Category: Still Photography

Photographic image made by Jeff Gatesman. Digital, film and HDR photography

Carroll Shelby’s Wife drives a mini van

Last week I was working on a project being produced by 21st Century 3D which will ultimately be a 3D Imax film about legendary car builder Carroll Shelby. As much an American Icon as his cars are, Shelby is a true original who, over the course of the past nine decades has been everything from fighter pilot to chicken farmer to race car champion and Philanthropist. Without an engineering background he designed and created cars that crushed then world dominating Ferrari race cars and has gone on to develop some of America’s greatest automobiles. So it was rather humorous, as we shot in his Gardena plant, to see his wife drive up in a generic mini van.

I’ve always been a huge fan of his work and had a rare opportunity to grab a couple stills of the cars in his collection.

The film will likely be in production for some time, but keep a look out for it. I’ve been a big fan of Shelby for a long time and after meeting him, and though he is well into his eighties, he is absolutely a larger-than-life character whose story you won’t want to miss in 3D.

Time lapse of the full moon rising over Joshua Tree

Joshua Tree National Park is a surreal landscape in the high desert called Mojave that is scattered with the foreboding, tree-like cacti from which it is named. It’s unique beauty is also reflected in the myriad of other hearty plants that dot the landscape and is oddly interspersed with other-worldly piles of gigantic rocks.

Toward the end of June the full moon came out and I shot some time lapse of it as it rose slowly over one such gathering of rocks appropriately named Jumbo Rocks.

A mosque in my home town, Berkeley, IL

I moved away from my home town of Berkeley, IL over 30 years ago but still have family there and visit a couple times a year. Oftentimes, when I’m visiting I like to wander around and take pictures of the place, though some of it has changed drastically.

A mosque in my home town
Before the dome or tower, I went to grade school here

I attended Field School in the 1960’s from K through 3rd grade. Sometime in the 90’s the school was sold to the Albanian American Islamic organization and is now one of their midwestern mosques. Of the 330,000 houses of worship in the United States, about 2500 are Mosques and of that number, only 200 were built for that purpose. The rest have all been converted from buildings originally designed to be something else…like a grade school.

PhotoRescue 3 saves the day

Occasionally you come across a product that is so impressive that you want everyone to know about it, and PhotoRescue3 is one of those products. An advanced data-recovery solution for digital photography media, PhotoRescue is so good the developers don’t want you to have to pay for it unless it can prove to you that your images can be recovered. This just tells me the developers are interested in creating a quality product that simply works.

I miss the analog world I grew up in. I miss the tactile feel of real film, developed with chemistry, and I miss working in a darkroom where I can see the images emerge from nothing, and where my hands were on the media throughout the entire process. However I have learned to embrace the digital realm we’ve arrived at and I have fallen for techniques and processes that simply cannot be accomplished with film, but one of the things that really irks me about digital is the absolutely fragile nature of the 1’s and 0’s. You know what I’m talking about: corrupt media, incompatible data, “the Avalanche Effect”, or, in real world terms: card falls in lake, bakes in the desert sun, is worn down, or simply mishandled. In short: a lot of hard work has simply vanished. I’m not in the habit of endorsing products but if you work in digital photography, you need to know about PhotoRescue3.

Occasionally you come across a product that is so impressive that you want everyone to know about it, and PhotoRescue3 is one of those products, in fact it is so good the developers don’t want you to have to pay for it unless it can prove to you that your images can be recovered. This just tells me the developers are interested in creating a quality product that simply works.

My sister, who is a fashion photographer in Chicago called me after a shoot recently to say that the SD card she pulled from her Nikon camera and mounted on her Mac was inexplicably showing up as an empty card. Even after putting it back in the camera, it came up as empty. She knew there was data on the card, but somehow between the camera and the card reader on her Mac, it had gotten lost. I suggested she try PhotoRescue 3. She downloaded the free trial version which determined there were in fact images on the card by showing her an accurate preview of the recoverable images–in her case, all of them. So she paid $29 to activate the full version of the software–a pittance in comparison to a re-shoot, and downloaded the images, backed them up and was editing away in no time.

The developers claim that this product may even be able to recover images from a card you erased by mistake, and it recovers movie files as well. You may not need PhotoRescue right now, or ever, but you need to know it is available should the unthinkable happen.

Culver City Car Show 3D!

The George Barris Car Show came to Culver City this past weekend and I worked with the 21st Century 3D team to capture all of the fuel injected fun in 3D video.

A dreary day at the skate park

I rode my bike down to Venice Beach on Sunday, as I usually do, but this particular Sunday was unusually overcast and dreary for Southern California. None-the-less there were plenty of skaters at the skate park and I managed to get a couple of shots. I used a polarizing filter to cut the light down even more so I could make the skaters blurry, to give them a sense of faster motion.

Blue Sky Mining

Last week I was working on a pilot for a television show and our location was a strip mine. The mine is still working, in fact they have plans to completely decapitate some of the large hills in the area. It’s gorgeous country and kind of sad to think it will all be leveled in a few years. But I wanted to get some shots of the huge machinery that is used for this kind of task, but I got to location a little later than I had hoped and only had time to get this one shot.

A huge earth shredding machine
Blue Sky Mining

A Huge earth shredder rips into the hills and grinds them into sand.

Night Photography in Chicago II

Chicago River Front Walk, winter '09

It used to be a writers town and it’s always been a fighter’s town. For writers and fighters and furtive torpedoes, cat-bandit, baggage thieves, hallway headlockers on the prowl, baby photographers and stylish coneroos, this is the spot that is always most convenient, being centrally located, for settling ancestral grudges. Whether the power is in a .38, a typewriter ribbon or a pair of six-ouncers, the place has grown great on bone-deep grudges: of writers and fighters and furtive torpedoes.

—Nelson Algren
Chicago: City On The Make

On a blue moon New Years eve Night in Chicago I wanted to get some more images of my hometown, so before going to the year end celebrations I wandered around the downtown river front until it got too cold. And at 17 degrees, that was a very short time and made the long exposures seem much longer.

The thing I like most about making images in a city at night are the colors, and in Chicago that generally means a golden straw colored hue juxtaposed with cooler tones in the buildings and sky.

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