A couple weeks ago I went to New York City again for another client meeting. I took the exact same flights as in my last trip to NYC. Consequently that put me in the Big Apple for about 19 hours, again. I got into Manhattan at about 10PM and left the next day by 5PM. I haven’t spent much time in NYC so when I do go I am such a tourist (insert geeky picture of me walking around with camera glued to my face). So much so that I nearly missed my flight this time since I decided at the last minute to go up to the top of the Empire State Building. Most of these shots are very documentary-like and I can imagine looking at them in 50 years and marveling at the way the city used to look.
The week after Christmas, we took a little family vacation/road trip to the desert. My kids call it Radiator Springs. My son was very excited that I was “not going on vacation by yourself again.”
I have to admit, that before last fall, I wasn’t much of a Nascar fan. But when Jimmie Johnson’s people called my people and asked me to come shoot Jimmie out in North Carolina, I jumped all over it. At the time, I didn’t know much about Jimmie but I love anything to do with cars or racing. Jimmie was a couple races away from becoming Nascar’s five time champion for five years in a row. No one else had ever accomplished this feat. Not Jeff Gordon (who happens to own Jimmie’s car). Not Dale Earnhardt Sr.
The car we shot with Jimmie was his 2011 car fresh off the show room floor. Everything is hush-hush in Nascar when it comes to the cars—in fact, we just got the OK today to be able to post the pictures of the car. To tell you the truth, it looked the same to me as the 2010 car. But everyone on set who had anything to do with Jimmie Johnson or Nascar could see right away “how the spoiler was different” and every other little nuance. And, by the way, these “stock” cars are anything but stock. There are so many modifications to these cars that they are not even symmetrical which drove me crazy when I tried to shoot it from the rear and couldn’t figure out for the longest time why I couldn’t get the car lined up straight in the camera. It was because they kick in the left side rear quarter panel and push out the right rear quarter panel and then chop it off the to reduce drag since they are always going left.
We shot Jimmie, his car and his crew chief, Chad Knaus, at Lowe’s headquarters just outside of Charlotte. Even though Nascar started in Daytona Beach, somehow all the teams have made Charlotte their home and the home of Nascar. So much so that the Nascar corporation itself had to finally give in and move itself to Charlotte from Daytona. Jimmie was a great guy to shoot and very down to earth. We made the shoot as painless and efficient for Jimmie that he appeared to have a good time and his publicist even disappeared after the first couple setups.
We’ve been cooped up in the house most of the week because of the rain. But it finally subsided yesterday so we took the dogs to their favorite spot—the beach. Being half whippet, saying that Maya can “book it” it is an understatement. People come from miles around to watch Maya run. Her strides are long and when she gets moving she can leap about 10 feet in a single bound. Especially when she hasn’t been out all week:
