It’s Friday afternoon, and to close out my week-long rant against the proposed Adobe Creative Cloud, just in case there are any of you out there who still don’t believe that what Adobe is doing amounts to a straight-up money grab, I offer you this to chew on…

Quoted from a Goldman Sachs research report on the subject:

With the announced update of Adobe’s flagship content authoring tools Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign the company rebranded them Creative Cloud instead of Creative Suite and stated that the new editions would only be available on a subscription basis. Further, the company stated that going forward all new features for these apps would also only be available with the subscription offering. Adobe will continue to sell and support CS6. While our conversations with Max attendees indicate that most found the timing of the move surprising, we view it as likely accelerating adoption of Adobe’s subscription offering…….We believe the lack of VIABLE ALTERNATIVES to the Creative Cloud apps along with the productivity enhancements in the new editions will drive the majority of CS users that are ready to upgrade to migrate to Creative Cloud despite what will likely be a vocal but small backlash.

That was followed with this little nugget:

In a report published Thursday, Goldman Sachs analyst Heather Bellini upgraded the rating on Adobe Systems from Sell to Neutral, and raised the price target from $34.00 to $48.00.

Adobe Systems closed on Wednesday at $44.70.

So…knowing they have the creative community by the balls because of the lack of “viable alternatives” to their applications, Adobe moves forward with the subscription only pricing scheme…and the biggest investment bank in the game upgrades their stock outlook by more than 40% on the news. And yet there are still those who think Adobe has OUR best interests at heart. If this isn’t a wakeup call, then what is?!!

Remember…make sure to head on over to www.change.org and sign the petition to get Adobe to offer us users a choice…they only need a couple hundred more names to hit the magic 15,000 mark!!!

So this morning, Broncolor just sent me an email titled, “10 Things You Should Know About the Broncolor Move 1200L Outdoor Para Kit”, and I hafta say, I’ve been fascinated with this spendy bit of kit since they announced it last year, so I wasted a bit of time and clicked the link. Here’s what you get:

The Super-Dooper-Fast Move 1200 L power pack…

One MobiLED lamphead…

A Para 88 reflector with mounting adaptor…

And a nifty Outdoor Trolley Backpack…

…but after reading the 10 things Broncolor feels we need to know about this light, I came up with the only thing I needed to know…THE DAMN THING COSTS OVER $10 GRAND!!!!!

Actually, to be fair to Broncolor, it’s only $9,354.10…but toss in the tax in New York, and that’ll set you back $10160.89, and that is a stunning amount of cash for a battery powered light and an umbrella!!!

But before you all pile on to tell me how great the thing is and how fast it’s flash duration might be and how it has NO competition out there (How about an Einstein, a PLM and a Vagabond for about $800 bucks?!!), believe me, I know it’s kinda cool, but $10 Grand worth of cool?!!

I dunno…unless I had a winning Powerball ticket in my pocket, it simply seems like a tremendous mis-allocation of funds to me…

…85,000 hits and counting!!!

The past 24 hours at Damn Ugly have been pretty damned busy. We’ve gotten more hits from that Adobe post than just about anything I’ve written about in years! And as I continued scanning the interwebs to see what far smarter folks than me are saying about the entire mess, a came across a treasure trove of information posted by Lloyd Chambers, the Capo di tutti capi of making your Mac computer Ferarri-fast. Lloyd is also known as DIGLLOYD…the driving force behind MacPerformanceGuide.com…and he devoted a few days going over the fine print of the new Creative Cloud scheme, and he’s none too happy about any of it. He breaks down…with a whole lotta very funny & sarcastic asides…a whole mess of stuff I hadn’t even thought of, not the least of which is the particularly heinous contract Adobe expects you to sign prior to joining their Big, Happy Cloud Community. I loved the part where he said that since he actually took the time to READ the contract, when it came to the point at the end where he had to click the ‘ACCEPT’ button, the page had timed out!!! Apparently Adobe never intended ANYONE to actually read what they were gonna give away before signing the thing!

