The up front light was a Profoto 2400ws unit, fitted with a beauty dish, draped in a diffuser sock. The Profoto folks have graciously outfitted the Syracuse studios, so the students there have the benefit of top of the line gear to shoot with. 

That unit is a very efficient light source, and of course, at 2400 ws, it’s got power to burn. I had it cranking at just about min power, and still had f11 at 1/200^th of a second. (Also, I wanted something around f11 to retain sharpness in the background objects.) So, it was with some trepidation that I put an SB 910, running at full power, in SU-4 (manual slave) mode, at the back of the set. I didn’t know if there would be enough juice in that little light. What I needed it to do was light the seamless, which would in turn silhouette the old style constant lights that are kicking around in the SU studio.

I set it up on the little floor stand that comes with the unit, left the dome diffuser on, tilted the head up about 45 degrees into the wall, and let fly. Bingo. That little sucker had just enough power to complete the photo.

Seems a little crazy, when you’re using a monster pack up front, to use a speed light in the back. I use small flash in conjunction with bigger flash all the time, but usually those bigger units are in the 400ws to 1100ws range. Using a 2400 pack, I thought the hot shoe flash might be like a small rock thrown into a deep quarry made of photons. It would vanish immediately.

But, it hung in there. When I overshot it, and the flash did not fire, this is what I got.

Small flash, big difference. More tk….

Every once in a great while, if you are lucky, during the course of your schooling, at any level of that schooling, you might intersect with a great teacher. And that teacher asks you questions, involves you, shapes your furious thoughts and aspirations, and calms the hubris of a young mind always teetering on the brink of the truly foolish action, like quitting the endeavor entirely. Good teachers open doors. They make sense of ramshackle, unformed thoughts. And by dint of their patience, and with the certainty of knowledge acquired over time, they allow the young student to become that which they might hope to be. Or, at least give it a shot.

Fred Demarest allowed me to become a photographer.

I was a good student in high school, largely out of fear. If you didn’t perform up to expectations, or if you were guilty of conduct they deemed unbecoming, the Irish Christian Brothers would often remind you of their exacting standards with a good crack to the head or jaw. If my mother got wind of wrongdoing or lackluster efforts in the classroom, she would simply continue at home the job the brothers started in class. Hence, for the most part, I did well. I could tell you I possessed an eager young mind, keen on learning. I’d be lying. I just didn’t want to get the shit kicked out of me.

College arrived, and I was woefully unprepared. I don’t remember much of my freshman year. (Hey, it was 1970.) I traveled through college in fairly shiftless fashion, enrolled as a writing major in J-school, and was academically undistinguished. But then, I was required to take a photography class, in my junior year, and I instantly committed to another direction. Which meant I had to take another class, which was not allowed for non-photo majors.

Enter Fred Demarest.

Fred didn’t start the photography program at Syracuse University. But he came aboard when it was an infant, and he shaped it, designed it, taught the classes, mixed the chemistry, administered the budget and forged it into what it remains today—one of the top photo programs in the country. When he started, he thought he’d be there a couple years. He retired as chairman of the department, 34 years later.

About 1960, Si Newhouse came to SU with cash and a mandate to create the Newhouse School of Journalism and it fell to Fred to design the space for the photo program, which had matured into a full blown sequence in the context of the journalism school. It became, in the building known as Newhouse One, physically the biggest department in the school, with wet darkrooms, space for nascent color printing technology, and of course a studio. Fred wanted a story and a half for the shooting space, but the building folks told him it was two stories or nothing. He then negotiated the installation of a balcony, so students could experiment with bounced light. It remains today, as he configured it. “Lots of the other faculty members didn’t like the studio, because it was basically a big hole in the middle of the building,” Fred says now, with a chuckle.

Fred was close with Arthur Rothstein, whose work for the FSA defined his career. On Rothstein’s recommendation, the US military, who felt their photojournalists were undertrained, spoke with Fred, among other educators, and he designed for them what has come to be known simply as “the military program,” ongoing to this day. It has trained hundreds of combat camera men and women, who, after a year in upstate NY, are spun out to the far reaches of the globe, better equipped to tell the story of life in uniform.

It is hard to overestimate his significance as a photo educator. The program he started growing in 1956 has produced the likes of Ed Kashi, Clint Clemens, Stephen Wilkes, Seth Resnick, Clem Murray, Bob Sacha, and Eric Meola. He brought notable photographers such as Karsh and Larry Burrows in to lecture, enlarging and enhancing the student’s view of what photography could do. He believed fiercely, and still does, in the power of the picture, writing a significant tome for the ASMP he called “The Three C’s—Creativity, Communication, and Craftmanship.” All are linked, all work together. Important C’s to remember in this, the age of pictures that begins with a big, capital D.

