if you can't be witty, then at least be bombastic

Behind the Scenes on the Philadelphia Weekly cover shoot with Neil Gaiman.

cassidy@netaxs.com — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:58:54 GMT

Behind the Scenes on the Philadelphia Weekly cover shoot with Neil Gaiman.

While it's the cover shoot, it ended up not being the actual cover photo. The actual cover was a photo I took last year of Neil taking a Behind The Scenes tour of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology given by Dr. Brad Hafford (you can read about that here. The photo that I'd actually taken for the cover ended up on a full page on the inside, which is fine, because it's a better photo and the cover had an ad on it that needed to be fit in, so the one I liked better got an uncluttered layout. There were about six different cover variants, of which I got to see the final two.

Which do you prefer? You may clickenzee to embiggen.

Anyway, the shoot was really basic and really fast. It was late at night, Neil had just gotten into town and picked trillian_stars, Amanda and I up at a house party in North Philly and we were headed back to center city. I'd wanted to do something with the Philly Skyline in the background because the story's about a speech that he gave in Philly a year ago. So we went out onto an island in the middle of broad street. I love the view down that street and I've used it a couple of times before.

Here's one that I took of Trillian on our way home from somewhere a couple of months ago -- a fog bank had rolled down and the place was lit up wonderfully.

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

One of the things that happens when you take a lot of photos of things is that you start to tuck little shortcuts away in your brain like "ah, now I know how to do this, I can pull it out of my hat later." I figured this lighting setup with this background might be useful later and it was.

So, with the idea of getting Neil and Amanda out of the street and into bed as quickly as possible, I figured the easiest and coolest thing to do would be to photograph Neil the same way, right in front of the pretty-pretty city hall. This is, I think, one of the most important aspects of a lot of my photography -- being able to move really fast. Many's the busy politician or musician who sighs mournfully when their publicist tells them they need to do a shoot for some magazine and then it's your turn to save the day by coming in and saying "I can be in and out in 9 minutes." It puts the pressure on, but it also makes you a lot nicer to work with and then people start asking for you.

Photo by Amanda

The lighting setup is really simple, there's one flash behind a shoot-thru umbrella. I'm using a Luma Pro LP605s light stand because it folds down really small and some generic double fold umbrella for the same reason. The camera is a Panasonic GX1 and a 20mm f1.7 lens -- I'd brought a Leica 45mm f2.8 as well but that had somehow broken earlier in the day and wouldn't focus -- which brings up a point -- when you're going on an important shoot, bring two of everything. I had a backup camera body and two lenses which the small footprint of the micro 4:3 format allows you to do relatively easily. The flash was triggered with a pair of Pocket Wizards.

So, shooting with the 20mm lens and an off-camera flash you have two sources of light, the flash, and the ambient street light. The ambient street light is made up of traffic lights, street lights, and the bright klieg lights aimed at city hall. The first thing to do is expose for city hall, and you do that by setting your f-stop and aperture until it shows up properly. In this case it was f 2.2 at 1/130th of a second at an ISO of 200. THEN, once that's figured out, you set the exposure for your subject with the flash power. Two light sources, two different controls -- camera first, then flash.

Once the light is properly balanced, you just start shooting. Badda badda bing.

Later in photoshop I burned in the edges to darken the bottom of his jacket and most of the street behind him -- this draws your eyes to the subject -- there are two things you want the photo to say "Neil" and "Philadelphia", and here you have it. You can read the article about "Make Good Art" here.

Hope this was useful.

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science

cassidy@netaxs.com — Sun, 19 May 2013 22:18:53 GMT

If I could clone myself. And then shrink my clone down until he was about 3 inches tall, I could find out if Roswell would eat me if I was little without actually having to die to find out.

I'm pretty sure she'd eat me.

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Last race related post for a while, (if you've held on this long, don't unfollow me now!)

cassidy@netaxs.com — Fri, 17 May 2013 10:50:45 GMT

This is not a fitness blog, I promise

I just need to do a race recap.

The Broad Street run is a ten mile race through Philadelphia in a straight line from Einstein hospital to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. About 40,000 people do it every year. It was The Thing I'd set my sights on late last year when I realized that I was getting less fat and more capable. Ten miles seems like a ridiculous distance and I wanted to do it mostly because it had seemed absolutely impossible at one time and then possible, however unlikely....

When I arrived at the starting line though I began to worry. City hall marks the half way point, and despite it being gigantic and looming, it was so far away that I couldn't see it. I'd never run in a straight line like that before. I'd run in loops and I'd always been able to see the next place in the loop, realizing not only that I'd have to keep running until I got to that point that I couldn't see, but also that when I got there, I'D ONLY BE HALF WAY was freaking me out. My training had been Not Good, since I'd fractured my tibia I had only very slowly come back to running, the longest I'd run in the last two months was five miles the week before, five difficult miles. I wasn't sure if I'd have the stamina and I wasn't sure that I wouldn't re-injure myself -- in fact, I wasn't sure if my fracture had healed (spoiler: I make it and nothing breaks).

clickenzee to try and find city hall

I was right at the very back of the pack, in fact, out of 40,000 people, only about 100 were behind me. The big lesson for next year was "bring a disposable sweat shirt and sweat pants" -- it was freaking COLD and they tell you to be there long, long before you actually need to be there. They suggested I get there by 6:45 or so which was a good two hours before the race starts. Next time, I'll pull into town around 8:00.

Finally the starters gun goes off, but it's so far away that we can't hear it from the back of the line. It takes 20 minutes, maybe more for the back of the line to actually get to the starting line but finally I was off. All along the way through North Philly people line the streets, waving and cheering, it was great. After about half a mile I started passing the first people who'd stopped running and started walking but I was cautious about going too fast. I wasn't sure if my leg would hold up -- I hadn't done a long run since the fracture -- which made my training a nightmare, and I didn't want to turn into one of the people who had to stop, so I loped along with 10 minute 45 second miles.

