The Assistant’s Journal

When I first started working with Joel, it struck me as a bit odd that there are so many photo contests run by professional organizations. If you win “Accountant of the Year” or “Region 6 Farmer of the Year,” you might get a plaque or a certificate, but it isn’t slathered all over the web quite the way photo contest winners are. Plus, isn’t a little ego-maniacal to enter one’s own work for Photographer of the Year? For awards like Teacher of the Year, it’s usually others doing the nominating.

So, why enter other than the thrill of tacking a superlative on your resume? It’s really good for business. The people who hire photographers for shoots and who buy stock images watch these competitions, and even an honorable mention will help your name stand out among thousands of colleagues. It’s also a chance to look over a year’s work and figure out if you’ve missed any really interesting frames or if outtakes from a story can be repackaged.

Now, the “why me” part: A few years ago, I made white-knuckle runs to FedEx to make the deadline for submitting materials to photo contests. If I didn’t hit the stoplights just right, I’d wind up pounding on the windows and making sad puppy eyes while displaying the prepaid shipping label.

In the digital era, the white knuckle drive is gone and replaced by hours of watching an upload bar tick its way to completion. ( Joel nearly had a stroke each time the ‘time remaining’ field recalculated. The final straw was his nigh-ghostly pallor when it refreshed to read 9 hours left.)

Both then and now, we try to get done early every year. It never works.

Maybe it’s the way J-schools and newspapers and magazines run: there is no reward for early completion, but whatever you turn in had better be your absolute best. This culture of deadlines turns journalists into adrenaline junkies. That’s why we’re always up against the wall at the last possible minute when it comes to contest. Joel can’t function without his adrenaline. The endorphins feed his inner aesthete, which delivers a better product in a shorter time than non-stressed Joel.

When I started this post, I was on hour fifteen of a seventeen hour work day. It’s nothing compared to the long days some people work, but I will freely admit that I’m a wimp who likes regular sleep sessions of at least seven hours in length. I postponed publishing because I wasn’t even sure I was writing in English any more. I’m no fan of reckless driving, but I think I preferred a last-minute rush to FedEx to interminable uploads.

And with those words, Joel has entered the modern age. Check it out: http://blog.joelsartore.com/

Joel’s ocelot photo from his latest article was one of the top picks on Digg today. In celebration, here’s a photo of me with an ocelot (shot at a zoo in Brazil). They’re very fuzzy, but their teeth are very sharp.

Joel’s trip to Bioko back in January required a pretty hefty amount of gear and pretty meticulous planning. We didn’t know what, if anything, he’d be able to get once he was there, he’d be camping most of the time, and he had to bring much of his own food. Additionally, he was bringing along a generator to run his lights and charge his camera.

Joel made a big long list of things he needed, and then I hauled it all up from the basement to the second floor so I could stage it in his office (and out of the way of the rest of the family.) My method is to lay everything out, verify that all the items on the check list are there, then pack the biggest, most awkward things first. This trip had no shortage of large, awkward items: softboxes, tripods, a lighting kit, and plexi and caulk for a makeshift aquarium. There was much shoving and no small amount of grumbling on my part.

The big lens case (lower right) holds a lens and a reflector. The Pelican case (middle bottom) held a lighting kit, the other Pelican case (behind me) held extra camera equipment, and the blue rubberized duffel bags from our friends at Cabela’s took care of everything else. I’ve finally gotten smart and learned to list the items in each bag/case on a sheet of paper, which I tape to the front.

We try to pack strategically so that the mission (getting pictures) can be accomplished no matter what happens, so Joel carries on his laptop, two bodies, and his standard set of zoom lenses. His current carry-on bag is wheeled, which is a good thing since all that gear can put it up over 50 pounds. I try to split things up evenly between checked bags so that if one bag gets lost, the others have a backup. (Joel takes at least two of everything.)

We always weigh and measure his bags to try and avoid extra fees where we can, using the good ol’ stand-on-the-scale-with-a-bag-then-subtract-your-weight method. Joel got a fancy digital scale a while back but it turns out you have to stand fairly still for those things to get an accurate reading, and it’s hard to stand perfectly still while hugging a 50-pound bag. The trusty spring scale from 1950-something works just fine, and lots faster. Once the bags are weighed, I add that to the contents tag so Joel knows where he can add in extra things.

Between trekking between multiple stories of the house multiple times and weighing bags, packing for big trips like this is one of the most physical parts of the job. It’s a great workout — wonder if I could market that….

