I didn?t get into this business to be a photographer. I came in from the writing side; my only camera in high school (and college) was a Kodak Disc camera. It wasn?t until my first car-magazine job, in 1993, that someone forced their spare Nikon into my hand and? insisted I ?go shoot something.? In those days of color slide film, I burned some Fujichrome, sheeted it up and threw it on the light table. Virtually everyone in editorial ? editors, feature editors like me ? came around and looked. And told me in no uncertain terms what I had done wrong, which was pretty much everything. More film, and out I went again.
After a few months of practice, I started to wrap my head around what was required. I do remember once, I shot a private collection in Tennessee, and not having gotten used to how to shoot indoors, returned with 60 blank/black rolls of film. An expensive trip, yet I was never scolded for it.
Soon, I was shooting features and show coverage. I even managed to eke a couple of covers out ? one I was proud of, one less so. Were there more? Too long ago to remember. I do remember that in my pool of office mates, there was a sort of unannounced competition between us ? that sense of competition drove us to try ever-more-elaborate set-ups and techniques. We all learned from each other by trying to top each other. It was friendly, and encouraging, but we all still wanted to do better.
By the time I?d made it to Hemmings in 2003, I?d been in the car-mag business for a decade and finally figured out how to do what I wanted to do with a camera, with reliable results. It was also the advent of the digital age ? I swapped over to a digital SLR in 2003. And the Hemmings machine is a hungry beast: four monthly magazines, a home office that gets snow six months out of the year, and a reliance on in-house rather than freelance-generated content meant that my sunny Southwestern shots were increasingly front and center.
Every cover is a gift, and most are a surprise; the editors generally refrain from telling me whether I?ve gotten a cover or not until I see it for myself, when the magazine arrives from the printer. The idea that I?ve done 100 of them now, in my nearly nine years with Hemmings, is humbling. In any event, I consider myself lucky that the editors have sufficient trust in what I do that they allow my images to be the face of their magazine, in hundreds of thousands of homes and on increasingly-competitive newsstands, for a month at a time. I?m grateful to them for their confidence in me, and I?m equally grateful to the guys and gals in the art department, past and present, who nip and tuck things here and there (and occasionally have to make new things from whole cloth) to make everything look its best. Every cover has a story. Some of them, I?ve been advised not to tell. Here are ten memorable ones that I can talk about?
Hemmings Muscle Machines #5, February 2004 / Hemmings Motor News, November 2009 ? My first Hemmings cover. Shot while I was still living in the Midwest prior to my actual employment with Hemmings, and printed about two months after my hire, this blue 442 was my first Hemmings magazine cover, period. (My previous full-time publishing job saw me get two covers in 4-1/2 years of employment, which tells me either that I?ve improved, or Hemmings?s standards are lower. I?ll let the readership be the judge on that one.)
Hemmings Classic Car #12, September 2005 ? Three covers in the first year of Classic Car?s life pleased me to no end, but this one had me scratching my head a little. The 1951 Ford was lovely, but I see a million things wrong with the shot: It was a handheld grab shot, so the back of the car was beyond the camera?s depth-of-field and appeared soft and hazy; some white picket fencing in the front fender distracts. But the set-up was serendipitous: the wood-stained garage doors of the car-owner?s home managed to match exactly the wood on the sides of the Country Squire, and my masters in Vermont fell in love with the image. Who am I to argue?
Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car #5, January 2006 ? A victory, of sorts: I?ve been a long-time supporter of vintage Japanese cars as the new entry-level collectible for a younger generation, and although this was an obvious choice, it was nice to see a bright orange Z make it on the cover of Sports? fifth issue. Pity the rest of the shoot wasn?t inside the mag. Come to think of it, I don?t think the rest of the shoot has run yet. Since the late 2005 shoot, Nissan (and the cover car?s owner, a Nissan employee) have both moved to Tennessee. The good news is, we?ve not lacked for Z coverage since, even putting a naturally-aspirated 280ZX on the cover a while back. (I shot that one too.) This was Editor David LaChance?s last issue before handing off the reins to Craig Fitzgerald.
Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car #21, May 2007 ? Old car-mag publishing wisdom is that you don?t put black cars on magazine covers ? or white ones, for that matter ? because they don?t draw the eye on the newsstand like a bright color might. Well, I?ve had enough black cars on covers now that I don?t buy it anymore; I dare say black cars are easy ? they just require patience and the right light.
But grey? Yes, it was a Ferrari. Even so? This 512 was shot on a man-made island north of San Diego, and as it happened, the day of the shoot, large chunks of Southern California were on fire. The smoke diffused the sunlight and gave off a warm, hazy glow ? so much so that editor Fitzgerald put a grey car on the cover. No one was more shocked than me.
I don?t know if these four would count as one, but this one was also part of the May-June 2007 cycle, which was a banner one for me. The May 2007 Motor News, Muscle and Sports were my images, as was June 2007 Classic Car. I found all of them on sale simultaneously at a Barnes & Noble in Spokane, Washington, while I was on vacation; all four Hemmings covers at once by one shooter is something I hadn?t seen done before, or since, really. (I?ve had three of four at once, which ain?t a bad feeling either.) I saw four of mine again at a Border?s in 2010 in Phoenix, but it wasn?t a true representation ? someone forgot to take the two-month-old Motor News off the shelf.