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

There are people all along the route, and every sleepy-eyed garage band in Philly is set up on a corner playing Counting Crows covers and eventually you pass the Temple University marching band (not marching) with baton twirlers performing amazing feats of dexterity, playing "Eye of the Tiger" (possibly over and over and over again) and the whole thing is like some grand party. It's somewhere after mile three that people start to space themselves out and you're not really passing people or getting passed too much, you're just trotting along. It was around here we passed two injured people, one had fallen in a pothole and was being carried off by friends -- the other had twisted his ankle and was limping defeatedly towards the El stop. I asked if he needed a train token, he waved me off and said his father was coming to pick him up and went back to looking sad and injured. To me, being so worried about the same thing myself, it seemed like a catastrophe.

Finally, at mile 5, city hall looms up and you realize that you're half way. I got much more enthusiastic at this point. I'd been promising myself to hold back judgement until I got to seven miles, but at five I felt pretty good which was encouraging.

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

At mile six my running partner said "I just hi-fived (former Philly Mayor and Pennsylvania governor) Ed Rendell!" "Where?!" I said. "About a block back? Do you want to turn around?" -- of course I wanted to turn around. So I ran back a block, and spotted Big Ed on the side of the street hi-fiving people & wearing a Boston uniform.

Palms were slapped and I continued to mile seven with a celebrity charge. Also, trillian_stars was waiting to cheer me on somewhere between mile six and mile seven which was a great thing. It's kind of hard to express just how happy it makes you when perfect strangers shout "you're crushing it! go go go!"

Clickenzee to see Big Ed even bigger

Big psychological charge by being on the other side of City Hall,
plus having Trillian Stars cheering.

At mile 7 I saw someone holding up a sign that said "only three more miles to go!" I was tired but that sign made me realize that now it was ony a 5k, and I can run 5k while clipping my nails now, it's no longer a big deal. That amped me up, and my running companion who decided that now was the time to put the burn on and he shot off in front of me. I would have been perfectly content to keep going at the same speed, but he saw this as our opportunity to pass a lot of people so I gasped and tried to keep up.

Clickenzee to see me surge through mile 8 or something.
Also note my weird messed up walrus flipper of a right foot.

The last three miles weren't all that fun. My hands got a little numb, I felt really tired, but all around me were people walking, they'd just stopped and I wasn't going to stop, even though it felt pretty bad the last mile. Eventually I saw the finish line about half a mile ahead. We surged through the chute with what I felt was the last bit of anything I had and there was someone standing with an armful of medals handing them out to people. I took mine and felt incredibly, indescribably happy. Everything started to go white, like the world was powerfully over-exposed. Someone handed me a plastic bag filled with food and a bottle of water. I walked out onto the grass and things kept getting brighter and finally went purple and my legs were wobbly. I realized I was going to fall over if I didn't sit down, so I sat in the grass and started eating the junk food out of the bag. It tasted pretty good. There was a 270 calorie "breakfast bar" from local vendors TastyKake which was ... freaking incredible. And I ate a banana and a bag of potato chips. There was no cell signal so I couldn't text Trillian to let her know I was finished.

Later I discovered that I was suffering from something called "Orthostatic Hypotension" paired with or causing another thing called "Exercise Associated Collapse" (conveniently called EAC) which happens a lot at endurance events and is mostly temporary. It's caused by blood pooling in the lower extremities -- when running the action of running helps circulate the blood, when you stop, it doesn't return as quickly and not enough gets to your brain. There are several recommended solutions to this, one is to keep walking, briskly, at the end of your run, the other is to lay down and elevate your legs. This is sort of what I did, but I substituted "eating candy" for elevating my legs.

As the crowd started to thin out I found Trillian and we watched the very end of the race come through the finish line -- the very end of the race is made up of all of the routes bicycle cops and golf carts they use (presumably) to pick up injured runners. When the bike cops and golf carts pass you, you're not a racer anymore, you become a pedestrian. I wonder if they shut down the finish line and stop handing out medals as the last golf cart crosses the line or if some kind soul stays there to see if anybody crawls up.

Anyway. When I got home I printed out a photo of myself at the finish line and mailed it to my sports medicine doctor.

I started the race with about 100 people behind me, and I came in 26,262th. At 1:50:19, my time was about double that of most of the people in my running club, but I realized that somewhere in there, I still managed to pass about twelve thousand people. Go little walrus flipper. Go me. My only goal was to finish, and I finished.

So there you have it. Last October I was fat and out of shape and today I ran ten miles. In the interrum I survived a fractured leg and various aches and weirdos at the gym and I feel pretty good about myself. Plus I have a medal. My final thought is this: Pin your goal in a place that seems possible, though very difficult, and work towards it relentlessly. The view from the top of the mountain is worth it.

I will now shut up about exercise for a while. Have a swell day.

Have I shown you my medal? Clickenzee to see it LARGER!

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Harps harps harps

cassidy@netaxs.com — Sat, 11 May 2013 13:43:43 GMT

At and Undisclosed Location with Elizabeth Hainen, principal harpist for the Philadelphia Orchestra, Kimberly Rowe harpist & editor (for twenty years now) of Harp Column magazine & trillian_stars.

We are performing teh awesomez. You actually kinda wish you were here.

More to come.

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

Kimberly, Elizabeth & Trillian. Clickenzee to Embiggen!

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stuff and stuff and stuff

cassidy@netaxs.com — Sat, 04 May 2013 22:26:05 GMT

So I got to see trillian_stars be Brutus in Julius Caesar last week at Boy Latin and it was spectacular. It's one of those Shakespeare plays that nobody ever seems to do (I don't really need to see Midsummernight's Dream again) but it's just packed with awesome. I now know where "the fault in our stars" comes from and "Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!" -- which is a great line. Aaaaand, I always thought that "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him," meant that Antony was, you know, angry and Caesar and was going to kill him -- but now I know that's not what happens. It's a great play filled with noble & ignoble people and beautiful language and Cassius -- hey, I was persuaded.

