| 00:01 | Photography was something that from
an early age it felt right to me, and more
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| 00:06 | importantly it made me happy.
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| 00:08 | And one of the very, very earliest
pictures that I shot got published in the New
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| 00:13 | York Times Sunday Book Review, and the
Times paid me the princely sum of $25,
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| 00:18 | which at that time was a fortune,
and that was a great experience.
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| 00:22 | And I also had a chance to photograph
William Manchester, who at that time was
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| 00:27 | writing Death of a President about
John F. Kennedy who had been assassinated
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| 00:33 | about two years earlier, and
those pictures got published.
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| 00:37 | So I learned very early on, A, that I
was good at photography and I shot nice
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| 00:42 | pictures and that there was a
market to do the kind of work that I did.
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| 00:46 | Even though I was living in a relatively
small place like Middletown, but it was
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| 00:50 | halfway between Boston and New York.
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| 00:52 | And so I made a lot of weekend trips
back and forth between Boston and New York.
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| 00:56 | Fairly early on during a geographic
story I had a chance to meet the man who I
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| 01:02 | consider to be the smartest human
being I've ever met, the absolutely great
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| 01:07 | Burt Rutan, the brilliant airplane
designer who up until about a month ago
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| 01:12 | lived in Mojave, California.
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| 01:15 | His most famous project was the X-
Prize where he actually built two aircraft,
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| 01:21 | the White Knight One and SpaceShipOne,
and it went up to 100,000 feet and came
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| 01:28 |
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| 01:28 | back down again, SpaceShipOne did, and landed.
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| 01:32 | And then that same aircraft had to be
refueled and flown again less than 10 days
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| 01:37 | later in order to win 10 million
bucks, and Burt designed these airplanes.
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| 01:44 | I was lucky enough with Burt that at a
time when his company was producing a
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| 01:51 | huge number of aircraft, sometimes they would
be working on multiple designs at any one time.
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| 01:58 | Because my connections within the
aviation industry were pretty good, sometimes
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| 02:03 | I'd be able to do a story for
Popular Mechanics on one of Rutan's planes,
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| 02:07 | sometimes I would do -- I had a lot
of Rutan's airplanes in the Geographic,
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| 02:12 | sometimes it's just a single picture
in a bigger story or story in a book.
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| 02:17 | But when I got a chance to photograph
Burt Rutan's airplanes there were two
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| 02:21 | things that were happening;
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| 02:23 | one were air to air photos
of the airplanes in the air.
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| 02:25 | How do you take a picture
of an airplane in the air?
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| 02:28 | And you come to realize very early that
just because you're 3000 feet up in the
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| 02:32 | air you still have to think
and act like a photographer.
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| 02:35 | You've got to be able to see pictures.
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| 02:37 | You still have to tell
the story of that airplane.
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| 02:40 | But then when the airplane was down on
the ground, that same airplane whether
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| 02:44 | you did it the night before or the next
day, it was a big piece of modern art.
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| 02:50 | It was really sophisticated either
sheet metal, or carbon epoxy fiber, that had
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| 02:56 | been formed into this
thing that we call an airplane.
|
| 03:00 | With Rutan airplanes each one was the
mark of a generation, and so what were the
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| 03:04 | features of that airplane that were
distinctive, and how much time would they
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| 03:08 | give you to photograph the plane, and
where on that airport can you take the
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| 03:14 | plane in order to photograph it?
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| 03:17 | And mostly we worked at twilight.
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| 03:19 | So the pictures of the airplanes on
the ramp at twilight, and each plane was
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| 03:23 | different, the thought process, the
way of working, the way of seeing that
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| 03:27 | airplane, of telling the story of that
airplane was exactly the same process as
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| 03:32 | photographing our friend Tony holding
the pizza in front of Tony's Pizzeria,
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| 03:38 | right at the magic hour in Ventura, California.
