Read an Excerpt
I wasn’t a photographer at first. In fact, I vaguely recall my first attempt at taking photos for the paper was an unqualified failure. But I definitely remember being curious about the darkroom in the back corner of the newspaper office, with the prints hanging to dry on a clothesline and the cool red light and trays of murky, smelly liquid. Coincidentally my high school required all students to take at least one fine arts class—and photography was an option. I had a chance at the trifecta of checking off a graduation requirement, improving my contributions to the school newspaper and learning how the darkroom worked. You needed to supply your own SLR camera for the photo class and my dad bought me a used Minolta SRT101 from the local camera store.
But black and white darkroom work isn’t for the impatient. Make a mistake and there’s no “undo” button. Start over. Film, paper and chemicals cost money. Developing and printing took hours. Mistakes were expensive and de-motivating. You were either all-in or quickly out.
Like I said earlier: Photography rewards persistence.
Turned out I was persistent enough to get adequately good enough to get encouragement from teachers and peers. I was all-in. It was tricky but measurable. Predictable but ephemeral.
If I had to name a ‘breakthrough’ moment, it happened, coincidentally enough, at the Air Force Academy the summer before my senior year of high school. Even though I knew at that point I was going to apply to Notre Dame, I attended a summer camp at the Academy. One night a moonrise behind the iconic Air Force Academy chapel caught my eye and I took a somewhat unauthorized excursion away from my group to make a photo. I got the “when” slightly wrong and the moon was overexposed (I’d learn a lot more in later years about photographing the moon) but it was the first time I had a specific vision and…more or less…got it on film.
It was probably around that time that I first had the conscious thought of wanting to do photography for a career. In the pre-internet days I had no idea there were any number of colleges that specialized in photography and photojournalism: Western Kentucky, Ohio University, Syracuse, Ball State, even the University of Nebraska right in my home town, just to name a few. Not on that list? The University of Notre Dame. But that worked out to my advantage eventually.
When I arrived at Notre Dame in August of 1990, my cousin Amy Cashore ’92 had already recruited me to work on the yearbook. I photographed my own freshman orientation. The yearbook started me down the road as a photographic generalist. It was an early version of the job I have now. We had a small darkroom on the third floor of LaFortune Student Center. Officially we weren’t allowed to stay in the building past 2am, but sometimes there was too much to get done and I needed to keep cranking away. I played a little game of hide-and-seek with the student building monitors. Not sure if I was a good hider or if they were indifferent seekers but I usually “won” and all-nighters in the yearbook darkroom were definitely part of my college experience.
Until the early 2000s, Notre Dame owned the NBC affiliate TV station on the edge of campus-WNDU-TV. Notre Dame students could do internships for class credit. I wished Notre Dame owned a newspaper instead of a TV station, but a journalism internship at a TV station was better than no journalism internship at all. I learned to shoot and edit video, and as luck would have it, when newspapers weren’t offering me a job, WNDU did. I was the wee-hours-of-the-morning photojournalist/editor. Go in around 3am, chase crimes, fires, weather, or whatever, and get done around noon. That left me all afternoon to do odd jobs for Notre Dame Magazine and others on campus. Eventually, I did enough work for Notre Dame that someone in Accounts Payable must have said, “Just hire him, already…” And in 2007, they did.
So after all these years—two re-gildings, two presidential inaugurations, seven football coaches—isn’t the tank empty? Haven’t I exhausted all possible views of the Dome?
Isn’t it…boring? Nope.
The question I get asked almost as much is what is my favorite thing to photograph and the answer is: “Everything.” Being a university photographer is a perfect job for a generalist. There’s a smidge of everything to do: Landscapes, sports, portraits, feature photos, news photos…I’m rarely bored. There are, I’ll admit, not as many, “Huh…never seen that before…” moments, but those still happen. And even when I have seen it before, there might a chance to share it in a new, different, and better way.
What makes a good photo?
Returning to the “Where vs When” at the start of this text: With a few exceptions, the most critical element in a good photo is good light. After all, “Photography” literally translated means “drawing with light.” The better the light, the better the drawing, right?
But “Good light” doesn’t mean “bright light.” Think of paintings by Caravaggio or Rembrandt, with their pools of light and heavy shadows. The light has a shape and a direction. Good light in nature is usually at the extreme beginning and end of the day when the sun is low on the horizon and diffused—what people often refer to as “Golden Hour.”
There are historically accepted rules on composition—“Rule of Thirds,” “Golden Ratio,” etc.—but of course artistic rules are practically by definition meant to be broken. The one thing I’d include in composition that’s not breakable is a good background. Usually that means a nice sky or uninterrupted color or texture.
When an iconic subject like the Golden Dome combines with perfect light and a dramatic background like a moonrise or passing storm clouds, it all adds up to what I call “The Magic.” I didn’t have a name for it at the time, but that’s what I had with the Air Force Academy chapel: Iconic subject, great light and a dramatic background, and that’s why my job today never gets boring, because the feeling of capturing The Magic is just as satisfying today as it was 35 years ago.
