mark: welcome, myname is mark. and i'm here with theauthors@google program. and today we're here to welcomemichael clark, who is an adventure photographer,surfer, skier, climber. i don't know if i've missedany, but you can certainly fill us in on that. and he was here about twoyears ago to tell us in general about how he shootsand sort of the stories that he tells.
and in the intervening time,he's been doing a lot of shooting for big name clientsout in the field, all different kinds of adventureand sports photography. and he's here today to go alittle bit more in-depth on some of those stories behind theimage, and to get a little bit more grungy about how theycome about, how you actually construct them, and how youactually get them to look like they do when you actually seethem in print, online, or wherever you encounter them.
so with that, i'd like to bringup michael to tell us some of those stories. michael. [applause] michael clark: all right. thanks for havingme out, guys. thanks, mark. thanks for having me back. it's a pleasure to be here.
and like mark said, i'm anadventure sports photographer. i live in santa fe,new mexico. i've been working for 16 years,shooting for pretty much any and every outdoorclient out there. magazines like "outside,""men's journal," "sports illustrated," some stuff with"national geographic." clients like red bull, apple,adobe, nike. i work with nikon a lot. i'm a nikon shooter--
not to create a controversy. and over the last 16 years inthe adventure sports world, i've had tons of adventures. so the reason i'm out here isthis book that i just wrote and finished earlier this yearthat some of you have gotten. and we'll give away a free copyof this after the show. the book is "exposed-- inside the life and images ofa pro photographer." and my last book was "adventure sportsphotography," kind of a
how-to for all thedifferent sports. this one's more of a revealingbook about what is the life of a pro photographer like? and i'll talk about that duringthe presentation. and it also talks about thestories behind 16 of my best-known images,which are fairly adventurous, the stories. and then it talks about how iset those images up, how they were shot, the gear used, andthen how the images were
processed, so that i could givethe reader a full view of how does this work frombeginning to end? how did he get into position? how did he meet these peoplethat are really famous athletes in the outdoor world? and who was i working for,and all that jazz. so we'll talk about that. just to give you a littleidea of the book, there's the cover.
there's chapters. this is "keeping the firestoked." it's one of the chapters that talksabout four images. i'll keep going here. and this just shows yousome of the chapters. there's even little lightingdiagrams to show you how i had the strobes set up. i think pretty much everypicture in the book that has strobes used in it of these 16,there's a little lighting
diagram that shows you how thelights were set up, and describes in detail which lightsi had, which light modifiers were on the lights,and all the details. the other thing i didn'tsay is that in the back of the book-- in the book, it talks about howthe images were processed. but in the back of the book,there's this dvd where you can sit there and watch mework up each of those 16 images as well.
and some of them took four,five, six hours to work up. so you don't see allthat, obviously. but there's like a five orsix-minute min piece and i'll do a little bit of what i didto work it up, and then show you the finished producton the dvd. then these little vignettes-- some of these chapters talkabout what it was like out in the field, being a pro. this was in tahiti, and i'lltalk about this whole series
of images i producedin tahiti. going to tahiti toshoot for 10 days sounds pretty glamorous. but reality was quitea bit different. so in terms of the job, ihave an office at home. i'll talk about percentagesand where i spend most my time. it's probably 10% to 15% of mytime is spent shooting, having these adventures.
this is a shot a buddy ofmine took in patagonia. i was covering an expeditionrace down there. it's like an adventure race,where there are sea kayaking, mountain biking, climbing,and trekking. one of most remote placesin the world. we're probably 600 milesfrom the nearest city at this point. and it's just like a swamplandthat you're walking through. and i have my cameras around myneck, because i don't want
them to get drenched. anyway, we were followingthe racers through this muck and mire. often it involves carrying abunch of really heavy packs. oh yeah, i have aclicker, too. i forgot about that. i started out as a rockclimbing photographer. when i first started out in1995, i was living in france and climbing two, threemonths straight.
i was on a bicycle tour. i'd quit my job in physics. i studied physics at theuniversity of texas in austin and worked for a year. then i started rock climbing. and rock climbing's one of thosesports like surfing or mountain biking. you just get obsessed. and i got obsessed.
and i couldn't stay in the labdoing physics anymore. i was working with gradstudents, working like 14 hours a day. and i just quit. and i just took off, sponsoredby visa and mastercard, and went climbing in south america,alaska, mexico, europe, thailand. and so after two years, idecided, you know, well, my images look about as goodas those images in
the climbing magazines. i think i can makea go of this. and i just went for it. and after about three and ahalf years, i had enough clients built up thati could go for it. it was still sketchyfor a few years. but i made it. 16 years later, here i am. so this just gives you an idea,in this picture, of what
it takes to shoot climbing. i'm not that far offthe ground here. but i just had a friend shootthis so that people can see what it looks like when you'reshooting from above. i'm pulled up the rope, sothere's no rope down here, to get in the picture. and it's a fairly difficultclimb, if you're a climber. but it's not crazy. here's a much higher offthe ground shot.
same technique usedto get this. it took us all afternoon to getup here, probably four, four and a half hours, becausewe're 600 feet off the ground. whoops, let me go back. this is devil's tower inwyoming, if any of you guys have ever been there. but pretty amazing position. sharp rock. i've had some incidents withsharp rocks and my ropes
getting cut, so i was prettysketched out in this place because it was over a verysharp rock when i was hanging off here. but i'll get into that herea little bit later. i'll just give you guys a littlebit of my work so you can see what i do. this is another shot of aguy named chris sharma. if any of you guys are climbers,he's probably one of the most famous climbersin the world.
and this is a new sport calleddeepwater soloing. we're in majorca, spain, off thecoast of spain, just south of marseilles. and he is 70 feet off thewater with no rope. so if he falls off from there,he's going to hit the water. it's a 100-foot climb. it's 514. at that time, it was one ofthe hardest climbs in the world, and this is the biggesthold on the climb.
