NSRG Media Team - Projects, Projects, Projects

I attended a meeting last night with the other photographers of the NSRG Media Team. Just for the record, that means myself, McGeeky (Brad DeMay), St. Apathy (Ger Gatzke), and Fotodog (Greg Mellang). We grabbed outselves a little table at Alary's Bar in downtown Saint Paul, had a few beers, and talked over our ongoing projects.

(That's Fotodog and Ger above in Sioux Falls, SD, and McGeeky below in Madison, WI.)

There's quite a lot on the Media Team's plate right now, which may surprise you since there haven't been many NSRG bouts lately and the championship isn't until May 9th. But we do a lot more than just take pictures of bouts. Here's an example of some things we're working on:

• Calendar. Yes, it's not just a rumor. We're making an NSRG Calendar for the 2009-2010 season. Some of the images will be game/action photos, and some will be posed art/creative photos. The project will shift into high gear right after May 9th, when we'll meet to finalize the layout. Then we have free reign to shoot creatively until August 1. On that date the calendar design & content will be frozen, and we will then turn to printing. Our target is to have calendars in hand so we can start selling them at the very first NSRG bout in the fall.
  
  
• Trading Cards. We're also working on creating player trading cards. Right now the design is fluid, and so is the cost. So we're going to do demo cards in very small quantities, probably of the NSRG Supernovas since they'll be active all summer and (we hope) well into the fall. Once we can see the first batch of cards we can assess their look & feel, and then we'll try to do cards for the whole league.
  
  
• Derby Wedding. We're meeting with the family this Saturday, April 25th, to create a wish list of photographs to be taken on the wedding day. We will then be meeting with the NSRG Championship Bout production team to see how many of these photos we actually have time for.
  
  
• Selling Prints at Bouts. We did an experiment at the last NSRG league bout where we offered prints for sale at the merchandise desk. They sold! Not all, but enough to show there's a definite fan interest. So on May 9th we're going to ramp things up and have many more prints for sale. We're also placing an ad in the program telling fans that prints are available.
  
  
• Photo Awards. The Media Team has come up with a few awards that we'd like to present at the NSRG banquet. It will just take 5 minutes and should be fun. To find out more ... well, you'll just have to be there! :-)
  
  
• NSRG Website. The Media Team is going to start helping the Website Committee with the photo-related pages of the NSRG website, to help take the pressure off and also because since (of course) we're photo-crazy we're probably best suited to help keeping those pages up to date. No more fan photos from over a year ago, or albums of shots by photographers who haven't been to an NSRG bout in months and months. This is something we hope to make progress on quite soon. Stay tuned!
  

And there's more. But these are the big ones.

You've probably noticed that some of the things I've mentioned above involve selling stuff for money. Where does that money go, you may wonder? Well, we've discussed this with our BoG representative and come up with a plan. Income from Media Team initiatives will go into a special kitty which will then be used to (a) defray Media Team expenses like travel and green screens, etc.; and then, if there's any left over, to (b) fund new Media Team initiatives (like buying lights to make the track brighter next season).

At rock bottom, whatever the money's used for, it will only be used for Media Team activities that directly benefit NSRG. Not a dime goes to anybody's personal use, or for any outside activities.

I always enjoy NSRG photographer meetings because the personalities are so much fun. I tend to be my usual Falstaffian self; Fotodog is a happy raconteur; Ger is droll (that is when he's not texting someone in the background); and McGeeky has a wide-eyed enthusiasm that's a pure pleasure to be around. In fact, all of the photographers have huge enthusiasm for what we do, and it's one of the reasons it's such a privilege to be part of this bunch. Who doesn't like sitting around with creative people who are madly in love with what they do? It's no different, seriously, than hanging around with the actors I used to know for so many years.

That's all for now. But stay tuned. There's always more to come. :-)

Tech Notes

Here's what I currently shoot with during roller derby bouts.

Camera:

• Nikon D3 body.
• I sometimes also use a Nikon D40 as a second camera. It's small and lightweight and is pretty smart re: exposure in a variety of situations.

Lens:

• Nikkor 70-200 f2.8 VR when action is on.
• During intermission or at the end of the bout, I switch to a wider lens. Currently I vary this between the Nikkor 14-24 f2.8 and the Nikkor 24-85 f3.5-4.5G. The latter has a better zoom range, but it's just too darn slow to be useful in a lot of venues.
• What I really wish is that I had a second camera, a Nikon D700, with a Nikkor 20-70mm f2.8 on it. I'd use this for both wide shots throughout the night and pre- and post-game shots. Ahhh. Then my life would be perfect. :-)

(Here's the awesome 14-24 at work. The only thing wrong is that I have to stand about 2 feet away from the skaters to get a shot like this, which would be just too dangerous during a live bout.)

Flash:

• On the camera a Nikon SB800. Connected to this, an external battery pack.
• Often I also use a remote Nikon SB600 to give highlights.

(The off-camera flash at work, giving a wonderful highlighted edge to Reefer E, Freddy Kruelgirl and Tin Lizzy.)

Settings:

• I set the camera to ISO 4000, which is a good trade-off between noise and speed.
• I mount the flash and set it to TTL BL, and synch it with the shutter rear curtain. Yes, the flash would fire faster if I set it manually, but I prefer to get the more subtle light effects that are possible with TTL BL. (See below.)
  
• The flash has one of Nikon's amber-colored gels on it, and I manually set the white balance to somewhere in the 3800K range. In this way the foreground (lit with flash) and background (lit by arena light) have the same color temperature, so they match nicely. Otherwise you get normal-looking skaters in front of an amber-colored crowd.
  
• Off-camera flash, if any, is set up using manual settings. It works just fine this way and wastes no time (or batteries) on pre-flashes.
  
