I got to take a portrait of oil man turned wind man T. Boone Pickens for The New York Times. He is continuing his advertising push to promote wind energy and natural gas as a way to get off our oil problems. He claims it is a matter of national security. The man has some points. He also avoids others.
I did shoot a speech, but by far, the highlight was taking his portrait and visiting his office in Dallas. The only other office with more of a “museum” feel is the Perot offices. Boone (what a name!) has a great Western painting collection. The best place to take the portrait was his office. I had some other ideas, but after waiting two hours for Mr. Pickens to finish his lunch I only had three minutes to shoot. After three minutes (exactly three minutes…17 frames to be exact) I was told “you got it.” I think I did OK. Without being sarcastic, this is not to say Boone is rude. He was extremely nice and I was impressed to see he remembered my name immediately (after all, Matt is an odd one.) He introduced me to people wherever we went and we had a great conversation about his amazingly large ranch in Texas.
The New York Times ran a great 5 column picture in print. I also liked the shot of Boone looking out the window into downtown Dallas. The curtains give it a cool old look. You can see the article written by Cliff Krauss online.
I was pleased to find that Coburn Dukehart at NPR ran a gallery of my iPhone montages on The Picture Show photo blog.
I have known Coburn for a while now and worked with her on my Migrant Death and Identification project which ran on the NPR website a few months ago.
Coburn had this to say on the blog:
“As a photo editor, I spend a lot of time sequencing images. When I build an online gallery, I want there to be a specific flow to the piece — a story with a distinct beginning, middle and end. I want to engage the viewer’s eye, making him look into the distance in one shot, then pulling back to examine the details of an extreme close-up in another. In my mind, I refer to the process as “Zen editing.” I couldn’t explain in words just how I know the correct order of the photos; I just know when the sequence feels right.
Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to Matt Nager’s iPhone montages. Instead of sequencing photos linearly, he places his images in a grid. The viewer’s eye wanders over these composites, not settling anywhere specific, but skating around while the brain processes the larger feeling created by the framework.
The montage that first appealed to me was Winter, which coincidentally was the first montage that Nager built. I love the simplicity of the color palette — crisp whites, deep blues, and that pervasive winter brown. I first look at the clouds in the center frame, then toward the clouds in the upper right, then to the Ferris wheel in the upper left. My eye then wanders to the frosty leaf in the top center, then back down to the middle, and finally around the edges. Individually, the photos are striking, but as a group, the canvas truly draws me in.”
Thanks Coburn for the words and the gallery!!!
You can see a gallery of my iPhone photos and order prints with your left over holiday monies at my Archive.
Here are two recent additions from Laredo as well.
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