9-11: In Memory of Peter Hanson

Today's posting is one that I posted originally on 9-11-2010 and tonight I was rereading some of my 9-11 postings (I've run a few) and looking at some related photos and I came across this and decided it deserves re-publishing. One thing you will notice that's different comes up in the final paragraph. Also, I mention another 9-11 photo toward the end of this entry and I will publish that photo again on Sunday. Please take a moment to follow the link to a letter from Peter Hanson's mother below. And by the way, if you're never been to the Statue of Liberty in person (though I'd see her dozens of times, I didn't go out to Liberty Island until a few years ago), make plans to do it this fall--you will never think of America or liberty or 9-11 in the same way again:

As far as I know I didn't know any of the people who died on the airplanes that day, but one was a regular listener to the noncommercial FM radio station where I have done radio for many years (WPKN). Here is the story of that day and a link to a memorial page about him:

I had been up all night writing the previous night and was sleeping (what else is new?) when the planes hit the WTC and my friend Lynne called around 10:30 a.m. and woke me and asked: "Are you watching the news?" And then she told me: "The World Trade Center is gone, the Pentagon has been bombed and there are other planes still in the air that they believe have been hijacked."

I thought she was joking, but I flipped on the local Connecticut TV station and the first thing I heard was the reporter saying he'd just spoken to a person that paid a cab several hundred dollars to drive a car full of people out of the city. Everyone thought the entire city was under attack and they just wanted to get back home.

I was scheduled to do my radio show at 2 p.m. and so I just got up and went to the station. We had no idea what to do but we just kept doing "rip and reads" from the AP and relaying things we heard online on CNN, ABC, etc. We're a small noncommercial station, so we had no reporters anywhere on such short notice. Instead, we just opened the phone lines and let people talk or give us bits of news.

A friend of mine, a good reporter named Ken Best, came and joined me on the air and together we took a lot of calls. Most of the calls were either updating us on what other stations were saying--remember, this was happening live and we were on the air live, there was no delay--and people were calling to sympathize, rant or whatever.

About four that afternoon a regular listener (a guy we call the "Trailer Guy" because he lives in a trailer in the woods and calls whenever I'm on the air) called and told us that his best friend, and a guy that was a regular listener to the station when he was in Connecticut (he grew up here but moved to Massachusetts), was on United Flight 175. His name was Peter Hanson. We took Trailer Guy's call on the air (again, live, no delay) and he told us that he had just received a call from Peter's distraught father. Peter had called his father from the air and said he knew what was happening, knew what had happened to the first plane (United 175 was the second plane that flew into the WTC--the South Tower) and that he was just calling to say, "I love you Dad, goodbye."(I learned later that his parents actually watched live on TV as the plane hit the tower.)

There was utter silence at our end. Suddenly the whole thing became a personal, hometown tragedy and it was right in the room with us. Ken and I were devastated. Or should I say, more devastated.

Peter had his wife and daughter with him and he was taking them on a business trip and then to Disneyland. He was 32. His daughter Christine was two-and-a-half years old and was the youngest victim of 9-11. His daughter was very excited to be going to see Mickey and Pluto. Peter and his wife and daughter died, no doubt, curled in each others arms.

You can read a letter and a memorial from Peter's mother here.

One other odd thing about that day, that has never left me, was that because so many of our neighbors in southern Connecticut commute to New York every day, there were literally hundreds of cars in train stations that were not returned to that night. The police set up security at all the train stations to be sure the cars were left alone. Families went to the train stations and waited for husbands and wives and children, many of whom never came home.

Even today in Manhattan, you will see fading little signs with the photos and names of victims, signs that were posted in the days after the attack. People looking for their loved ones, their friends.

In yesterday's posting I ran a photo of a memorial to 9-11 in Jersey City, New Jersey, across the Hudson from where the towers stood. It is made of a beam of the WTC and is decorated with things that people have left: flags, angels, etc. When you come across this memorial in person, and then look up and see the gap in the skyline, it just about takes you to your knees.

And yet Bin Laden still walks this earth. Let's hope not for long--there is a place in hell waiting for him.

Liberty Glows

Spent the entire night playing in Photoshop to create some photos for the revision of my book The Joy of Digital Photography. I knew from the start of the book that Lady Liberty would be a part of it. Last fall Lynne and I spent three days in New Jersey shooting the statue and visiting the area. I have never been more moved by a single photographic subject in my life. Something about seeing that face in person (it was my first time on Liberty Island, though of course I'd see her from Manhattan hundreds of times) really shook me to my core. The idea that she was the first vision of America that millions of immigrants (including my grandfather) saw hit me profoundly when the ferry first brought us close to her. I had an extraordinary first day there--it was baking hot and then we were hit by a rollicking thunderstorm. And as much as I tried to concentrate on photographing her, I could not shake this feeling that I was meant to step on that island, meant to look her in the face and meant to be there with a camera. When you go there, you are surrounded by thousands of people, most of whom, I think, are having the exact same experience: awe that such an amazing country exists and that such a fabulous work of art welcomes everyone. If you have never been there, go this summer. Take your kids, or take your parents--or both. You will never be the same.

By the way, I created this using a combination of color tools (including the channel mixer) and created the lighting effect using the--what else?--the lighting effects filter. Just playing and having fun. Also, today's Black Star Rising blog features two of my Liberty collages. Black Star is the greatest photojournalism agency in history and they have a really great and interesting blog.