he hung on that hold for20 minutes, twice. so he'd climb in from the side,go to this hold, and then he'd climb out. and then we'd doit over again. it was at dawn. so the base of this route,which you can't see, goes underneath this roof. and there's a 60-foot horizontalroof, literally here back to the door, that hehas to climb out to even get
to this position. and the hardest move is the oneoff that hold to the next hold, which is likesix feet away. he has to jump in thisdynamic move. so some pretty exciting stuff. i'm also an avid ice climber. i mean, i shoot pretty much allfacets of ice climbing, as you've seen. i started shooting mountainbiking after like four or five
years of just shootingrock climbing. i realized i was going to bereally poor if i just kept shooting rock climbing. so i branched out into a bunchof the other sports, and mountain biking was one of thefirst ones i started shooting. this shot may look likeit's at sunset, and the rocks all gold. but this is a strobe. it was a cloudy, overcast day,and i just had a huge
elinchrome ranger strobe thati blasted into this with an orange gel on it to getthis end-of-day look. this is actually an assignmenti shot for adobe when they came out with lightroom, whichis where i met mark, when he was back at adobe. i shot some of the firstpictures for lightroom. and they wanted mountain bikingshots of people going off huge cliffs and doing wildstuff on mountain bikes to download the software.
so we went out to moab, and mygood buddy ryan, who's one of the best mountain bikersout there, that i've known for a long time. this is a pretty classic jumpcalled a mushroom rock. it's only about a 35,40-foot drop. he lands right in here, evenjust out of frame. but it's on rock, so if you messup, you're going to be in the hospital for a long time. so as you can start to see, oneof the coolest things of
my job is i get to see theseamazing feats of athleticism happen in the outdoors. this one's not quiteso dramatic. but this is a shoti shot for nikon. it's the first time i'd evershot jpeg-only for an assignment, because itwas with one of their point-and-shoots. and so they asked me to go shootsurfing and mounting biking with theirpoint-and-shoots.
it was difficult,let's just say. i work with red bulla lot as well. this is danny macaskill. you guys might know him,because he's kind of a youtube superstar. started his career. i'll tell you more about thatstory, because there's a whole set of images ofhim, later on. and i just started shootingsurfing five years ago.
when i wrote my last book onadventure sports photography-- i live in new mexico. so obviously i'm not doinga whole lot of surfing these days. we wanted to include a broadvariety of sports, and surfing is obviously one of the bigadventure sports out there. so i went to california andstarted shooting surfing, and then a fellow photographerfriend of mine, andrew eccles, who's a very famous portraitphotographer from new york,
suggested i call thisguy brian bielmann. so i called him up. and he answered the phone,we had a conversation. i said, hey, can i interviewyou for my book? because i don't really knowanything about surfing photography, other thanjust go stand on a beach with a big lens. and so he was gracious enough togive me all the details for my book of what it takes to bein the water and what lenses
to use and how to set itup and the housings, and all that stuff. and we hit it off. and he's like, hey,you need some more pictures for your book. why don't you just flight outhere one of these days, and we'll go shoot at jaws. and jaws is like the mega-wave,the 80-foot monster off the north coast of maui.
so i was like going crazy. i was like, sure, i'lldo that right away. whenever the next wave comesup, i'll hop on a plane to get out there. so jaws didn't come upfor a little while. but he called me back the nextweek and said, pipeline's going to be up at 20feet next week. or it wasn't next week, itwas a few days from then. so i hopped on a plane, iwas there in 12 hours
and shot with him. we hit it off, and we've beenclose friends ever since. and he's kind of been my entreeinto the surfing world. because i'm not really competingfor his clients. i'm shooting surfing for theseother companies like nikon and apple and other companies thathe doesn't really shoot for, since he's shooting for, specifically, the surf industry. but this just happens to be a55, 60-foot wave in waimea
bay, the last eddie aikau. if anybody here's asurfer, they'll probably remember this. the biggest surfingcompetition in the history of surfing. amazing waves. and i went with him to tahitilast year, just shooting for this book and also foranother client. and you shoot froma boat there.
the waves weren'tnearly as big. but it was pretty amazingin terms of the perspectives you could get. i've also shot a fair bitof whitewater kayaking. let's see what elsewe got here. this is another shotfrom the race. this is, again, in patagonia insouthern chile, hundreds of miles from civilization. and that's in summer, withstill a lot of snow.
a little bit of backpacking. i also have some shots, somearticles for clients where basically, they just want aphotographer who can do crazy stuff that other photographersprobably wouldn't do. so for this, it was for "men'sfitness magazine." and they had me hanging off the bottomof this helicopter, flying over the ocean, and all kindsof crazy shots, which i'll talk about that in moredetail as well. and i'll talk about how this onewas shot as well, because
there was quite a few strobeson this image. so a little bit of yoga. this was for patagonia, a clientjust down the way. and living in new mexico, i'veshot at the balloon fiesta a few times, and i've gottena few decent images. little landscapeshere and there. this was in the waimea bay,shot at the same time that 60-foot wave was happening. this was the day before.
so this is a little pie chartthat's in the book. and there was a few of thesethat were running around before i made this one up. but i just made this up togive kind of the reality. because everybody has thisperception that, oh, your job's so glamorous. and i'm always flyingoff to somewhere, this or that or whatever. so they have no sympathy.
which is ok. they don't need to haveany sympathy. but it just gives you a muchbetter idea of how much time goes into marketing, how muchtime goes into working up the images, networking andaccounting, all the other little things we doas freelancers. definitely would say thatfreelancing, it's an up-and-down job. some years, like the last threeyears, i've been off the
charts busy, just flying fromhere to there to there to here, it seems, everyother week. and that's exhausting. sometimes it slows down a littlebit more, so you're not as busy and you need to startdoing some other stuff. so anyway, i'm definitelynot creating images 65% of the time. traveling to exotic locations,every once in a while. tahiti might be the firsttruly exotic location.