Brutus is actually a really good guy (I didn't know). Brutus doesn't just kill Caesar, Brutus kills just about everybody. He's a fierce warrior, and, really truthful and trustworthy. When he explains why he stabbed his good friend to death, it all makes even more sense and you end up feeling really sympathetic -- or at least it did when Trillian did it. She makes a really wonderful Brutus. I have a super awesome wife.

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

Race Stuff
I'm live-updating my progress in tomorrow's race on Facebook. If you want to follow or whatnot, you can friend me there. I'll probably do a re-cap later in the week and then hopefully I'll shut up about sports/fitness for a while. It's been a long time since October 1 when I joined the gym and got on the rowing machine for the first time and was so beat up by it that I couldn't lift my leg high enough to climb into the tub to soak my wounded body.

If you're going to be along the course of the Broad Street Run tomorrow, let me know where you'll be sitting and I'll try and be on your side of the street for the waving and whatnots. The exciting thing is my leg may just snap in half and you'll get to see the agony on my face as I limp by.

Today was my mother's birthday and what do you think she wanted for her birthday? We all went on a picnic & then watched The Creature from the Black Lagoon -- which is about as awesome a birthday as I'd ever want for myself.

Anyhoo. I'm going to bed in half an hour. See you tomorrow.

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the big day approaches...

cassidy@netaxs.com — Fri, 03 May 2013 22:32:11 GMT

First -- I want to thank Mary & Picasso (who may be a ... cat? dog? rat? fish?) for sending me this awesome homemade button to wear on Sunday's race. It says "HAVE I TOLD YOU ABOUT MY SPORTS RELATED INJURY?" and has a photo of my tibia fracture. I shall wear it with honor and I'm sure it will start many a wonderful conversation.

Clickenzee to embiggen!

Sunday is The Big Race -- well, for me it's the big race, ten miles through the streets of Philadelphia, though I saw someone on the Internet call it "a good beginner distance". Yikes. Anyway, the race starts at 8:00 AM and if my leg doesn't break or my heart give out, I'm expecting to be finished by 10 or so ...

If you're in Philly and are watching the race
I'm having my position posted automatically to Facebook because I figure that people on Facebook have signed up for that sort of annoyance, so if you're on your porch stoop and want to watch me stagger past, you can check there to see where I am. And if we're not "friends" on FB already, please feel free to add me (you can unfriend me on Monday if I'm not interesting).

I think that's about it for the not-a-fitness-blog shiznit. I'll have an update about Trillian playing Brutus and how cool it was.

I should have a photo of trillian_stars as Brutus carrying a sword, right? At the Battle of Philippi. Right?

Anyway -- have a swell day. I'm going to bed.

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more on the pocketesses

cassidy@netaxs.com — Thu, 02 May 2013 11:08:03 GMT

There's been a huge response to my post about womens pockets, a lot of really interesting comments here, on twitter, tumblr and facebook. I wanted to mention two things -- one is that Bri Date (aka @WittyToddy on twitter) reports from the United States Navy that while the mens dress uniforms have pockets, the womens dress uniforms have fake pockets, they're just flaps. This was something I discovered is common on womens clothing -- the appearance of a pocket with no actual functioning pocket. Mind boggling. I'm not really able to wrap my head around the why of it.

There was one great comment I found on Facebook though that shed a lot of light and insight into this discussion. It was made by Kirsten Brodbeck-Kenney on her FB page where she'd reposted my blog post. Prior to this I'd gotten an angry-unfriending email from someone who thought I was expecting him to take blame for something (as he pointed out) he had no knowledge of nor any control over. Which is one of the reasons that I hesitate to throw around words like "patriarchy" because it does seem to suggest that if you're a guy, you're, somehow at fault.

Kristen explains this really well and I wanted to share it.

When something is referred to as "patriarchal," it doesn't necessarily mean that it is only heterosexual men perpetrating it. Women contribute unthinkingly or even wholeheartedly to practices that are inherently patriarchal -- to take an example somewhat more serious than pockets, women definitely contribute to restricting other women's access to birth control, or to shoring up practices that result in lower wages for female workers.

One of the interesting things about fashion is that it tends to enshrine certain things far past the point that they are useful or even that their purpose is understood. A gender-based example might be the tradition of having women's and men's shirts button in opposite directions -- at this point, no one is even positive that the explanations for why this is so are even accurate. Another example might be the vestigial "watch pocket" still found in pants and even jeans, when very few people carry pocket watches.

I think Kyle Cassidy's modest proposal is that designers should ask themselves, "Have I put pockets in this clothing? Why not? What are my expectations for the person wearing it? Are they consistent with reality?" What Kyle has noted is that most men's clothing is designed with pockets as a matter of course, whereas most women's clothing is not, and the reasons given for this (when reasons are given at all) are pretty weak. Did someone set out to deprive women of agency by taking away their pockets? Probably not, no. But there are a set of assumptions that have led to women's clothing being designed the way it is (including but not limited to: "women always carry purses" and "the man carries the wallet anyway") that deserve to be interrogated.

Thanks for all the discussion, and the sharing of links for places that make womens clothes with pockets. I like to think that if enough people bang their cups on the bars, the people who make buying decisions for large retailers and who make design decisions will wrinkle their brows and ponder ... wait, why are we doing this?

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theatre

cassidy@netaxs.com — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:05:06 GMT

Did I mention that my badass wife is playing Brutus in Julius Caesar?

Clickenzee to Embiggen

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What we talk about when we talk about pockets

cassidy@netaxs.com — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:33:16 GMT

This post is about pockets, feminism, design, autonomy and common sense. Please feel free to repost or link to it if you know people who'd benefit from the discussion.

A few weeks ago trillian_stars and I were out somewhere and she asked "Oooh, can I get a cup of coffee?" and I thought "why are you asking me? You don't need permission." But what I discovered was that her clothes had no pockets, so she had no money with her.

Mens clothes have pockets. My swimsuits have pockets. All of them do, and it's not unusual, because, what if you're swimming in the ocean and you find a fist full of pirate booty in the surf? You need somewhere to put it. Men are used to carrying stuff in their pockets, you put money there, you put car keys there. With money and car keys come power and independence. You can buy stuff, you can leave. The idea of some women's clothes not having pockets is baffling, but it's worse than that -- it's patriarchal because it makes the assumption that women will either carry a handbag, or they'll rely on men around them for money and keys and such things. (I noticed this also when Neil & Amanda were figuring out where her stuff had to go because she had no pockets.) Where do women carry tampons? Amanda wondered, In their boyfriend's pockets, Neil concluded.

I then noticed that none of trillian_stars' running clothes had pockets. Any pockets. Which is (as they always say on "Parking Wars") ridikulus. Who leaves the house with nothing? (It's not a rhetorical question, I actually can't think of anybody).

We fixed some of this by getting this runners wrist wallet from Poutfits on Etsy -- it holds money, ID, keys ... the sort of stuff you'd need. Plus you can wipe your nose on it. It solves the running-wear problem, but not the bigger problem.

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

The bigger problem is that people who design women's fashions are still designing pants and jackets that have no pockets. In fact, this jacket we got last December has ... no pockets. It's not a question of lines or shape, it's a question of autonomy.

Clickenzee to Embiggen

So I'm asking my friends who design women's clothes to consider putting pockets in them, they can be small, they can be out of the way, they can be inside the garment, but space enough to put ID, and cash and bus tokens. And maybe a phone. (And if you can design a surreptitious tampon stash, I'm sure Neil & Amanda & a lot of other people would appreciate it as well.)

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race fans (race fans (racefans))!

cassidy@netaxs.com — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:20:02 GMT

So tonight I ran the UCP5k at the art museum. On the one hand it wasn't really a big deal since 5k is a bit less than my normal running distance, but since breaking my freaking leg everything's gotten harder and, well, it was a race, and I had a number and I'd paid $35 to run this three miles instead of doing it for free in the cemetery. (None of this actually makes sense, but anyway....)

It was a perfect day and a very nice race -- it was at 6:45 in the evening rather than the crack of dawn. There were a few hundred people there, the city shut down the art museum circle and part of Kelly Drive and at the sound of the starters pistol, people started hurling themselves over the starting line.

"Remember," said trillian_stars "it's not a race. Don't break your leg."

"It's not a race," I said. But I took off over the starting line too. The most difficult thing in the first half mile are people who shoot over the line like arrows and then just stop running after a few hundred yards, creating pile ups behind them of runners leaping left and right or just stopping dead. Ye local running shoppe advises people to be wary of trying to jump past or around people who've stopped on the course as you're more likely to injure yourself. A bunch of people much faster than I left the street and ran up on the curb, I followed them until the pack had thinned out and I found a group of people running at my pace.

The Philly Rollergirls were there directing traffic (and by traffic I mean runners, there weren't any cars) and there were a few people on bicycles who'd stopped by the side of the road to clap and cheer which was a very nice thing. I started wanting to hug people.

Round about mile one I came up behind a kid in a blue track suit running with his shoes untied. I passed him, but about a minute later, he shot past me and sprinted off into the distance. A quarter of a mile later I passed him again, he was sitting on the curb watching people go by. A few minutes later he sprinted by me again.

This is the big democratic lesson that running teaches you -- no matter how much you've struggled, no matter how much you've worked out, no matter how much you've overcome, there's always going to be someone who beats you. And not just someone who beats you, there are going to be lots of people who beat you.

In which I manage to cross the finish line ahead of a guy pushing two kids in a stroller.
Go me.
You may clickenzee to Embiggen

About a mile into the race, I got passed by the first racer on his way back, he was way out ahead of the pack, maybe a hundred yards between him and the next person. He shot past me, I clapped. Then more came past in dribs and drabs, the rollergirls divided the street and directed us to various sides.

There was a cone in the road at the half way point I went around it and a few yards past the kid in the blue track suit shot past me again. About half a mile later I looked at my watch for the first time and was shocked that I was running a lot faster than usual and it dawned on me that I could finish in under 30 minutes if I applied myself. I know it's not a race, I thought, and I don't want to injure my leg before the big, giant, ten mile thing I'm running on the 5th because that's the goal ... but I've already been running so fast.... -- that was my logic and I stepped it up a little. I also decided that I wasn't going to get beaten by a little kid who didn't seem to even be trying.

You may clickenzee to embiggen

The last half mile I thought there was probably a 30% chance that I was going to barf but I didn't. I made it, and I made it in under 30 minutes which is a personal record. And, so far, it doesn't seem like I've broken my leg.

I lost track of the kid in the blue track suit towards the end but was happy to watch him cross the finish line a few minutes after I did. I shook his hand and told him he was really fast and it nearly killed me trying to keep up with him. He didn't seem impressed. Which is another of the valuable lessons you learn from running: The things that you have to fight for, some people just have. -- and from that you realize it's not what you can do, it's how much you appreciate what you can do.

I just texted my nephew who's a real bona fide runner. He had some words of wisdom about the whole thing.

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Portraits with no help

cassidy@netaxs.com — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:59:16 GMT

Recently I'd posted about high-pressure low-time-frame location photography, where you have a very short period of time to go in, get a shot and get out. tniassaint has a really good point in a comment which was basically along the lines of "I see that short portraits take a long time to set up and things are easier with assistants" -- which is very true. Though it's nice to have an assistant, I don't always, but I still have a backup plan in mind, often that I've figured out long ahead of time on my lonesome.

In 2009 I was planning on visiting Worldcon, the giant science fiction convention, being held that year in Canada, and I wanted to do a series of portraits of fans. And I didn't want any of the technical aspects of it to be a mystery when I got there, so I designed the lighting setup & background long before I left.

Here's a nifty blog post about how I testing lighting setups in my own studio with some recruited volunteers who needed photos of stuff so that when I got to the important places, I'd have all my numbers already figured out.

Eefa from Worldcon 2009
Lights figured out in advance.

The really great thing about this is that a setup like this then goes into the can of setups you've already figured out that you toss in the back of your head. And your backup plan can then be "I'll just do a Worldcon 2009 setup as Plan B" or "I'll do a Steve Severin setup as Plan B." Or "I'll do a Worldcon 2009 setup with a Steve Severin gridded spotlight on the face". The more you do it, the more you have in your tool locker and the easier everything gets.

of course, everything is easier with an assistant, even if it's just someone who has to laugh at your jokes.

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Steven Severin

cassidy@netaxs.com — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:40:35 GMT

A few months ago I gave a giant lecture at Franklin & Marshall College on photography and storytelling and what makes us human and all the little interconnected bits that go with that, and it was marvelous fun. And recently they called me back to see if I'd be interested in doing a short, fast, little project on Rock Star Photography -- since I seem to do a lot of that, it would just be a few students and the goal would be to photograph a musician in the manner in which I've become accustomed -- which is to say, in five minutes or less. I thought it was a great idea and happily agreed. Especially when I found out that the Rock Star would be Steven Severin, who many of you probably know as the bass player & one of the principle songwriters of Siouxsie and the Banshees, and whom others of you may know as one half of The Glove with ex-Banshee and current Cure frontman Robert Smith, but who also has an incredible career doing beautiful soundtracks for forgotten silent films.

We'll go backwards. Here's how it all ended up.

Steven Severin, Musician.

You may clickenzee to embiggen.

Rule #1 of Kyle Cassidy's Guide to Rock Star Photography is "Never go in without a plan." Your plan is Plan B -- it's the backup plan, it's your goto if nothing awesome pops up when you get there. Because you only have five minutes to do your thing, you need to be In Charge. Stephanie, Erika, Rebecca, and I worked out something kind of dramatic which was a close, tight light on the face from high above (on the left) but what do you do with that? It's just a floating head. We decided to throw some dramatic light onto the background as well (right) that adds a little more depth and dimension to the portrait. We practiced all this an hour before we were to meet Steven until we were pretty confident about all the camera settings and light placements. This is something I do all the time so that I'm not the guy wandering around the room going "Let me think for a moment," while people tap their toes, look at their watches, and, inevitably, wander off to do something more interesting.

Our initial test setup.
You may clickenzee to embiggen.

When we got to the location, I sent Steph and Becca and Erika out to find "something" (that was the extent of my suggestion) -- an object we could shoot light through and that would create shadows, and I scoped out spaces. There was a big hallway with a blank wooden wall which looks like every ordinary, less than interesting hallway on Earth, but had plenty of room to move about in. This was the place. Our job then became to make it look like a fancy studio.

Becca, Erika and Steph returned with a milk crate, which was perfect. We set up one light with a grid, from high above (left) and the second light we put under the milk crate and aimed at the wall. This gives us all those angular shadows in the final image. We practiced for about 60 seconds to make sure all our settings were right & then we scoped out some other options to see if we could find anything more interesting. There was a window and we thought perhaps we could have Steven looking out through the window with some dramatic light from underneath, so we tried it with ourselves as models and couldn't make it look better than our initial plan.

Steven arrived soon enough and we set to work.

Behind the scenes photos by Kostis.
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Steven was awesome. Very kind. He's been doing a live soundtrack for Carl Dreyer's 1932 horror film The Vampyr which you can listen to here. It turned out we have friends in common (of course). We talked about how electronics are shrinking the sizes of the kits that we both have to carry around -- he's making music now on a box the size of a briefcase and I'm endeavoring to fit my entire setup, lights, cameras & action, into a smaller and smaller backpack. We noted that if you could tour, musically or photographically, with equipment you can carry by yourself things get so much easier. A lovely time was had by all.

That's kind of what you get taking a class with me.

If you're someone who has done this sort of thing with me, let us know your experience in the comments. What did you learn? What did you do with what you learned later? How's it impacted your work? What kind of things do you want to do next?

Thanks to Stephanie Lifshutz, Erika Herrera, Rebecca Frantz & Kostis Kourelis.

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This is still not a fitness blog

cassidy@netaxs.com — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:56:42 GMT

So I was in New York this week doing [mumble mumble secret secret] and I thought it might be a good opportunity to go running in Central Park. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this, but I saw my Sports Doctor last week for what we believe will be the final time (sniff!) he was happy with my progress and said I could continue on my running schedule to get to the 10 mile Broad Street Run on May 5th. I'd been running between 30 and 40 minutes every other day with intervals of 12 minutes running, two minutes walking and things were going well. I was pain free and had been pain free for a few weeks. So I posted to the Twitters and asked if anybody lived near central park and would let me stash my cameras there for an hour or so to go running.

Running With Rollergirls. Clickenzee to Embiggen

I got a message back from Jenetic Defect (#SLOW for the Houston Roller Derby's All Stars travel team) saying that she was in NYC and was scheduled to skate at practice with Gotham but would be up for running in the park, plus I could stash my cameras at her place.

So we ran and my foot felt good, though it's amazing how out-of-shape I've gotten in the past six weeks and I've put on six pounds. The first half mile was difficult and, although it got easier from there, it never got easy like it used to be. We ran for 40 minutes which turned out to be 3.8 miles through a beautiful park packed with people running. We ran past turtles, we ran past a castle. Every turn seemed to show some other hidden adventure. A fountain jetting water sky high ... it seemed every person in Manhattan was out there sprinting. I ran slow. I only passed people who were going in the other direction. A Marine with a purple heart blew past me carrying a five foot American Flag on a pole and a heavy backpack. I watched him for the next 10 minutes as he got smaller and smaller in the distance, never slowing down.

After we stopped I got on a train and came back home, feeling pretty good. The next morning there was a hint of that same tell-tale pain in my ankle at the fracture point, a dull, very difficult to place pain, but the same one I remembered from the early days of the injury. I fell into an ocean of disappointment. My recovery wasn't going as well as I'd thought and even with the relaxed schedule we'd come up with, I might not make it. I'd been hoping to run with Philly for Boston that night and I kept thinking what kind of schedule I could make -- I could take the subway half way and meet the pack around 16th I could just run the half mile from city hall to the Liberty Bell -- but it became obvious that anything I did would probably jeopardize my recovery. And, as my Sports Doctor has said "If the 10 mile Broad Street Run is the goal, don't get distracted by other, smaller things along the way."

The two big factors at work here are the healing of my tibia, and the building up of my endurance and it's a crazy see-saw. The more endurance I build, the more I risk re-injuring my tibia, the less endurance I build, the stronger my leg gets. There are three possibilities when when race comes up -- 1) That I won't have the physical endurance to run ten miles and I'll crap out somewhere along the way and limp defeatedly away to find a taxi home. I've never run ten miles before. Even at the peak of my fitness, the most I've ever done is 7.5 miles; most people will be training for this race for months, I have two weeks. 2) I'll hurt something while running and crap out along the way. This isn't just a re-injury of the stress fracture, there are lots of muscles that need to be built up, that I could hurt -- like my quads which I've discovered I need to keep my ilio tibital band in place ... the whole thing is a careful balance. Option C is that I have enough endurance and my leg is strong enough and I finish and nobody really cares but me but I stare at that medal hanging on my wall for the rest of my life and think if you really want, you can do things you didn't think you could do.

It's been 48 hours and my ankle feels better, but it might mean days before I can run again and I may be going way back -- to essentially start over again.

On one hand, it's just a race, blah blah blah, there will be many more but I feel like I've been through fire and up mountains for this -- and I've turned this body from a lump of clay into something that moves fast and goes far and I've earned this.

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Madville is no more

cassidy@netaxs.com — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 16:01:04 GMT

Madville, playwright Paul Kuhn's epic ode to his childhood in the wilderness of Canada has completed its run. The final performance (like many of the others) was sold out so I had to sit on the steps outside the theater and wait. But that's OK; I'd seen it twice and I'd rather my seat went to someone else.

Remarkable about this performance was that the "real people" were there -- each character in the play was based on a real life person, now thirty years older than the children in the play and there was much worry, I think, whether or not they would appreciate their words and actions performed on stage. When the show ended I recreated the panorama we'd done to advertise the show but put the real people next to the actors who portrayed them. trillian_stars played Paul's mother, who'd gone into the wilderness with her husband and her children so unprepared they had to burn clothes in the winter to stay warm. It's her indomitable, though quirky, character that holds the family together. For the children the imaginary land they've created, Madville is a wonderful almost Peter Pan in-reverse world, everybody is a child play-acting at being an adult. There are rules ("No one may enter or leave Madville without spitting upon the spitting stone.") and consequences (If anyone does, they must spend the day in the jail -- one of the three structures in Madville) and eventually the children are pitted against an entire Scottish highland regiment on manouvers in the wilderness. One of my favorite characters was older brother Saul, played by Harry Slack. Saul is domineering and leads the band, and he doesn't need to goad them into dangerous acts, they practically beg him to. Saul is based on Paul's brother Sam, who looked bright eyed and perky but I still couldn't judge his reaction to the play as he sat with Harry in Madville's courtroom.

The Madville cast with the real citizens of Madville.
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After 60 seconds for a photo shoot a large crew started to dismantle the set. They moved like ants with power tools. There's always been something special about striking the set. The first time that I actually felt like I was trillian_stars' boyfriend was when the set for The Green Bird was struck. I was standing around waiting for Trillian to come out of the dressing room and she came out in jeans and a black top with little gussets or something along the sleeves and we helped take down this giant clockwork of a set and it felt like we were a couple.

In any event, I didn't help much during the strike of Madville, but I did takes some time lapse video on my phone.

As the carpet came up I saw that part of the risers were made with the wonderfully painted flooring from Slaughterhouse 5 which made me think about how in theater things are so impermanent -- it's something of the exact opposite of what I do, making things stay. In theater something is the most important thing in the world for four or eight weeks and then it's gone, it's a memory and a line on a resume. I was sad that Madville was over, I was sad that Slaughterhouse 5 was over, but just that night Trill had heard she'd been cast in something incredible, so our thoughts were reaching out toward that one at the same time this bit of empty started trailing behind.

The set came apart and got stowed very quickly (within an hour) and everybody headed back to the Curio house where I screwed up some courage and found Sam on the front porch and asked him how he like the play. The next three hours were lost in reminisces of the real Madville as the brothers and sister tumbled down a rabbit hole. They loved the play. And -- shockingly, most shockingly, they said that everything was true -- it had all happend. All the insanity, all the danger, all the ridiculousness of a family unprepared for living where they did and children mostly oblivious to it -- not only was it true, but there was more. We learned that eventually their father broke down and got electricity but he refused to allow more than one outlet, and that would only be used to power the freezer during the summer, and it hung in the middle of the cabin. The bales of clothes burned in the winter because, somehow, they'd never gotten enough wood, the battle between the children and the Scottish Highlanders.

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We left feeling like we'd been part of the most elaborate insider story every created and I wished there were DVD special features that went along with this play. Be sad that you missed Madville if you missed it. Feel special if you saw it, because it was a special thing. And the thing that's coming up -- you'll want to see that, very much.

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cassidy@netaxs.com — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:36:32 GMT

I'm on a limited running schedule until I see my doctor again on Friday. So as the sun comes up, trillian_stars runs laps around the cemetery. I sit under a tree & read a novel. When she runs past I snap photos. When she's done, we eat breakfast in the graveyard. The rest of the world starts to wake up around us.

Trillian running in the graveyard at sunrise. Clickenzee to Embiggen!

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zombie zombie zombie

cassidy@netaxs.com — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 02:26:28 GMT

Some time ago, after I started running and
before my grievous sports related injury I signed trillian_stars and I up for a zombie 5k in Philly. You run, zombies chase you, that sort of thing.

In the interim I broke my tibia and was relegated to "aqua jogging" in the pool. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to do the zombie run but, slowly, day by day, my recovery went on and my doctor had me doing things like "run 10 minutes, walk 2, run 10, walk 2, run 10, walk 2" and similar things and day by day I did these and my leg failed to hurt and also failed to swell up like a pumpkin and I became somewhat hopeful that I'd actually be able to do it.

Last night I finally decided I'd do it, but I wouldn't run the whole way, I'd maintain the schedule my doctor and I had set, which was 12 minutes running and 2 minutes walking -- I realized I could do three miles this way and walk my broken leg over the finish line.

So at 5:00 in the morning, much to the chagrin of The Claw who wasn't scheduled to wake me for another half an hour, we got out of bed, got dressed, and headed down to Roosevelt park for the Zombie Apocalypse.

There were lots of great costumes (My favorite shirt said "NO BRAINS, MOVE ALONG") and some really, really fancy zombie makeup done by pros on pro zombies whose job it was to lurch from the woods (or wherever) and eat your brains. The set had crashed cars, chemical spills, fog, and ... well, all sorts of zombies.

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About 3/4 of the way through the race one of the zombies yelled "TRIIIILLLLLLIIIIAAAANNNN!!! BBRRAAAIINNZZZZ!"

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It turned out to be bona fide Real Runner & fitness blogger Allie Harcharek who writes the Navel Gazing fitness blog. We met up after the race and went off for a fancy photo shoot and brunch and beers.

Anyway. We made it through, my leg didn't snap in two. And I'm a real runner now. I have a number, I ran a race.

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Win a Date with Kyle!

cassidy@netaxs.com — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 18:11:04 GMT

Trillian Stars is off being famous tomorrow night (March 28, 2013) which means we have an extra ticket to the Orchestra. They're doing Bach's masterpiece "The Passion of St. Matthew" which is 3 1/2 hours of like a 15 page chapter and it's filled with fabulous music and choirs like hammers and vocalists and whatnots.

If you'd like to be my mystery date you need to a) be in or around Philadelphia and able to get to center city (and back to wherever you live) and b) fun to be around. The show starts at 8:00, I'll probably get there around 7:00 to wander around hoping that the roof garden is open (it never is).

Let me know if this is you. In the event that multiple people want to go, Roswell will choose by eating a cat treat with the lucky winner's name on it out of a hat. (She will eat them all, but we'll see which one she eats first.)

*** EDIT: WE HAVE A WINNER ***

COULD THIS BE YOU????

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My Ankle....

cassidy@netaxs.com — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 01:14:03 GMT

Saw my sports medecine doctor on Friday, he showed me my MRI and you can pretty plainly see where my tibia fractured, all the way out to the ankle bone. The healing time for something like this is 6-8 weeks, which means I have 2-4 weeks before it's fixed. He came up with a "back to running" schedule that will give me a week of training before the Broad Street run, we'll see if it happens. It may, it may not. It's not the olympics so if I don't make it, there will be other races. In the meantime I'm "aqua jogging" to keep up my cardio and showing everybody at the gym the photo of my Sports Related Injury.

Rock on.

Clickenzee to Embiggen the Embroken!

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The Pool

cassidy@netaxs.com — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:48:18 GMT

I can't walk past the swimming pool without looking to see if something's in trouble. It's one of my OCD behaviors I guess. So I'd occasionally halt the shoot yesterday to fish something out that was struggling and move it to the concrete to hopefully dry out and fly away. A large number of them did, but this morning There were four in the pile that hadn't made it. I decided to take on a portrait project of the bugs that didn't make it. Seeing them up close makes them seem more significant to me.

I took this with the Panasonic GX1 and the 45mm Leica macro lens, and an off camera flash in a really small softbox.

I'm weird, I know.

Click to see her larger

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comet pan-STARS

cassidy@netaxs.com — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:59:36 GMT

It was a long, long day here in Arizona. It was one of those Life at 100 MPH times where it feels like so much happened it must have happened over the period of a week. We shot book stuff in the morning, I got a call from my doctor very early in the day -- he'd looked at my MRI and discovered that my foot is indeed broken. He wanted me to come in and get a walking cast, but I'm in Arizona, so, in between shooting I was on the phone with a number of local orthotics places and eventually discovered that my insurance doesn't cover anything outside of Philadelphia (!) so no cast until I get back. Kake suggested we go to an antique store and look for a cane instead, which sounded like a good idea. We did and Ryan found an antique shillelagh that looks like a rattlesnake. We came back to the ranch and Ryan leapt into the pool, which kind of meant everyone else did as well. We spent an hour bobbing up and down in the pool while Ryan did cannon balls and we waited for the next shoot to start. Dorio regaled us with stories of her life in one of the first punk rocks bands and we were mesmerized. Did I mention that I'm now walking with a cane?

Another model shoot in the evening where I balanced between my cane and the ever capable Ryan, who hauled all the gear and treated me like a celebrity invalid. After the shoot, we ended up (by design) on a mountain in the middle of the Sonoran desert where it seemed there would be nothing between us and the setting sun but Mexico. (We all figured it was prudent to maximize our opportunities and try and fit as much awesome into the time allotted as possible.) In this isolated spot, we found there were about 100 other people, drawn like something from Close Encounters, they'd all come independently thinking this would be a good place to see the comet. There were a bunch of people with telescopes and tripod mounted binoculars and we watched as the sun set and the moon lowered. Finally someone shouted "I have it!" and there was a bit of a frenzy of pointing. It was actually a lot like that scene in Close Encounters now that I think of it -- where they're all waiting at the top of the hill for the aliens to come back. I couldn't see anything but I took a photo with a long exposure and eventually, after a few shots, there was a smudge in the frame. By the time it set, about 25 minutes later, it was very barely visible to the naked eye, but I managed to get some nice photos. Everybody was concentrating on getting as close a crop of the comet as they could -- I figured it was just a fuzzy blob without that beautiful desert in the frame. We went out to a glorious dinner after where we sat under the stars and watched the moon collapse behind the horizon.

So, saguaro cactus, and comet.

Life at 100 mph. It's a good life. I think there are two more days of this. Or maybe three. It doesn't really matter. Great things are happening.

Hope you're all well.

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At work making pretty things pretty

cassidy@netaxs.com — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:07:20 GMT

So, today's the first day of actual work, yesterday was just me trying to solve a photography problem. I'm here working on volume II of Kate Mckinnon's epic, monumental and game changing Geometric Bead book. Kate Mckinnon along with Jean Power and Dustin Wedekind revolutionized the bead world with their bizarre designs based on mathematical formulas. Their work is both geometric and organic at the same time and set that part of the world on it's edge. I was happy to have been a part of the first one and looking forward to the next one.

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This all came about when Japanese engineers discovered, in the 1980's how to make precision, quality beads the size of a pin head. Kate's one of the first generation of people to ever have the opportunity to figure out what to do with them, so it's an exciting time.

Some photos from Volume I

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I didn't do the cover shot, but I did a bunch of the interiors, like this one of Gabriella in a Jean Power creation.

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Ryan, aka Estrella Mar who'd worked with me on the Caitlin R. Kiernan Drowning Girl project as well as the Amanda Palmer Purple Rain poster came all the way from Rhode Island to assist. We all love having him around, he makes all the work not work, he's almost prescient in his ability to be in the right place to take a camera or move a light stand. He also snapped this cool behind the scenes photo of Dustin and I working.

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So, we're spending the rest of the next four days with models and cactus and these weird beads and having a great time. In the meantime, you can make all of Kate & Jean & Dustin's creations if you score a copy of their book. There are also free patterns up on Kate's website.

That's the news from the desert.

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The Hummingbeasts of Arizona

cassidy@netaxs.com — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 05:26:56 GMT

Long, long day, from Philadelphia to Arizona which seems insignificant if you think that people walked it in the past, with a couple of oxen, hoping that their map was accurate and they'd find spring water 140 miles away.....

Anyway -- the marvelous Kate McKinnon picked me up and I wanted to get started trying to photograph hummingbirds right away since the real reason I'm here is to photograph her next jewelry book and I wanted to get the hummingbird thing out of the way, or at least tested.

Last time I was in Arizona I had a go at photographing them and ... well, freezing their wings is elusive. Even at an 8000th of a second, which is my highest shutter speed, they still blurred. I'd been thinking for the past few months that it would be easy to freeze their wings with a 1/50,000th second burst from a flash, but how could you do that with a flash sync speed of 1/250 ... (camera nerd camera nerd camera nerd) ... and then I thought of a way it could work.

So that's what I tried, and with good results.

You can check out the results below & to celebrate, you can buy tiny square prints of tiny birds for tiny prices and hand them in the tiny spaces of your home. The prints are 5x5. Or you can just look at them. (And you can right-click & save them and use them for wallpaper or whatever.)

Clickenzee to buy tiny prints of tiny hummingbeasts at tiny prices!

The vicious little brutes are fierce and I spent most of the afternoon being bossed around by them. They contemptuously ignored the studio I'd set up and spent the bulk of their time in my face trying to start a fight. Peace prevaled in the end though and I got some very nice photos.

Estrella-Mar just got here from Rhode Island and we're both a bit loopy from the tired. Big day tomorrow in the desert with models and whatnots. So I'll leave you with the birds.

(p.s. thanks to everyone who's participated in the Peter Sagal demotivator contest. It's been fun to see them popping up on the Twitters.)

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Demotivator Contest!!!!!!

cassidy@netaxs.com — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:23:46 GMT

A few weeks ago I went to Chicago to photograph Peter Sagal for the back of his new book jacket about running. You probably know Peter as the host of NPR's Wait wait ... don't tell me!, the oddly informative news quiz, but Peter is also a writer for Runners World magazine and has run a bazillion marathons. (Do check out the Chicago Tribune's behind the scenes photos of Wait wait.)

We put one of the photos for the book jacket shoot in the Wikimedia Commons under a Share & Share Alike license because that's the kind of guys we are. Which means that it's been showing up as clip art in all sorts of articles about running.

To celebrate the ever-oddening of the types of stories it's getting used for, we're announcing a demotivational poster contest. If you don't know what a demoitvator is click here for some examples.

Contest rules:

1) Using Peter's photo, made a demotivator.
2) Post it here, tumblr or on Twitter.
3) Let us know where it is (@PeterSagal & @KyleCassidy or use the hashtag #PeterRuns)
4) Winners get an autographed print and, more likely than not, some Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me! swag cluttering Peter's garage.
5) There's no maximum number of winners.
6) Posters will be judged solely upon the fortunes of our whims.
7) Contest ends when it looks like it's run its course or we get bored with it.
8) None of the prizes will likely be Carl Kasell's voice on your home answering machine, but shoot for the moon anyway. Stranger things have happened.

Clickenzee to get yourself a high-res version of this image!

Begin!

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oh my stars

cassidy@netaxs.com — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 20:00:30 GMT

Trillian was off being a flapper in some movie.

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Sports Related Injury Update III: Probably not broken

cassidy@netaxs.com — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:55:04 GMT

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So yesterday I got to see an actual sports medicine doctor who was absolutely awesome. Bar none the best visit I've ever had with a health care professional. He totally seemed to know what he was talking about, he spent a lot of time with me, looked at my x-rays, watched me walk and his diagnosis: My foot is probably not broken, it's more likely a "stress incident" than a "stress fracture" -- there may be microscopic breaks in the interior of my leg bone that are the cause of the swelling. He knew when my race was without me having to tell him and said we can come up with a recovery schedule that allows me to run it and train for it. I've got an MRI scheduled week after next and I'm going back for a followup in two weeks. I can walk on my foot, though if it give me much pain, I can get a walking boot from his office.

Writing North Dakota stuff today and prepping for my trip to Arizona next week.

That's all the news from lake Woebegon.

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