Now a warning…as with my post yesterday, reading through this requires a certain investment in time, but trust me, it’s well worth it! As a public service to all my Damn Ugly groupies, I’m linking to all of what Lloyd dropped over at MacPerformanceGuide.com regarding the cloud. Enjoy!

Adobe Clouds Software Choice (Adobe Creative Cloud Only Going Forward)

Adobe Creative Cloud: Date of Birth Mandatory, Lopsided Legal Agreement

Adobe Creative Cloud: Lopsided Legal Agreement

Adobe Creative Cloud: A Time-Wasting Chat

Adobe Creative Cloud: No Fair Warning Given for Upgrades

Adobe Creative Cloud: Why no ‘Buyout’ or Read-Only Option?

Adobe Creative Cloud: Reader Comments

Adobe Creative Cloud: The Main Point

Adobe Creative Cloud: Summary View

Adobe Creative Cloud: The “Toaster”

Adobe Creative Cloud: Activate/Deactivate and “Phone Home” License Check

And please…if you haven’t done so already, head on over to www.change.org and sign the petition to get Adobe to offer us users a choice!!!

THIS IS NOT THE TYPICAL ‘LIGHT AS AIR’ POST ON DAMN UGLY PHOTOGRAPHY. IF YOU HAVE ANY CONNECTION WITH THE PHOTOGRAPHY, DESIGN, ADVERTISING OR PUBLISHING BUSINESS, I ASK THAT YOU TAKE THE TIME TO READ THROUGH THIS MAGNUM OPUS OF MINE AS I TRULY FEEL IT IS ONE OF THE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS I’VE POSTED SINCE I’VE BEGUN DOING THE BLOG…BRAD TRENT

Last week Adobe announced that, going forward, all of its software products will only be available on a subscription basis. No more perpetual licenses for Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, or any of the applications that make up the Adobe Creative Suite…from now on, users will have to pay a monthly subscription fee forever if they want to use any of these products!

But before I set off on what might get interpreted as a narcissistic rant, let me make my opinion on Adobe’s decision to move to what they are calling a ‘cloud-based’ subscription only licensing model up front and crystal clear…

As a professional photographer who relies on Photoshop just as much as I rely on the digital cameras that produce my RAW files, I believe having to pay an ongoing monthly fee to use the application is an incredibly shortsighted decision by a company that essentially has the monopoly on digital asset management, and if I may quote David Hobby…the Strobist…”feels like the biggest money grab in the history of software”.

I will also say that the majority of what I’ll be talking about relates to Photoshop, since that’s the World I live in. Whether or not users of Adobe Muse, Dreamweaver, After Effects or any of the other applications in the Adobe Creative Suite find added value in paying the new $50.00 monthly subscription scheme, I have no idea. I’m gonna focus on the concept on what an ongoing $20.00 per month subscription means for photographers…

Adobe announced that by moving to cloud-based subscriptions they will have a better handle on software piracy, be able to better update the application as needed, and cut their development and distribution overhead. I can’t speak to their development costs, but as for software pirates, I’m not so dumb to think that if there is a will, there is a way. You can bet there is already a kid in a basement somewhere with a pretty good idea on how to distribute free “Cloud Copies” of piracy-proof software!