i don't know. patagonia's fairly exotic, butnot quite the way people would think, because it's usuallylike 45 to 55 degrees and raining sideways. so it's not very enjoyable,necessarily. i don't know that i've everpartied like a rock star, maybe not since college. and even then. before i go on a shoot,i think one of the big
differences, i find-- because i teach somephoto workshops-- between amateur photographersand professional photographers is the amount of preparationthey do before a shoot. that's not to say that amateurphotographers aren't doing the same amount of preparation. some of them are. there's a ton of amateurphotographers out there getting amazing images, as wesee on the internet every day.
but the average professional,i mean, for myself, i have what i call a shot list. it's not always in a book ornot always handwritten. sometimes it's typed out. sometimes it's on my iphone. and i've talked with a clientor i've talked with whoever i'm going to be shootingin that area. and i've seen what they can door what's going to happen, to some degree.
and i can start creating ideasand think in my head, what kind of shots do i want? and i'll have a list of20 to 30 shots of things i want to get. i'm not going to get all them. i almost never getall of them. it's just something to helpme plan out the image. so say it's a shootin new mexico. i will sometimes go scoutthe location.
if i can scout the locationat all, i'll do that. and that definitely helps. because then i can be, like,this is going to be the perfect angle, and it hasto be here at sunrise. and you can kind of plan outyour shot and figure out, well, can i use my speedlights for this? do i have to bring out thebig guns, a giant strobe? it's going to weigh a couplehundred pounds with all the other gear associatedwith that.
will i need assistance? that just kind of helps setyou up for success. and i do everythingi possibly can-- checking the weather. i can almost predict whereclouds are going to go, just by looking on noaa's website,and figure out that stuff. so is it going to be crappyweather that day? should we come backa different day? if i'm shooting in the woods--
like say, i'm showing up in theredwoods here, i wouldn't want a sunny day, because thenyou have these bright patches of light coming through theseinto this dark forests. i would look for an overcastday-- which probably wouldn't be that difficult to find here,some times of the year-- so that the light's alittle more even. stuff like that. and then i do a few shoots. this is actually probably themost well-known athlete i've
ever shot for the mainstream. this is camilo villegas. he's one of the top 20golfers in the world. and it was shot for state streetglobal advisors, which is a financial firm. i had 45 minutes toset up for it. and i shot 12 images in amatter of 24 seconds. the art director came over to meand he whispered in my ear, he said, you've got 10 shots.
make them count. and he was watching, because iwas tethered to the laptop. he was watching everyimage come in. so there was like thisinsane pressure. they had the layout. they had everything dialed in. our lighting was dialed in. for that 45 minutes,we had a stand-in. so i wasn't worried aboutthe lighting.
but it was just like-- [snap]. they were shooting a $4 millioncommercial the same day they were doing this. so i had seconds, literally, toget the images before they had to go off and keep shootingthe commercial. so there's a bit of pressuresometimes. this is a different versionof that image. and you can tell-- he does thislittle spider pose to
kind of assess the greens. super cool guy. he's probably the fittestgolfer i've ever seen. he's basically doing like aone-armed push-up there. but you can see herehow that was shot. so i'll just go backto that image. there's a light infront of him. so there's a light coming infrom kind of this angle, and there's two lights behind him.
it was fairly windy that day,but you can see there was these clouds behind here. there was a storm moving in. the winds were startingto pick up. when we got to the location-- i couldn't scout it first,because it's on this really fancy green. the accenture golf tournamenthappens there in tucson. it's some mega-tournament thatwas happening that day, or
later that weekend. and they wouldn't let us takeanything onto the greens. so no lightstands, notripods, no nothing. and so i was like, ok, whatare we going to do? but well, i figured,he's in this pose. we just laid everythingon the ground. put soft boxes on the lights,laid them on the ground. had different people come holdthem, because the wind was blowing everything away.
laid the laptop on the ground. put my jacket over it so the artdirector could watch the images as they came in. and we figured itout on the fly. and the lighting diagramis something like this. pretty simple set-up. just took a little timeto figure it out. here's another image,just to talk about some of these images.
this is the finished image. this was actually shotnot in a studio. he's a free diver. this was taken in new mexico. there's a place calledblue hole. and he had just dove to thebottom of blue hole, which is like 100 feet down, holding hisbreath for, i don't know, a couple minutes. he works with the cousteausociety a lot, nico danan.
he's on the cover of the book. good guy. so i told him after thedive-- the location was not super scenic. and the water was frigid. and i didn't have an underwaterhousing with me that day, so i told him, look,i'm going to set up this little studio over here. just get out of the waterand come straight over.
and so the studio was set up. i just basically taped a whitebackdrop in the entrance-way to the men's bathroom. so it was pretty hilarious. it was a tiny little area. i mean, in fact, the lengthof the men's bathrooms is probably not much longer thanthe width of that image. so it was a tiny little area. and i shot this.
this is pretty much thelighting diagram. there wasn't all thisother stuff. there were no standsor anything. it was just taped to the whitebackground of the wall. there was a light behind himthat was shining onto the background, to illuminatethe background so it'd be pure white. and then i had a shoot-throughumbrella on a strobe. basically it was rightabove my head.
and literally, he was onlythree feet away. this was shot with a17 to 35mm lens. so he was only like three feetaway from me, really close. and that's the shot thatcame out of the camera. which i have to say, asa pro, that sucks. and that's not going towin any awards at all. so i knew this technique waswhat i was going for. it was a high-contrastblack-and-white technique. so i knew when i was shootingwhat i wanted
to do in the end. so that's why i shotit this way. and i knew it was going tobecome this high-contrast black-and-white image thatlooks like that. so with a little bit ofpost-processing, this is what i did to it in lightroom. basically, i converted it to ahigh-contrast black-and-white. i cranked the contrastup a little bit, crunched the blacks.
you can still see there'slike a few things. i think this is a hot pixelfrom my camera. i can't remember what that is. i cleaned up his face a littlebit in photoshop. and here you can seethe final image. so there's some cleaningup of the face. i did a little stuffdown here. did a little fancy footwork withthe unsharp mask to give it a little more crunchiness.
