On Assignment

Sometimes your favorite picture from a shoot is the last one you take. That happens a lot with me where I think I just keep shooting until I am finally satisfied with something and willing to call it quits. This happened on this enterprise piece AP asked me to shoot special for the Chicago Tribune.

The subject was on this researcher growing artificial heart tissue in Petri dishes. All I had to work with was the dude, and his Petri dishes… After a bunch of run-of-the mill environmental portraits in the BSRB Atrium and his dimly lit lab, I was getting desperate. Then, I realized the Petri dishes all had this Koolaid-colored solution in them and that I had this little red LED key-chain light my Mom (bless her heart) pawned off on me last Christmas. “Here you might have a use for this toy”

So I put the Doc into his little lab closet, turned off the lights, and shined the LED from below the Petri dish as he held it. Its a little too dark, and a bit soft, but at a glance the shot works to grab attention. I didn’t know if the Tribune would run the photo, so I included my safety shots in the transmission too.

Oh, and while I was in the lab, one of the research assistants started cutting up a dead mouse. I liked how she used a sheet to cover up the “unpleasantness”, as if the mouse was in surgery. Alas no, she was harvesting its organs.

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A lot of people, i assume, know of the trick where you can get a nice fire ball from igniting a cloud of non-dairy creamer. Apparently has to do with the emulsifying qualities of the powder with air, or something…Alton Brown can explain it better. Anyhoo, earlier this month, I had an AP assignment special for the Atlanta Journal-Constitutional [story] that featured Michigan Aerospace Professor Bill Kauffman.

He’s a big expert on the science of dust explosions, which apparently frequently blows up grain elevators (see photo in picture) or saw mills.

My only option for the story was to get something interesting in the form of a portrait for Kauffman. His office in the Aerospace building on campus didn’t help with the story as it was covered floor to ceiling with airplane pictures and such. This story doesn’t mention aviation at all. So, we found a room where there wasn’t much clutter, and i liked the scribbles on the chalk board, which made a nice clean “academic” background. He was a pretty photogenic old fella so i knew I should just make him pop. With the room’s florescent lights off and all the blinds drawn, i could control the lighting with two strobes.

He thankfully had a framed picture of a dust explosion accident, and that worked okay to relate his mug to the topic of the story. He also had a bag of saw dust, which looked like rabbit food. He didn’t mind making a mess dumping all of it on the table, so that helped add even more context. The good thing that made this shoot work was definitely Kauffman’s cooperation. He was a good sport with trying out different poses and performed to his abilities.

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I shot the Iowa-Michigan men’s gymnastics meet Saturday night, and quickly remembered how crappy the lighting and angles were in Cliff Keen Arena. Plus, given I’d taken Michigan Men’s gymnastics pictures there extensively in the past years, it was hard to find something different to do. This picture is my attempt at making something different. Not very satisfied with how that worked, although I think the idea can be improved upon with better execution. What do you think?

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So I had to get a picture of this as I was shooting a high school wresting tournament for the Free Press last Saturday in South Lyon. The kid, from Milford, has the job of slapping the ref with a yellow nerf stick to alert him that time is up in each round. Seems like there totally could’ve been a more efficient and less silly system of time keeping. This is why wresting is so funny to watch and photograph.

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So I’ve ditched that horrible bastard of a hosting/domain registrar: Registerfly.com, and moved onto Aplus.net as my host for both tonyding.com and the newly minted and re-incarnated MISTERDING.COM. This blog, On Assignment, is my idea of having a notepad to record all my ideas and thoughts from my photo assignments. Lets see what I can do with this blogging software!

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