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 
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.
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.
ging on basic civil liberties in others. Here are a few recent examples of America, home of the paranoid:
* People Who Need People: The New York Times