this is before the clarityslider in lightroom. and this is what i came up with,which is a pretty cool portrait, i think, because itcatches a moment where he's kind of in this weirdzone of just having come out of the water. and the funny thing is, i tooka bunch of portraits of three or four differentguys that day. and they all said i got them. which you know, in theparlance of portrait
photography, people talk about,oh, we got their soul, or whatever. that's total crap. you can't get anybody'ssoul on film. it's just you can get a piece ofthem, maybe, that they can relate to, or they see a pieceof themselves in the image. and that's what they weresaying, that we could get a piece of them in theimage somehow. here's a rock climbing image.
and there was the lightingdiagram for this earlier. this is a climber namedtimmy fairfield. this was shot probably anhour and a half from my house in santa fe. and i had been to this locationa bunch of times before, so i didn'tneed to scout it. we'd been talking aboutthis image for years. so talk about preparation. we had been thinking about thisimage for a long time.
he has been, historically,one of the best climbers in the world. he's an amazing climber. this is a super hard route. it was 98 degrees the day wedecided to do this in i think it was august. and i had to carry 200 poundsof lighting gear up into this cave. i didn't have an assistant thatday, because we were just
trying to do it-- it was just a portfolio shoot. i didn't have a clientfor this image. it was just something i wentout and wanted to do. and he's sponsored by a wholebunch of companies i've worked for, so i thought, oh,after the fact, we'll sell this image. no big deal. so we got up in the cave.
we waited. the whole idea was to get aset-up with the lights and everything and thenwait for dusk. you know, that 15 minutes afterthe sun went down and the clouds are illuminatedin the background is what we wanted. and we got it. didn't take that long toset up the strobes. as you can see here, there'sjust two strobes set up.
all the strobes that i haveare battery-powered. these are older dynalite ones. and one of them had what'scalled a spot grid on it. and that focuses the lightto a certain area. you see how that's carved outup there and it goes black really fast? that's kind of showingyou where the spot grid is hitting. and this other one, i took thespot grid off and just filled
in this area over here inthe cave that was dark. the other thing you probablywouldn't know is this is shot with a fisheye. because there's no straightlines in the cave. the cave wasn't huge. the cave was probably about thesize of this room, and the opening probably not too muchbigger than floor-to-ceiling over there. but with the fisheye, i couldmake it look more voluminous
than it actually is. and here's danny macaskill. i was talking to youguys, he was the backflip picture earlier. red bull, one my first jobs forred bull was with this guy danny macaskill. and he had just signed with redbull like the day before. his life turned over ina matter of months. because he's from scotland.
he was working in a bikeshop as a mechanic. and he and his roommate decidedto make a video. and this kid's been ridingsince, i don't know, two or three years old. i don't know how long he'dbeen riding a bike. but he did this video wherethey're riding along a spiked fence and doing all thesecrazy things. you've probably seen it,because everybody-- my grandmother saw it and knew whothe guy was before i did
the assignment. i was kind of blown away. but basically, he got like thesecond-highest number of youtube hits in two weeks,at that point. and next thing he knows,he's on oprah. "the new york times" is doingarticles with him. he does a volkswagencommercial. he's being asked to do movies. his life changed overnight.
he's the nicest kid. so it's pretty cool to seehow that worked for him. in this example, we went on anaircraft carrier in san diego. he was visiting sandiego, because his sister lived there. and so red bull set up that wecould get on this aircraft carrier by ourselves. and you know, as soon as we goton the aircraft carrier, it's like a museum.
they wouldn't letus do anything. so we were just taking picturesof him hopping like little security ropes, whichfor him is boring. so he suggested, hey, cani go up there and stand on those boxes? and the guy that was taking usaround was like, yeah, sure, i don't think you can hurtanything doing that. so he goes up there, and he getson top of this box over here and he pops a wheelie.
and he's told the guy and he'stold us earlier today, i'm more comfortable on my bike thani am on my own two feet. there's an 80-footdrop right here. and the boxes arelike this wide. so he's sitting,pops a wheelie. and the guy's standinglike right here. and i'm not really shootingtoo much, at this point, because it's like, is he justgoing to sit there? i mean, what arewe going to do?
so then he hops from one boxto the other and then hops off the box. and the art director is standingright next to me. and she says, his t-shirt, wecan't see any branding, because he's wearing a helmet. and red bull's all about havingbranding in their images, as you saw withthe red bull stratus project here lately. so she has a whole box fullof t-shirts and stuff.
she was like, we got to put at-shirt on him, so you can see the red bull logo bigger. so to get up to this place,you've got to go in here and go up there and dothis and do that. so the guy had to come down tohelp usher her up to there. and as soon as he left, dannyjust started going nuts, just like doing all these tail whipsand back-flips, and going from box to box. and that's when i just blastedaway and start
shooting this stuff. you know, working this image up,it looks exactly like this in the camera. so most of my images, i'd say,they look like this, the way i'm showing them to younow in the camera. there's just a few i'll show youthat took these huge leaps and bounds in terms of howthe processing is done. later in the day, wewent to these. these were over by theairport in san diego.
but we'd found the day before. i spent a whole day with dannyscouting, because he'd never been to san diego before. this is just an example of howscouting can help you out. and we found these, because idrove right by them when i came into town. i was like, wow,those are cool. i wonder if he could do aback-flip off of them. and there was literally cars--
it was like rush hour. there were cars just packedaround this island, right in front of the airport. and i thought, there'sno way they're going to let us do this. we're going to have thecops on us in seconds. anyway, we go out there. he does this like fivetimes to feel it out. he couldn't get it rightoff the bat.
but after like five tries, hecould do it on command. and so we had him do it. i pulled back, shotone like this. and then i did a closer up. at one point, there was a copthat pulled up over there. and i just put my camera ownand started walking away, because i thought, that's it. we're done. and danny did itone more time.