This isn’t even close to the most gear he’s ever taken with him. On one of his trips to the Pantanal, he ended up taking something like fourteen different pieces of luggage. I think Madidi was even more than that. The amazing thing is that he manages, with the help of a cart and some crazy determination, to move this mountain of stuff around at one time.

Joel is supposed to be on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 tonight (Monday 7/28/08) discussing his latest NGM story on Bioko Island. It’s television, so that could change at any moment, but that’s the news for now.

The studio crew has been in charge of the Sartore family dog, Muldoon, whilst Joel is teaching in Santa Fe. Muldoon huge, friendly and very puppy-ish (being less than a year old). He’s a mix of golden retriever, standard poodle, and lab and as you can see from the photo below, looks a little like Sprocket from Fraggle Rock. The breeder refers to Muldoon as a “Fancidoodle”, so why not make him look a little fancy? I brought him over to my house for a while over the weekend and we played a little bit of dress up:

He asked about mascara and lipstick, but I told him they would be too messy (and probably clump in his fur.) Note that his fur was recently cut — this is how he looks au naturale:

As usual, it’s been a while since I posted last. Things in the studio have picked up quite a bit, and we’ve got not one, not two, but three part-timers helping us keep up with the influx of stock that Joel has been shooting.

Product-wise, we’ve got some new stuff, too…
Most recently, a post card book with some of Joel’s “Greatest Hits” in it.
Also somewhat recently, the Nebraska book has been reprinted in paperback.
A DVD of the Nebraska Educational Telecommunications documentary on Joel is also available.
(Just click on the links to order.)

A fresh edit of that same documentary is slated to air nationally at 10pm Eastern on Monday, Feb 5th.

Look, ma, I’m on TV!

Geek news:
We’re now running four computers in the studio, the pride and joy of which is the Tower of Power. (Athlon X2 3800+, ASUS A8N32-SLI deluxe mobo, 4 GB of RAM and two, count ‘em two, 20″ Apple monitors.) I’ve always been a skeptic about claims that two monitors increase productivity, but I’m a believer now. It makes editing digital shoots so much faster. We had a DDR module go bad on us this week, but other than that it’s been a nice machine to run.

Joel picked up a MacBook Pro a while back, and it’s been running like a top as well. If money were no object, I’d buy one for my very own.

Expecting a D2Xs in the studio any day now from the good folks at Nikon. Note to self: remember to change the image mode settings as soon as it comes in (so Joel doesn’t shoot anything important in jpeg-only mode.)

Remember the buffalo? I hit my head on its nose at least once a week.

Lots has happened lately, but here are the high-lights:

Nerdy…

Turns out that the insufficient power supply may not have been the problem so much as a faulty Linux driver for the RAID card, a rather crucial piece of hardware. After a great deal of frustration, we ended up going with Windows and using Cygwin to run rsync. Had I known it was that easy, I would’ve done it long ago.

It amazes me how quickly digital files pile up. Our archive is up around 300 GB already. Because it’s a fairly small studio with a fairly targeted archive, our current system of organizing things is working fine. I only quake in wonder when I imagine how the big stock houses are dealing with digital.

Studio-related…

It’s relatively certain that the Nebraska book (now out of print) will be re-printed sometime late this year in paperback.

It’s also relatively certain that “At Close Range” will be picked up by PBS and aired nationally. I knew I should’ve done more with my hair that day.

Watch for the May issue of NGM; Joel has a story in it and the cover of home (but not newsstand) editions.

CBS picked up another one of Joel’s essays last week. This time, the topic was mud. Yep, mud.

That’s all for now, folks.

Back in days of yore (2000), I was packing Joel up for assignment and trying to get bags down to acceptable weights. One of the tripod sleeves was unusually heavy. The tripod sleeve lives in the basement, so it could’ve contained spiders, scorpions, or anything else urban legends are made of. But, it also could’ve had a piece of gear in it so I resisted the urge to invert the sleeve and instead proceeded with a manual examination.

My hand met with a hard, rather lumpy chunk at the bottom, with thin sheets of plastic. For the brief instant before the object hit daylight, I thought of all sorts of mind-scarring things, mostly revolving around the “pack it in, pack it out” rule of camping. Finally, as the brown, now slightly-crumbly object emerged I breathed a sigh of relief. It was solid mass made from in the neighborhood of ten Snicker’s bars. They’d long since passed from edible form but thanks to modern preservative technology and the dessicating power of basement dust, they’d hardened into an aggregate. I was tempted to call my geology professor — an entirely new class of rock was being formed by the mammoth forces of airline baggage handling.

Other packing stories forthcoming, as I remember them.