[Doc Diaries] The Big Leagues

Imagine striving to follow a compass as far North as you can make it. Every line of latitude feels like a milestone. A hallmark.

Sure, there are setbacks — sometimes geography will force you to traverse sideways before you can keep moving forward. Sometimes, you'll even have to turn back and find a different route. But the progress is definite. And with each new milestone, the clarity of your purpose intensifies.

An irony, that also intensifies, is that the closer you get to the goal, the less your compass actually guides you. Sometimes it wavers and falters in ways that never happened farther back. And once you actually Make It, the direction it points to is… anywhere else. Just not here.

So do you stop, or do you keep moving? And if you move, how can you possibly judge and evaluate your sense of progress? Was finding the North Pole worth it in the first place? Was the compass really guiding you in a direction that mattered? How would life have been different if you had travelled due East? Or West?

What if the compass was meaningless all along?

When the Good Night Beckons

I've long felt a kind of distant, undeserved kinship with Renaud Lavillenie. We're within 5 months of the same age. We're both pole vaulters, and we both started over 20 years ago.

He's much better, obviously. But whenever someone's questioned me about the realities of pole vaulting at our age, I would point out Renaud as a canonical example of what's possible. "The world record holder is still competing, and we're the same age," I would retort. If he can keep going at his level, then I can keep going at mine.

Doc Diaries: Aesthetics and Storytelling at the Stanford Invitational (part 2)

I mentioned in part 1 that it's important to take some time before the meet to make guiding decisions about the general shape of the coverage. As a documentary photographer, I always feel a sense of duality between my aesthetic decisions and my storytelling decisions — they're almost inseparably intertwined. And as much as I love to make beautiful images, my actual aspiration is to make images whose aesthetics support the meaning that they're trying to convey. For track and field, beauty is often, but not always, the tool of choice.

Power and Grace (Footwork, part 2)

The throws require a controlled kind of crazy.

For me, that's one trait that distinguishes them from the other event groups in track and field: you have to unleash the beast in an instant, but then you have to settle just as quickly. In every throwing event, there's a limited throwing area, and the athlete has to start and finish at rest, under their own power.

In practice, it tends to look like a raw explosion of energy to launch the implement, followed by a dance with the laws of physics to come back to a controlled stop.

Now as a reminder, I am not a thrower. I've watched and studied the events a fair bit, but some of my analysis could still be off the mark. With that said, this time, we'll dive into the footwork in three of the four outdoor throwing events, the hammer throw, shot put (two techniques), and javelin.

(Or click here to read the first part of the series, "Running and The Heel".)

On Candid Photography and Self-Doubt

I was chatting with another photographer, who mentioned "I'd shoot more street pictures of people if I could get over the intimidating/scary part." I hear this reasonably frequently, and as someone who's spent a bit over a decade taking photos of people, I figured I could offer a perspective on how I go about it.

First and foremost, I try to be friendly and confident. When people look at me, I smile at them, and I don't hide my camera. If someone asks me to delete a photo of them, I generally abide. But as some wise photographer once pointed out, you have to decide how much of a jerk you're going to be, and in which situations. It's helpful to explicitly consider that question, and to consciously make a judgment:
Are you going to take pictures of people you don't know? Are you going to take pictures without asking? Are you going to take pictures when people are sad, or angry, or otherwise emotional? Are you going to take pictures when people don't want you to?

Knowing that you have limits, and knowing what they are, is a big step toward being comfortable operating within those limits.

For myself, I basically never ask before taking people's pictures, simply because I strive to capture them in a natural state. It's definitely possible to do that after asking, but it generally takes a lot longer, and my photography is driven by the fleeting moments that I notice.

Another key is that you can't be ashamed of or intimidated by taking a person's picture. It's like if you're walking on the sidewalk and some random guy is walking towards you. You two cross, and then you just walk past him, and you generally don't even think of reading anything into his behavior. Maybe he glances at you. Maybe he pauses. It doesn't matter; it's a sidewalk. Of course people are going to walk past each other.

Next, it's the President walking toward you. Suddenly everything changes, right? You start to doubt yourself. "Maybe I'm taking up too much room. Maybe I should just scoot over so he can pass and then I'll keep walking on the sidewalk. Oh no, did he just glare at me? Maybe I am taking up too much room. Maybe I should walk on the other side of the street to give him some room; doesn't he usually have the secret service with him?" A lot of times, I think that sense of "oh no, I can't do this" is just the same kind of self-perpetuating self-doubt.

The real key here is that the difference between walking past a random guy and walking past Obama isn't him, it's you. It's the doubt in your mind about whether what you're doing is okay, and about whether you need to change your behavior to accommodate the other person. Making an explicit, conscious decision beforehand about what is okay and what is not can help to prevent that spiral before it begins. There will always be questionable cases, but there's a big difference between running into a questionable case once in awhile, and having questions every time you point a camera at a person.

Case in point: I took the picture above while walking behind some people in downtown Palo Alto on a Friday night. Were they friends? Acquaintances? Strangers? The judgment that I've made for myself is that it doesn't really matter. Sometimes you're on a sidewalk, and someone else is on a sidewalk, and then you take a picture of them.

I mean, I'm here, I've got this camera, and I'm taking pictures. I love taking candid pictures of people, and that's what I do. If someone spots me taking their picture, then yes, they spotted me taking their picture. I smile at them and go back to what I was doing (or maybe I smile at them and wait for them to go back to what they were doing). But I try to treat it like the sidewalk situation. If the other person notices that I'm walking on the sidewalk, I'm going to keep walking on that sidewalk. If the person notices me taking pictures, I'm going to keep taking pictures.

