Far Out Son of Lung...

Found: Photographer

I met with a photographer Wednesday night at The Flying Saucer and it looks like things will be shaping up nicely. Photo1 has an awesome portfolio located here that you ought to take a look at for some great examples. I really like his style because he is artistic in mind. His shots create a sense of being, a feeling of being right there that I hope will compliment my own writing style in which I hope to put a reader in the middle of the action. Instead of, "Hey, its a motorcycle" or "Hey, its a person", I sense more depth in the photo and a feeling of "Holy crap I'm about to get run over!" or "Damn, she's smiling at me...". In any case, we're both excited about covering motorcycle racing be it on-road or off. He is also more business minded than myself, evidenced by the ideas:

His first idea was to create a series of How-To pieces regarding dirt bike riding, which we could sell to/through KTM and Red Bull into a magazine. The pieces would have photography and copy (more like ad copy) describing how a rider would properly execute a certain type of turn. We could have photography of factory backed riders with commentary from the rider (spun by me) to describe the process and steps needed to do such a thing succesfully.

I think this is an awesome idea and would be a challenge for me to be able to describe in accurate detail. Coming from a non-dirt bike riding background it will be all about hand signals getting the information from the rider to me, and me to print. The other positive is that we can sell this through KTM and Red Bull for branding! The opportunity for more work along these lines is also probably high.

I brought two ideas of my own to the table:
1) If I can get ahold of Clint, we can take a trip to New Orleans and the out lying areas to photograph and cover the current state of Louisianna. Its fallen out of the press but I think there is still a huge story down there in terms of what is happening between FEMA, the contractors and the people doing the work. There's a lot of corruption, a lot of fighting and not much harmony in the clean up efforts.

2) Get inside a racing team. Ty Howard and Ryan Andrews are riding for Rockwall Honda in the AMA Formula Extreme series and the opportunity to get into their heads, get into the team and cover a privateer effort in the series is really exciting to me. Normal race coverage gets dull, technical info can be monotonous or dry without the proper explaination, but who the riders are and what motivates a small team could be really interesting.

I've gotten in touch with Ty and need to call him today, while Photo1 gets in touch with some people regarding the business side and how we'll go about selling these ideas to magazines. I'm a little worried about being able to support his photos with my writing, but I'm confident I can do it. I just need to stay motivated and on task. Small victories will mean a lot in the coming months on these projects.

posted by GreSam @ 12:51