You had to get to know Fred a bit to truly appreciate his gifts as a teacher. By virtue of his nephew actually going through the program, he became known as Uncle Fred, and given his status as Chairman, his admin duties often overwhelmed his time in class and presence in the lab. There were other profs more dashing and charismatic, to be sure. But none approached his skills at refining a young photographer’s intentions, and hooking raw, unhinged photo notions to the larger vehicle of a project or a story. He calmed you down, and redirected you. So quietly, sometimes, that at the end of a semester’s efforts, you would pat yourself on the back and think, wow, glad I thought to do it that way! And really, it was Fred, all the while, pushing you towards hoped for excellence.

Given the onus of chairmanship, he reveled in the Syracuse program abroad, where he could escape into the smaller setting of the photo program based in London, and spend a semester with 15 students, as opposed to lecturing 50 at a clip in an auditorium. That is where we all got to know Fred, not just as a professor, but as a friend. In 1974, I went with him to London, my first year of graduate work in photojournalism. He gave me nine free credits, and the London program paid me five pounds a week to run the lab and maintain the chemistry. It was there that I first really embraced the struggle to try to be good enough at this to actually do it. It’s a struggle that, trust me, is ongoing.

But, he opened the door to that wickedly wonderful, lifelong tussle with a camera. I didn’t have the grades or the portfolio to be admitted to the graduate program in photojournalism. I used to sleep in his Photo 302 class quite regularly, not a fault of his, but a byproduct of me burning not just the ends, but the entire candle my senior year, trying to graduate. He perhaps, in his patient and insightful way,  might have seen a glimmer, a faint hope.

Fred is 88 now, and still looks the same as he did all those years ago. He hired Tony Golden, who became the chairman after Fred. Tony has now given way to Bruce Strong. Time flies. The program remains strong, and has more students than ever.

I made the portraits above just a couple weeks ago, when Annie and I went to Syracuse for a brief stint. It was, perhaps, my way of thanking him. As a teacher, he gave me the benefits of his patience and wisdom, and withheld his doubts, which he no doubt had.

Your time with a good teacher is short, perhaps, but the gifts they give you last forever.

More tk….

It was a hot day yesterday on the beaches of LA, so it was worth it to bring a watermelon, no matter how far you had to roll it. More tk….

Just a quick note from NIPHEC, in Lagos, Nigeria, which is definitely a whirling dervish of a city. There is an amazing energy here in the burgeoning photographic community. Fly home on Friday to an assignment in DC this weekend, and then Denver, and, by the end of next week, I’ll be teaching at the Julia Dean Workshops in LA for the first time. Lagos to DC to Denver to LA–that’ll be a bit of a head spin.

For the technically inclined, Udoka is facing off with a new Lastolite umbrella box, which has a really deep parabola shape. I’ve stuck a ratcheting Tri-flash in it, and then caught a little glimmer of the light for the back of her orange scarf with a gold, reflective version of a Tri-flip, which is just a really handy relfector/diffuser that pretty much goes with us everywhere.

More tk….

News came this week that George Jones died. I never photographed him, and only know a few songs of his, but there was a beautiful, suffering quality to his voice. Anybody desperate enough to drive a lawnmower eight miles to town just to get a drink has got something to sing about, for sure.

I did photograph one of the women of his tumultuous life, Tammy Wynette, down at her home, First Lady Acres, in Nashville. Like George, her life was a roller coaster of love, loss, and the lyrics that sprang from it. We only spent a day, but even in that day, I picked up on a wistfulness, a certain ambient pain that lingered around her.

She of course famously wrote, “Stand by Your Man,” of which she once said, “I spent fifteen minutes writing it, and a lifetime explaining it.”

The great thing about being a photog is that you meet people like Tammy. I was working for People Magazine, and one of the smartest, most wonderfully down to earth editors ever, MC Marden. MC was a fan, so I brought Tammy’s Stand by Your Man album with me, and had her sign it to MC, with the alteration: “MC—Stand by Your Magazine.” I believe MC still has it on her wall.

I also made a location snap that still makes me smile, of myself and Tammy reflected in her vanity mirror. I remember saying to her that right then I was the envy of a lot of men, getting a picture made with her. Ever the lady of the house, she smiled knowingly, and fluttered her eyes at me. She knew it was a photo shoot, and she was being flattered, but she liked it, nonetheless.

Music intertwines readily, emotionally with life, and the lives of the musicians who play it. Music sees you through, and it opens your heart. Strains of certain songs are evocative of time and place. Others are a warp speed return to a specific event or memory.

This is certainly true of country music, which I don’t claim to be all that knowledgeable about, but certainly listen to. My life is richer because Johnny Cash, Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris picked up a guitar and stepped to a microphone. And I do remember that day with Tammy Wynette.

More tk…