Monday, January 1, 2007

Photographing President Ford

BEHIND THE PHOTOGRAPH

By Will Crockett

About this article

On December 26, Gerald Rudolph Ford, the 38th President of the United States, died at age 93, outliving Ronald Reagan by 45 days. Gerald Ford was best known for being the only person to become President without having participated in a general election. Ford had a long and distinguished career, and, prior to his death, was the last surviving member of the Warren Commission, the body that originally investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In 1992, photographer Will Crocket had the opportunity to photograph the former President. In honor of President Ford's passing, we present to you Will's story Behind the Photograph.

In 1992, I was on assignment to create and advertising image or two for Northwest Airlines. The image shown in Figure A was taken in the backyard of the Ford's Palm Springs, California home.

FIGURE A

President Ford looks "grandfatherly" in his golf clothes. (click for larger image)

Our goal was to make him look "grandfatherly" in his golf clothes, so we put together a clean outdoor shot using only one strobe, off to the camera left fitted with a medium size Chimera (30x40 inches) soft box, driven by an Elinchrom pack and head set to around 800w/s carefully metered to preserve the underexposed sky.

My first thought for this image was to start with the camera up off the ground a little more so we could see the lush green golf course behind our subject. I thought it looked really nice and I was all set to start there, but when we brought the President out of his home for the session, ten Secret Service agents suddenly popped out of nowhere and stood awkwardly in various spots out on the fairway completely ruining the shot. I tried to gently hollar back to them to move but they ignored me -- imagine that!

So we lowered the camera to crop out the agents, switched to a longer lens (210mm on a Fuji GX680 medium format film camera) and worked with the palm trees to add a lively element to the image captured onto a snappy Fuji transparency film. We were allotted only four minutes for this session but needed only two or so to get this image that all were pleased with.

Weeks later, the President requested a print of this photo for his personal library and sent me a wonderful hand-written thank you note that I keep to this day in a scrapbook for my kids. To this day, I think fondly of this session and how kind President Ford was to our crew.

Our thoughts go out to the Ford family for their loss.

Will Crockett's impeccable pedigree is stamped with a successful commercial shooting career with celebs, presidents, CEOs and magazine covers too numerous to count. Will is also the founder of ShootSmarter.com (at http://www.smartshooter.com) and is the owner of ShootSmarter University, a state-of-the-art photo education facility located in Aurora, Illinois.