Action Portrait of a Kayaker
Action Portraits
Recently while sitting around thinking I realized living here in Bend, Oregon I’ve not worked at the newspaper for longer than I worked for them. What makes me sad is I’m a photographer who should be doing pictures every day and am not doing pictures every day. Need to remedy that problem. Wedding photography doesn’t happen every day. It couldn’t because a person would fall over with exhaustion after about five days of doing that style. Then after a long sleep, a person would have to spend about 40 hours looking at pictures on a computer. It would be too much. I could indeed to studio or location portraits every day. They aren’t as tiring. The computer time wouldn’t be as bad either because there aren’t as many pictures to work with after a photo session. For whatever reason I’m not doing those pictures every day either. It would be nice, but I don’t know the secret to gathering customers.
What I would love to do every day are action portraits of athletes doing what they do for fun, training, and exercise. To be out breathing the fresh air and listening to the sounds of whatever it is they’re doing, be it kayaking, rock climbing, mountain biking, whatever. I also watch. Always. To see what patterns emerge. Patterns in sports always show themselves. Sometimes they work well for pictures. That’s what I’m really watching for while doing action portraits.
Jayson Bowerman was always a favorite person to do kayaking pictures of for the newspaper. He’s the grandson of Nike founder Bill Bowerman. He was also one of the top local kayakers and was always up for getting out for pictures. I would call, set a time, and Jayson would be there. Then I would get to see how much fun kayaking is and do fun pictures at the same time. My favorite lens was the ever trusty Nikon 400mm f2.8 (named John Holmes) set to autofocus on a Nikon camera preset to high speed shutter release. I imagine it was fun for everyone involved.
My big dream was to learn how to kayak myself, but I didn’t really fit into these tiny boats and I never even came close to having enough money to invest in the gear, much less the lessons to learn how. So I had to content myself with watching other people kayak and try for the best pictures possible.
Jayson started working for Breedlove guitars and stayed working for them for a few years. Then he started making his own accoustic guitars. Don’t know if he’s still kayaking. I’m still writing about it and sharing the pictures. Here’s to both of our successes.