Havana in Japan

Yesterday was Boxing Day. Havana and I were on the bullet train bound for Osaka. We blasted past Mount Fuji.

It seems like just yesterday when she was born. One of my favorite and most important of the more than 10 million images I've made in my career happened right after she appeared.

Now her 14th birthday is right around the corner.

We're traveling through one of the places I love most, and a land she's asked to see for more than a third of her relatively short life. It's a pleasure share with her.

She's learning again how important friends are. Our first day here two friends, Karou and Rie, took time led us through Harajuku and Roppingi Hills, giving generously of their time and consideration.

Two days ago, Christmas day, Gen broke away from work and took us through the city on an itinerary he created for Havana. He's my favorite creative director and one I've worked with on four continents over the years. Talking with him always makes me quite reflective and introspective. The twinkle in his eyes always brings a slow smile.

Watching Havana navigate a foreign land is fun. When she took her first step, I was in the room.

Her first day of school I delivered her, wide eyed and excited. John Hiatt's "Circle Back" playing premonitionly on the sound system in the car. I remember thinking that the things he referenced would all happen, I just thought it would happen slower.

Which circles back to this trip.  I'm on the road, a lot by anyone's standards. When I'm home, we go for long walks and talk about our worlds.

One of the people I turn to regularly for advice counsels me that my world is vast — as is her’s — and that changes perspective, and that I especially need to pay attention to that while I am working and teaching.

I've always been on the road — I was 14 the first time I visited Europe and the Middle East. Pretty exotic for a kid from rural Nebraska.  I was hooked immediately.

Havana got a much earlier start, and I think she'll be on the move for a long time too. She was on planes regularly hopscotching the country before she started preschool. She's spent time in Paris, Zurich, Istanbul and Tokyo. She speaks regularly with friends living in Europe.  I envy her future.

I learn a lot about communicating from her.

It helps me refine my message — something that's fairly critical to a storyteller.

Directly and indirectly we talk about what's important information and what's not.  How delivery is key.  Fast is crucial. Directness is extremely important. Subtly not so much.

She's an analog girl connected digitally to the world. She reads 1,000's of pages a week of properly printed materials, makes her own greeting and holiday cards with ink and paper, and yet she lives attached to her electronic umbilical cord — her iPhone is never far from her grasp.

It's that combination of near and far, new and old, fast and slow that I'm reaching for.

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. 

Let Freedom Sing

Over the Fourth of July, I was invited to document the Estonia Song and Dance Celebration -- an event that takes place every five years to commemorate the important place music holds in the heart of Estonia. Throughout the nation’s history, and under various occupations, Estonians have kept their culture and language alive with song.

While I was there, we shot videos and stills for a short documentary and longform story titled "Let Freedom Sing."

The Only Undefeated Triple Crown Winner

California Chrome roared down the front stretch at Pimlico on Saturday shining, much needed light on horse racing. I was head on to the action, tracking the Pimlico Field with a 600 f4 lens mounted on a Nikon D4S camera.

Three races make up horse racing's fabled Triple Crown -- the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes. I've covered the Derby 31 times, the Preakness 28, and the Belmont at least 20 times. That's a whole bunch of big-time horse races. This will be the 12th time I've gone to NYC hoping to see a horse and jockey close the deal and win the Triple Crown.

I'm obviously not sure how it will turn out this time.

But I know how I got started in all of it.

Bill Nack wrote Secretariat, Making of a Champion. I read it and was hooked on the sport.  With apologies to my many writer friends, Nack's Secretariat remains my favorite sports book.

Dan Dry invited me to the Kentucky Derby.  I couldn’t, and still can’t believe how wonderful it is there.  All these years later, I still see Dan at the track, and we talk with no pause in our ongoing conversation that has stretched over a few decades now.  I am as fascinated by the Derby just as much now as I was the first time I walked into Churchill Downs. The only difference is I am little better acquainted with that glorious track, and that leads to better pictures.

Heinz Kluetmeier started assigning me to cover the races for Sports Illustrated in 1986. He taught me how to do it the SI way, big and bold. He was and still is an extremely generous teacher and friend.

But first, there were the images of Tony Leonard.  I was casually flipping through Nikon World. Marveling at the images done by Art Kane. Crazy good stuff.  I remember going back through that article a few times, then finally I moved on.  The next image I saw, a big red horse running free, mane streaming, in a paddock, clobbered me. I couldn’t believe how powerful and poignant it was. I still have that magazine. Published in DECEMBER, 1980. VOLUME 13. NUMBER 3. It’s a prized possession.

