolling in.  That night would bring thunder and rain and the next day the highs would be in the low 60′s.  But for the evening, when the shoot was scheduled, the weather was perfect:  not too hot, but with spectacular clouds, as the storm came closer and closer.

I’ll post some pictures of the scenery later.  For now, here are a few of the portraits we got.

Some people don’t see the appeal of Eastern Washington.  Too dry.  Too barren.  Too empty.

I’m not among them.

Give me some backroads, some music, a camera, maybe even a traveling companion, and I’ll have a great day.  So it was on Saturday, as I did a little South-of-Tri-Cities exploring, including a drive up to the mighty windmills, which I had seen from afar, but never up close.

It took a while to find the right road, but the timing was perfect:  orange sunset; strangely blue sky to the east; rich green fields.  The wind bent down the grain and encouraged silence by whispering “shhhhhhh” in the ears and sometimes died down just enough to ear the “whush-whush-whush” of the rotary blades on the windmills.

Here’s a little taste.

I have been wanting to do a country road shoot for a while (and will be doing more . . . . lots of area left unexplored there). So I arranged and shoot with Haley, who brought along her friend Julie. We drove out towards Cheney (I think they thought I was leading them on a goose-chase for a while), and found a spot.

The concept is a breakdown, as you can see. But it ended up being as much about the sunset as anything. Okay, so there are some continuity problems (few girls would breakdown on the side of the road with a wardrobe change), but it was a lot of fun, as you can see.

And though the road was fairly deserted, I think it’s pretty safe to say that these girls would have no problem finding help if they DID breakdown.

This is my boy, Marcus.  He is five and a half years old.

He loves animals and insects, no matter how ugly or strange.  Sometimes, it seems, the uglier and stranger, the better, so his favorites include bats, armadillos, and platypuses.  Yet he appreciates that the kestrel must eat the sparrow to survive, and that the sparrow must eat the ant.  And he loves the ant.  The sparrow, too, and the kestrel.  He especially loves the ant.

We walk hand-in-hand to the Spokane Arena to watch a hockey game together.  He wants to know if Everett will be the opponent.  I say no, Vancouver.  He says, too bad.  He likes Everett’s uniforms.  And I think back to last year when we saw Everett play.  Then he goes on, “At least when they wear their green shirts with the green helmets.  I don’t like white jerseys as much,” he says, accessing memories two years old.  “They wear white helmets with those.”

A nightmare disturbs his sleep.  He asks to be hugged in the morning.  He tells me that he is sad, so we talk about other things.  That afternoon, after preschool, while talking about the day––painting and pizza for snack––he says to me, “Daddy, you know what’s funny?” and he says “funny” as in “peculiar” or “worthy of pondering.”  I ask him what.  “It’s funny,” he says, “how I spend more time thinking about the bad things than the good.”

He is sick, his fever breaking, and he has no energy, and he lays on my chest.  I play some soft music for him, “The Weepies”, a sad song called “The World Spins Madly On” and he is warm against my body, and I love being able to hold him and rub his back.  Then he says to me, in a froggy, groggy voice, “These words don’t make sense.”  “What do you mean?” I ask.  “It says the world spins madly on.  But the world doesn’t spin madly, like this,” and he lifts up his body so he can demonstrate, and he spins his fingers around, “or we would all fall off.”  He lays back down.  “At first,” he continues, “I thought it said, ‘And the world spins magically on’.”  His throat is thick with illness, and every word is an effort, but he lifts himself back up to look me in the eyes.  “That makes more sense.  Because it spins around and around and no one is pushing it, like magic.”  He puts his head back on my shoulder.  I rub his back.  It has started to snow outside.

I haven’t posted in a while because it’s the middle of wedding season, which has been keeping me busy.  Still, this last week, I managed to work in a shoot with Christalle.  We had shot before, in miserable, cold conditions, so it seemed proper and right that we should shoot on a glorious summer evening.  We shot in the evening, past sunset, and into dusk.

I’m a Walla Walla boy–grew up with wheat fields behind my house.  Maybe that’s why there is something about wheat fields that speak to me.  But put me in the middle of rolling wheat fields, under a massive sky, and I get a sense of the infinite.

So anyway.  I had been wanting to do a shoot in a wheat field.  Results here.