Each month for Marin Magazine, I make a photo and write a short essay (200 words) that fills a page in the front of the book. Here’s an example about Life on the Edge, and another about being Between Sea and Sky.

For June, the editor wanted something about Father’s Day, a cliche idea, but I liked the challenge of creating something that wasn’t a cliche and thought I might find it at a local Little League game.

I spent a couple of hours at one game and made some fine actions shots, but couldn’t capture the moment I wanted between a coach and a player or a father and a son. I was looking for that instant, communicated visually, when knowledge moves from one generation to the next.

I returned a week later, this time to a night game and spent about an hour shooting before the game as the kids and dads warmed up, playing catch and a bit of pepper. As the light faded, I looked for some final shots. It would soon be too dark to shoot the game. Suddenly, the coach called all the boys near and he knelt before them. I has to change lenses and got off two frames before the huddle broke. The above frame image ran in the magazine.

Below is the essay I wrote to accompany the picture.

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… And They Will Come

“Little League baseball is a good thing ‘cause it keeps the parents off the streets and it keeps the kids out of the house.” — Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra, the language-mangling New York Yankee, also once said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

What you observe when you watch the boys (and a few girls) take to local Little League diamonds is that this diminutive form of baseball depends as much on the coaching talents of fatherhood as the hitting and fielding skills of the sport.

Take a night game, for example. The fathers arrive fresh from work, some in their suits, others already changed into colorful T-shirts bearing the names of their children’s teams – Thunder, Storm or Raptors, outsized words for such pint-sized players.

Out come the gloves, the bats and the balls. A simple ritual begins. Catch. A child throws. A father catches. Back and forth. Back and forth. Encouragement is given, adjustments made. The moment is timeless, the lessons eternal.

As game time nears, the young players gather around their coach. He makes eye contact, commands attention. A man never seems so large as when he is surrounded by children who look up to him. A good coach, like Eric Dahlke of the Timber Rattlers in the Mill Valley Little League, takes a knee before his team, knowing that little ballplayers need men who are big enough to meet them at their level.

* Get Visual, Buy a Book: Here’s a good list of photo book publishers compiled by A Photo Editor. The cover on the left is from Once Upon a Time in Wales by photographer Robert Haines.

* Hope Amid the Flotsam: Another good read from A Photo Editor on the “endless stream of photography” and, with it, the proliferation of mediocrity. He connects through to a farewell post from photographer Liz Kuball in which she comments:

“It is so easy, when your Google Reader is always full of excellent photographs, to feel as though the rest of the world is producing constantly, consistently, at a level you’re simply incapable of.”

But cheer up, brave hearts, A Photo Editor also points to Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey’s more sanguine view:

“… but if you are “special” there are also way way more opportunities…and so so much room for invention….i swear, i have never seen so much room!!! “

* Get on the Grid: Sportsshooter Robert Hanashiro sings the praises of Dave Honl’s grids (and other gadgets) for speedlights. They work. I use them. Get some.

* Rumor Focus: Nikon Watch keeps the full-frame Nikon mill churning with word of 12mp D400 and a 24.8mp D3x.

* Sync & Swim: Check the Journey-to-the-Bottom-of-the-Sea rig Jill Greenberg used to shoot the U.S. synchronized swim team for a Radar magazine fashion spread.

A wedding of two friends in Cartagena last week was a good excuse to end the vacation drought my wife and I have been in. We’d been working non-stop for about 18 months and whenever a getaway window opened we’d manage to slam it shut for one reason or another. So, when the couldn’t-say-no-because-we’d-help-bring-them-together invite to the boda in Colombia came, we jumped at the chance.

I couldn’t leave work behind completely, though, so I pitched a travel story to local magazine, packed a camera bag and booked a room in a luscious hotel fronting the Caribbean at a wedding rate that was 60 percent of rack.

Cartagena has hit the travel-writing radar lately. The New York Times just did a 36-hours-in-Cartagena piece, as did Travel & Leisure, which called it:

” … one of the prettiest cities anywhere: Imagine Havana with a fraction of the population, or San Juan or New Orleans without the sophomores on spring break. It’s both crumbling and majestic.”

I agree with all that, and would add that Cartagena is also home to some of the most beautiful human beings — women and men — I’ve ever seen. Skin colors range from the deep cocoas of the Afro-Caribbeans, to the mochas of the native South Americans, to the near ivory blanco of descendants the European pirates who pillaged the Colombian coast for centuries.

The dancer above was one of a troupe who accompanied the wedding party on its short walk back from the (blessedly air-conditioned) Iglesia Santo Toribio to the Sofitel Santa Clara Hotel. (The photo was shot with an SB800 on camera, using balanced TTL and rear-curtain shutter.)

The old-walled city of Cartagena was beautiful and a delight to photograph. The newer sections of town (where most people live) was a standard Latin America mix — flourishes of prosperity set amid wider pockets of poverty. The beaches were wide, the sand heavily tramped down (except on the outlying Islas del Rosario), and the water 80 degrees.