It was more than 15 years later that I met Tony on the track in Louisville. I gathered my courage and walked up the man who was a legendary equine photographer, who defined the genre working for the greatest farms and owners doing portraits of the best mares and stallions alive. These were not simple photographs, these were elegant posed portraits chronicling the golden age of thoroughbred racing.  I stuck out my hand and said, “Mister Leonard, I just want to tell you how much I admire your work, and your style.”  He smiled that wry smile of his and said, “Kid, I know your pictures, they’re terrific.“  Few sentences have meant as much during my career. We were close for the rest of his life.

When Sports Illustrated’s Jimmy Colton asked me to photograph Seattle Slew, the only horse to win the Triple Crown while undefeated, I called Tony and asked for advice.

He did better than that, he came along as my assistant.  Showing up to do a horse portrait with Tony as your assistant would be like having the Rolling Stones as your backing band when you were in music school.

The shoot went well. What classics they were, both of them.

Out of Darkness - Jeff Lukas

The Second Life of Jeff Lukas Tim Layden is the writer I work with the most often, and he is a close friend. To say he is intense, driven and immensely talented is an understatement.

Laura and I were fortunate to be asked to shoot video and still portraits, to accompany Tim's incredibly moving, powerfully written essay about Jeff Lukas. I've been reading SI for many years and this long form essay is one of the best.

As usual, Laura and I had to work fast. We had just a few days from start to finish to get to Kentucky to interview D. Wayne Lukas and then move on to tiny Atoka, Oklahoma to complete our part of the Lukas project with Jeff Lukas and David Barrage.

Unusual for us, we sent the footage raw to New York where Collin Orcutt and his team did all of the edits.

I learned a long time ago to let Tim tell the story with his words.

Please spend some time with this piece, you won't regret it: Out of Darkness.

Storytelling

A Life magazine writer, Richard Woodley, called me today to ask some questions, and we talked and talked. His books and movies are part of our national collective conscience.

But what fascinated me was listening to him talk about the magazine he wrote for during the decade of the 1960s. It was a different time in print journalism. Globe trotting photographers and writers brought us stories with panache, adventure, and style. Fueled by seemingly endless budgets, a loving and devoted readership and an enthusiasm for getting it perfect, every time. If it needed to be covered, they were there in force.

For those of you too young to remember, Life magazine was once the gold standard among journalistic publications.

I really should have gotten moving and cut the call short, what with needing to pack for a five day road trip to do five portrait shoots -- including one for a magazine cover and two unrelated new video projects. A trip that would require twelve cases of gear to get through the different setups.

We spoke for an hour and it was delightful.

He called to ask about an old friend of ours, the great Bill Epperidge who passed last week.

But we talked about all kinds of things, as one story about Bill spun off into another.

I learned a lot, shared some, and did I mention, just had a great time.

Storytelling, done just right, is a huge treat.

Borrowed Cameras

A few weeks ago, I was at Kent State participating as a panelist for the Media Ethics Workshop they do in combination with the Poynter Institute. Dave LaBelle is a professor at KSU and a longtime friend. We left his office in the journalism school and started up the stairs. I saw the light, borrowed his camera to make a handful of frames of him before giving his camera back.

Dave's wife, Erin, posted it to Facebook and Don Winslow saw it. An hour later it was on the cover of News Photographer Magazine.

I've been an NPPA member since college, and one of the major draws is that incredible magazine.

LaBelle has been a hero of mine since I was a student at the University of Kansas and heard him speak.

One of the first times I thought about the power of photojournalism  was reading The Kent State report by James Michener, where he wrote about the Pulitzer Prize winning image taken with a borrowed camera, by a 20-year-old journalism student named John Paul Filo just steps from the Kent State journalism school.

As I did with LaBelle, I met Filo when I was a student at KU. John was working for the AP in Kansas City. He was later one of my editors at SI. We've been friends for many years.

This was a nice tidy circle. I made a picture of a friend, in a place that started my photographic recognition -- although I didn't really understand that at the time -- and another friend saw it and put it on the cover of a publication that has been integral to my understanding of my profession.

The Music and the Road

Strange circles.

My life is a series of free association experiences.

Working for Sports illustrated has put me in position to live on the edge of  some amazing scenes.  I get to drift, seemingly aimlessly but actually with great purpose, from one to the next.

Recording not simply sport, but hopefully the vital cross section of game and culture.

At the University of Georgia, one of the great traditions is the singing of the. Battle Hymn of the Republic.  Listening to the huge red clad crowd singing, following the lead of the lone trumpeter I was taken to another game in a far away land.

20 years virtually earlier to the day I was covering the Australian Rules Grand Final at the Melbourne Cricket Club listening to a huge crowd of Aussies singing along with Noel Watson as he saluted the assemblage with Waltzing Matilda.

Both songs, written for different purposes, sung with gusto, in giant stadiums decades and thousands of miles apart.... Connecting the dots in my memory, with many stops in never forgotten places, all the same, all connected, all incredibly unique.

The music, and the road, roll on.