• The camera is in shutter priority mode, with shutter speed anywhere from 1/30 to 1/120, depending on how streaky I want the shots to look.
• Focus is Continuous; if I shoot from the inside of the track I have it on center-weighted dynamic; if I'm shooting from the outside, I set it on full-frame auto. However, I do something that some Nikon cameras allow: I disable focus being triggered by the shutter button, so that the camera only focuses if I push the AF-ON button with my thumb. This takes a bit of getting used to, but when you do you have a lot more control over when the camera does and doesn't try to focus.
• Image quality is RAW uncompressed.
• The Lens is set to VR On, and focus range is full.
• The D3 holds two memory cards. I tell the camera to use these sequentially, so that it fills one, then the other. It's how I make it through long bouts with only 6 cards.

(VR means "vibration reduction," which is Nikon's way of saying the 70-200 lens has motors in it that stabilize the image and reduce hand-shake while shooting. It sounds like voodoo and it is, but it's the kind of voodoo that works brilliantly. This shot was taken hand-held from 40 feet away as Memphis Misfit flew past.)

Misc:

• I used to shoot with a monopod during bouts but don't anymore since I now usually stand in the middle of the track. When you shoot in the middle, you sort of rotate like a lighthouse. (Side note: you can get quite dizzy doing this until you get used to it!) With a monpod I'd get all tripped up. But it might be nice to try using one again someday. It gives lovely steady images.
• I often shoot 1,500 or more images during a night at NSRG. If there's a lot happening this number can very quickly climb over 2,000.
• Images are post-processed using Adobe Lightroom 2.0. Occasionally I open them in Adobe Photoshop too, if there's some special correction to be done. But for the most part Lightroom does a terrific job.

(TTL BL means "Through The Lens - Balanced Lighting." In this mode Nikon cameras & flashes take a quick reading of the scene before them using a pre-flash, and then fire the shutter and add just enough flash to balance the subject with the surroundings. When it works - which it does almost all the time - it looks as if you didn't even use a flash at all.)

A lot of the stuff mentioned here was worked out in the last 12 months, with some innovations coming quite recently (gel-coloring my flash started last November, and using a battery pack on the SB800 for faster shooting just began in February). The fact is, I'm always tinkering with my derby photography setup and wondering how I can improve things.

But frankly I think I've stretched it to the limit as far as small-scale camera improvements goes. Currently when I step onto the track to shoot derby I'm wearing about $9,000 worth of camera equipment, and some of the items - my lens, my camera body - simply have nothing better available. Unless I want to start buying my cameras from NASA, something else has to be done.

One of the alternatives that the NSRG Media Team is likely to be exploring next season is ways to get more light on the track during bouts. Currently the light levels at the MCC are very low for photography, causing all of us to push our cameras to extreme settings to get decent results. With just a bit more light, we could actually back off a little, and get images that are much sharper, have better color, and are less reliant on the camera's flash for lighting. There are some good alternatives available, it turns out. We're currently looking at a variety of small, portable-yet-powerful battery-powered lights which could be set at intervals around the track. Some of these only cost $40-50 each, and yet only six or eight of them would have a pretty big impact. Not just for the photographers, either, but for the general audience as well. With the track brightly lit up like this, NSRG league bouts would take on a brand-new dramatic theatricality that I know the audience would love.

But this is all in the wish stage right now. The Media Team hasn't spoken to the league about this yet. It's just one of several ideas we're tinkering with ... because, of course, we want NSRG photos to be the most rocking images in all of derby. :-)

Sports, Drama, Frozen Boats

If you look in the comments under my blog entry called "Origins" you'll see a note from my friend, photographer Wijadi Jodi. He says:

...Bridges, lakes, frozen boats, they can wait. Dynamic situations, when time is pressing, I think, are more interesting. It's when you blinked and you missed a great image, that's where I want to be, where I need to be on my toes to make sure I catch that one memorable moment.

The phrase "frozen boats" is a kind of in-joke between Wijadi and me. We actually went and photographed some frozen boats this past winter near Stillwater, Minnesota, which is on the St. Croix River. They tie up river steamboats there in the fall, and by the time we went to see them last January the water was frozen solid and covered in snow. We stepped off the shore and walked out on the ice, taking pictures from all angles.

It was fun in one sense, because there's something a little spine-tingling about walking on a big frozen river - the St. Croix is probably a mile across at that point. But when I got home that evening and looked at my photos on my computer screen, not a single photograph stood out. They all bored me. My images were completely lacking in drama or originality. To this day, I haven't seriously photoshopped or publicly posted a single one.

Days like this happen to all photographers sometimes. But knowing that doesn't make it less depressing. You go out and shoot and come home with a bunch of images you hate - man, that can really have you wondering whether you have any talent with a camera at all. But it's easy to forget that even the best photographer in the world isn't going to produce good images if they don't remember the fundamentals. And the most fundamental fundamental of them all is this: you have to be engaged with your subject matter. In my case, it's no good me going out and snapping various angles of a bunch of ice-locked paddlewheelers if I don't find some point of view that makes me tingle, or gasp, or my heart skip a beat. That day in Stillwater, I didn't. And so my subject never came alive. The pictures were dull. A bunch of still, boring frozen boats.

The longer I take pictures, the more I accept that having a bad day can actually be a useful part of the maturing process. A photographer, IMHO, cannot be 100 percent chameleon. It's not humanly possible to find every single subject in the world engaging. There are always going to be some things that you think are worth taking pictures of, and some you don't. Maybe a young brand-new photographer should consciously try new things; but in an older artist like me, I think developing a fondness for certain types of subjects isn't a rut, but a sign of maturity. Photography is an inner voyage as much as an outer one. And every time you shoot, you learn a little more about what you love.

