White House Photowalk, Part IV

Gah! Three weeks have past since my last post. Life's been busy, the kids are getting out of school soon, I had a nasty cold a few weeks back, Memorial Day weekend, yada yada yada... basically my mind has been elsewhere but as Homer Simpson once said:

"Relax. What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind!"


Pete Souza, White House Photographer, All-Round Nice Guy

We were all herded into a conference room to meet Pete Souza, the guy who took the famous "Bin Laden Raid Meeting Room" photo with President Obama and various other high-level officials. He took the picture of the little boy who met the President one day at the Oval Office and asked Mr. Obama if he could touch the President's hair. Basically, Mr. Souza has nearly 24/7/365 access to the President and consistently turns out great shots, photojournalism-style.

A link to his website is listed at the bottom of this post, before you check it out, let me tell you what I learned from Mr Souza.

He worked for the Reagan Administration for 5 years or so and was the official photographer for President Reagan's funeral. He has many accomplishments under his belt and you can read the impressive list on his website. He's a fairly soft spoken fellow who, on his afternoon off while the President and Vice President played golf, generously gave an hour and a half to speak with a group of photographers.

The one thing, possibly the most important bit of information I got out of this conversation was the importance of trust.


How can he get such access? Doesn't he annoy the president? Is he always working? Why does it seem that he is in the right place, at the right time, all the time? How can one person churn out so many "Decisive Moments" in one lifetime, let alone three quarters of one Presidential Term? Well, when it comes to President Obama (and President Reagan as well), it all comes down to trust. The President knows that Mr Souza is there most of the time and he knows that he is striving to create great work.

Officials that visit the President are sometimes irked or confused when Pete is in the room because of the sensitive nature of the discussion but it doesn't matter. The trust is there. If there's a problem with a photographer being in the room, it's their problem. They have to get over it and continue.

The whole notion of trust is an important one to any photographer. Many fly-by-night photography businesses have sprung up and gone to pasture simply because they aren't really in it for the art. It's a quick buck, take some pictures, hand the client a flash drive filled with unreadable RAW files and disappear back behind the website homepage. This is a problem.

It's great that technology has become more accessible to more people. Digital camera technology is becoming quite close to the old analog filmstrip negatives. It's easy to be "arty" and slap on a bunch of filters but what is truly difficult is taking a digital negative, adjusting only the "Lights/Darks/Highlights/Shadows" and calling it a day.

Photography is like music. I have played the guitar for almost as long as I've used a camera. There are hundreds of effects pedals one can plug into an electric guitar but unless you understand how the fret board is organized, which notes go where, and the difficult job of learning the theory behind music you're just in it for yourself. You can make noise. You can't make music.

The same can be said about photography. Although it's getting more and more difficult to tell the difference, I feel the most people can still separate "professional photographers" from the "Photographers with a capital P". It's really all about consistency, trust and selflessness.

Although Mr. Souza himself said that he captures roughly 1000+ photos a day, the ones that make it to the front page of newspapers, websites and magazines around the world are edited only slightly, to make sure the light is properly balanced.

Another topic that helped me out was in regards to composition. Mr Souza uses a prime lens in most of his work and sometimes there is a photo that is great but maybe he would've liked to re-compose the shot to add something or subtract somone or otherwise make it more visually appealing. I am a perfectionist when it comes to certain things (photography, music). When I was able to pour through all of the images I took from the photowalk, some of them were good, some of them benefited from slight cropping or a change in aspect ration. A few were off by just a few inches and if I could, I would have loved to re-take them... but that wasn't going to happen. Before I heard Pete talk about this, I wouldn't have shared them. However, because I knew that the guy with one of the coolest jobs in the world occasionally has to pinch his nose and share it anyway, I did. If I hadn't heard him speak, I wouldn't have shared this:

Do you see how the very center point is slightly off and located around the bottom part of the inner circle instead of smack-dab in the cetner? That drove me crazy. It still does. Everything else works but the imperfection is there and it pokes me in the eye, every time I see it. I shared it anyway, considering what Mr Souza had suggested and it quickly became a "Featured Photo" on Picasa.

Also, this one:

It's quite an enchanting photo, I've been told it's "Escher-Like" (I'll take it!). So what's my problem? The top level tiles on the left are "not-quite perfect". The angle of the photograph isn't parallel with each set of floors. I wasn't going to share it because of that. There was nothing that I could do to it that wouldn't have taken away from the overall composition. It was either "don't share" or "forget about that and share it anyway". So I shared it and it was very well received (and a photo I submitted to the Plus One Collection's first issue on Architecture).

So basically it comes down to execution on the spot. Compose the shot before you take it and you're life will be easier. Sometimes, however, the shot that works the best is one that perhaps you didn't think would work. For me, no matter how many photos I take of one particular subject, the best shots are usually the first or second one taken. I suppose it mostly due to "seeing the photo" before I take it and shots 2 through whatever are just alternates. It's a challenge not to take 20 shots of one subject, especially since digital cameras allow that to happen but I try to limit myself to 2 or 3 shots per "picture". Anything more than that is a waste of camera life and will make oneself less focused on the composition. Experimentation is fine in the beginning of one's photography travels but once you understand the camera, it's much more satisfying to "catch the moment and move on".

Looking back, I think that the meeting with Pete Souza was my favorite part of the whole photowalk. Sure it was cool walking around the White House grounds, the EEOC and taking an closer look at the Vegetable Garden but from a photographer's standpoint, the information I gathered from Mr Souza highlighted the "once-in-a-lifetime" aspect of the experience and will stay with me for the rest of my days.

Pete's website can be found at http://www.petesouza.com/.