Roger Snider approached us a few months back to create a new photography portfolio for his niche specialty: shooting big rig trucks. After some soul searching, our photo editor/portfolio consultant Sean Stone came up with with an interesting, custom approach to the portfolio, and one that involved skulls and flames:
I asked Sean Stone a few questions about his approach to the edit and the physical books themselves, which are fun to hold because of their glossy, metallic surfaces and custom-painted design.
What did Roger approach you to do, and why?
Roger approached me to create a portfolio specifically for a project called the Shell Rotella Superrigs Calendar. He wanted to have the book done in-time to be considered for this very big job. Its a calendar of custom trucks in different locations, and their drivers, which is exactly what Roger shoots. He wanted to create a book that would really set him apart from the competition for the calendar, but also something to help him expand his brand.
What was the extent of your input?
Roger put a lot of trust in my opinion to make the edit, and really gave me free reign to assemble the images in the way I thought would be most effective. He wanted to be sure we included the more polished work and didn’t include his more journalistic work, which was recently featured in National Geographic.
He sent me 200 images, which I honed down to 30 for our first approval round. Roger was happy with the edit, and sent a few new images which he thought would enhance what I had put together. Fortunately, a few of them fit in nicely, and we were done editing by round two.
Of course, this doesn’t include the internal rounds that I had before presenting to Roger, which include printing thumbnails on paper, allowing me to quickly re-arrange the spreads to perfect the edit. I’ll also run my edits by some of our marketing people, to get another perspective on the images’ relevance to art buyers. My goal is to make a book that shows a consistent style, unique imagery that brands the photographer, and also has marketability.
The hardest part was creating an edit that looked fresh, when dealing with a subject that is, on the surface, all the same stuff. Sort of like if I was making a book for a food photographer who only shoots sandwiches. But Roger has a huge variety of content, style and location. The longer I looked at his work, the more I appreciated the subtlety of his truck photography.
As far as the physical book goes, we both agreed that bigger would be better. We chose to use 11 x 17 landscape because the format allowed for almost no cropping, compared to a 16 x 20. I thought about a number of options for the book itself, something that would be economical but make a bigger impact than a standard book.
As I researched options for customizing the books, the idea of truck materials kept coming back to me. The sturdy aluminum of the Pina Zingaro was immediately attractive.
I also located a double sided luster paper for him, which was surprisingly hard to do. I then printed and assembled his books. The pages are hand punched by me, because Pina uses a weird size post in their Machina line of books.
I also thought that we should take advantage of Roger’s connections in the big rig business, and get his books tricked out like his subjects. Roger loved the idea and sent the books to be painted by his friend, Jeff Botelho, who builds custom trucks from his shop in Los Banos, California. Jeff made three custom painted books for us:
These were based on color schemes of trucks he had produced [including the truck in the image below, which is also in Roger's portfolio]. Do the green flames look familiar?
And what does Roger think of the finished product?
He’s been very happy with the books, so much so that he’s having me edit and create a new portfolio for his other line of photography (no trucks involved).
Fred Licht makes his own lenses (a lot of work!) , and some of his images appear in an LA show opening tomorrow at Affinity Galleries, running through April.
Licht discusses why he decided to take on this technical endeavor in the first place :
At my website, you will notice a portfolio entitled “Proprietary Optics”. These are images created with lenses that I have designed and built myself. Some of these images are from assignments where I have been hired specifically because of these lenses. Other images are personal work or personal exploration with these lenses.
My desire to explore optics as a creative tool began with my longstanding interest in 19th century photography. Many of the images from that period have a distinct “look” (as well as other sensibilities) and I began by purchasing lenses from that period of time. I quickly realized that this was not giving me the look that I wanted and I began to research the field of photographic optics. It turns out that nearly all of the lenses that we use today (with the exception of zoom lenses and a few other formulas) were designed in the 19th century and have not really changed. I came to understand that the optical designers of the 19th century, the leading physicists of their time, had been given the task to create lenses that were, technically speaking, as perfect as possible.
Interestingly, many of the leading photographers of the 19th and early 20th Centuries then sought to counteract this “perfection” and devised techniques to make their images less technically accurate and more emotionally grounded. They did this, primarily, through printing techniques, breaking down the image after it was created in the camera, though some did this through optical means as well. I decided to take a more radical approach and alter the optics themselves. I decided to start from scratch, did a great deal of research, and began to create optics that had a more emotional appeal without concern for technical “perfection”.
I have since built four optics, all designed to work on a 4X5 camera, where each has a particular signature. The image is created in the camera, and none of the “effects” are done in postproduction. If I had more time to work with this, I would build more lenses (and use the ones that I have already made!), but this remains an ongoing interest for me.
Here’s one of his lenses:
Fred also shoots with “normal” lenses to capture his architectural and travel subjects:
Mcmillen began his career as a pro climber and eventually realized that he could be paid more as a photographer than an athlete (at least in his sport).
Since then, he’s stopped living out of his van and shoots portraits of athletes (and the occasional CEO) from just about every sport. He says that pro athletes “tend to be very image savvy these days. A photo shoot with a professional basketball or football player can be a lot like a celebrity shoot with an actor or musical icon, involving handlers and publicists and egos galore.” Though he finds that this challenge is what makes his job more interesting.
Because of time constraints with his subjects, he sometimes needs to shoot composite backgrounds, like the image above of Kevin Durant. He finds that this gives him more flexibility to tell the story as he imagined it, since he sometimes only has 15 minutes to shoot an athlete in front of a white backdrop or in the locker room.
He had 30 minutes with racing phenom Danica Patrick (below), and I’m not sure about Andre Agassi (at right) but I thought the shot was nicely balanced.
Jared discusses his gear in the article, too, and makes a “prediction” that in ten years every still shooter will be a “photo-videographer” because of the rapidly advancing technology. You can read more on their website.
On a side note, our Los Angeles-based photographer Caesar Lima lent his photograph to the cover of the same issue. We’ll be talking about Caesar in a future post, since he’s been featured in a few other places recently himself:
