This is the first picture I ever had published in the magazine
from a story about La Salle, the French explorer.
We worked on Patagonian dinosaur hunters.
These are dinosaur footprints in Patagonia.
And then the third story I did
was more what you’d think as aNational Geographicstory.
I skied around the Yukon Territory with scientists
and we were studying nunataks
which are the rocky regions that pop through the glaciers.
And we were doing a survey of the animal life on that.
The assignments started to come more frequently.
One year I did six assignments.
This is from a story in Ashkelon in Israel.
This is a story from the Battle of Trafalgar.
And… these are sea scouts
that are looking at a painting on the wall behind me.
This is the first digital photo I ever had in the magazine.
I worked on an impossible story to do. It was called…
you know, “How Old Is It”.
It was about how scientists date and age the universe.
And I had a mathematician we talked to
and he calculated that a three-day old baby is
one-one hundred trillionth the age of the universe.
So, my brother-in-law is a OB-GYN in New York
he hooked me up with somebody who just had a baby.
I shot it on the third day, flew to California,
we were out in the desert and we’re just trying to think
of something that was illustrated
that would make people stop and pay attention.
I think my job quite often is the opposite of a writer.
You know, it’s… they want you tearing through their words and
I want people to stop.
I always want people to stop and just consider
and pay attention to things.
This is from the Xinjiang Dynasty.
These boys had collected river stones
and were going off to build a wall.
I remember this picture well because
there’s a building in the back and
I was standing at that gas station in the back
and I saw them drive by and it’s like,
“Oh, my gosh, that’s such a good picture.”
So, I took off running down the road.
My driver was in the restroom, so I ran down the road
and jumped on, after a quarter mile or so
I jumped on the back of this tractor.
And the guy driving the tractor didn’t realize
the kids didn’t realize. ( audience laughter )
And I’m sitting there and I get the camera up
and I’m shooting pictures.
I’m like, “this is great, the light’s really pretty.”
And I had four frames on my camera.
So I was like, “Argh!”
This was when I’m shooting film.
So I just slowed down and made…
I made four pretty good frames and
it was one of those situations that
I’m happy and lucky that I had this image.
Worked on a story about Doggerland.
A land bridge, during one of the Ice Ages
between the continent and England.
Where the tide– when this goes out
they can find footprints and artifacts.
Some of these places are finding amazing burials.
When things get covered up by silt and water
and things like that that’s actually–
people would think that’s what destroys things
but that keeps the microbes that are in the air away
and things are more well preserved.
I worked on a story on a tomb in Peru
called “Wari Tomb”.
We set there and you know they said,
“hey there might be something here,”
and they completely uncovered it in front of us
and it was clutching that fabric.
It was an amazing thing to see
there’s small tattoos on the wrist and
this fits into a larger body of work that I’m doing.
I photographed about 60 or 70 mummies.
3D printing. 3D printed gun.
You know we were technically trying to figure out
how to capture a bullet.
And it’s really complicated because the strobes have to be
photographed at about one one–millionth of a second
to capture a bullet coming out.
And, you know, there’s no strobe conventionally that can do that.
You’d have to go to MIT, to the laboratory where
‘Doc’ Edgerton invented the strobe.
So we were going to do the best we could
and had these other strobes and he fired the gun
this guy who 3D printed this gun and it exploded.
So, the bullet was slowed down because the barrel exploded.
So, this was the first picture I shot on that assignment.
It was like, looking at it on digital,
“well, that works out pretty well.”
( audience laughter )
That, uhh… happy with that.
I don’t want to get near an exploding gun anyway, so.
And this was the most fun, doing this one.
This is a scanning electronic microscope picture
that I shot of shark skin, and you can see
the shape of shark skin and they built a swimsuit based on that
and it was…
the fastest times in the world was set using that suit.
Ultimately that suit was outlawed because
they would throw it in the water and it would just float
and you can’t, you know, wear a floatation device
they decided– In the mean time
I had an assistant, who was a college swimmer
and he was like, “we should get the
fastest swimmer in the world to wear this.”
I’m like, “Yeah.”
So, he goes, “Oh, it’s Gary Hall, he’s in Florida.
I know where he swims.”
So, he called and within half an hour
Gary Hall had said yes.
So, I was like, “Really?”
So, then it was time to figure out how to do it.
So we did a lot of testing, we got there and tested.
Before… we were being delayed through thunderstorms
and before Gary got in the water
we were doing some testing.
And this is me… ( audience laughter )
swimming. I showed Gary the picture and I was trying to get
You know, ’cause in my mind’s eye
it was like that, it was like–
( audience laughter ) you know, really svelte.
I said, “What do you think?”
And he said, “I think you should keep your hips up.”
( audience laughter )
This is a chart of the Pythagorean Theorem of Light.
I have no idea what it says. Or what it means.
But I had the opportunity to work for a photographer
who did know what it meant.
And I learned more in about a month from him
than I had learned in the entirety of my career.
This is a picture I did for a story about bog bodies
and this is every picture I shot of this on this assignment.
I think I made 87 lighting changes
and there’s 87 pictures.
And then that’s the one we ended up publishing.
Generally, in my work, I kind of stop when I’m happy.
You know, lighting a situation, so I kind of stop when
I think it’s gonna look as good as it’s gonna look, so.
These were hard mummies to photograph because
they are, basically, shiny and black
so, you had different choices on how you’re gonna do it.
This is one of the mummies.
It’s called the river of tar.
And that’s the location where some
of the bog bodies were found.
In the bogs they are finding all sorts of things.
They are finding, you know, shoes, and that’s a peat shovel.
A peat bog shovel from about 2,500 years ago.
Each of these has an individual story.
This is a 14-year old female
that they don’t know why she was in the bogs.
And this is the most famous, this is the Tollund man
who had the leather noose around his neck
and had a leather hat.
You know everybody talks about his peaceful gaze
and the tannin, the soil that he is in
is the thing that has made their bodies so dark.
It’s like tanning a saddle.
They absorb the chemistry and
it’s also what makes their hair red.
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