A project that I have been working on for several months now has gotten zero love here on the blog. Much like everything I’ve shot since the middle of the summer but I’ll do my best to get caught up before 2012′s work starts to pile up.
I was fortunate enough this past June to photograph a wedding in Rome, Italy at The Vatican. Yeah I know….something like that should have already graced the pages of this blog. I’ll get to that very soon too. But one of the first e-mails I had when I turned my phone back on after the flight home was from The Decatur-Morgan County Chamber of Commerce about being the photographer for a coffee table book they were planning on publishing. It has since been named “More Than A River”. So since then I have been working on documenting almost everything about this city and the surrounding county. There is still much work to do and I hope I can document some behind the scenes from that work as well as some related photos. Of course I won’t be able to publish any of the final photos here until the book has been published but I can post some images that will give a little glimpse into what I’ve been working on.
The most recent thing I shot was the annual Polar Bear Plunge that takes place on New Years Day at the Decatur Boat Harbor. This isn’t just something that the arguably unstable of Morgan County participate in but is instead a worldwide ritual carried out by crazy people worldwide. My goal for the photos in this book is to shoot events, people, and places in this community in the most creative way possible while still making sure to tell a story. I wanted to photograph the polar bears from the water. It sounded so simple when the idea first hit me.
One of my first phone calls was to Phil at Dive Sports. He could not have been more helpful and I certainly do appreciate him. When I told him I was planning on photographing from 50˚ water he politely told me that I would more than likely drown without a dry suit. Phil took care of getting me set up with one so that I could maintain motor function…a detail I hadn’t really considered.
I was using an Ewa Marine bag for my camera. It’s a poor man’s underwater housing. My usual Nikon D3 wouldn’t quite fit with the lens I was using so I fell back to my Nikon D300s. Using one of those bags is like having someone wrap your camera up in a blanket, club you over the head, and then ask you to compose a photo. The up side…it did keep my camera dry.
Anna was there for several reasons but the most important one was keeping me from drowning.
One of the event’s organizers had a thermometer in the water so we could quantify exactly how crazy the participants were on Sunday. As you can see we were several ticks above freezing but smack dab in the middle of “spoilage” which I can only assume is another word for lunatic.
Although I can’t publish any of the photos I hope to use in the book I can show you a few I shot before and after. If you were wondering what Santa Claus does to unwind after Christmas here is your answer. You may see more of ol’ Kris Kringle later on.
Now you see him…and now you don’t.
As much as I’d love to tell you that the photo below was carefully composed and thoughtfully exposed it was not. This one goes in the happy accident pile.
I looked at the metadata on my images and I was only in the water for about 5 minutes. It was unbelievable exhausting. At one point Anna had to swing a bag to me to hold on to in order to catch my breath. The picture below doesn’t reflect how terrible I felt at this point.
Even though I know this picture isn’t the most flattering of me I had to include it because it illustrates what I felt like. It took me an hour to stop feeling sick.
Gary Cosby Jr. was on hand shooting for The Decatur Daily and shot the photo below as I caught my breath.
It’s easy to take such a well composed, well lit photograph when you’re warm and dry and your camera isn’t wrapped in a ziploc bag. :)
by David Higginbotham
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