Inspirational

TRANSFORMATION by Zack Arias

Guilty Pleasure

When you are really feeling down on your luck, check out this site here. Its sure to make you feel better and realize that some things could be much much worse.

Move from Vail....

Some more early edits of time lapse movies from the Vail ad shoot. The lead off features the whole shoot crew prancing around an open slope overlooking a massive "bowl."



Next up - skiers!

The Abuse Debate

Benjamin Chesterton makes an interesting argument. One that questions much of the ethical tightrope that social documentary photographers straddle.
Its a slippery slope, both the practice of photographing and publishing something so horrible and the notion that we should stop. Would then the image of a dying man on a road in Georgia, Gaza, Iraq, be considered wrong?
What about Eugene Smith's image from Japan of a deformed "Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath?" Is this wrong?
At what point do we as journalists, as human beings, stop photographing? Where is the line?

Back in Business

Just got back to NYC after an exhausting 2 1/2 week trip to Vail, CO for a tech scout, down to Bogota, Colombia for an editorial shoot, then back to Vail for my first advertising campaign. There is lots to be said, and impressions made following my experiences in the last few weeks.
First off, The editorial gig in Colombia was for Purpose Driven, Rick Warren's new Christian themed publication from Reader's Digest. As most people know, I am not a particularly religious person, but the story was interesting (Former FARC members now Christian missionaries), the print quality of the rather thick magazine is amazing, and they have a budget for international travel. In this day and age, with magazines printing on thin paper, with hardly any ads and very few pages, this is a magazine that stands out. And while the subject matter has a particular theme, a photographer gets to experience new ideas, situations, stories, and receive a paycheck.
I was able to travel through out Bogota and a smaller northern city near FARC territory called Villavicencio. And while the photographic possibilities that accompanied the story were slim (I wasn't inclined to spend a few months as a "guest" of the rebels), I met some really interesting people - former fighters, commanders, soldiers - who "found" God and put down their weapons in favor of the Bible.
In order to make more compelling shots - beyond the stale portait of a pastor, missionary, or "hands-in-the-air-praying" image, I resorted to using, almost as a crutch - the Canon 45 Tilt Shift Lens. Amazing. I think I found my new Holga/Lensbaby/Kitch cliche tool of the moment. Had a ton of fun with it.
Though by far the most amazing thing to come out of my trip to South America was a chance to see the clouds. Flying back to Bogota from the north of the country, I must have shot 16 gigs of Cloud imagery.
They have truly amazing cloud formations. I almost felt like Stieglitz from the plane. Except with a digital camera.

After that I was back to the USofA for my first ad campaign. Stuart Hart of New Cruelty was my producer, David Holloway and Ken Cedeno for the DC crew were my stalwart assistants. I haven't had as much fun doing my job as I did last week. Climbing snow covered slopes in the freezing cold dawn, crawling through waist-deep snow, setting up four sets of cameras to shoot time lapse, stills, and video - was great fun. It was actually the opposite of stressful.
I swear I felt my hair growing back.
Almost.
I know having a stress free ad shoot in rare, having a creative director like Graham Button - a funny extroverted brit stuck in Colorado who can do imitations of Bear Grills while singing "Im Too Sexy," is even more rare.
I found myself climbing a snow swept rock face at about 11000 feet with David, Ken, and Graham - we staggered our climb, ten feet away from each other and passed up cameras, tripods, lenses, and pouches. Finally we arrived at the summit to witness one of the most spectacular Dawns I have ever seen. The fiery red tendrils of the morning sun cresting through a gap in the mountains. A layer of clouds separating the pink sky of dawn from the deep blue of the night.
Meanwhile, as I shot this, I lost most of the feeling in my gloveless had as the temperature dipped low and the wind howled and whipped against us.
All this and no bullets. No armed guards yelling at me about security risks. No managers demanding I get written approval. No bombs, no danger. No danger except from and errant snowball or stumbling skier. People were having fun, laughing, doing ski tricks, and were glad I was around. I wasn't the liability, I was the party.
I was in Vail to shoot the Vail Resort's marketing campaign and image library for next year. I could seriously get used to this sort of thing in these lean editorial times.
Below are a few outtakes - Skiers jumping off ramps in the "Terrain Park," and a time lapse of my second dawn on the roof of the Rockies. Or at least close to the roof.

Dawn on the Mountain. Sunrise that is...

Ski Jumpers at the Vail "Terrain Park"