In the last 2-3 years I've particularly noticed that I've been moving more and more toward photographing people. I haven't completely given up on landscapes or cityscapes, mind you ... I still think there are interesting - and if you work at it, original - subjects to be found there. But for the moment, I'm content to let these things wait while I focus on other, much more dynamic topics. In the summer months I photograph baseball, and in the winter months it's roller derby. In the past two years, in other words, I have somehow become a sports photographer.

If you had said to me five years ago that I'd be primarily a sports photographer by the year 2009 I would have told you to go jump in the lake. (Preferably the one I was photographing at the time, to make pretty ripples.) No, seriously ... I never saw myself as the sports type of guy at all. I'm an artsy-fartsy type. I've spent all my life surrounded by theatre and music. When I rediscovered photography in 2006 and began shooting seriously, I thought the road ahead would eventually lead me back to the theatre, where I would photograph plays and musicals. I still think that someday this will become a part of my life somehow. But for the moment, it is roller derby and baseball that rule my passions.

Why? What's so great about sports? The best explanation I can think of is that sports are people-centric, unplanned, revealing, and real. The world of sport is one of the few places in the world where you can find real people, engaged in dynamic activity, revealing their feelings in a completely unconscious way.

The theatre couldn't be more the opposite. In the theatre, you are photographing performances. They may look quite convincing, but they are performances all the same. If an actor looks at another actor in anger, it's not real - it's a performance. Likewise, it's not real fear, or sadness, or joy, that you're seeing on the stage or film. It might be very similar ... the best actors can pull some pretty amazing things out of their psyches. But at the end of the day these emotions, displayed in the service of a story, have strict limits imposed on them because, obviously, they have to. An actor who fights with another actor isn't seriously trying to hurt him. The whole thing is staged. And if you're taking pictures of it, during a theatrical photo call, and you suddenly think that it might look better from another angle, it's a simple matter to ask the actors to stop the fight and wait for you to change position. And then start over again from the beginning.

Not in sports. Sports is real life, and real life doesn't wait for anybody. The clock is ticking, things are happening, and you don't get a chance to back up and do it a second time. When you shoot sports, you really have to be on your toes ... and I find this wakes me up in a way that I doubt frozen boats ever could. The whole energy of a sporting event, after all, is centered around uncertainty. Athletes, unlike actors, don their uniforms and equipment and then go out into the arena without the faintest idea of what will happen in the next two hours. I find the sheer freedom of this idea tremendously exciting. And, after years as an actor, tremendously refreshing too.

Sports wait for no one. They are definitely not frozen boats.

My current passion, as you probably know, is roller derby. I'm one of the Media Team photographers for the North Star Roller Girls of Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am completely over the moon about this. Not only am I immensely proud of my association with this league, I am completely enamored of the women who run it, and the women and men who volunteer for it. And I am completely nuts about the sport of roller derby itself, which, though tricky to shoot, is full of wonderfully dramatic photo opportunities.

Take the photo above, a portrait of Kili St. Cyr of the Violent Femmes as she circles the track at the lead of the pack. She's her team's pivot for this jam, indicated by the striped 'panty' on her helmet. If you don't know derby, a pivot is kind of like the quarterback on the track; she doesn't score herself, but she directs what everybody else is doing. But this isn't about derby rules. You know what I love about this photo? Look how absorbed Kili is. She's watching the jammers approach the pack. They're probably moving at pretty high speed. She's getting ready to react - making way for her team's jammer, while blocking or bashing the other team's. In just a few seconds this scene will be totally different - complete chaos will break out. But for the moment, things hover, waiting. Kili is oblivious to me, and to the crowd behind her, and to everything else. Her strength is gathering, coiling.

I just love shots like this. Capturing a little fleeting moment of drama. I'm not sure it's every photographer's dream. But it is certainly mine.

Here are a few more photos that show what I love about shooting derby. To me, these are all like stills from a very, very exciting movie.

The Kilmore Girls' bench frantically tries to signal their jammer:

The 2008 Travel Team, just moments after pulling off an upset win in Chicago:

Apple Smacks, out with an injury, tearful because she won't be playing in the league championship:

And last, for now ... Stalker Channing, knocked down, rises up like one possessed, to rejoin the action:

Like I said, these shots are, to me, kind of like frames from a very exciting movie. One that hasn't grown stale for me yet. Are you kidding? With these sorts of characters and drama going on? Not by a long shot.

And just listen to me, will you? The way I talk about this sport ... expressions, faces, characters, drama, tension ... it's no wonder I feel so at home. It sounds like I'm shooting theatre and not sports after all, doesn't it?

Maybe I am.

Madison, Wisconsin - April 5, 2009

I went down to Madison, Wisconsin with the North Star Northern Lights last weekend to watch them bout against the Vaudeville Vixens of the Madison Mad Rollin' Dolls league.

To view my Top 120 photos from this bout, click here. To view over 600 photos of this bout taken by myself and the rest of the NSRG Media Team, click here.

I originally wasn't going to go to this bout, but then decided at the last minute I didn't want to miss it. The real thing holding me back was money - I'm pretty darn poor right now. But hell, I managed to score an online hotel booking for $39 a night, so I couldn't argue with that. All in all the weekend cost me about $150 in gas and food and lodging. Not bad.

So I went. Drove down by myself on Saturday evening and plunked into the Extended Stay America hotel. The hotel was fantastic! A little kitchen, nice bathroom, beautiful bed/living area with *two* work desks. It was really a great find. I wonder if there's a way for me to suggest to the league travel folks that they check into this hotel chain in the future? Just a thought. All this for 39 bucks made me think I had the deal of the year.

On Sunday I drove over to the auditorium and hooked up with the Northern Lights and the rest of the NSRG Media Team. Everyone looked hale and well, which is better than *I* felt. I've had the damndest lingering cold this past two weeks now, with a persistent cough that's played hell with my sleep. In Madison I felt pretty good much of the time, but there were moments when I just had to sit down and shoot from a chair. Well, that's okay. That's why we have a team. And it's fun to get a different perspective on things.