With the “Creative Cloud” being the really big news, it came as almost as an afterthought (perhaps to take your mind off the whole subscription thing???) when Adobe mentioned some new features they’ve added to Photoshop…like the Camera Shake Reduction tool, Smart Sharpen, and that you can now apply Camera Raw edits as filters. But let’s forget about any new features, since new features are why you would have paid for an old-school upgrade to Photoshop anyway. New features are a given. The real controversy is that from now on, you won’t have the ability to move forward incrementally as you see fit. In the past, if Adobe trotted out an upgrade to Photoshop that didn’t fit your workflow, you could just keep using the version you had and wait for the next version before you kicked in your money to be up to date. Adobe obviously didn’t like this. They saw it as a money-losing proposition if users didn’t slavishly continue along the upgrade ladder, paying for the privilege, of course. To counter this trend, they even changed their long-standing upgrade policy so that if you didn’t have Photoshop CS5, you wouldn’t be able to move up to CS6. That pissed off a lot of Photoshop users, but I understood it. I’m not against Adobe being able to charge for upgrades to their software, that’s their right. But apparently that wasn’t enough for Adobe. They have obviously decided that a perpetual subscription licensing model is the only way to continue bringing in a substantial cash flow. Assuming that hobbyists and ‘occasional’ photographers make up the vast majority of Adobe’s customer base, do they really expect these people to happily pay a $20.00 per month licensing fee to continue to use Photoshop? And if you can also assume that they will lose a pretty good percentage of that customer base…the casual Photoshop users, or those who decide to switch to Lightroom or Aperture…what are their plans to recover that lost income? Or maybe they’ve already got that figured out, and that is how they came up with the $20/month pricing plan for the Photoshop-only side to their cloud strategy. Maybe the actuaries have figured that since everyone who uses Photoshop doesn’t march over the upgrade cliff every two years, if they were to install a mandatory payment schedule it would ensure their income stream and they could claim the new plan, while more expensive, is actually better because it ensures a much more up to date Photoshop experience (even if the user doesn’t need the new features).

But let’s look at what they are really proposing…

Adobe claims the new “Creative Cloud” strategy “includes everything you need to experiment like never before”, and will allow you to “track comments posted to shared files, keep tabs on your work and your followers on Behance…”, and they drop buzz words like “Collaborate”, “Grow” and “Change” as though they are candies to be gobbled up by sugar-hungry children. I read this and couldn’t help but wonder if they have lost track of what a professional photographers work flow is REALLY like?!! Professional photographers aren’t looking to pay a $50/month license fee to ‘experiment’ with Illustrator, Premiere Pro or Dreamweaver! Professional photographers don’t use Photoshop as a social media tool. We don’t finish off an assignment by hitting the ‘Send’ button so our work posts in real-time on ‘Behance’ (which, in case you missed that press release, is owned by Adobe!). Professional photographers shoot, process, archive and retouch images in Photoshop. We send those images to our clients. And then it’s on to the next gig where we do it all again. I dare say that the overwhelming majority of professional photographers don’t waste too much time worrying about how Photoshop might aid them in ‘sharing’ their assignments on social media sites.

As for the “Creative Cloud” itself, it’s not actually a typical cloud service either. It’s simply an electronic distribution method of getting software to the end user. OK…there are some very minimal cloud services included…cloud file storage, syncing of settings, etc…but electronic distribution of software is hardly a new concept for Adobe. They’ve been selling upgrades for years using this technology. You will still have an actual application on your hard drive, but it will have to ‘call home’ to Adobe every month (or every 99 days for those who pay up front for a yearly subscription) in order to continue to function. What Adobe seems to think makes their cloud more desirable is their ability to issue more frequent updates and patches. In the past they have made patches available as needed and the version upgrades available every 1 to 2 years. With the cloud these feature upgrades can theoretically be added as they are developed. I suppose that is a plus, but again, there are huge chunks of Photoshop I don’t use or need now, so dropping even more features on most users isn’t going to be a make or break decision for most people anyway.

But let’s get to the two awfully huge elephants in the room…the pricing and what happens if you stop paying! After reading Adobe’s claims that the new pricing scheme has an arguably lower annual cost, I guess we’re supposed to all join hands and sing the Adobe Theme Song and be happy for the windfall that has been bestowed upon us. Personally, I don’t believe that paying $240.00 annually to rent a software program adds any value to my business model, but that would be narcissistic, and I’m trying hard not to make this all about me. Adobe is making it abundantly clear that they intend to employ this model to increase a revenue stream they feel they have lost because of those users who don’t upgrade on a regular schedule. We can’t keep going back and forth on that point. However, there is no mention from Adobe what happens after you lose the use of the software once you stop paying. How does a long-time user of an Adobe product access their files if they have stopped paying for a use license? And alternatively, what about your clients who may not have a subscription to Adobe? I guess they will not be able to view your work, unless of course, they decide to pay Adobe for the privilege. I have no issue with a company wanting to profit from their product. Adobe deserves to be paid for their marketing and R&D when it comes to all of their software, but under the old model if you stopped paying for upgrades to the new version, Adobe didn’t take away your software license on your old version! Stopping an upgrade cycle didn’t mean you couldn’t open a file you processed fifteen years ago! And believe me, if you get on the Adobe subscription licensing model train, if you get off that’s exactly what will happen with all of your work. It will become useless digital trash. The only way to continue to access your work is to keep paying the subscription license. And that is just wrong.

With this new decision to implement a subscription only licensing model, Adobe is in fact trying to change they way software licenses as we know it work. But is there something so totally broken with the idea of paying an initial fee for the license and then paying a scheduled upgrade/maintenance charge? As long as the user pays the maintenance charge, you continue to get the upgrades. If you stop paying the maintenance, you lose access to NEW upgrades, but your software will still function as you expected it would when you signed on. And I have nothing wrong with the idea that if the user stops paying the maintenance fee for a certain period, the user would then have to start over and re-purchase the base license if they want to continue along the upgrade path. I just had to do this when I moved from FileMaker version 5 up to version 12. I hadn’t the need or the want to pay for annual upgrade over the years, since I saw no added value…FOR MY PURPOSES…but when version 12 came out that changed. Since I had long since fallen out of the scheduled upgrade track, I had to repurchase a full version of the new software. That is a business decision best left to the consumer. What the vast majority of Photoshop users have been complaining about over the past few days is that Adobe has removed ALL choice in the software buying process, while reducing the value of the software for certain segments of their customer base…and increasing it for others. They seem willing to lose a large portion of their base clients…those hobbyists and ‘occasional’ photographers who don’t regularly stay on the upgrade path…and to make up that lost income it appears that the rest of the users will now and forever have to pay an ongoing fee to rent their product.

But perhaps the real reason Adobe is so hot to lock in a subscription-based scheme is because even they know there are only so many filters and gizmos they can add to ANY program before the end user reaches a saturation point and doesn’t see a cost benefit to upgrade! A new sharpening widget here or layering tool there every year isn’t gonna be enough to make most users feel the need to push $200.00 Adobe’s way, so before they ran out of ideas of ways to improve the software, they might have figured out this entire plan. And they don’t really have a compelling incentive to continue developing new tricks if their users are forced to pay FOREVER for a subscription just to ensure continued access to the files they’ve created with their software, do they?!!

These are only a few of the things that I really think need to be talked about. Adobe is, of course, making their “Creative Cloud” strategy sound like a wonderfully happy place and we should all bow down and thank them for thinking of us, the end-user, when they came up with this solution. But I’m sorry, but I can’t help but see this as a solution to a nonexistent problem! And I’m hardly the only person saying this. The outcry online has been thunderous. Just about every techie geek board on the interwebs has been filled with mostly negative comments. And these are aren’t the typical, “This Sucks, Man!” stuff…no, instead, thousands upon thousands of regular users of Adobe software are voicing their outrage in very clear terms. And if you’ve made it all the way through my own diatribe, I urge you to also make your voice heard. An online petition is sitting on www.change.org that demands Adobe to kill this ridiculous scheme and offer it’s customers what we expect…choice!!! Please check it out and add your name. There is also a new petition over at www.petitions.whitehouse.gov calling for a DOJ investigation on the legality of Adobe’s move, and it can’t hurt to put your name on that one, too. And if you have the ear of your Adobe rep, or even the guys at your local camera store, digital outlet or rental shop, make your opinion known. This is not going to go away without a significant groundswell that will be heard in the boardroom at Adobe.