and the cop was like,yeah, man! that's awesome! so i was like, ok, let'skeep shooting. [laughter] michael clark: earlier in theday, we'd been kicked out of a few places already. i mean, there was some-- i think it was a retirementhome or something. we had him jumping offthe top of this--
i don't have the pictureof that one-- the top of this little gazebo. and somebody went ballistic andcalled the cops on us, and we had a huge drama. but anyway the nature of thebeast with that kind of stuff. one of the other red bull shootsi did was this stuff with the red bull air force. and most of the base jumping--does everyone know what base jumping is?
base jumping is where you leapoff of some fixed thing, like a bridge or an antennaspan or a huge cliff. this is in utah. and i promised those guys iwouldn't tell people exactly where it's at, because this isone of the most dangerous base jumps in north america. it's in very southern,very remote utah. i'll just say that. it's a 3,200-foot cliff.
and we had a helicopter. it was a pretty big expense. "abc news," "nightline" wasdoing a piece on these guys and how they deal withdanger and stuff. and so it was a huge kind ofthing. they had like seven guys from "nightline" outthere filming this. there were three jumpers. if you've seen the last"transformers" movie, these are the three guys that were in"transformers 3," jumping
through downtown chicago. anyway, these guys areincredibly talented. they've done like17,000 jumps. it's not like they just walkout there and put a suit on and jump off a cliff. so we get out there, and theweird thing with this shoot is i was going to be therefor three days. we were supposed toshoot at dawn. it was howling like 70 miles anhour wind, all night, all
day the day before. and the morning we wokeup, it was like 60 mile an hour winds. this is not going to happen. you're not jumping off a cliffin 60 mile an hour winds. so somehow the winds died downto like five miles an hour at 10 o'clock. so we thought, let'sgo for it. the helicopter came upfrom salt lake city.
and we got up to thetop of the cliff. and they got three jumps ineach, which is pretty amazing. then the wind started upa couple hours later. the guys from abc requested thatthey use smoke canisters so they could actuallysee them. there was one abc filmcameraman on top. and there were a couplelying down at the bottom, 3,000 feet away. so you can imagine, 3,000feet away, it's a
freaking dot in the sky. you can't see anything. and for me, there was really noshot from the ground that was going to be that exciting,as a still photographer. so i elected to go up tothe top with them. they had another cameramanshooting from a helicopter. but it was tough, because theseguys are moving so fast after they fall off the cliff. they're going like 120 milesan hour within a second.
so anyway, what i didis, there's all these little bushes. and being a climber, that's whyi went up top, because i thought i could rappel off thetop of the cliff and kind of be underneath themas they come over the edge of the cliff. so we get up there. there's not a singlerock in sight. there's nothing to tie offto, except for these like
two-foot-tall bushes. and they're like this thick. so what did i do? i tied off like 15 of them. and i slowly down-climbed overthe edge of the cliff down to a little ledge, never weightingthe rope fully. because i was like, that's notgoing to hold anything. anyway, it was a littleexciting, in that respect. and they jumped with thesecanisters, which the bad thing
about these canisters were,they'd have to pull it before they jumped. and there's like thislittle platform. it's like standing on theedge of this table on a 3,200 foot cliff. and they've got to kind ofcompose themselves after they pull the cork beforethey jump. and so they're just basicallyjumping out of a cloud. so you can't even really tellwhat's going on in the image.
they each went individually,too, because it was a little windy. so it wasn't one of those jumpswhere they could all three go at the same time. and hence, i didn'tmount any remote cameras because of that. let me back up for a second. the other fact is-- you can'tsee it in this image, necessarily.
like 1,000 feet down, basically,the first thing they do is they go to the edge,they drop a rock, and count how many secondsit takes for the rock to hit the ground. well, this one, in five seconds,hit a ledge that was 60 feet wide, flat,1,000 feet down. so they're like, we've got tostart flying away from the wall within five seconds. otherwise we're goingto hit that ledge at
100 miles an hour. and then right after theyget away from the wall, it's the canyon-- you'll see from thenext picture. so the ledge is hard to see. it's down here. and the canyon looks reallywide at this point. this is a fisheye shot. they had to make a 90-degreeleft-hand turn right after
they get away from the ledgeso they don't fly into the other side of the canyon. so super technical drop, whichis why they told me not to tell anybody the location. they only did it three times,because it was so technical. they said it was like a tripleblack diamond ski jump. anyway, so the second timearound, after begging them not to use the smoke canisters,they didn't use the smoke canisters.
and that's when igot this shot. and to improve my odds ofgetting shots-- because literally for this assignment,i had nine seconds to get the images. because after second,they're gone. it's over. and they each went threetimes, so three times three, nine. so i had two remote camerasset up on either side.
and then i would shoot withone camera and had a pocketwizard radio transmitter triggering those other cameras. so at least i would get threeangles of view on each jump. and this is the one igot with my camera. and that seemed to be thebest shot of the day. but pretty amazing, goingout these guys. i was trying to follow them witha 7200 as they went down the cliff line.
i only got like 1 out of 12shots where the guy was even in the frame, because theywere moving so fast. and that just kind of showsyou the trajectory. this is the same guyas he goes down. so what ended up happening,i think they got 90 seconds of air. and they landed somewhereright out there on this riverbed. so you can see that it's crazywith these guys are doing.
it's amazing. i mean, people ask me, likeall these extreme sports that i do. this is the only sport i'vephotographed that i would ever call extreme. all the other adventure sportsseem pretty doable. this one, as a climber,i wanted to jump off that cliff bad. i really thought, man,this is so cool.
but you know, i'd have to spendthe next three, four years of my life dedicated tothat sport to do it safely. and this is a shot of one of theguys, miles daisher, being interviewed. super passionate guy. interesting thing, theseguys are all married. one of them has kids. all their wives were basejumpers or had done parachuting at one point.