The teams warmed up and then the bouts started. The first bout was between two teams called the Unholy Rollers and the Quad Squad. Now, nobody had explained these teams to me at any point, so I didn't really know what I was seeing. I guessed that the day's derby was a double-bill of travel teams: the Madison WFTDA-ranked team vs some other city's equivalent team, and then the Madison non-ranked team (the Vixens) vs the Northern Lights. The action seemed to bear this out, because the derby in the first bout was extremely fast and damn, the jammers seemed to be on rockets. I really thought, wow. It wasn't until after intermission that Ger told me these were both Madison league teams. Then I stopped thinking 'wow,' and started thinking "Oh. My. God."

I've heard of leagues like this but this is the first time I've actually seen one. I've been told in the past how great Windy City is, for example, and how they have very disciplined skaters, amazing conditioning, super speed, etc., etc. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've always thought. You haven't seen how good our skaters are. But now for the first time I was kind of blinking at the action and thinking, holy shit. These teams are both Madison teams? This league is amazing.

When the Vixens got up against the Northern Lights it didn't start out brilliantly for us, but that never worries me. We always start out lousy in travel team bouts, it seems. It's like our team has to get out there and be spanked a little bit in order to wake up and start playing up to speed. And sure enough, as the game progressed we did get better. But it wasn't enough. The Madison level of training was just too much to handle. The final score was 159-57.

Now, I don't want to make excuses here, but it's just as unfair to ignore realities. The fact is the Madison team was very good, but the fact also is that the "Northern Lights" are not really a team at all. They're more like an NSRG pickup squad whose intention is to go out and make friends with new leagues. The Lights' roster is different from day to day, and they typically get just one or two practices before heading off to a bout like this one. So there's a very good reason that the score was so lopsided.

And it's also worth noting that in spite of all this, Naughty Kitty and Olga Ogilthorpe, who are two members of the NSRG Supernovas (the real NSRG travel team), took their Madison counterparts pretty much in stride. Kitty and Olga both decked Madison players more than a few times (see above), and Kitty scored quite a few points as jammer. If the game had been between the Vixens and the Supernovas, or the Vixens and any cohesive NSRG team such as the Deltas or the Kilmores, the outcome IMHO would have been very different.

If I sound a bit annoyed while saying all this, I am. I overheard the other day a bit of news that kind of bugs me. Apparently Derby Network News was at the bout, and their reporter was taking the score as a reflection of NSRG's skill level - which may ultimately have an effect on our DNN rankings. What??? Yes ... from what I hear, it was explained that the Northern Lights are just a scratch team, but apparently this didn't make much of a dent. If this is the case ... then WTF? Come on DNN! Surely you want to report the truth? If the Northern Lights are representative of NSRG's skill level, how do you explain the track record of the Supernovas - who haven't lost a game in a over year and a half? Who've beaten teams in our WFTDA division that are ranked not very far below Madison. Who won the Sioux City tournament just a few months ago by, among other things, beating the MNRG all-stars in the final.

Come on DNN. Get a grip!

If DNN ranks NSRG poorly because of this, I swear, I am going to write them an email so hot it's going to set fire to their fucking server. I mean it. This bugs my ass. NSRG has worked very hard the past two years to gain the respect of other leagues throughout the midwest. To have all of the travel and bouting and hosting and money and sweat and time trumped by a single DNN reporter having a bad hair day is just plain tragic. It's also sloppy, second-rate reporting. And downright unfair.

Come on, DNN. Don't let me down. Do the right thing.

[Hey readers - turns out DNN did the right thing after all. Please read Medusa's comment to this post. Thanks for the update, Deuce Coupe!]

After the bout there were a couple of fun things. First, someone put Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" on the loudspeakers, and the Vaudeville Vixens came over and mingled with the Northern Lights and everyone sang along. Then the teams went out into the lobby where they have tables set up in an autograph area. This is a really nice feature and it'd be great to see it at NSRG bouts in the future; each team stands behind a table with a collection of non-permanent magic markers and for about half an hour chats with the fans and signs any hat, program, arm, leg or other body part (within reason) presented. It's really a nice party atmosphere, and it's a great chance for skaters and fans to mingle and bond. There was one fellow there who was obviously a regular Mad Rollin Dolls fan; he had a baseball cap and jacket festooned with buttons. Earlier that day I had seen him at the ticket windows saying proudly, "I guess that makes me first in line again!" I thought, man, fans like that are just fantastic. Non-creepy, genuine fans of the sport and all the wonderful wittiness that goes with it. You have to hope you have fans like that. They're the ones who'll keep coming back and supporting the league, season after season.

I actually almost never interact with fans at NSRG bouts, because I'm so intent on photographing skaters. It occurs to me right now that maybe this isn't the right balance? Maybe we need more fan-fun shots on the NSRG website to show fans how much they're appreciated? It's something to think about. Fan dedication is no small thing. It can go a long way to not just creating a great atmosphere, but actually putting real money in NSRG's coffers. I also shoot for the Saint Paul Saints baseball team, and that's probably the best example I can think of where a big emphasis on fan fun at every single game (activities, mascots, special days, kid-friendly stuff, etc., etc.) translates into tremendous fan loyalty. That team has had seasons where they flat-out suck but the fans could care less; they show up in droves because they consider themselves part of the family, and as a result the stands are rarely below 70-80 percent capacity.

I'll be sure to suggest this to the Media Team sometime. Anything we can do to help might be a big help to NSRG.

Boot Camp

Today is the day of the Minnesota Roller Girls' championship bout at the Roy Wilkins Hall in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Good luck to them! I hope it's a fun time for everybody.