Keep Working the Montage: Another Liberty

 

After writing about montage work yesterday, I kept working with a few different images of the Statue of Liberty. I find that the more I concentrate on just a small group of images the more ideas that pop up--it limits your picture choices and forces you to find new ideas with a limited palette. This is a montage of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline (both shot the same weekend) and it's totally just an experiment to try a few things. Essentially I used the method described yesterday--dragging one image (the skyline) onto the background image (the statue). I then made hue/saturation and selective color adjustments (to the overall montage and to each image) and then played with the blending modes until I found one that I liked (I ended up using linear light). But at this point the statue wasn't coming through strong enough, so I duped the background layer (Command J on a Mac) and again played with blending modes until Liberty's face come through more powerfully. Just by coincidence it was the same blending mode--linear light. 

I don't know if this is a finished product or not (I kept one version with the layers open so I could go back and play more--a good idea if you're not positive you're done) but it has a kind of poster/graphic quality that I like. The skyline background is pretty abstract and you might not really know what it is, but I still think it has a bit of an urban/modern look. The fun thing about doing this is that you learn more about the tools you're working with and you create some fun colorful images along the way. And there's no right or wrong, so it's all just fun. We had a great weekend photographing the Statue of Liberty and exploring and I'm having a lot of fun going back and pulling more out of the images. In fact, I shot nearly 1,000 photos in three days, I think, so I'll be playing with them for a long time!

Please Follow this Blog!

Just a quick interim tip to remind you that you can follow this blog via your Google account. All this really means is that you will see updates from the blog on your Google Dashboard page (to remind you that I'm still out here typing away!). This blog is, and will always be, totally free. I make some small amount (tiny) from clicks on the ads on the blog and if you order something from Amazon and start by clicking one of my Amazon ads (the ads are just a gateway to Amazon, you can order anything in any department--you *don't* even have to be interested in the product that's in the ad), but other than that, I write the tips for the fun of it and because it helps keep me focused. I'm my own therapist (hey, who knows me better?). Anyway, I have a lot of new readers lately and so about once every few months I just ask that readers put me on their follow list. It helps me to know how many people are reading this or if I'm just writing to myself. And don't forget you can always email me or leave a comment requesting certain topics--shooting or Photoshop/editing.

About the photo: I shot this photo of the Statue of Liberty this past summer with a Nikon D90 DSLR and an 24-120mm Nikkor lens (I've grown a bit unhappy with that lens, by the way, it's not as sharp as I'd like and very heavy). As brilliant and blue as the sky is in this shot, the day ended up with an wild thunder storm--it was great. Exposure, in aperture-priority mode, was 1/1000 at f/8.

Weather & Photography: Abandon Your Preconceptions

Preconceptions in photography can be a dangerous thing creatively. They can make you so focused on looking for the images that you see in your mind's eye that you ignore even better possibilities that are right in front of you and, even worse, they can cause you to get discouraged if you're not finding the types of images you wanted to find.

Preconceptions are especially problematic when it comes to weather because you simply can't predict (or change) it. As I mentioned in my last posting, last week I went to the Statue of Liberty to shoot pictures for several book projects. Lady Liberty is something I've always wanted to spend a day or two photographing and I had to make some pretty elaborate (and expensive) arrangements to make the weekend happen--car rental (simpler than driving my 20-year-old van in NY traffic!), hotel, ferry tickets, etc. The one thing I hoped for was a nice crisp blue sky on the days I'd be shooting. I'd done a lot of picture research leading up to the weekend and I knew exactly what I wanted: Liberty's green copper face against a rich blue August sky.

Naturally as the weekend drew closer, the weather reports were anything but encouraging (this is a perpetual pattern in my life) and, in fact, the weather people were calling for possibly the worst of all weather options: rain, thunderstorms and heavy cloud cover. Yuk. No blue skies were forecast. Surprisingly though, when we got out to Liberty Island the weather morons were wrong once again--the sky was perfectly blue with occasional puffy clouds giving relief from the intense sunshine. Yes, sunshine--and lots of it. In fact, the sun was so intense that after an hour of shooting around noon, I had to seek out the shade of a beautiful wooded grove.

As I was shooting though, I realized that the statue didn't look as great against a blue sky as I had thought it would--and the sunshine was creating really contrasty and unattractive shadows on her face. Then clouds started gathering and I lost the blue sky. As the cloud cover thickened I found myself losing the desire to keep shooting--and I nearly stopped. But determined to find good shots, I kept looking for new angles--low, sideways, from behind, etc. I was even able to shoot some silhouettes against the sun at one point. Sun and clouds began to mix and the sun started to hide more often than not (one point to the weather people). Then it became very apparent that a big storm was headed our way and the skies darkened and thunder and lightning began to scatter the crowds.

Suddenly though, with the sky getting darker and darker, Liberty's face began to take on a strange luminescent glow. Her face seemed to posses a far more soulful expression with the sunlight gone. It became clear to me that the beautiful sunny day shot I had envisioned wasn't the only great shot--and perhaps not even the best one. With rain and hail starting to pelt me, I kept shooting until the sky behind her crown was nearly black. These were far more dramatic shots that I had been looking for. Finally the skies opened up and I had to pull on a poncho and stop shooting, but I'd managed to get several shots that I liked a great deal.

Don't let bad weather stop your shooting and don't let your preconceptions of what "good" weather and good lighting is close your imagination to even better opportunities. You can't control the weather, but you can alter your creative vision to match the weather--and you certainly should.