Clips

Here are some samples of the finished product--photographs used in various publications, along with some comments on the photos. Click on the photo to view a larger version.

All photographs Copyright © Jeffery F. Davis. All rights reserved.

The day after a major snowfall brought below-zero temperatures and high winds. A winter nature hike through the Ridges Sanctuary was scheduled for that morning, but the mature trees along the trails reduced the wind to nothing, and warm clothes took care of the cold. My daughter and I were the only two who showed up for the hike, but Paul Regnier, the Ridges naturalist, led us through a wonderful, quiet trip. This shot was at the end of the hike, returning to the Baileys Harbor Range Light. Shot with a 300mm lens with a 1.4X converter to compress the distance between Gabrielle and the building, I had to run backward to establish the relative position of the subjects, kneel down in the snow, and yell for Gabe to turn around. Door County Magazine

She turned around and gave me time to shoot two frames--Paul had promised her cocoa when we were done, and she was cold.

There was one diffused strobe on the left, balanced with both the ambient light in the war room and the video display.

An AT&T internal magazine used this photo of the CEO of a company that manages toll-free telephone numbers. It was shot at their facility in Omaha, and he is standing in front of a semi-transparent wall of glass overlooking a "war room" where the controllers work, and a company video played on a multi-screen video display in the background. In an eight-minute video, the company logo appeared twice--and the CEO had time to play the video for me only once.

There were three small strobes set inside the hood (triggered by the radio remote) to light the foreground, and red gelled strobes to light the background

A husband-wife team of eye researchers in Milwaukee make a discovery in their color-blindness research that was of interest to Focus, a German magazine. The photo was shot with a full-frame fisheye lens on a camera triggered by a radio remote from inside an isolation hood. The camera was about a foot away from the researcher's hand.

The Alpine Resort, an Egg Harbor institution, needed new photos for advertising and brochures. The main photo is from a 4x5 transparency, shot just after sunset using a 5-minute exposure. (A crescent moon was removed electronically because the long exposure made it streak.) The dining room shot was of actual guests eating breakfast, with strobes balanced to the morning light outside the windows. The golfer (who is a friend of ours from Chicago) was shot the year before, for my stock file. When the Alpine contacted me for the assignment, I included my stock photos in the final package.

Newsweek used this photo of Hillary Clinton meeting with a farm family. There were over a hundred people in the small house, including 12 still photographers. In talking with a daughter, she said that her mother was born in a smaller house visible from the kitchen window. Thinking that she would show the First Lady the house she grew up in, I positioned myself in the kitchen near the window, while still being able to shoot them in the living room. As they moved into the (very small) kitchen, they went to the window, and I was the only photographer (still or video) in position to capture a personal moment.

The photo was shot with a 18mm super wide angle lens, with bounce flash set 1 1/2 stops less than the light from the window. The kitchen was so small that the husband is against the refrigerator and wife is backed against a counter.

A routine basketball game turned into a series of shots (two shown here) in Sports Illustrated magazine when a star player from Ohio State breaks a bone in his neck after being fouled by an Iowa player during a breakaway layup. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the play, but I had followed the collision and shot the player on the floor. He continued to play, but had a stiff neck and X-rays later confirmed the broken bone. His season (and a shot at a pro career) over, he was admitted to a hospital and fitted with a halo brace to immobilize his neck.

I used a 180mm lens to visually stack the pump and cow, and a wide f/stop placed the cow slightly out of focus.

A picture editor from Time magazine called about ten in the morning needing a photo to go with the Hugh Sidey column on the Presidency. She only had the vaguest outline of what the column was about--drought and ranchers and government policy (what policy she didn't know). Naturally I told her I could get exactly what she needed, a ridiculous statement since she had no idea what the column was, it was winter and was going to snow that day, and I didn't know a thing about ranching. I knew Sidey grew up an hour west of where I was, and there had been a drought for some time. And so, armed with more enthusiasm than brains, I drove west. Five hours and two unproductive rolls of film later, I locked up the breaks when I saw cattle coming in from a field. I saw the old pump, jumped a fence into waist-deep snow in a ditch, and waited for a cow to move into position. Gathering darkness and and light snow forced me to give up the search for anything else, and I got to the FedX office with an hour to spare. "It's perfect," was the message on the answering machine the next morning.

The field was shot with a 16mm full-frame fisheye lens, with the horizon in the middle of the frame to eliminate horizontal distortion. I shot quickly with a tripod at f/16 to maximize depth of field.

Newsweek called needing a photo to go with a story about the economic problems farmers were having. One part of the story concerned the finances of the brother of the governor of Iowa, who farmed in the northern part of the state. Understandably, he declined to be photographed, and I had about five hours to shoot (which included the three hours it would take to drive to the location). I found his home, which was at the end of a very long driveway (at least 1/2 mile). Knowing that he would not cooperate, I went into town to the county courthouse. Using property records, I determined where his property was and drove to a field he owned a short distance from his home. It's not easy making an empty field look interesting, and to complicate things a storm was moving in, dropping the light very quickly. I did not want to trespass on his land, so I stayed on the highway right-of-way, used an extreme wide-angle lens, placed the old fence post in the frame according to the rule of thirds, and hoped the converging lines of the fence would add a dynamic element.

Meetings & Conventions magazine was doing a profile on the World Pork Expo, a three-day meeting that attracted more than 100,000 people connected with the pork industry. Along with a serious look at the strategy and logistics of managing a huge convention, the editors were also interested in the way the conventioneers had fun. And these people had fun! Along with a BBQ contests, a pork sing-a-long and pig art contests, there were the amazing racing pigs--and a lead photo as a result.

Morrell was shot with a 105mm lens and a soft box from the right and a small reflector on the left front..

Author David Morrell usually writes action-based books, such as the original Rambo book, First Blood. When he wrote a touching, introspective and personal book about the death of his son, called Fireflies, I shot him in his office in the basement of his home, and juxtaposed the two very different books. Morrell was gracious and friendly, but seemed to get worried as I was setting up my lighting equipment, and kept asking if I didn't want to do this outside. After explaining what I wanted to do, I could tell that something was still wrong. He finally told me that the last time he let a photographer in his home, the photographer's lighting equipment caught on fire in his office! I Have no idea what went wrong, but after assuring him that nothing like that has ever happened to me, the shoot went off without a hitch.

Overholser was shot during a staff meeting with a 105mm lens and available light.

Geneva Overholser was the editor of the Des Moines Register when the Washington Journalism Review did a story on her. At the time, it was rare to have a woman in the top slot of a major newspaper (little has changed in the ensuing years) and Overholser brought a different way of looking at things. The art director wanted the assignment shot in black & white, with black borders, indicating that the negative was printed full-frame. The negative carrier for my enlarger did not have enough room around the negative, and I didn't want to wreck it by running a file on the opening to get the rough look. The only place I found that had a negative carrier that would work was at the Des Moines Register! I Printed the photos at night, after everyone had left, except for the lab supervisor.