I'm staying home. I'm kind of catching my breath the past few days. Things have been pretty busy with the North Star Roller Girls so far this spring, with both league bouts and travel team bouts coming rather quickly. In March there was a league bout, and then a week off, and then three consecutive weekends with travel team bouts in different cities. One of these was in Columbus, Ohio - 14 hours each way by freeway. I'm very, very committed to supporting NSRG and I really want to go to every single bout I can, but even I couldn't survive this schedule without going broke. Neither could the rest of the NSRG Media Team. So we finally had to meet and divide these games up among ourselves. It was the first time we've done that. I hope we don't ever have to do it again.

Last weekend was the third of these trips, to Madison, Wisconsin. I went, and when I got home I spent (as usual) the next 3-4 days absorbed in post-processing the photos. At one point I had them all done and posted them on Fotki.com (which is where the NSRG media team maintains albums of NSRG photos), but then I took a second look at them and hated the color balance. So I deleted them all and re-processed them!

In one way that sounds fanatic but in another way it's not. This is just me wanting excellence, and also me being willing (and, thank goodness, able at the moment) to put in the kind of time that all this post-processing requires. I'll say it again - derby is not just a passion of mine. It is also my graduate-level PhD in photography. If passion is the reason I shoot this sport, then learning new skills is one of the great rewards. My friendship with NSRG has given me a chance to shoot in many, many different conditions - portraits, studio, action, candids, events, parties, outdoor light, bar light, stadium light, studio strobes, with on-camera flash, without flash ... the variations go on and on. And beyond the camera, I've been learning how to use Lightroom and Photoshop at a whole new level just to make these photos look the best they possibly can. After all this, I honestly feel like I'm ready for any photo subject on planet earth. Somalia? Antarctica? Urban riots? Terrorism? Pirates? Hah. After derby, these would be a piece of cake.

You think I'm joking, but I'm not. Derby is fast, has multiple subjects (the pack), is chaotic, and takes place (as often as not) in lousy lighting conditions. At least in a war zone I'd be shooting in daylight and people aren't hurling past on roller skates. Are you kidding? It's a no-brainer. Give me the war zone any day. After derby, I could cover flying bullets in my sleep.

Origins

Madison, Wisconsin, on April 5, 2009. That's my good friend Strawberry Snatchcake of the North Star Roller Girls hanging out, waiting for the game to begin.

It's appropriate I start this blog with her.

Strawberry (obviously that's her 'pirate' name - all the girls in roller derby have them) and I used to work together at the same company. About three years ago she introduced me to roller derby. That one single step, combined with a few other things, literally created the life that I live today. And that I shall blog about here.

So, since this is called "Origins," let me tell you a little about it.

Three years ago I was going through an aimless period where I wasn't sure what to do with my life. For the previous 25 years - from age 17 to age 43 - I had been an aspiring professional actor, and my life took it's shape and sense of purpose from that. I first lived in Toronto, then New York City, then Hollywood California, all in pursuit of furthering my performing career. I was in plays on large stages and small, and appeared in a smattering of TV shows and films too. The whole adventure was a lot of fun, and I often (this is true) at random moments would look up at the sky with a big smile and say "Thank you!" for having such a cool life.

But by my mid-forties, I have to say, these feelings were starting to change a little. The whole theatre lifestyle was starting to wear me down. It's perfectly fine to be a staving actor when you're 23 years old and you feel you have nothing but endless amounts of time and health and energy to spend. It's quite another thing when you're 43 years old and start realizing that your time, health and energy are not infinite. Life is short, in fact. You don't have endless time to come to grips with your dreams - not if you want them to stop being dreams and start being reality. But wasn't I living my dream? The thing is, it didn't feel that way anymore. I was acting a lot, true. But what did I have to show for it? Where was my life's work? The fact is, theatre is ephemeral, and while that can make it poignant and exciting - you'd better see that great show tonight because next week it will be gone forever - it was for me starting to feel hollow. When a show is over there's nothing left but a few photographs and memories. Good God, I found myself thinking more and more often, is that all I'll have to show for it when my life is done? A bunch of thin air, newspaper clippings and stories?

Around the early summer of 2002 things came to a head. I was living in Los Angeles and my financial situation abruptly crashed. I was evicted from my apartment, then I got back in, then I was evicted again ... all for having no money. Meanwhile, across town, I was appearing in a play at one of Los Angeles' more beautiful and reputable non-union-contract theatres, but because I received not a penny for my performances it was actually *costing* me money - in gas and meals - to do the show. It was absurd.

Something had to give, and finally I sat down one day and faced reality. I had to get a full-time job of some kind. So I did. I took a position at a financial printing company. And I did something that in twenty-five years of acting I never, ever did, not even once: I quit the play.

When I settled into my new job it was with a strange, brand-new feeling. One of deep humility. For the first time in my life I had to admit that I wasn't (probably, anyway) going to become famous sometime in the next week or month, therefore becoming rich and solving all my financial problems in a stroke. In fact, I would have to be much more like regular people now. I had to actually plan my life ... with healthy respect for the money I could earn. This was a major adjustment for me. It's still one I have trouble with, frankly. I don't think we were meant to be born and live according to a financial system that people basically made up out of thin air about 3,000 years ago. I think surely life is about priorities that are more sublime and eternal than that. But oh, what the hell. That's the kind of thinking that got me into trouble in the first place. So be it. A job.

I made a mental deal with myself. I would stick at the job until a number of financial goals had been reached. I would pay off certain debts, I would replace my current car, and I would take care of my teeth. Then I would quit and return to the world of acting, with my life now on a much more secure footing.