Fish fresh from the sea dominated menus — robalo, mero and, especially, pargo (red snapper). Street vendors fried up crunchy corn fritters called arepas, some filled with eggs, cheese and meat. Eating one was not an option.

Nothing, though, beat colder-than-cold limonadas, especially those made in a blender with lime juice, sugar, ice and club soda. Add in some leche de coco (coconut milk) and you get a concoction we gringos dubbed a Key Lime Pie.

One of my great challenges in photography has been making new techniques work the first time out on the job. I haven’t always been successful at that, so if the job permits (meaning there’s enough time or the art director doesn’t have a specific shot in mind) I usually plan on a back-up shot as well, something I’m sure I can pull off.

I shot the two pictures in this post to illustrate a story in Marin Magazine on trail running here in the Bay Area. The women belong to a Luna Chix running team headed by the magazine’s web mistress.

We chose a trail on Mt. Tam called the Sun Trail because it provided some great views (I wanted the context of the geography) and was close to a road (to cut down on the gear lugging.)

My original idea was to light three of the runners along a curve in the trail (like in the shot below), but after a few test shots I realized it would be very difficult to time the runners so a strobe hit each one as she passed. Also, I was shooting from 100 feet away on a rock out-cropping and would have needed an assistant to help reposition the lights after each test shot. Since this wasn’t a Chase Jarvis-type-budget-shoot, meaning it was just me and five runners, I went for Plan B.

First I shot three of the runners going through the curve. This was my sure shot. They were great sports because it was about 90 degrees out and they ran it a half-dozen times.

Then, I set up four SB800s along an upper portion of the trail — two in front and two along the side — and had them run toward me. When the led runner crossed a line I had made in the trail she shouted to me and I shot the group with a 12mm lens. I could only get off one frame each time since the flashes were firing on full power and needed recycle time, so the team ran it about 20 times. I did several variations of this shot, including backing way off with long lens.

The final shot (above) isn’t perfect, but it worked for the magazine and I learned a lot about lighting a group of moving people outdoors. Next time, I’ll concentrate more on separating each person, targeting them with an individual light and watching their expressions more.

The magazine used the above shot in the index and the below one as the lead shot for the story.

Just a quick post on this portrait because I am jamming to finish a couple of magazine projects before I head out of town for a working vacation — to the wedding of a friend in Cartagena. Vive los novios!

The magazine wanted a picture for Father’s Day and we found Greg Snowden, the owner of a local green building materials company, and his three sons.

I met them in the store after it closed, put up a big softbox over a picnic table and threw a couple of smaller lights on the background.

The boys were rambunctious and never settled down, mugging for the camera, grabbing at each and pulling Dad into the fun. At first I tried to control them, then realizing I couldn’t I just went with the flow, hoping a make a couple of good frames.

The result is above, one of about four or five usable shots out of 75 or so. I happy with it, although it’s not what I set out to do and therein lies the lesson:

Never try to teach a pig to sing. It doesn’t work and it only P’s off the pig. In this case, the pig sang when it was good and ready.

* Expanding or Contracting? Jim McNay, in a column at SportsShooter.com, tells us to do a Seriousness Gut-Check about our work. Am I “sending out portfolios, meeting with potential employers, pitching assignments to editors and the like?” Or am I “doing none of the above mentioned activities?” Me? I’m doing No. 1, but not as much as I should.

* Fair Use, Explained: Photo Attorney, aka Carolyn Wright, parses the “fuss about fair use.” After explaining the entitlements of copyright and the boundaries of fair use, she concludes:

“It is always a judgment call until a court gives a final ruling whether the use of a photograph is fair. But if you find your work has been used without your permission and the defense is “fair use,” don’t be too quick to accept that answer. “

* Don’t Shoot II: Hirlpoo points to more harassment of photographers for, ah, taking pictures. (Read: Don’t Shoot, I’m a Shooter.)

* Photojournalism and Passion: Self-taught photojournalist Colin Summers talks about his career at ProPhotoLife. He shot for more than a decade in places like India, Cambodia and Indonesia before gaining recognition. His mission: “I try … to convey the truth in a compassionate and inoffensive way”

Some people say their love affair with photography came when they first picked up a camera. It didn’t happen that way with me. I had been idly making snapshots with my first 35mm camera — a Pentax — for months before I felt a moment of magic, and that happened not with my eye in a viewfinder, but with my hands in a tray of developer. I fell in love with the print.

The first time I saw an image form on a piece of wet photo paper I was hooked. Even though that first image only lasted seconds before it turned black (because I had overexposed it in the enlarger), that we enough.