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| 03:42 | One guy happened to be in Mojave, the
other guy happened to be in Ventura, but
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| 03:46 | it was all about telling
stories and illustrating this concept.
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| 03:51 | Later I got involved with some
friends of mine at the Geographic, mostly
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| 03:55 | Rick Gore who was a great science writer at
that point, and I started to do science stories.
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| 04:01 | So as a result of doing science
stories they had a different requirement and
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| 04:05 | I learned how to light, and
learning how to light and learning how to tell
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| 04:09 | the story of complex subject.
The most difficult one was gravity.
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| 04:14 | I did a story on gravity for the
Geographic and that was really, when I got that
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| 04:18 | assignment it was really a gut shot for me.
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| 04:21 | How do you photograph something
that you can't see, smell, touch,
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| 04:27 | put your hands on, do anything to it?
But it's there all the time and you're
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| 04:30 | surrounded by it and you -- it's your
job to illustrate that. How do you that?
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| 04:35 | In order to photograph gravity I
had to show the effects of gravity or
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| 04:39 | the things that it did,
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| 04:41 | because I couldn't take a picture of
it directly. And I had a great picture
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| 04:45 | editor at the Geographic, Bill Douthitt,
who is a very close friend of mine to
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| 04:49 | this day, I'm happy to say.
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| 04:51 | And he and I decided that in order to
do gravity one of the things we needed to
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| 04:55 | show was we needed to illustrate Sir
Isaac Newton's concept of a feather and an
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| 05:01 | apple dropping at the same rate.
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| 05:04 | And that lead to doing a photo
which again to this day was the hardest
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| 05:09 | photograph I've ever done.
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| 05:11 | And I was able to find a vacuum
chamber at NASA Ames in Mountain View,
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| 05:17 | California and we build a trap door
and got a feather and an apple and I
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| 05:24 | collected them very carefully, and
then I got a special set of lights that
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| 05:30 | fired about 20 frames a second.
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| 05:33 | And I was able to figure out how to
fire these strobes, and we took all the air
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| 05:40 | out of the vacuum chamber and we put
the feather and the apple at the top.
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| 05:44 | And then when I pulled the release on
the trap door, the feather and the apple
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| 05:49 | fell in the vacuum chamber and it
took about three days to get it right.
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| 05:55 | I didn't get it right the first time,
but at that time we were shooting this on
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| 05:59 | Kodachrome and there was a Kodak
dealership right down the street where we could
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| 06:02 | get the film processed overnight.
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| 06:04 | It's not like using one of these
digital cameras where you can see that -- I
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| 06:08 | didn't know that I had the picture or not had
the picture until the next morning literally.
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| 06:13 | And the second day I still didn't
have it right, but by the third day I had
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| 06:17 | everything dialed in, and frame
after frame after frame was perfect.
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| 06:22 | There was no manipulation of the image,
the image was very, very carefully set
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| 06:26 | up, but we did it right and we did it honestly.
|
| 06:29 | That was the kind of shot that
occurred at a point when I was learning
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| 06:32 | photography that I couldn't have done
that as an earlier photographer, but at
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| 06:36 | that time it was really a
breakthrough shot for me.
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| 06:39 | And so photography for
me became problem-solving.
|
| 06:43 | Are you doing street people down in
South San Francisco under the freeway
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| 06:47 | somewhere next to the railroad tracks?
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| 06:49 | Okay, you can do that, but at the same
time somebody may ask you to go out the
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| 06:53 | next day and do a CEO of a corporation,
or a CEO of a company where the photo
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| 06:59 | has to be lit, or you may have to go
out and photograph a feather and an apple
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| 07:03 | dropping in a vacuum chamber, and do it
honestly, it can't be done in Photoshop.
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| 07:09 | So there were other people who were
done similar things before that, but for me
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| 07:13 | the level of complexity for that shot
gave me a lot of confidence that almost no
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| 07:19 | matter what was thrown at me
photographically I could figure it out.
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