Well, that was the plan. But the Buddhists have a saying that very roughly goes, be where you are. It implies that a healthy spirit doesn't spend all its time lost in imagination, pining to be in some other place, but instead takes the place where it finds itself right here and now - whatever that place may be - and begins to create life and peace and happiness. And that's kind of what happened to me at this new job. As I showed up for work day after day and began collecting a paycheck and retiring old worrisome bills, I began to realize how much I really kind of liked living this way. It was such a change, such a relief, after so many years of hand-to-mouth. I began to feel, not simply less worried about money, but also in a very deep and profound way more peaceful, more at ease with the world. My spirit began unfolding and relaxing as it gradually healed from all the distortions that an adult life mostly ruled by poverty had inflicted on it. Having a job, it turned out, wasn't making a deal with the devil. It was bringing sunshine and water to a parched and needy soul.

Over the years I had gotten in the habit of thinking that I just couldn't afford major things in life, so it was better not to think about them at all. Now I realized this wasn't necessary anymore. If I wanted to, I could plan for a purchase, or a trip, or whatever else I liked. The sheer novelty of this was breathtaking. If I wanted to go to Hawaii, all I had to do was save the money and make the arrangements at work. New clothes? Go get them. Car needs fixing? Make an appointment.

Wow.

This may sound like a "well, duh" concept to many people reading this. "Gee, Paul, so you discovered in your forties that regular employment is a good thing. You don't say?" Okay, okay - go easy on me. I wasn't just your average dedicated artistic nut, you know. I was a very, very, very dedicated artistic nut. I had been living in a self-constructed ivory tower of the mind for twenty-five years. This new lifestyle took some adjusting.

Flash forward.

Two years after starting my job I was completely settled into it. I still called myself an actor, but I was now comfortable with the concept that I would stay at this job, not merely until my debts were paid and my car was fixed, but until something more fundamental happened - until I felt my spirit was completely healed and happy again. To tell the truth, I was no longer in any hurry about it. It was such fun to be a non-acting 'civilian' for a change. Such a *relief* not to have to plan each day, week and month after the next show, the next role. I could wear my hair the way I wanted it, not the way some part demanded. If I gained a few pounds, it didn't matter. It was so great to be out from under that constant pressure, that theatre yoke. I really felt like a huge amount of weight was off my shoulders. And then, one day, into this life of new bliss there walked an opportunity. On the internal bulletin board at work I saw a posting: applicants wanted for an open position in the company's training department. The money would be better. The atmosphere would certainly be fun and interesting. The training department's people were among the coolest people I knew at the company. The only catch was, if I got the job I would have to move from Los Angeles to Saint Paul, Minnesota.

I remember the giddy, liberated feeling that came over me when I thought, "Why not?" If I wasn't going to be acting anytime in the near future, what did I need to hang around Los Angeles for? It's a big city, true, but not exactly one of the world's most beautiful. It's not even what I'd call one of the world's 'great' cities (like New York). It's just there, a sprawling monster, founded on show biz and railroads and tourism. I could definitely use a break from it. So I applied for the new job. And a couple of months and a few telephone interviews later, to my delight, I was informed that I had gotten it.

In the mid-summer of 2005 I packed most of my belongings and gave away the rest, and drove my car with a U-Haul on the back across the country. By August, I was a newly-ensconced resident of the Twin Cities, MN.

When the dust settled, I loved my new life. I was a trainer. Part of the job was writing manuals and teaching materials, which I love to do. And another part was leading classes, which was enough like being a ham actor to satisfy my latent performing urges. The pay was good, the benefits too, and the company had a cheerful (if always-busy) atmosphere that I thought was marvelous. My new life in Minnesota quickly became almost dream-like in its perfectness. Outside lay the streams, forests, lakes and meadows of one of the most beautiful states in the Union. Inside, my new friends a new job were a constant challenge and source of fun. My gosh, I felt lucky.

There was only one thing. Downtime. I've never been good at having downtime. I get too restless. I really love the sense of having a project I'm working on, and not just any project, but a creative one. While I may have made peace with not being an actor at this time, that didn't mean I had no need of doing something. So I began to cast around for ideas. In my mind, I went for a stroll back through my life and asked myself what had I ever done - or run into - over the years that was creative and fun, and looked like something I'd like to try?

My first answer was, models. As a kid I used to make model airplanes. Now that I was a grown-up, I could ramp up the scale. What kind of models? Ships, of course! And not just any old ship. I was going to build a sailing ship! Yes, by God, that was the answer. In fact, I already knew the exact ship model I wanted to build. I wanted to build the Cutty Sark, an old English tea clipper from the 19th century and in many people's opinions one of the most beautiful sailing ships ever built. I could fill a lot of this blog with my adventures on this project, but let me give the short version here. I bought the kit and supplies; I set to work; and for the next year I labored on that thing. But one day I looked up and saw that the project was only half-finished and I thought, that's it, I can't do this anymore.

The problem was that ship-model-building is a very finicky, and very lonely, business. You sit by yourself for hours and hours sanding this part, painting that one, talking to no one, and often making very little visible progress each day. In my case, the project was especially slow because I was determined not to compromise - I wanted this model to be museum-quality. So each little binnacle and brace got the same slow, meticulous attention. After a year of this, however, I was going genuinely batty. I kept thinking in the back of my mind, "What am I going to do with this thing when it's finished, exactly?" I didn't have an answer that really satisfied me. Show it off at work? Put it on a shelf in my living room? None of those sounded nearly as resounding as they needed to, given the fact that I had pored twelve fucking months into this thing, with more to come.

Finally around November of 2006 I took a break. I went a week without working on the ship. Then two. Then three. And then I had to admit it - I didn't want to go back to the project. I was finished with it.

The Cutty Sark today sits in the spare room of my apartment, with the hull, deck, and masts all looking very pretty but with a good year's worth of work still needed to put them in shape. But to be honest, I don't miss working on it. Ship building didn't really match my temperament very well. As you can see by this blog (and my life, if you know me), I prefer my art projects to be a bit more social. I either need co-creators, or an audience, for creativity to feel like more than self-involvedness. Building ships was bound to frustrate me sooner or later.

