Sailing Into A New Career
This post is by David Higginbotham whom I worked with for several years at The Decatur Daily. David is now a contract photographer for NASA and a freelancer shooting weddings, portraits and bands. In addition to his photographic skills which are considerable, David is an excellent musician. He is also a good friend. I assist him from time to time on weddings and am continually amazed at his ability.
I got my first job as a photographer at a small newspaper near by hometown called The Athens News-Courier when I was 16. I Freelanced basketball games for $25 a pop. They would give me hand rolled canisters of T-max and in return I would give them sub par photos. However the photos were good enough to get me hired on permanently the month after I graduated high school.
The Courier gig led me to The Decatur Daily in 1998 and I was a full time shooter there until 2003. I was learning all I could from 3 other photographers who had been in the business for as long as I had been in the world (Sorry guys…I know that hurts a little). It didn’t take me long to fall in love with photojournalism. Even in a small market it was awesome! My Noon-9:00pm shift yielded me everything from hostage situations to used cars. In my opinion nothing does more to sharpen the skills of a young photographer than newspaper work. It’s a baptism by fire that makes you learn to deal with more of life’s experiences in a week than a cubicle jockey will in a career.
But much like many photojournalists, I reached a crossroads in my career where I had to make a decision about my future. I had an opportunity to leave the world of photojournalism and venture into a government job. I would still be a photographer….but I would leave the newspaper world behind. I would be more of a cube jockey than I had ever been.
I became a photographer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). It’s hard to describe to people what I shoot at Marshall but to say it is diverse is an understatement. From something as mundane as an awards ceremony to something as exciting as a shuttle launch….we shoot it all.
Here’s the story of one of my most published images. About 3 years ago I was sent to Sandusky, Ohio to photograph prototypes of something called a solar sail. It works on the theory that objects in space can be propelled with a large super light material opened up much like the sail on a boat. Except that instead of wind it used photons from the sun (somewhere an engineer is shaking his head at my poor explanation.) I was taken to the largest vacuum chamber in the world where my job was to take a “glamour shot” of what was basically a Mylar balloon spread over several trusses.
I setup 8 remote flashes underneath of the sail. At the time I didn’t have access to any pocket wizards so I was using a couple of Quantum Instruments radio slaves. The rest of the flashes were firing using their optical slaves so I had to do a lot of playing with angles to make sure everything was “seeing” the other flashes. The vantage point that I used for the first image was from a crows nest type area 123’ above the sail.
The flashes were placed under the sail inside looking out with 4 gelled with blue and 4 gelled with red. The light for the top of the sail came from the ambient light in the room. This worked out great considering that at this point I was completely out of flashes. The next image was shot from something called a spider lift that crawled us up the side of the room. The company who produced the sail wanted to put their people under it to give it scale.
This image actually got published double-truck in Popular Science. This started a chain reaction that wound up in this image being published in several magazines worldwide. Oh and for all of you FotoQuote junkies out there….don’t bother asking the circulation of all these magazines…images I shoot for MSFC are usage free….public domain….free. That’s normally not hard to stomach….but when several magazines give you that kind of play…you start crunching those potential numbers!
Working as a photojournalist in my early years prepared me for all of the amazing opportunities and challenges that I have faced in my career thus far. The things that all of you are learning on Cosby’s blog are invaluable to you especially if you are just getting started in this field. You may not always find yourself shooting the most exciting things but if you take pride in your work you can keep yourself entertained and provide the best possible product for your client/customer/editor.
A special thanks to Gary Cosby Jr. for allowing me this opportunity to write on his blog.
If you are interested in seeing some of my other work, please visit my website at www.davidhphotography.com.
NASA is the source of all images in this post. David Higginbotham’s words
are in no way endorsed by NASA nor do they reflect the views and opinions of
NASA. These words do not reflect a NASA endorsement of any commercial
product, service, or activity.