Hemmings Muscle Machines #62, November 2008 ? Two Trans Ams. The owner of both, who has since become a neighbor, lives in a gated community, so the main road in and out was relatively unused, and we shot late enough in the evening that rush-hour traffic was minimal. The road was freshly paved and went on for at least half a mile into the distance. Throw in a perfect sunset and a little cactus and scrub at the edges of the road, and voila! My favorite black-car-cover yet.
Yet I remember this cover for an altogether sillier reason. I am a pizza snob, New York style all the way, and had not had a decent slice since leaving my ancestral homeland of New Jersey in 1996. The topic of pizza had come up during the shoot ? just that, as East Coast guys with standards for such things, we knew that good pie was hard to find. A dozen years in Los Angeles and I hadn?t found anything up to my standards. But the car owner, a nice Lawn Guyland boy, suggested his favorite spot in Scottsdale, just up the road from where he lived. I was skeptical, but I was wrong: damned if it wasn?t the best pie I?d had in ages. It tasted like home. Now that we live in Phoenix, the place (coincidentally?) is ten minutes away from my house.
Hemmings Muscle Machines #64, January 2009 ? One of those rare shoots where everything just falls into place: a lovely car, owners who are willing to bend over backwards to accomodate whatever cockamamie idea the shooter has concocted, some nearby locations that worked out perfectly, and cooperative weather. Mix in the notion that the 1971-1972 Plymouth Satellite/Road Runner/GTX is my favorite musclecar body style of all time, and this shoot is one I look back at and think, man, if they could all go as well as this one did?
Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car #43, March 2009 / Hemmings Motor News, October 2010 ? To date, this issue of HSX has been that magazine?s strongest newsstand seller, in terms of percentages of issues sold versus issues printed and distributed. Dedicating a third of ALL pages ? not just all available editorial pages ? to a popular marque like Porsche could have been the clincher, but I?d like to think that my shots of a rare plastic-back-window 911 Targa (our buyer?s guide car) helped. Another case of debunking the black-doesn?t-sell myth. The targa top was up because as we started to take those shots, it was drizzling.
For the still shots, we used the home of the owner?s friends ? the place looked like a Spanish castle, all stucco and stairwells and hidden doors under archways, deep in the hills of southern Orange County, California. I shot all kinds of artsy stuff at that place ? and of course absolutely none of those shots made it in. But a high rear three-quarter shot with an open targa top and unsnapped rear window made it on the cover of Motor News a year and a half later.
Hemmings Motor News, March 2009 / Hemmings Muscle Machines #86, November 2010 ? A headscratcher, this. I shot this Daytona, I want to say, as far back as 2004. It was early in my Hemmings employ, for sure. It wasn?t just a Daytona; the current owner?s dad bought it as an almost-new used car, and he grew up in the back of it. It had traveled a quarter-million miles. It was a cool story. So color me shocked when a red Daytona (shot by current Hemmings Digital impresario Dan Strohl, IIRC) ended up on the cover of Muscle in 2007 or so, and it wasn?t this one. Things were confused in those days ? the editor certainly was ? and so my queries as to what happened went unanswered. Fast forward to the May 2009 issue of Motor News; the action shot of the Charger, which I did shoot, made it on the cover ? but Strohl?s shoot from Muscle was inside. I was starting to think something was wrong with my shots, but mostly I was feeling bad for the owner of the car, who?d waited half a decade to see his car in print. At long last, in November 2010, both car and story appeared in Muscle Machines.
Hemmings Classic Car #71, August 2010 ? Any time you get to see Jay Leno in a setting other than on your flat-screen late at night is special. The intimidating thing about him isn?t that he?s famous and on TV ? although that?s surely part of it ? it?s his intimate knowledge of everything he owns, and how it all works. Steam cars, sleeve-valve engines, all are beyond my top-of-head knowledge; his comprehensive understanding of both the inner workings of his machines as well as big-picture issues of the era will educate and delight. The day I was there for this particular piece, I talked with Jay for all of 15 minutes, and spent another half-hour shooting examples out of his collection. The cover shot of him standing between his Corvair and his Toronado in his shop was a pure grab shot.
Hemmings Muscle Machines #83, August 2010 ? Three Berger Camaros, a single original owner, and one completely photo-shopped background. A shortage of manpower and light meant that getting three cars in one place at one time in a pretty desert setting wasn?t going to happen, so I spitballed it, parked everything in the owner?s culdesac, got up on a stepladder and hoped for the best. When the result looked like I?d parked three cars in a culdesac and stood on a stepladder, our crew of layout artists and designers got on the case, saved my bacon, and made it into an image that didn?t suck out loud.
This was also the first in a string of five consecutive covers I had for HMM, ending with December 2010; I had another five-month string from March to July 2011, and seven out of 12 covers last year. None of them, mercifully, needed the degree of tweaking that my triple-Berger cover did.
Source: http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2012/09/03/jeff-kochs-10-most-memorable-hemmings-cover-shots/
Rihanna Tony Scott UFC 151 empire state building Todd Akin Hurricane prince harry
কোন মন্তব্য নেই:
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন