| This 625-word story was written as a sidebar for a chapter on how to compose photographs in the book, Blue Pixel Personal Photo Coach, published by Peachpit Press in 2004. I wrote a sidebar for each of the book's twelve chapters. |
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If you're assigned to shoot something that's been photographed to death, how do you make your picture stand out? Nick Didlick solved that dilemma with an unusual composition when he was assigned by Canada's National Post newspaper to shoot the Running of the Bulls festival in Pamplona, Spain in the summer of 2000. "The first day I got there," Didlick says, "I walked the path the bulls would take through the streets every day, trying to come up with a picture in my mind that would be super dramatic of an event that's been heavily documented for years. "The other photographers told me about this one corner. It's a hard right hand turn where the bulls slip on the cobblestones, and generally that's where all the pictures happen. So the first day of the festival, I decided to stand on the fence at the outside of that corner and get a picture from there. The pictures were okay, but you've seen them a hundred times before." Didlick, however, had noticed something. "The bulls came charging up the street, slid into the fence, and hit right below me. When one bull was struggling to its feet down below me, I thought, 'that's where I should be. Looking up at the bull.' Eye-level is the most boring angle, and that's where I was on the fence: eye-level. With composition, you have to pre-visualize and paint the scene [in your mind], and then go out and capture that." Didlick also knew that a very wide-angle lens would exaggerate the size of a looming bull shot at ground level. Didlick couldn't actually be at the bottom inside edge of the fence himself, of course, but one of his cameras could. The next morning, he attached the camera—a $5,000 Nikon with a very wide-angle lens—to a clamp that he had mounted on the bottom railing of the fence. "The local Spanish photographers were in horror," he says, as they watched him mount his fancy digital camera in the path of the bulls. Didlick would trigger the Nikon remotely with a radio device synchronized to fire the camera whenever he pressed the shutter release on his second camera. He planned to handhold this second camera and shoot from the standard fence-top spot because, he explains matter-of-factly, "one money shot you can't miss is a bull goring some guy and throwing him over his head." "So the second morning," Didlick continues, "the bulls come running down the street, they slip on the cobblestones, everything's looking good, I press the shutter button, a hoof kicks the camera off the railing, it goes flying back about six feet into the crowd, and I end up with a bunch of pictures of peoples' feet." The kicked camera was still working, so the next morning Didlick moved it ten feet further down the fence and tried again. It wasn't far enough; he ended up with the same result, complete with flying camera and pictures of feet. "The third morning," he says, "I move it fifteen more feet down the fence. By now, the Spanish photographers are taking pictures of me because they think it's a hilarious story: the crazy Canadian letting the bulls kick his camera around. "So, the bulls come out, they come charging down the street, I push the button, they smash into the fence, this time missing my camera by about five feet, and I have this great picture of a bull sliding towards me with his brakes on as he's hitting the fence. I transmit the picture to the paper, and they run it huge. The next day I pick up the local Spanish paper, and there's a picture of me attaching my camera to the railing."
© 2004 Eamon Hickey
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