Full Circle in a Pair of Small Nebraska Towns

Amy Sandeen and I were standing on a glacier in Iceland and I looked her and said do you know where we need to go?  Sutton, Nebraska.  

She smiled and said, of course we do.

A few weeks later we were walking into Browns' Thrift Store.  More than fifty years ago my grandfather Adolph Roemmich would take my hand and walk me three LONG blocks from his house to Sutton’s main street.  We’d go to Browns.  For chocolate clusters and pickles.  And to look at the magazine rack just inside the front door right next to the cash registers.

He’d show me Life, Time, Sports Illustrated.  It was my window on the world outside rural Nebraska. Big bold beautiful images crafted by the best photographers working. What a life they must have had.  Real life Walter Mitty’s.  I saw things I’d never seen before presented by people who knew how to observe.  .

I would spend hours looking at those publications—and the man running the store took pity on me, at my age, I couldn’t afford any of those glorious glossies, so he let me treat his store like a library.

So on a lovely late September afternoon this year I went in to pick up a coke.   And found my past and my future.  

The chocolate and pickles are still there. So is the magazine rack. Looks about the same, a little the worse from decades of use. There was a tow headed kid standing there looking at an SI. And one of my images was on the cover.  

I grew up in the Panhandle.  The big paper there is the Scottsbluff Star-Herald. As a kid I was a newspaper boy carrying the StarHerald to 100 homes, 6 days a week, for 4 years.   

The Star-Herald would drop a bundle of the papers on my front lawn around 4:30 a.m., and by 5 a.m. I had folded them, put rubber bands around them and packed them into a cloth bag that fit on the handle bars of my bike. My route was 3 1/2 miles long. During the spring, summer and fall it was awesome. Up early, out on my bicycle, throwing things. Best exercise, best time of day, and it paid well. 

It was a wonderful education.

Imagine my delight when the StarHerald devoted a big chunk of their Sunday front page real estate to a story about my nebraskaproject.com.

Yet another nice hug from Nebraska.

Home. 

It's Here: The Nebraska Project

After six months of shooting and traveling around the prairie lands, I'm excited to announce the launch of Straw Hat Visuals' new artistic and storytelling endeavor -- The Nebraska Project.

To me, Nebraska is not only my birth place, but a rich terrain for the imagination and the journalist. It is a place of cowboys and poets, buffalo and meadowlarks.

Often overlooked as the middle of nowhere, Nebraska is actually the center of everything, providing sustenance and grit for the country.

Some stories are small, like the 60 year romance between Rodney and Delores, and some are as big as the Nebraska sky itself.

There are many more stories to tell and ways we can together preserve and record the beauty of America’s majestic frontier.

I hope you enjoy our project and learning more about Nebraska - the land and people who make it great.

Visit the Nebraska Project. 

Short Film Premier - Prairie Lights Film Festival

I am pleased to announce that my short film, A Teacher Remembered, will premier at the Prairie Lights Film Festival this weekend.

My documentary, produced with the help of many friends,  follows the impact of a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse on a rural Nebraskan community.

It will premier during the Sunday morning block of films on September 14.

Weekend passes for the festival are available online now.

The Prairie Lights Film Festival is a 3-day showcase of Nebraska cinema and Nebraska filmmakers held at the historic Grand Theatre in Grand Island, Nebraska.  The festival takes place September 12 -14.

Learn more at prairielightsfilmfest.com.

Iceland Photo Tour

Join us for a 10 day tour of Iceland - the land of seals and poets.

This Photo Tour and Workshop will take place August 4-14, 2014.

We will spend as much time outside enjoying the environment as possible.  August in Iceland will give us 23 hours of golden light every day.

We will roam all over the island and spend time making photos and time-lapses of a variety of places - volcanic glaciers, black rock beaches, small fishing towns and more.

The ten-day tour is $6,000 which includes meals, lodging and intern Iceland transportation.  The tour price does not include airfare to and from Reykajavik or alcoholic beverages.

This is going to be serious fun and there will be daily chances to make incredible images.

It's a small group, and we've just secured a few more hard to find hotel rooms so we can take four more guests.

To secure your spot, please contact bill@strawhatvisuals.com.

The deadline to join the tour is June 24, 2014.

Editing the Derby

There was a certain magic to opening a box of exposed transparencies... an almost childlike wonder of the exploration of your own work. In years long past, Sports Illustrated would return a few hundred rolls of my out takes from the Kentucky Derby, and I would diligently sort through them, cataloging and filing the best of them. Making notes on what worked and what didn't.  How much film I shot, what they kept in the magazine's files, and what I needed to do the next time.  That process usually happened a month or two after the event. Now, two days after returning home from Lousiville, I am finishing going through the more than 15,000 files I burned through with the 25 Nikon bodies I used last weekend at Churchill Downs. The images are all sorted, captioned, and stored on raids using Aperture.

I can find any image through metadata tagging in less than a second.

In days gone by, it would have taken me a few seconds just to get out of my chair to head to the file cabinets to start a search.

I suppose it's in my German DNA, but I love the efficiency.

I enjoyed the magic, but I don't miss film.

A few images of Derby fashion for this week's digital version of Sports Illustrated.