the longest, coldest stretch of winter weather in florida in over 80 years.

~$100 MILLION lost in southwest florida alone.

EVERY county has been declared a disaster area, because EVERYONE lost ~30% of their crops.

farm workers out of work, nothing to harvest.

millions of dollars worth of equipment, just sitting there.

flies. alot of flies.

…..and yet, an air of nonchalance from both the congressmen and the heads of the farms. turns out alot of the small-time farmers around here rent/lease the land from farming conglomerates like Alico. And guess who gets to sit at home, wallowing in uncertainty and grief, while the farmer with THOUSANDS of acres of diversified product, the one who will still survive, gets carted out for the cameras to gladhand with the bureaucrats?

this is where i SHOULD be talking about how viewing disaster through a viewfinder provides the kind of detachment that keeps one from emotionally crumbling.

the difference on this day was that the comforting monocular blue-gray glow of my panasonic was emotionally detaching me from an already emotionally detached scenario.

people are going to be RUINED by the cold spell. people are going to be homeless, or killing themselves, or will be unable to send their kid to college over this shit. and here are a couple senators and a farm baron’s 4th-in-command cackling and back-slapping amongs rows of ACTIVELY ROTTING LIVELIHOOD. of…life.

and here I was, face buried in viewfinder, totally consumed with shutter and aperature settings…requiem for a conscience, right?

no.

i can understand the bank teller sitting on the couch with a microwave dinner not really understanding the magnitude of the damage. only thinking about how all those melted, rotten peppers are going to amount to an extra $4.38 on her next sweetbay reciept. she hasnt seen just how far those fields stretch in every direction, or how thoroughly destroyed each individual plant is. she can’t smell the decomp, she isnt getting dive-bombed by bees and having flies wander up her shirt sleeves…

so it’s my job to grab that scenario, and plop it down right next to her on the loveseat. to make her feel it.

now you’d think that in order to make it as real as possible, i should just shoot it raw. no shutter, no bokeh, no over-the-top shot composition, just show the scene. hell, many a news director would say something very much to that effect.

so why make it look so…cinematic? (jackies words, not mine) well if it was a bank robbery or a rollover on the interstate, that’s exactly what you’d get from me. and from pretty much every other photog in our market.

and that’s why i put so much effort into making it look…surreal. (my words, not jackies)

our bank teller has had a rough day at work. she’s got a choice between a 4.6% pay cut, or 5 furlough days per quarter for the next 2 quarters. she’s got 2 kids throwing their tyson chicken nuggets at each other across the living room. she’s eating around the pieces of her cavatappi genovese that the microwave didn’t quite get to. she’s watching the news on auto.

rollover, city council meeting, the measures the zoo is taking to keep its monkeys warn tonight. some plane crash in mississippi. and all of it looks like….news.

then, she sees what looks like a movie about a biblical plague ravaging the croplands of some fictional eastern nation. everything looks…surrreal, cinematic…emotional.

but…

the WINK news logo is still rotating in the bottom-left corner.

she’s hearing the voice of the same collier county reporter that was on yesterday in a county commission meeting.

the lower-third resolves, and it says “east naples”.

…and that incongruence, that visual departure, slaps her in the face. demands her attention. and she tunes out the thuds of nuggets versus floor tile, and she puts the fork down. and she watches, and listens, a little harder.

and gets a little bit closer to comprehending the utter devastation.

…and feels it.

a feature-length historical documentary/where are they now?/social investigation about the international phenomenon that was/is FMILLEST.
what’s an FMillest, you say? it was/is our crew from our more formidable years, a group of people brought together by rollerblading. but it turned into much more than a skate crew.

so when jackie was down here a few weeks ago, we decided to:
A) see where everyone was, and what they’re doing
B) see if we can scare up as many old photos/videos/letters/etc. from that time as possible, and
C) put it all together as a documentary

we are now in the interviewing and old-media-gathering phase of the project, which we expect will last a long time. my conservative estimate for completion is one year. each interview, thus far, has been at least an hour. we’re looking at the possibility of acquiring THOUSANDS of stills, and HOURS UPON HOURS of old skate/party video.

Wesside’s interview was done on a rocking chair in his daughter’s (pink) room, with little mya in one hand and a quart of old english in the other.
Ol’School’s interview, if all goes according to plan, will be done via conference call on speakerphone while his buddy does the shooting in nashville (where Ol’School now lives).

while the most apparent reason for attempting this project is, as i will call it, active reminiscence, there’s a much more important mission:
we’re trying to figure out what it was about FMillest that made it so…special.
while it may be easy to say that we were so crazy because we’re skaters, that’s not entirely true. see, rollerbladers from around the country/world—young, old, pro, unknown—all thought we were crazy.
my hypothesis is that FORT MYERS was the base of the insanity, and rollerblading was simply an accelerant.

anyway, i’ll give periodic progress updates, along with maybe some little clips or production photos or whatever. this is going to be fun.

is a video i shot/cut for a friend’s band, bus-stop shanking. shot it like 6 weeks ago, but finally got it finished last night.

it actually came out pretty close to what i saw in my head beforehand:

the exceptions to the realization of that vision being
A) not being able to get ahold of a single tarp/sheet big enough, and having to use 3 bed sheets instead, and
B) having to deal with a drunker-than-expected, and astonishingly uncooperative, band. which of course led to fewer usable takes, fewer takes…period, and therefore VERY limited raw footage to work with.

but i gave it the old college try, and am mildly pleased with the outcome.

we finished another one too, which i will put up here as soon as i figure out this vimeo thing…

See that 1lb hairball tumbling across our great nation?

yes…doug ohlin is not only a photojournalist, but also a purveyor of fine works of graphic rediculocity.

…our art director at the station doesnt approve. on account of multiple “misunderstandings,” he has a bit of a problem with my self-expressions manifesting on the same screen as the station’s logo.

misunderstandings, you say? I offer an example:

Our web manager, who has since been laid off, had a weekly segment on our morning show where he would present 4-5 websites/services/etc. within that weeks theme. an interactive flash-based fireworks display and some cookout tips on the week of july 4th, for instance. well said webguy had been asking the art director (politely, i may add) for an opening clip for his segment for some time. and by “some time” i mean roughly 5 months.

I, having learned of such evil, agreed to make an open for webguy. it contained the words “webcellence” and “webtegrity,” and involved pictures of hillary clinton and baby ducks and such flying off his computer screen and past his head, all while some mid-90s-radio-sports-show-esque music blasted in the foreground. webguy and i then exported the final product to a thumb drive, and conned one of the production-folk into loading it onto the clip playout server. this meant that the producer needed only type a 4-digit number into the rundown, and the clip would load and play out on-air.

well, we almost got away with it. one hour before the show, both the art director and the director of promotions came barreling into the newsroom, aimed squarely at webguy’s desk. he got a stern talking-to, the clip never aired, but…

the next day, there was a brand new (approved!) open for his segment.

there were 3-5 other instances of me subverting the will of the almighty art director, which served to cement his opinion, and his willingness to work with me.

so when i decided that the best way to illustrate the relocation of the donated hair clippings was to fly a giant hairball across the country, i had to:

A) figure out how to do it, given the limited power of our news-based editing software, and

B) figure out how to get a nice-looking map of the country, with only locators for fort myers and san francisco, from Captain Graphics without letting him in on the rest of the scheme.

all was going according to plan. i had submitted a formal graphics request form, with a crude ballpoint illustration of what i needed. since i was hard at work editing the rest of the package, i sent my reporter back to the Art Cave with the paperwork. what i hadnt counted on was holly telling him about the entire plan.

request denied. no tinkering with graphics after getting them from the art dept.; any additions/alterations are not approved for air.

so what did our hero do?

i called him up, submitted to his will, and told him “OK, just give me an arrow then. it’ll work just as well.”

mission accomplished.

so i got the graphic from him, and now had to figure out how to get that hairball to fly. i slid on over to webguy’s desk, and handed him a thumb drive containing a still frame of the shot in question. he was kind enough to, using photoshop, remove the background and export the image, in the same size and format, as a .gif, since that format includes, some sort of alpha channel. i then still-framed the final frames of the hairball clip, and dissolved from that to the map graphic. on the overlaying video track, i placed the “hairball-only image. i then, using “3D picture-in-picture” (which allows not only positioning and effects plug-ins, but also keyframe-based movement), shrunk the clump down to a manageable size while positioning it over fort myers, and sent it along on its journey.

it aired exactly as you see above. i dont thing our beloved art director ever saw it, because he wasnt at work yet when it aired, but i haven’t gotten any grief from him. in fact, the reporter, morning EP, and everyone else who saw it, loved it.

the kicker?

CNN picked the package up, and it aired nationwide (i believe on headline news network).

yet again, victory.

Fun with Photons: Episode 1-In a pinch…

So I was doing a routine “Satellite Center” shot all morning today. That’s where we set up in master control (where they switch between local and network programming) and *.reporter talks about *.the lead from last night.

Simple shot, controlled environment.

…unless you have the palsy.

—Somehow I slept on a 9v battery a couple weeks ago, and I suffered radial nerve palsy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrist_drop)—

So in my limp-wristed state, I apparently wasn’t able to tighten the lock on one of my light stands enough. 90sec out from a live shot,

SHHHINK…CRACK. POP!

80sec.- No back/hair light, no extra bulb.

70- Run to the other side of the room, steal the operator’s chair. Stand on it.

60- Struggle on tippy-toes, on a rolling chair, to reach the track lighting above the switcher.

45- Get the light pointed roughly at *.reporter‘s head. Leap from chair.

40- Get back to camera. Realize track light is considerably weaker than the backlight that popped.

35- Adjust key light, pulling further away from subject. Take a guess on appropriate distance/brightness, no time to double-check in viewfinder.

25- Back to camera. Slam iris to full open, engage shutter option(1/250). Hope the shallower DOF will make up some of the separation lost with a weaker backlight.

15- STAND BY- Zoom in, re-focus because the backfocus on the camera will never stay set.

10- Re-compose shot, because *.reporter got flustered when I jumped on the chair and wasn’t in the right spot any more. Damn, you can see the program monitor over her shoulder! The whole shot will look like one of those hallways of mirros that create endless reflected subjects!

5- Kick/slide tripod about 5-7in to the right, which tucks said monitor back into its place, BEHIND the reporter. Re-re-compose shot.

ON AIR. Clean.