Zeitgeist

Yesterday, I had the amazing opportunity to watch virtuoso jazz bass guitarist Kai Eckhardt play a public concert with his new group, "Zeitgeist," at the Stanford Shopping enter. The music was fantastic, and it was also fun seeing all of the musicians interact on stage.

While doing some research before the concert, I ran across this John McLaughlin Trio concert from 1989 where Eckhardt plays a pretty funky bass solo. More photos to come…

Construction is Awesome!

Two workers help to set up rows of vacuum-activated suction cups on a large truss device which will be used to lift large panes of glass into place.

A worker watches as others help to set a second 10'x15' pane of curved ceiling glass on the ground. A different worker had mentioned that there were likely a total of 6 such panes in the shipping container.

Amazing Feats of Bubblery

As weekends go, this past one had an uncanny number of bubbles. My friend Andrea found a surprisingly resilient bubble formulation which allowed her to create tiny structures made of bubbles. In the photo, she's just about to capture another one and stack her bubble tower one higher.

BUBBLES!!!

The evening prior was also packed with bubbles. Here, John blows a large bubble upward with hopes for it to catch some warm air and rise into the night sky. During prior attempts, John and our other cohorts discovered that if you blow hard enough, a single large bubble would often split into a pair of smaller bubbles.

Queuing, in Theory

I had a pretty surreal experience at Pizza My Heart last night. I arrived around 1:15 am. The line was reasonably short, as is typical — it was around 5 minutes from when I arrived until I had my pizza. The clientele already included a noticeable number of inebriated folks, but other than for a bit of wobbling and a dropped phone, the line moved reasonably quickly and efficiently.

Around 1:40 am, I finished my slices and decided to get one more. By this time, the line was significantly longer, but was still recognizable as a line.

After about 5 minutes in the line, that all changed. People were streaming through the doorway, sometimes in groups of 8–10 at a time. The line stopped moving and I noticed folks trying to edge in unnoticed. Someone took some ranch dressing, and then a guy a bit farther ahead in the line started licking his iPhone. He explained to someone else that some ranch dressing had gotten on it but… wow…

Then this guy showed up out of nowhere and made a beeline for the front of the line. After standing in the same place for 10 minutes, the people around me in line told the guy to go to the back. In response, he pulled out a twenty and explained that he'd buy them a slice.

The guys behind me in line insisted that he go back and he said "I'll buy y'all a slice too." This went back and forth for a bit as yet other people came out of the woodwork to offer their take on the situation. He finally ended up staying, and the next thing I knew, he was ordering 7 slices of Pesto, plus a couple others.

"You want a slice? Take one."

Fear The Tree

After 3 years in the Bay Area, I finally made it to my first Stanford football game this past Saturday, during which The Cardinal dominated the San Jose State Spartans in a 57-3 rout.

I moved down to the side of the field during halftime, and managed to catch this photo of the costumed drum major leading the rest of the marching band back to the stands for the beginning of the second half.

Stanford Jazz Workshop: Nothin' But Love

From June 25th through August 7th, Stanford played host to the Stanford Jazz Workshop, a musical meeting of the minds dedicated to jazz education and appreciation. The Workshop consists of the Jazz Festival (a series of over 20 performances) as well as a number of teaching programs.

That I ended up at Stanford for an evening of jazz was in itself one of a multitude of coincidences that night. I had been planning to go for a while, but didn't actually take action until a coworker sold me his ticket. And thank goodness, because it was a fantastic night.

One of the main things that struck me was the atmosphere. It seemed like everyone was a friend, either a friend from long ago, or one simply waiting to be met. The greetings weren't handshakes, they were hugs.

The evening started with a concert: trumpeter Nicholas Payton, performing with the Taylor Eigsti Trio. For a few minutes every song or two, Payton would leave the stage and the trio of Eigsti on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass, and Eric Harland on drums would play alone. On returning to the stage, Payton would stand back in the shadows for a bit before he returned to center stage.

Here, Payton waits with a pensive look during one of those breaks. One can only imagine what was going through his mind at the time.

Through a further sequence of coincidences, and with much thanks to Jimmy, I ended up at the Stanford CoHo after the concert's conclusion. The CoHo Jam Sessions offered a venue for growing musicians to play with Jazz Workshop faculty as well as with other experienced musicians.

Around midnight, Taylor Eigsti, Harish Raghavan (bass), and an unidentified drummer hopped on stage to play a short set. Oddly enough, Eigsti was one of the main reasons I ended up buying my coworker's ticket. Back in January, I was witness to a fantastic concert of Gershwin pieces that Eigsti played with Raghavan, Eric Harland (drummer during the Nicholas Payton performance), and the Peninsula Symphony. That Eigsti was included on the bill for that night made the decision to attend a no-brainer.

On multiple occasions I was floored by how much energy the performers poured into their solos. Above, a saxophonist blows with everything he's got.

The CoHo stage area was a cozy, if somewhat quirky place. And among the last musicians to take the stage were this trio, with Zaccai Curtis on piano in the green jacket. As it happens, Zaccai's brother is Luques Curtis, a bassist who I happened to recognize. Luques had played a lot with MIT graduate and saxophonist Louis Fouché back when I was still at MIT.

Hailing from New Orleans, Fouché was deeply affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and became a major organizer of benefit efforts at MIT. I shot both Luques and Louis on a number of occasions, both before and after the hurricane; for instance, they performed during the "Pulse" culture show, which I shot for the 22 Feb 2005 issue of The Tech (see page 6).

I guess it's a small world after all.