But once I retired the ship, I was free to look around at other possibilities. And in December of 2006 I rediscovered photography.

I have always been fascinated by cameras, but that doesn't mean I've always pursued photography as a serious art. In the late seventies, when I left home for college and then moved away to Toronto to start my life as an actor, I bought a used Rolleflex SLR and went around late at night taking arty black & white photos of the city. In those days, of course, everything was film, and that meant quite a few limitations. First, you could only take up to 36 shots on a roll. Second, film and processing cost money, so every time you had one of these artistic inspirations you had to have a little cash to make it workable. And third, you never really knew what you had photographed until you got your prints back from the lab days after taking them. All this taken together was just enough to keep me from being a serious photographer, for in those days I already saw myself as primarily an actor, which was already a complex and demanding lifestyle (with many unique expenses to go along with it). I didn't have the time, or money, for a second calling.

But now, 25 years later, it was a different story. I was prosperous now and working at a job. I had time. And it was the age of digital, where you didn't need film to take photographs, just a decent computer and a copy of Photoshop. I plunged in and bought myself a Nikon D200. It arrived in the middle of December, 2006.

And this finally brings me back to my friend, Strawberry Snatchcake.

Strawberry is one of my favorite people in the world. She's one of the coolest women I've ever known anywhere. She's bright, witty, funny, affectionate, artsy, unaffected ... the list goes on and on. She has a knack for forming relationships with interesting people and turning up interesting activities. For some time now she had been a member of the North Star Roller Girls roller derby league. For several months previously, in fact, she had tried to sell me tickets to the league's bouts. I had declined, mostly because I was at home going through my little artistic identity crisis. Strawberry knew I was working on the Cutty Sark, but she also knew I had recently bought a camera. She approached me at work with a ticket in her hand and said, "Come on. Buy this! And come! You'll have fun and you can take lots of pictures with your new camera."

To my eternal gratitude, I said, "Okay, I will!" And I did.

My first view of the North Star Roller Girls was less than a week later when I drove from my apartment in Saint Paul to Coon Rapids, Minnesota - about half an hour away - and parked in front of a roller rink called Cheap Skate. I went inside, where the lights were multicolor and the rock 'n' roll music was blasting away. I saw other people from work, and at some point I saw Strawberry too ... so different from her work persona, in a short-skirted derby uniform with fishnet stockings, roller skates, knee and elbow and wrist pads, and helmet. She looked like a cross between a biker chick and a gladiator - which, now that I think of it, is pretty much what all derby girls look like (with lots of ingenious variation). I took a few photos of her and some of her teammates, and then pretty much spent the rest of the night hanging around near the track trying to take photos of the action. When I got home, I had nearly 600 shots.

I won't say that I was instantly hooked on roller derby. It was fun, yes, but my photographic interests lay in other directions at that time. When I first had my new camera, and first began to take photography seriously, it was nature and landscapes and cityscapes that I wanted to shoot. I wanted to get out there in the world and photograph majestic beauty. That was my first notion of what photographers did. I wasn't going to shoot roller derby, which was so Annie Leibowitz; I was going to shoot breathtaking sunrises over the graveyard and other sweeping scenes, and be known as the new Ansel Adams.

I was therefore in no particular hurry to get back to Cheap Skate and shoot more roller derby. I went to another bout a few weeks later, and didn't even bring along my camera!

But as the weeks turned into months, and as I began to get more comfortable with photography, then I began to get more restless about my early notions of subject matter. A sunset is a lovely thing, no question. But if you go join an online photo-networking site like Flickr (which I did) you'll soon see hundreds of thousands of them. All lovely. So I had to wonder, was I really contributing anything to the betterment of humankind by capturing yet another pretty shot of our closest star going down beyond that far-off hill?

I had the same vaguely dissatisfied feelings about shooting beautiful architecture and scenery of the Twin Cities. Especially when I began seeing dozens of other people on Flickr doing the exact same thing. Why even have a camera if all you're going to do is take the same old photos as everyone else? It's not like it's any kind of brilliant technical accomplishment: if you have a good camera, folks, then catching sunsets is pretty easy. Pretty sunrises too. Ditto barns, ducks, falling water, majestic buildings, and the glint of sunshine on a drop of dew on a leaf. These are all subjects that have been explored so many times they amount to enervating cliches. Even when taken by a master photographer, do I really need to see another image of a tulip moist with dew? Unless it's from a completely new perspective, the answer is no.

And that's the thing. Perspective.

Here's what I think: I think every photographer has a unique opportunity to be an explorer. I think a photographer goes out into the world, captures an image, and brings it back for the rest of us to see. Sometimes these photographs are of familiar subjects - in which case, the photographer is being something of a recordist or historian, capturing and preserving the life that we know. But other photographers, the explorer-artists, ask more of themselves. They go out and bring back images that surprise, or dazzle, or mystify, or provoke us. They capture images that we never imagined existed, or were possible. Images that, but for the alchemy of the photographer, we would otherwise never have seen.

Scenic beauty is sometimes part of this. I've seen beautiful landscapes ... in particular a series of foggy woodlands at dawn in the middle of the French countryside ... that I'm immensely grateful for, because the chances of my getting to French countryside at dawn in the fog anytime soon are pretty slim. But I'm not talking about exceptional scenic beauty shots. I'm talking about routine beauty shots. If you go to, say, Niagara Falls and set up your camera and take a routine beauty shot of the water plunging over the cliffs into the valley below ... then you're being a recordist, in my opinion, not an artist. You're reproducing a photo taken thousands of times before. This documents the fact that you were there, and that may be in fact what you want to achieve. But if take a shot like this and think you're an artist, in my opinion you need to think again.