Please sign these petitions I’ve linked to below in an effort to stop Adobe from moving forward with their new scheme for Subscription-only access to their software:

www.change.org

www.petitions.whitehouse.gov

Me and Alan at the 2008 Roundtable

Alan Abelson, the veteran financial journalist and longtime writer of the “Up and Down Wall Street” column in Barron’s Magazine, died last Thursday. The former Editor of Barron’s was a regular member of the panel who quizzed the Roundtable members each year about their predictions on the coming years financial markets, and as many of you probably know, I’ve shot that Roundtable issue for the past seven years. Alan was well-known as being a thorn in the side of Wall Street for his fearless style of journalism. Ben Stein, the writer, actor, economist, and humorist who was a longtime friend of Alan’s, wrote in the American Spectator…

“…His columns were dour, hilarious, insightful. He never bought into the prevailing “wisdom” of Wall Street. It was all about hucksterism and self-promotion. He realized that from the first day until the last. He could and would deflate any balloon, from the dirigibles of the Fed to the smaller ones of hedge funds. There is no one like him now. The rest of us are just ordinary people. He was Superman.”

Goodbye Superman.

I got an email today from the 22 year-old son of a photographer who follows Damn Ugly Photography. It seems that while his Dad hangs out in here for the photo-related stuff that dribbles outta my brain, he turned the son on to the music that I (ever more infrequently) post here. He was wondering what the Hell I had been doing that’s so important to be keeping me from my duties of distributing free new music to the masses! He told me that once he spent some time here, he’d gotten hooked on the Song of the Day and had gone back to the beginning of the blog and downloaded every song I put up, but now he was going through serious withdrawal waiting for me to start up again.

I’m sorry….I’ve been busy.

Well, more correctly, I’ve been busy and distracted and homeless. The busy part is great, actually. We here at Damn Ugly haven’t been working this much in a long time, and trust me, we ain’t complaining, but that bit about being distracted and homeless has meant that devoting time to devote to the old blog has been tough. Some of you know that I sold the Damn Ugly World Headquarters last September. The plan was to move into new digs shortly after, but a few wrenches got tossed in the works and I had to scramble to figure out a new plan. Still…contracts were signed on a new location October 1st, with assurances that we would be moved in by, “December 1st…the 15th at the absolute latest!”…today is May 12th and I’m still couch surfing! The excuses as to why it’s taken so long don’t even matter to me any more, but the lack of a Manhattan base of operations has really been kicking my ass. All that work we’ve been doing is fine, but it means that I typically have to finish the gig, then head up to the Damn Ugly Northern Command…where the bears are…to work on the processing and such. So between the work we’ve been doing, the travel time to and from the gigs and all the other minor details that make up my life, the posting frequency at Damn Ugly Photography has certainly suffered.

But I’ll try to do better. I promise! I’ve got months of stuff I gotta catch up on…starting tomorrow!!!

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Today’s behind-the-scenes (and lighting tutorial) is from my recent shoot for the Wall Street Journal’s Review Section on Connie Brown, who paints one-of-a-kind wall maps on canvas that are, quite simply, works of art. She researches each private commission and creates much more than a map, but instead produces what can be described as personal portraits of a region special to the client.

I spoke to Connie and she told me she lived in a converted schoolhouse, but her studio was an all-new building out back, with lotsa white walls, high ceilings, and quite bright…which it was…but it was also surrounded by a lot of really tall trees…

…and as bright as it may have been, those trees did a super job of keeping any direct sun from lighting up the studio. And since I wanted to have a bright, airy look to the shots, it fell upon me to invent some Sun…fast! Thankfully I had the perfect thing for making Sun when there is none…a Profoto Magnum Reflector…

As a light modifier, the Magnum couldn’t be simpler…it’s just a deep dish with a 50 degree throw that is highly polished to a mirror finish. This not only makes for an extremely efficient light…even backed off 50 feet from your subject you still get a huge output…but the quality of light has a nice, open feel to it that looks just like the Sun!