so they understood the game. and they were basically askingthem all these questions about, well, how do youguys deal with risk? do you talk about this withyour wives and stuff? there's been a few of theirfriends die in the last few years at red bull as well. so it's dicey. but you know, these guys havethe experience to make it safe, or at least dealwith the risks.
so on to surfing. as i said earlier, i met brianbielmann through my book, a surf photographer. he's been shooting surfingfor 25 years. inside the surf world, theycall him the godfather of surfing photography. anybody and everybody he'sbeen on trips with. he was close friends withandy irons, who died a couple years ago.
this shot is a shot i got one ofthe first times i went out to hawaii and shotat pipeline. and i have to say, pipeline,it's amazing, this wave. and it's not amazing that it'sso famous, because it's such a perfect wave. it's really closeto the beach. this was shot at like9 o'clock at night. it was practically dark. but i just used a reallylong shutter speed.
and i shot maybe 200, 300 imagesto get this one, where there's something just alittle bit sharp there. another shot at pipeline. this was during the pipelinemasters, or pipe masters competition. yet another shot at pipeline. and my second trip out to thenorth shore of oahu, i got really lucky. because i had scheduled thistrip like a month or a month
and a half in advance. so being that far in advance,i had no clue if there would be waves. i just thought, you know what? i need more surf pictures. i'm going to go out there, stayfor two weeks, and see what happens. and this was the day before. when i got there, igot off the plane.
as i was driving to brian'shouse on the north shore, like an hour away, there were allthese warnings on the radio, like, we've never seen a stormof this size coming in. board up your home if youlive on the beaches. we're evacuating all beachfrontproperty, because we're expecting 60 to 80-footwaves in waimea bay. i was like, that soundshorrific. but it might be great forsurfing, so anyway. michael clark: as it happened,you know, like four or five
days later-- i can't remember exactly howmany days after i got there-- there started getting 20 to30-foot waves in waimea bay. and there's a contestheld every year. it's the quiksilver in memoryof eddie aikau. and eddie aikau was a lifeguardon the north shore, a very famous lifeguard,hawaiian lifeguard, who would swim out in basicallyany size waves. and he saved people in hugewaves that got caught in some
of these waves. so the whole event is namedafter him, sponsored by quiksilver-- hence the strange name,if you're not familiar with surfing. and the deal with the eddieaikau is the waves have to be 20-foot hawaiian or bigger. so the way they talk aboutwaves in hawaii, which is different than everywhere elsein the world, is that they
measure the back of the wave,not the front of the wave. so a 20-foot wave in hawaiianis 40 feet or more front of the wave. so like, here in california,you would measure the waves from the front, so you wouldhave maybe a six or seven-foot wave on an average decent day. for this event to even run, ithad to be 40-foot waves on the wave faces. so here's a good 30-footerthe day before the event.
and just to show you howthis one was worked up. this is the final image. i'm with a 900-millimeter lens,maybe 3/4 of a mile away from the wave, standingon the shore. unless you're on a jet ski orsomething out there, there's not really any wayto get out there. you can swim out, but once thewaves start getting this big, it gets a little exciting. so anyway, this giant wave.
there's a ton of salt spraybetween me and that. so this is how the imagecame out of the camera. again, nothing to writehome about. but i knew this was going tohappen, because there was just so much water vapor betweenme and the wave. so in lightroom, this is howi manipulate the image in lightroom, basically adjustingthe contrast sliders and kind of bringing the contrastand color saturation back into the image.
and this is how it changed fromlightroom to photoshop. so it's a very slightdifference from lightroom to photoshop. if you know photoshop, it'sbasically just a levels adjustment and a little bit offine-tuning on the saturation there to get that. but coming from that, that's apretty amazing difference. apple ended up using thisimage a few years ago to promote their macbooks, ithink, on their website.
so this is the actual day ofthe eddie aikau event. these guys-- this is a smallwave from that day. this maybe only a 30--or, i don't know. that's probably a 40-footer. it's hard to tell, because youcan't see the bottom of the wave, because at this point, thewave hasn't even formed, just as he just took off,the top of the wave. and you can tell, he's nottouching anything except for the spray at theback of there.
he didn't hit thewave until here. so pretty much everybody thatwas catching waves-- and they weren't using jetskis this day. there's no jet skis allowedin the competition. so they were paddling intothese waves, which are technically some of the biggestwaves ever paddled into by human beings. so he free-fell off the top ofthe wave for 15 to 20 feet before he even hit the water.
and at that point, the water waspretty much vertical until he got to the bottomof the wave. and this is a smaller wavefrom earlier in the day. so you kind of see, here'sa little bigger wave, later in the day. this is like a 55-foot, maybe. it's hard to tell. 55 to 60, 50 to 60 range,somewhere in there. it's sunny garcia.
this is definitely one of thebiggest waves of the day. they were all kind of in that50 to 60-foot range, for the biggest waves of the day. but for paddling into a wave,that's just monster size. anyway, this is also shotfrom the shore. pretty much lookedjust like this. this was a little clearer thanthe day before, so there wasn't as much water vapor. i think i was using a is 500f/4 with a 1.5 on it.
so it was basicallya 750 millimeter lens, and a motor drive. this is a shot of andy irons. and this is kind ofa weird shot. the funny story with this-- we were sitting on one pointright in front of the wave when i was shooting someof those earlier shots. and then at another part ofthe day, i walked over to completely the otherside of the wave.
and there was only me and oneother guy, shooting video with a giant red camera. so i was the onlyguy over there. and what would happen is, thewave breaks about 3/4 of a mile offshore, collapses,then reforms, then collapses, then reforms. and that last wave is basicallya beach break. and it's like 50 yardsoff the beach. and those are very rare, tocatch a barrel doing that.
so this is a picture of andyirons catching that barrel right on the beach. he was one of only two guysthe whole day to catch a barrel right on the beach. i was the only guy toget the shot, so. when i was editing 3,000, 4,000shots later that night, i was zipping through them,and my friend brian was looking over my shoulder. and he saw this image.