The Statue of Liberty, Niagara Falls, the White House, the local graveyard ... we all know what these things look like. Sad but true, thousands of photographers have gotten there first, and all the standard angles have been covered to death. If you don't find some new way to treat these subjects, but instead go and repeat the same set-piece photos that everyone else has taken for years, then you've completely failed in your very first duty as a photographic artist by choosing a trite subject and covering it tritely. In heaven's name, there are already millions of stock images of Niagara Falls on this planet. We don't need more.

This is how I feel about local photographers in the Twin Cities area. Yes, there is a lot of beauty here. Yes, it's understandable that new photographers want to photograph the same subjects as those who have gone before them, as a learning experience. But honestly if I see another shot of the Stone Arch Bridge taken from the east shore looking west towards the Minneapolis skyline, day or night, I'm gonna puke. Seriously people, get some imagination! Ask more of yourself. Stretch a little.

This is how my mind was running when I began thinking of roller derby again.

It took time, but by the middle of 2007 I began to realize that roller derby was not just some weird sport that my friend was constantly bugging me to buy tickets to; it was, in fact, exactly the kind of photographic subject I was looking for. Here was originality itself: a group of women, ages 21 to late 40's, not only playing a rough contact team sport but also organizing and running the league on their own. And doing it, I discovered, with a wit, style, and friendliness that you just don't see in most organized men's sports. Yet roller derby was still underground as far as most of America was concerned. Simply by covering it, I could possibly help it get off the ground by exposing it to a wider audience. And in the meantime, I could experience the thrill of covering a largely un-covered sport (and culture) while improving my photography by chasing some of the most colorful, fantastic on- and off-track action you can imagine.

All my instincts said, go back to derby.

And so I did.

In the fall of 2007 I learned that the North Star Roller Girls had moved their bouts to the Minneapolis Convention Center, which was not only a bigger and more impressive venue, but one that's much easier to get to than Cheap Skate. I started going to bouts regularly and started taking pictures. Lots of them.

At first they sucked, but I was determined to improve. And I also wasn't shy about spending money. One of the advantages of being a 40-something bachelor with a full-time job is I had no other life commitments demanding my paycheck, so I could save my money relatively quickly to improve my camera gear. In March of 2008 I bought Nikon's best sports lens, the 70-200 2.8 VR. In May I sold my Nikon D200 for a brand-new D300, which was much better in lower light conditions. Around this time I also began using a flash on my camera, and learning how to use it artfully. By midsummer I also began using Adobe Lightroom for post-processing. And so on and so on. It's a process that continues to this day.

I have often said that for me, derby was photography boot camp. In about one year flat it turned me from a nervous newbie into a confident shooter.

And as my art developed, my life blossomed too. Mostly because my relationship with NSRG has brought humanity whooshing back into my life in the form of friendships with the skaters, referees and other league volunteers. Derby folk, it turns out, are very exceptional people. It's a bit like a sport, and a bit like being in the circus.

Derby skaters, in particular, make an interesting contrast with the actresses who used to fill my life. Both groups of women have a special spark that is immediately striking. But derby girls, in their role as serious athletes, have an extra dimension of pioneer strength that actresses as a group don't require. The arts, after all, have been full of women for decades. But competitive team contact sports? Before derby came along, exactly how many shining examples of that for women have there been out there? I'll tell you. Next to zero.

By playing any sort of sport seriously, then, derby girls rock. That they do so against the counterpressure of society - a world that still wants women to look pretty, stay home, make babies, worry about their weight, and otherwise leave the world of the locker room and bruises and sweat and aggression to men - means they doubly rock. But it goes even further. Derby is not just any old sport; it's a truly punishing sport demanding endurance, agility, flexibility, strategic thinking, and an ability and willingness to bash the lights out of opposing players while occasionally being bashed yourself. I used to play ice hockey and I'm telling you, I wince when I see some of the shoulder-blocks these women dish out while wearing no shoulder padding whatsoever. Those who play roller derby are not faint-hearted debutantes, sham-beautiful while they worry about about split ends and china patterns. They are dedicated athletes, hurling around the track, playing an exceptional sport exceptionally, fast and alive and beautiful - and awesome - to behold.

And from a social point of view ... where else, I ask you, do you find a sport where the players will bake you cookies for being their loyal cameraman? Where else do you see players on opposing teams laughing and smiling and talking to each other just before the whistle blows? Where else do you find a sport where, in some far off city on a traveling team trip, you show up and are immediately surrounded by players who want to gush thanks at you for making the trip? In a life that has not been without its share of exceptional people, derby has got to be one of the most fun and rewarding families I've ever been a part of. I wouldn't trade my position with NSRG today for all the tea in China.

And that pretty much brings us up to now.

Thank God! I can finally stop blathering and get down to what this blog is really about, which is, the daily and weekly adventures of me with a camera in my hand. Since starting to shoot for the North Star Roller Girls I've picked up a second amazing gig, becoming (starting this year) the official photographer for the Saint Paul Saints baseball club. The Saints are another amazing family, and their ballpark, Midway Stadium, is a mecca for some of the most delightful characters and fans and players I've ever met. Every time I go there it's a pleasure, and that's a good thing, since I just got this summer's schedule and there's a LOT of home games on it. It's not time to rev up yet. But almost. The fun starts next month, in mid-late May.

Meantime, NSRG has its championship bout on May 9th. I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be a doozy.

And that's all. Except:

Thank you Strawberry for bringing me into this life. Thank you, guardian angels, for kicking me in the pants enough times to realize what I had. Thank you, roller girls and volunteers and refs and fellow photographers of the NSRG, for adopting me into this family.

And thank you, who are reading this now, for being my new friend. I hope you'll come back often. I have lots to tell and show you. Meantime, leave me a comment! I look forward to it.

:-)
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