We placed one Magnum with a Half CTO (for warmth) on a Profoto Acute 2400w/s pack about 20 feet from the main, double-height window…with a second pack & head lighting up a smaller second window…and were amazed at how realistic the results were…

The white ceiling and walls acted as natural fill cards, so we were able to point and shoot from pretty much any angle we wanted, and the hot backlight perfectly mimicked the Sun. And when we switched to a more head-on shot of Connie against her easel, the bright, open, lifestyley look of the first shots now turned wonderfully dramatic…

With the portraits done, I now had to do some vignettes of her studio, and the outside lighting still proved to work without any changes…

I can’t say enough how impressed I was with the lighting effect we were able to achieve with essentially one pack and one head. This is the kind of thing filmmakers do all the time by dropping a few 10K HMI’s outside of a window, but this was much, much easier!

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Here’s a quick follow-up to what we did with that $30 Grand in cash I needed as a prop for the Week Two and Week Three group shots of this years Barron’s Roundtable shoot. Once again, our object was to shoot as many different single images of each Roundtable member playing around the cooking theme so that we could later assemble them into our little stories. Since the theme played on the idea of cooking up a recipe for the perfect economy, cash…lotsa cash…was required as our main ingredient!

And here’s how the final pages looked…

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We here at Damn Ugly Photography have done many, many, many Barron’s Roundtable shoots over the years, but this time we came close to breaking the bank…literally! Our cover idea was to have the members of the Roundtable rockin’ Chef Props as they cooked up the perfect economic recipe for the coming year, and for our ‘ingredients’ we needed cash…lots and lots of cash…

Since Photoshop has added high-tech security filters that make it almost impossible to scan money and print it out…and prop money looks way too fake…we decided to hit my bank and just get real cash (that’s about $30 Grand in the bag) to use in our recipes…

The basic cover setup was a raised plexiglass platform that I could shoot from both a low angle for the cover image, and from slightly above for the inside compositions for the Week Two & Week Three images…

Hasselblad H1/50mm f4.0 with a Leaf Aptus 33 for the cover and the 5DmkII/24-70mm f2.8 for the higher-angle inside shots…

As in previous years, we have only two hours to shoot everybody…all separately as they arrive at The Harvard Club for the meeting…on two different sets, and we must come away with two covers (for the January and June Mid-Year issues), two inside openers for those covers, two feature openers for the second and third week follow-up issues and individual shots of each person for the June Mid-Year issue. In those two hours we try to cram in as many different poses and props as possible so we have enough to work with when it comes to assembling the final group shots. Here’s some of the fun…

Marni worked her super-fast makeup magic on everyone before they got on set…

Oscar Schafer…

Brian Rogers…

Fred Hickey…

Abby Joseph Cohen…

Scott Black…

Adrian and I liked the idea of placing everyone on the edge of a mountaintop made from a butcher block cutting board and viewing them from below…

…so once I shot a bunch of angles on the board, we had all the raw materials in place. Now it was up to me to assembly the individual shots into our cover and feature opening photos…

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This stuff never gets old!

Stay tuned next week and you’ll see what we did with all that cash once Barron’s runs the Week Two and Week Three images…

You just gotta love Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster as the scummy boyfriend and brief shot of Ted Leo in a fright wig!

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As a wine geek, getting a call from Adrian Delucca asking if I wanted to spend a day photographing Tom Ryder in his World-Class wine cellar, made me extremely happy that I do what I do for a living. Tom has been the President of American Express Publishing, CEO of Readers Digest and was the Chairman of the Magazine Publishers of America, and over the years has amassed a truly amazing wine collection. He was writing a feature for Barron’s that discussed how the bottom has fallen out of the wine collecting (as an investment) market and told his own story of when he auctioned off a small portion of his own cellar. As part of the process, he had the auction house appraise the wines he wanted to sell and was shocked to learn that the 1,000 bottles he was looking to divest would ‘only’ fetch between $70,000 – $100,000…but if he were to sell only three Magnum bottles of his 2005 Romanee-Conti he would get roughly the same $100,000! It was my job to show him with those three bottles of very pricy DRC. Here’s how it went…

Nick and I started by stacking up cases of his very best Grand Cru Burgundies that would be our posing table…

…and then cleaned up the background a bit…

Nick enjoying the view from the stacks…

…but Tom fit the mood a bit more…

Because of the tight quarters in the cellar, we were kind of limited with what we could do, lighting-wise, but we pulled off a nice, warm and dramatic look with only two lights…an Elinchrom 39″ Mini Octa high and to the right of the camera, and a Ringlight…that’s it!

