Raining in the Laughs

Saturday morning I headed out in a rental Toyota 4-runner to shoot Virginia at Princeton lacrosse for Sports Illustrated.

I knew I was in trouble when I checked weather.com the night before. The spot where they show a little Denny’s picture menu icon to tell you what to expect was a big cloud with huge drops coming off of it. I think it actually wet my monitor.

On the drive down it was only raining a little bit. By the time I got to Princeton Stadium, the floodgates had opened.

I was smart enough to rent an SUV so that I could unload my gear while standing underneath the open hatch. However it doesn’t help too much when the rain is coming in at a 90 degree angle.

I bagged my gear up, hermetically sealed myself in plastic, and grabbed an umbrella.

I think I’ve shot lacrosse 3 or 4 times at Princeton and it’s ALWAYS raining. What’s that about? I wonder what that place looks like in sunlight?

Anyway, I parked myself in a corner and sat down on the track around the field. I’ve never done this, but I actually opened my umbrella and kept it over my head while I was shooting. Since I was staying in one spot, it worked pretty well! I didn’t even need my rain hood.

My gear was fine until the temperature went up about 10 degrees in the span of 5 seconds. No joke. This blast of warm air came in and while it felt good to not be freezing anymore, my lenses didn’t react well to the shift. A layer of condensation deposited itself on my front element and wouldn’t go away.

I thought I had imagined the temperature change, but I looked around and all of the photographers and TV guys were desperately wiping their lenses.

For most of the fourth period, I was able to shoot in 20 second bursts until the lens had to be cleaned again.

I’ve always said that if the weather is going to be bad, then please be horrendous because it makes better pictures. It almost doesn’t matter what’s happening in the photo if there’s a blizzard or monsoon out there. It’ll always look cool.

After surviving that storm, I got home with just enough time to take a quick shower and go downtown to shoot the taping of a standup comedy show for Comedy Central called Live at Gotham.

I did this job as a favor for my friend, photographer Brian Friedman (the money doesn’t hurt either!). They were taping for four nights and he had a conflict on Saturday and asked me to fill in.

The job was fun. I did 30-second portraits of each of the two hosts for the night, Rich Vos and Kevin Hart. The funny thing is that I just watched the movie 40-year-old Virgin on my iPhone a couple of days ago and Kevin is one of the stars. Turns out he’s as nice as he is funny.

One of the comedians was T.J. Miller. He’s the guy who holds the camera in the movie Cloverfield. He did a really funny bit about people who use inappropriate Asian expressions in conversations.

I had to put a “blimp” on my camera to shoot during the show. The blimp goes around the camera and lens to (mostly) silence the sound of the shutter so the audience watching at home doesn’t hear me snapping away.

The industry standard is a hard version (the Jacobson blimp) and it’s what is always used on movie sets. I don’t need one very often so I have a less-expensive soft blimp (Sam Cranston’s Camera Muzzle) that works pretty well.

My only issue with it is that after you have your hand inside of this contraption for a few minutes, it’s gets awfully sweaty in there. Yuck.

But I can’t complain. It’s always cool when you can get paid to watch comedy all night.

| Leave a comment