and i'm like, that's horrible. look at all thatjumbled water. it's not very aestheticallypleasing. like, mike, you don'tunderstand. this doesn't happen! this is andy irons on a beachbreak wave in the eddie aikau. so he pimped out this image,and it got published all over the place. and because i'm not a surfer,i didn't know that this was
like some iconic image. i still look at it, and i'mlike, that's not very good compared to, you know,one of this. but you know, that's justnot knowing this sport. so last year. while writing this book, i'vewanted to go to tahiti for a long time, and brian told me,mike, if you want to get the best surfing images you evergoing to get in your whole life, go to tahiti.
because you can sit on thiswave break, teahupo'o-- or cheo-pu is how thelocals call it. breaks right off the shore,it's like a mile off the beach on a reef. the reef is literally like afew feet under the water. and it's right in frontof the wave. so if the wave's braking wherethe wall is back there, 40 feet away, the reef'sright here. so if you make a mistake,you're going to
pay for it big time. people have had their facesripped off there. a lot of people havedied there. "teahupo'o" means "brokenskulls" in tahitian. so those are some tahitiankayakers. kayaking is a hugesport in tahiti. when i got there, i wasbasically writing the book sitting on a beach. you know, the beginning of thetrip was fairly glamorous,
because i was sitting on thebeach, writing the book, whatever, doing nothing inthis tiny little fishing village on the opposite sideof any tourist thing. and you had to staywith locals. there was no hotels on this sideof the island, so it's very difficult to stay over onthat side of the island. but literally, the villageis named teahupo'o too. and the wave is basicallyright here. and you can see, it'stotally flat.
there was nothing happeningwhen i first got there. so i was just shootingpictures of whatever the first few days. and this is the wave. the wave isn't very big in thispicture, even though you can't tell it. this is probably a sevenor eight-foot wave. it just looked really coolfrom that perspective. and the deal was this wave isthat it's so far out to sea,
you're either on a jet ski, orin a boat, or you're swimming. because you can't shootit from shore. you can barely even see it fromshore, unless it's huge. so you're going over theshoulder of the wave every time it's coming by. and that's what washappening here. i was in a boat. and here's just an idea. you can see some of thephotographers swimming.
and this is a little bigger. it's an overhead wave, maybe8 to 12 feet tall, decent-sized wave. the trick with this wave,though, is it moves incredibly fast. so even though it's not as bigas some of the bigger waves in hawaii, the back of the wave ispretty much level with the top of the wave. so it sucks it off the reefand just snaps down like a
shark's mouth on topof the surfer. so even catching the wave isreally difficult, because it forces it up so fast. so it's a very hard wave. and there's not many peoplesurfing this wave, unless they're pro surfers, whenit gets to this size. also, being a photographer inthe water is pretty sketchy here, because remember, thatreef's just in front of you. and if you get pushedonto that reef, it's
going to be a bad day. i saw a few photographers cracktheir camera housings and come back bleeding. here's a little bigger wave. the bottom of the wave is stilllike five feet below where he's at right there. this was another surfingcompetition. i shot these before the surfingcompetition started. this was shot from the boat.
and you can tell i'm above hisposition, because we're already up on the shoulderof the wave looking down into the wave. the day before the competition, they had the top-- i think it's 36 surfersin the pro series. they had what they calleda free surf. it's the first time they'dever done it in tahiti. so basically all thepro surfers could
come out and surf. and it was a decent day. it was probably 20-footwaves on the face. this is kelly slater. he put on an exhibition. it's like he barelyeven touched his surfboard that day. everybody was just sittingthere, like, how did he do that?
he was just cruisingall over the place. another picture of kellyon teahupo'o. so you can see the back of thewave just keeps going. it doesn't like go down,like you would normally see on a wave. there's an insane amount ofvolume snapping over you. so if you mess up, there'shuge consequences on this wave, even though it's smallerthan your average wave. now getting back toland-based stuff.
i did another shot for redbull with paragliding. and this guy-- oh, what's his name? i can't remember. he was training for the transalprace in europe. and basically, we did theshoot in salt lake city. for this race, you have to hikeor fly from somewhere in austria all the way to southern france, through the alps.
so it's an insane race. so he's super fit, and wedid this photo shoot in salt lake city. this is the first strobedimage of a paraglider, i think, that's ever been done. i'd never seen one before,and we tried to do it. so i'm standing on a ridge withan assistant strobing him in early morning light. and you can tell thebackground's blurred, because
i'm using a long shutterspeed to bleed it in. this is another one. chris santacroce is the otherparaglider we were shooting. he's doing what's calleda wingover. so he's flying over thetop of his wave. not recommended. he's one of the few guysin the world who could even do it. and we had all these problems,just, you know, being a pro
again, it rained entirelythe first day. so that's why i shotthis portrait. we just shot portraits theentire first day, because it was just pouring outside. then the next day, we got luckywith some light and lots of clouds and stuff. and then the third day, i gotto go up in a paraglider and shoot from paragliderto paraglider, which was kind of fun.
i'm not sure the imagewas as good as some of the other ones. and then we flew over someof the mountains above salt lake city. so just to show yousome variety. i think i'm runningout of time here. so i'll go a little faster. here are some of the imagesfrom this "men's fitness" article with a helicoptersearch and rescue team.