When I shot film, I came to live for the print because the print enabled me to see the image I’d made. Later, as I switched to digital I realized I didn’t need the print to experience the excitement of the image. There it was, on the computer, large and vibrant. I still enjoyed the “darkroom” work — enhancing contrast, extending tone, shaping color — but now the darkroom was dry and digital instead of damp and chemical, so I stopped printing.

Until now.

I have a show this week of photos I made in connection with a cookbook I wrote and photographed about organic food from Marin County (Organic Marin, Recipes from Land to Table, Andrews McMeel, July 2008).

It is a small show — 13 photos (one of them is above) — and is part of a month-long arts salon put on by Marin Magazine, which I do a lot of photography for, and a local home decor showroom.

At first, I was reluctant to do the show. Digital printing is dicey, at best, these days, with quality varying from printer to printer; and framing is expensive. But with some trial and error, I found good people to do both (Alesha Rogness at Vivid Imaging in Sausalito, 415-331-8272, and Bob Woodrum at Sausalito Picture Framing) and when I saw the finished prints, 20 x 30 and framed, that old excitement returned.

I’ve learned to loved the print again.

The show is up this week at California Closets Showroom 610 Dubois St., San Rafael. The party is Thursday, May 15, from 6-9 p.m, free music, snacks and wine. C’mon by if you can.

The harassment of photographers in the name of security continues, reaching the point of ridiculous in some instances and infringing on basic civil liberties in others. Here are a few recent examples of America, home of the paranoid:

* Scott Kelby writes on his blog, Photoshop Insider, how he and some fellow photographers were braced by security guards in a New York hotel for carrying tripods. (Hold it right there, fellow, and don’t unfold that thing!). In response, Rob Jones, one of Kelby’s readers, created the shirt you see at left is selling it on Cafe Press. Get one.

* The yahoos in the Shelby County, Tennessee, sheriff’s 0ffice are asking the local citizenry to call in reports of photographers taking pictures of buildings. “You may think a guy is just shooting pictures, but if you report it to us, we’ll send it on to the FBI and they may have four or five other reports of the same thing.”

* War on Photography is a blog that keeps track of these sorts of things, like the Minnesota photographer accosted by guards while shooting a refinery.

* Do your know your rights? Good. Then carry them around with you so others will know them too. Get a printable PDF of The Photographer’s Right.

* Photographer or Terrorist? That’s the headline in this BBC News Magazine story about increasing harassment of photographers in Britain. (Tip from Thomas Hawk, who’s been all over this issue.) Quote from the story:

“It’s a sad state of affairs today if an amateur photographer can’t stand in the street taking photographs.”

A sad state indeed. Keep shooting.

* People Who Need People: The New York Times asks the question we’ve all been wondering about: “Can a few snapshots of a baby or a bride, accompanied by a fawning article, really be worth millions of dollars?” Read the whole story about why tab magazines now routinely pay celebs to play (like this cover of Branjelina and child).

* Gulf Twosome: The two shooters atop the current photo how-to heap — David Hobby and Joe McNally — report back from the doings at Gulf Photo Plus. David offers the behind-the-scenes story on this SB800-laden image. Joe calls Dubai “3 parts Vegas, one part planet Tatooine, and 6 parts oil money.

* Photographers Wanted: Want to be a photojournalist? These newspapers are hiring.

* Pitching a Home Run: Rob Haggert (A Photo Editor) tells us how to make winning pitches to photo editors. Rule #1: “The absolute fastest way for photographers to get a story made is to approach a writer that the magazine uses on a regular basis.”

* Jumping the Canon-Nikon Divide: Freelance sports photographer Preston Mack switched from Canon to Nikon when he heard these words from an editor: “The cover image doesn’t look in focus.” Read Mack’s whole tale of learning to love the D3 on Sportsshooter.com.

* Blog I Like: Heather Morton is a Toronto art buyer who often writes about photography on her blog. In this post, she highlights Seattle photographer Lindsay Siu.

* Oh, Miley, We Hardly Knew Ye: Plenty of discussion about the Vanity Fair-Annie Liebowitz kerfluffle. There’s outrage in the Flickr Strobist group, puzzlement over celebrity worship in Utata, and James Danziger at the Year in Pictures makes it official:

“Annie Leibovitz’s work reveals four things: one – she likes to get people to take off as many clothes as possible; two - she loves to photograph skin, loves the different textures and colors; three – she loves to show a family bond and loves to show touch; four – she designs her pictures to cause a reaction. Her work is about making contact on every level. “

* From PJ to Plastic: ReyGuy is a Dallas Morning News photographer and photo editor who indulges his creative side (or sides) with polaroids and Holgas. Here’s his Texas highway sign set.

* Phono-journalism: Live news — a shooting — broadcast from a mobile phone. Jeff Jarvis has the link. Definitions of journalism and photography are continually in flux.

100 Years of Photos: The Melbourne Age, an Australian newspaper, has compiled a Century of Pictures from the paper. Take a look. (Via Rob Galbraith.)