This is Allen. He worked at the Maine Media Workshops as the Digital Service Bureau Manager and we shared an office space. We also were roommates at the cabin. He’s a cool cat and possibly the best photo printing ninja I’ve met. He now assists for John Paul Caponigro. He is one of my best friends from my time in Maine and I look forward to following his blossoming career.

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Allen

I was playing with a tilt-shift lens awhile back and shot these two pics of my coworker from The Maine Media Workshops, Dave. It was really tough because I had to use a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds (which is a long time!), camera balanced on my knee, adjusting focus and composition by trial and error.

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Dave at Union Hall

I’ve got a big project in the works and as soon as a few more of the details fall into place, I will be able to announce it here.

I left Maine Saturday morning, Dec. 13th, and am driving back to Arkansas for the holidays. I’m stopping in several places along the way to hang out with some friends and am looking forward to being back down south for a bit. It was starting to get pretty cold in Maine!

So I probably won’t be posting much besides pictures for the rest of the year.

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Leaving Maine

I spent Thanksgiving 2008 being sick in Maine and didn’t go anywhere or do anything special. I had some generous offers from fabulous friends to hang out with them and their families and I was planning to hang out with my friend Sarah, but I just didn’t feel up to it. I have a cold. My head is super congested and I’m sneezing and coughing on a regular basis. My body aches all over and it hurts just to walk around.

Instead of eating Turkey I had mac and cheese. I put a little tuna in it. Also some salt. Instead of eggnog, I had lots and lots of water. Been chugging the water. I’ve heard staying hydrated is helpful for the immune system.

Of course it is cold in Maine. But I wonder if there is any truth at all to cold weather contributing to catching a cold. Isn’t it germs? Isn’t a cold contagious because of germs? I don’t think people get a cold from the cold. I probably got a cold from the airplane rides on Saturday. An airplane is a great place to trade germs with people. I first started feeling bad on Tuesday night though. Is that a normal time progression?

But I don’t really feel too bad about missing turkey today. Two reasons. First, I’ve got a feeling some leftovers will be brought to my house on Friday and second, I already had a great big thanksgiving meal a few weeks ago. The staff and students still left here at the workshops, decided to have a themed potluck thanksgiving meal before everyone left called “Dranksgiving”. Well, actually there were a couple of themes and you could pick and choose your outfit accordingly. First there was the gangsta option. Then there was the pilgrim/Indian option. And finally there was the ugly sweater option. So inevitably we had pilgrims sportin bling and gangstas wearing ugly sweaters. Here’s a picture of Jeff showing his amazing costume:

photo by Kathleen Guill

So evidently there is a drink from the hood called Drank. This drink was the basis for the party being called Dranksgiving of course. The recipe that was used was cough syrup, dry gin, and sprite. A healthy pitcher was mixed up and most people were drinking it. So about 9:00pm food was finally ready and everyone got busy eating. The food was excellent and the party was rocking until the late hours of 11:30pm.

11:30pm!!!!! Yeah, turns out when they bought the cough syrup they forgot to get the non-drowsy kind. Add the tryptophan from the turkey and it’s the perfect recipe to pass out early. I didn’t have any drank, so I was one the last person to leave the party at 1:00am. We had parties during the summer that didn’t start until 1:00am!

Anyway, So even though I didn’t get turkey today, I’ll think I’ll be ok.

To everyone that I love, I am thankful for your support as I work to achieve my goals. Happy Thanksgiving!

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Thanksgiving 2008

I grew up in Arkansas which has incredible fall colors, but I must admit, this fall in Maine was really quite beautiful and probably more colorful than most Autumn’s in Arkansas.

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Maine colors

The tilt shift lens is very tricky to use. For the non-photographers out there: basically it gives you the ability to manipulate your plane of focus on an x, y, and z axis instead of just the normal x axis. So you can throw certain areas of the image out of focus. The problem is that the more you manipulate the plane of focus, the more bouncing around inside the lens the light has to do and therefore, the more difficult it is to accurately asses the needed exposure settings. Add to this that this is a very wide angle lens and has a tendency to distort the image at times and you get a situation where it takes a lot of practice to use this lens well.

Anyway, below is a flickr slideshow of some of the more successful images I got that night. If there is no slideshow showing up, try clicking here. Also, 3 of these shots were actually taken with my 50mm prime, but I’ll let you try to figure out which ones!

I’m interested to hear what you (the reader), think about using these slideshows on my blog versus what I usually do, which is just load up all the images one after the other down the column.

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Tilt Shift Picnic

We used 3 canon 580EXII flashes for the lighting with 2 pointed onto the makeshift backdrop and the third attached with a 4ft cord to the camera aimed at the subject.

Each photographer got a copy of the pics and is doing their own post processing. The shots below are my ‘selects’ from the shoot and I wanted to share them with!

Michael

Kalie

Bruce

Carlos

Chris

Lou

Kalie

Bruce

Lou

Me

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Photoshoot with 7 Weekers

Now, here’s the thing, while filming this documentary Ryan and Steve the producer of the doc, were blown up along with a couple of the special forces soldiers in Afghanistan. He was seriously injured/burned and had to be airlifted to Germany. Filming was cut short by 7 days and the entire documentary changed course. It became a much more personal film and very compelling.

(youtube video)

The video above is of the producer talking about the incident and the impact it had on the film crew. The story is very engaging and powerful. With the director/producer and director of photography both in the hospital, the sound guy picks up a backup camera and records some extra footage. It’s just very moving to me because these guys are there trying to make an honest film about what it’s like to be in a war zone as a green beret and they very nearly die in that effort.

Ryan is just a little older than me and has had a similar life, so it’s hard for me not to put myself in his shoes. In the Q&A he talked in detail about what it was like and what he experienced during and after the filming. It was riveting.

Afterward all I could think about was the idea of sacrifice and what drives certain people to be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country. Would I be willing to go shoot a documentary in Afghanistan or Iraq? I think since I am not married I’d be willing to risk my life and use my skills to bring back stories of the conflicts of the war on Islamic Extremists. But If I were married and/or had kids… i don’t know… Maybe I’d be more inclined to do it to try and make the world safer… or maybe I wouldn’t be willing to put myself in harms way and leave the people that depend on me for safety behind and alone. It’s a very tough moral decision and obviously one I don’t look forward to ever having to face.

The film is available on Amazon and also on youtube (divided into 6 parts, click ‘more from saif316′)

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Inside the Green Berets; a viewing with the DP

Matt and Kevin

Deb

This is a little semi-private area of the bowling lanes and we took over the whole area!

Carlos

Carlos showing off his hours old tattoo

Bruce

Carlos bowled a spare

Lou

Michael

Matt

Good times with good friends!

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More Candlepin Bowling

Click here for a Flickr slideshow of the pics!

Below are a few highlights… but I encourage looking at the flickr show for lots of fun party pics!

Alan

Emily

Hannah

Trevor and his hat made out of film!

After the party!

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ABC PARTY

This pic was taken 5 days after the injury.

It was very very dark and I was running as fast as I could to grab the flag or at least untag one of my teammates. She was standing between me and the flag and she reached out to tag me, I tried to go around her, and in the process, my elbow made quite an impact with her cheek and eye. I knew from the second I hit her, that it was a pretty severe injury. We stopped the game and went to get her some first aid. At first we thought it was just a black eye, but when it wouldn’t heal, she went to get x-rays and they confirmed the fracture to her zygomatic bone, commonly called the cheekbone.

She took it like a champion and just so that everyone knows, she tagged me out an instant before I nearly killed her with my elbow. Good job Hannah!

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I’ll break your face!

Just thought I would share a pic of my office in Maine.

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My office in Maine

It’s much harder than regular bowling. I went with some friends from the Maine Media Workshops and we had a great time. My camera got passed around a bit so some of these shots weren’t taken by me.

Allen and Tre

Tre (possibly not taken by me, not sure who got this shot)

Evan, doing some karate kid stuff

Me. Not sure who shot this, but it’s a great one!

Ryan. He was getting frustrated by the difficulty of the game.

Jenny’s Tattoo! Isn’t that awesome!?

The Dave.

You will notice that there aren’t many pics of the actual bowling. That’s because bowling is about the fun times, not the final score!

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Candlepin Bowling in Maine

That’s my roommate and officemate Allen doing the printing.

Of course I brought Charlie and we got our picture made!

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Maine Media Workshops Open House

A poker tourney in action!

A girl named Jackie showed me her films on her iphone. Pretty cool!

My buddy Trevor throwing some darts!

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Local Bar Scene

Downtown Rockport, ME

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summer blogging

So I recently accepted a 6 month job for the Maine Media Workshops. I’m going to be doing a variety of things related to technology and IT support. The Maine Media Workshops is similar to the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops and I will be doing similar things to what I was doing when I worked for them. The main difference is that the MMW offer film and video classes as well as photography. As most of you know, I’m a video producer as well as a photographer so this is exciting to me. The creative and fun environment of a workshops program is really great and I look forward to an exciting summer of meeting new people, learning new stuff, and having good times!

I want to say thanks to the following amazing people for housing me, entertaining me, modeling for me, feeding me, and basically making my road trip an enjoyable experience!

Angela and Tommy— Thanks for everything! You guys are awesome!
Maryam — You are amazing!
Joey and Cecelia — you guys are such good friends to me!
Jessica — I’ve already said it.
Chelsea and friends — you guys rock, I had a great time!
Rainer — at this point, you’re like a brother!
Madelyn and friends — New York was such a blast with you guys! I will definitely be back!

PS: I took lots of pictures on my way to Maine and will be posting them on my photoblog at www.kendrickdisch.com/blog over the next few weeks!

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Moved to Maine