these guys are up in santarosa, the henry one. and this is one of theirguys hanging 100 feet off the bottom. they basically pluck people outof the ocean, pluck people off cliffs. so i positioned one of thecopilots on one of their training runs on this littlecliff, and you know, inched him out a little more than hewas probably comfortable with. then i hung off thecliff below him as
they picked him up. this is an interesting thing. i'd just gotten the newnikon d3 and d700. and it was like 9:30 at night. there was basicallyno light left. so i thought, these things aresupposed to be great, these high isos, let's try it out. so i slapped my 7200 on there,cranked it up to iso 6400,
shot like 50 shots ofthis helicopter going across the ocean. and i had a walkie-talkie so icould kind of control where they were going tosome degree. and amazingly, i got a shotthat was in focus and not completely blurred. and this image, i thinkthere's two strobes, a headlamp, and a speedlight. i just saw this scene and theywere putting on their night
vision goggles. and i thought, let's go aheadand get something here. and 20 minutes later,i had it set up. and the last little piece wasthat i couldn't really get light to his face. it was hitting thispilot's face. so i just had him hold myheadlamp, which i pretty much always have in my camera bag. and that's what this arm isdoing, holding a headlamp in
front of the heads-up displayto finish off the lighting. i think i'll zip through afew other images here. there's a good storywith this one. this is when i was shootingthe patagonian expedition race, which is the adventurerace i was telling you guys about earlier. we ended up in the middle ofnowhere after hiking for four days, raging seas. this fisherman and his sonwere in this little bay.
this is in the magellanstrait. it's at the very southern tipof south america in chile. and there were three of us--myself, another photographer, and a writer-- and then a chilean guidewho was with us. we were all about togo hypothermic. because they had pulled us outinto this bay, said, we'll pick you up in this boat, we'lltake you to the end of the race to cover this otherpart of the race.
anyway, they never showed up,but this boat was there, by some miracle. because we're still 600miles from anything. and so we call overto their boat. they pick us up. we end up spending 36 hourswith these guys. and this is angel, he's 54, andhis son steve, who is 36. both of them look likethey're about 83. they were very weatheredfaces.
he spent 15 hours a day underthe ocean in a one-inch wetsuit, which you can see,cutting this stuff called luga, in spanish. i think it's red algaeis what it was. we never really figured outexactly what it was-- off the bottom of the ocean,breathing out of a garden hose, no compressor. they had a compressorbut i mean, no regulator or anything.
just a cut-off gardenhose, that was his breathing apparatus. so the second day, he went downand got a king crab for us for lunch. we wanted to photographthese guys working. and they wanted lunch. so we're like, yeah, kingcrab sounds great. so this is him hanging overthe boat, watching us get the king crab.
all right. let me go on here, showthe other images. and just so you can seehow i market myself. obviously the website's homebase to everything these days. i also produce a newsletter,which these are some of the covers of the newsletter. it's a pdf newsletter. they're free on my website,michaelclarkphoto.com, which i'll show here at the end.
you can go download those. those include equipment reviews,stories behind the images, kind of what i've beentalking about, digital tips, editorial-- a whole bunch of other stuff. i started producing these 10years ago as just like a printed one-side, front-and-backmailer to remind my clients istill existed so they'd hire me for jobs.
and now it's exploded into itsown little mini-magazine. it's between 20 and 30 pagesevery time i do it. it's quarterly. and it goes out to about6,000 people now. so it's just a way for me tostay in touch with my clients and also all the subscribersthat sign up for it. and if you send me an email,i'll put you on the list, and you'll get the newsletterwhenever i get around to writing it, which isusually quarterly.
sometimes it's only threetimes a year. and this gives you an ideaof what's in it. like this is a little storyabout that shot. there's equipment reviews ofsome the nikon lenses. there's an interview with"national geographic" photo editor sabine meyer inone of the issues. this is my other book that i wastalking about earlier, the "adventure photography" book. and i also have a digitalworkflow e-book that you can
purchase on my website if you'reneeding some digital workflow help. and that's pretty much it. thank you for having me out. mark: thank you, michael. that was a really good talk. i consider shooting a birthdayparty with five-year-olds about as adventurous asi get, so this is very, very, very humbling.
i appreciate it. so we do have a little bitof time for q&a if folks want to come here. i know you have your book thatyou want to give away. not for free. i think people are going to haveto work for it a little bit, so maybe we'll workthat in as well. but if you do have a question,please come up to the mic. audience: so how many picturesdo you actually
do photoshop work? or what percentage of picturesyou don't edit at all? like how much? michael clark: it varieswith the shoot. so like some of thosesurfing images. surfing, every time a surfer'son a wave, you just hold the trigger down and you're blastingat eight to ten frames a second or more. and so you couldhave thousands.
i think the tahiti trip, i had12,000 images from 10 days of shooting, which is the most ihad ever shot in 10 days. sometimes a portrait, imight take 50 shots. and i might only workup one or two. so it depends on the shoot. with the tahiti thing, i thinki worked up maybe 100. so that trip to tahiti, i onlyworked up 100 images out of 12,000 or 11,000. it's very small, like less than1% probably, 1% to 2%.
it depends on how goodthe shoot was. like that danny macaskill shoot,i think i worked up a few hundred out of acouple thousand. so that was a bigger percentage,just because we got more interesting images. audience: hi, great talk. what percentage of the time doyou think you use like prime lenses, fixed focallength lenses as opposed to zoom lenses?
and have you, in the situationsthat would warrant more of a prime lens kind ofapproach, have you ever considered using differentcameras, such as rangefinder cameras, like leicas andthings like that? because personally, i've foundthe optics to just be ridiculous on a leica,compared to a nikon. michael clark: back in the filmdays, i used to have a hasselblad set-up, which i hadall fixed lenses on that. and i'd use that a fair bit,sometimes even for action.
for my photography now, likemy fisheye is a fixed. i've got an 85 fixed. i've got some tilt-shiftfixed. most of the stuff's shot withzooms, just because it allows me more freedom and to carryless gear, which is sometimes a really big deal. even the telephoto stuff,i have a 200 to 400. so i have a balance. but my zooms are my mainstaysfor a lot of this stuff.
the new nikons arepretty amazing. i mean, they're not leicaquality lenses, but they're not far off, fromwhat i've found. and most of my clients demanddigital, so shooting film is kind of a nightmare, becausethen you have to scan the film and that takes forever. audience: but i mean, leicahas had two generations of digital cameras. and they're comingonto their third.
michael clark: and they'regreat, for sure. but for action photography, theydon't have auto-focus. they're not reallydesigned-- for mountaineering, they're awesome. so it just depends onthe application. so anyway, thank you guys.