Our final select, with the three Magnums of DRC valued at $100,000 (and those messy cases behind him cleaned up in post )…

And here’s how it looked in the magazine…

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In the Dreamworks Holiday Blockbuster, Rise of the Guardians, Alec Baldwin is lending his (Russian-accented) voice to Santa Claus, and in a bit of cross-promotion, David Baratz at USA Weekend called upon me and the crew to shoot him for the cover of their Holiday Tech Gift Guide. So a few weeks ago, we turned a room at the Crosby Street Hotel into our studio and brought a bit of Christmas to Soho…here’s how it went down…

Since it was a Christmas cover, I figured it was OK to dress up the set with a few Xmas lights…

Even though we knew we would only have Alec for maybe half an hour, my stylist, Cynthia Altoriso, pulled together a stunning array of clothes, including a couple of $7,000 Brioni burgundy velvet jackets (that unfortunately didn’t get worn)…

Since the idea of the cover was to have Alec plugged in to the tech gifts, he worked with the few props that played on that metaphor…

…and here are the final images…

Merry early Christmas!!!

Relax…relax…I know I’ve been incognito!

The ongoing project of moving the Damn Ugly World Headquarters has proven to be a much more daunting task than we ever could have imagined and with that, updating the old blog has certainly suffered. But never fear, we’ll be back with a vengeance come Monday morning!!!

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I got a frantic message the other day from Silvia Nieto, editor in chief of the Sunday magazine for Spain’s “El Mundo” newspaper. The Magazine was doing a feature on assassinations and they had somehow stumbled across a story I did for Life Magazine in 1989 on infamous guns of the 80′s that included the guns used to shoot President Reagan and John Lennon. She desperately wanted to use my gun ‘portraits’. It’s not that I had forgotten about these photographs, but I certainly hadn’t done anything to put them out there, either. So I headed downstairs to the file cabinets and pulled folder #65…

For a lot of reasons, I found that assignment incredibly depressing, but especially photographing the Lennon gun. I don’t know too many people of my age who weren’t deeply affected by John Lennon’s murder and the idea of holding the gun that killed him was not exactly one of those things anybody would ever think possible. But when I arrived at the New York City Police Department Ballistics Lab…in one of those typically dreary looking NYC Police buildings…I was surprised at how nonchalant the attitude was about me photographing the gun. I was led to a small, dark room with a metal table and a couple of chairs. It had the look and feel of every interrogation room from every cop movie you’ve ever seen. Shortly afterwards an officer came in and simply handed me a plain brown envelope and told me to just let him know when I was done. Then he left. I opened the envelope to see the gun, but there was also a smaller evidence envelope inside. It contained two .38 caliber slugs that were found during the autopsy. Both had passed through Lennon and were found trapped in his jacket. And both had bits of flesh embedded in the jagged tears of the deformed lead. It brought tears to my eyes. I just wanted the job to be over. I set up my lights, shot maybe ten sheets of film, and got the Hell out of there.

The Reagan gun shoot couldn’t have been more different. Getting access took all the weight and political capital a magazine like Life has at their fingertips. The gun was in the hands of the FBI in Washington, stored in a massive limestone fortress. After passing through layers of security, I ended up in a sterile ballistics facility surrounded by lab techs and watched by an agent the entire time. The gun was presented in a sealed ziplock evidence baggie. I couldn’t touch it. It had an evidence tag attached to the trigger guard. It couldn’t be removed. The agent had to position the gun under my lights. I absent-mindedly reached out to move it a fraction of an inch and his beefy hand grabbed my wrist. I didn’t try to move the gun again. I remember thinking how small it was. It was just a shitty .22 caliber. Cheap looking. Toy-like. So bloody small and so fucking deadly.

So thanks to Silvia for stirring up memories buried in the files for a couple of decades…