Photo by Robbie Cooper for New York Times Magazine

Photo District News, Robert Benson, and Vincent Laforet are all lauding the latest work of Robbie Cooper in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.  The whole thing was shot with the RED video camera, with the video published online and the stills going into print.

The buzz about this piece is the innovative use of multimedia.  With more and more video cameras being able to produce quality stills, and professional SLRs adopting video, I’ve found myself counting the days (months really) until I own a Canon 5d MkII.  My friend Dan, a TV producer, has tried to keep me grounded by pointing out that the equipment is ultimately just a tool and that a person’s ability to tell a good story visually will always be more important to the end result.  I must agree that innovation comes from the photographer’s eye, not the camera’s.

Benson points out a series of photographs very similar to Cooper’s, of adults playing video games, made by Philip Toledano.  And I notice an even closer resemblance between Cooper’s work and Wolfram Hahn’s 2006 photo essay called A disenchanted Playroom, in which he photographed children watching television.

Photo by Wolfram Hahn, 2006

It’s interesting to me the similarity of expressions on Cooper’s and Hahn’s subjects, since one might consider television a passive pursuit and video games a very interactive one.  I guess in both cases what these kids are experiencing is a strong detachment from reality, replacing it with the world inside the screen.

Hahn didn’t use a fancy new video camera, and just put the camera on top of the TV, not behind a transparent screen, but I think I like his eye better.

I covered a youth flag football tournament recently, and besides being creeped out by the absurd number of Yes on 8 signs posted in front of the Christian academy hosting the teams, the hot sun was putting the pressure on me to get the shots I needed and leave.

After three hours of distilling the drama of kids’ sports I knew I had too much of the same shot and was experiencing diminished returns for my sun-baked efforts.  I also saw that the school carnival being held in conjunction with the tournament had not died down, so I weighed my genetic predisposition toward skin cancer against sticking around for another ten minutes and seeing something different.

That ten minutes netted me two of the five photos the newspaper eventually ran, including the front page photo below.  This is why I almost always stay just a little while longer.

As an aside, the day’s opening ceremonies pointed out a few things that I didn’t know about Christian culture.  I learned the difference between Calvary and cavalry, and that Christian schools have a Christian pledge of allegiance, recited to their very own flag just after the American pledge of allegiance and just before the kids put on their Armor of God.

Students and staff recite the American and Christian pledges of allegiance.

Meanwhile, I was perfectly content to squeak by with an ancient 300mm wide open at f/2.8 to keep the bulls and their riders sharp.  That is, until I found out that a spectator’s beer I had clumsily knocked over with my big fat camera bag cost seven dollars to replace.  My chagrin at the remuneration of said refreshment bled over into pessimism regarding my ability to deliver quality images of the rodeo.

Later that night, however, I was perusing my photos when I found an unexpected keeper: I had caught the flash from the parabolic satellite dish on the rodeo photographer’s camera, giving me one frame of a cowboy’s ride lit dramatically from the side.  Considering my shutter speed was close to 1/1000 of a second, I assume that the pulse from the flash had to have been rather long.  That, and maybe I had a little luck on my side after all.

And then, a few weeks later I was reading Newsweek’s terrific Beijing Olympics photo blog Visions of China when I came across a photo by Donald Miralle of Michael Phelps celebrating his eighth gold medal.

Photograph by Donald Miralle for NEWSWEEK

Simon Barnett, DOP for NEWSWEEK, lauded Miralle’s photo for the effect added by catching another photographer’s flash.  I couldn’t help but note the similarities between the circumstances around Miralle’s photo and mine: both shooting sports, both using 300mm Canon lenses, both struggling in low light to freeze the action, both using another’s flash to highlight the subject.

Regardless of the historic event that Miralle caught so well, I couldn’t help but smirk at the fact that my photo came first.

And so the latest of the many plaques mounted at the base of the controversial cross at the Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial honors Brigadier General James Maitland Stewart, not Jimmy.

The Navy Band Southwest performed at the dedication ceremony for Stewart.  I hadn’t known that musicians get their own specific rankings, as I learned from MU1 (Musician First Class) Evan Vis, a fine euphonium player.

More photos here.

I had never quite understood what exactly defined the sport of roller derby – or that it was actually a sport at all – until a week ago when I went to my first match.  It was a friend of a friend’s first match as well, only she would be on the rink, elbow to elbow with the rest of the women of the San Diego Derby Dolls league.  But some of the top players appeared to be well into their thirties, quite unexpected for what I thought would amount to a staged show reminiscent of professional wrestling entertainment.

What I found was two teams who took their sport seriously even while competing with names such as Isabelle Ringer, Anita Battle, Taryn Hearts, Micki Dagger, Slamurai and (my favorite) CN Enemy.  My sentiments were echoed by a reasonable proportion of the crowd in attendance who seemed to have never been to a match before, but were nonetheless engrossed in the action once it got underway.  The organizers are keen to get the word out about their young league; if you want to play roller derby, even if you’ve never laced up a pair of roller skates, they’ll train you.

More photos here.

Photos here.