You know, this has become more about my middle school experience than I had originally planned.

Anyway, those of us in Photo Services thought we’d offer a reminder that it wasn’t always this way. Before it became the March and April bully, winter had a beauty of its own – a quiet side that excelled at hushing the world into a contemplative tranquility.

Winter will eventually get hauled off to the principal’s office and sent home for the day. As we pick ourselves up off the ground and wipe the gravel from our hair, let’s not forget that the bully once had the soul of a poet.

Editor’s note: St. Thomas Photo Services is making images from this post available for purchase here.

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But, my friends, the reactionaries don’t believe in election returns. When we undertake to go forward with the measures to achieve real security and real opportunity for all our citizens, the reactionaries are stirred to harsh and bitter criticism. And I thrive on it. They do not understand and they do not believe that these things can be done. They have too little imagination and too little faith in the future of their country and the powers of its people.

But the people know that these things can be done. They have seen similar progress made in their own lifetime. They have seen this Nation rescued from the brink of collapse and set on the road to greater security and greater prosperity. They know that the policy of working for the general welfare produces the best results.

The people will not go back to the day when their destinies were controlled by tight little groups of selfish men who made their policies in secret and exercised economic control over millions of people. They understand that a growing country like ours can provide increased prosperity and greater freedom for its citizens. They propose to see that that is done.

And with God’s help it will be done.

The Depth of Field Icons series will bring you historical images of noteworthy cultural, political or artistic personalities who have visited campus.

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You will never see those photos.

The first “real” photos I took, with even a bit of photo knowledge in my head, were on T-Max 400 black and white film for The Aquin and The Aquinas yearbook. For the next three years black and white was all I shot as I learned how not to make a complete fool of myself with a camera (thanks MO’D).

All of which is to say that black and white holds a special place in my heart. It’s how I first learned to “see” through a camera, and even though the demands of modern marketing and publishing at St. Thomas require color most of the time, it still feels good to slip back into those old eyes. In fact, in some situations it’s still the only thing that makes sense to me – like the photo (18) of English professor Matthew Batt for the upcoming issue of St. Thomas magazine, or the photo of sisters Blaire and Ava Pospesel (4), who let us publish the admissions essays they wrote about the death of their mother. Black and white strips away all the decoration and distraction, and lets us concentrate on the forms and expressions of the people telling us their stories.

Of course I’m not shooting T-Max anymore (that stopped my senior year at UST with the purchase of my first digital SLR), but the digital cameras we’re using today allow me to create black and whites that I like even more than those produced on that Kodak film. It’s as simple as removing the color from the file the camera creates – and as complicated as  interpreting that (usually) flat and lifeless image into the style of black and white you envisioned when you tripped the shutter.

These photos, I’ll let you see.

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As St. Thomas photographers we are privileged to capture these moments. We get to deal with what, to me, is still a magical process where the infinite string of time can be captured, however imperfectly, on a finite medium and shown to others. Even as the sheer volume of photography each of us is exposed to exponentially increases, the power of a single well-done image to show you something new – or something old in a new way – remains. If just some of the images in this collection do that, then we’ve succeeded in meeting the highest of the goal we’ve set for ourselves: showing St. Thomas to itself.

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Which is why, at 6:45 a.m. on Nov. 26, staff photographer Mark Brown and I found ourselves positioning several cameras around the Anderson Student Center. Physical Plant employees were just beginning to haul 118 boxes of branches and two metal crates filled with framing sections into a blocked-off atrium.

What followed was four days of thrice-daily trips to the student center to change camera positions and come up with ever-crazier places to stash cameras. We climbed inside the tree to put a camera on the floor looking up. We mounted small video cameras to the lift used to work on the top section of the tree. We even had the lift operator suction cup a small camera to the top of the windows, looking back at the tree.

Some of these cameras shot video (which we’ve sped up in the finished piece above), but most were programmed to take a picture anywhere from once a second, up to every 30 seconds. At least one camera ran every day from 7 a.m. until the workers knocked off for the day around 3 or 3:30.

We walked away with 15,582 still images (and a smattering of video clips) totaling almost 80 gigabytes. That data had to be processed for color, tone and crop. The stills were than merged together to form the video clips above.

After that, it was all about finding the right music and cutting the clips together to tell the story of the tree.

Quite frankly, this was the most fun I’ve had since … okay, a helicopter ride. I’m not sure I can say the same for the Physical Plant workers who had to assemble this thing under the increasingly curious eye of the St. Thomas community (not to mention a pair of photographers mounting cameras to their lifts). As you’ve seen in the video, they did a fantastic job and we wouldn’t have been able to achieve some of the angles we did without their help.

Merry Christmas, St. Thomas.

(Oh, and if you want to see the entire construction process from beginning to end with just the lunch breaks and non-working hours edited out, the video below is for you.)

Photographer Mark Brown and I each made separate trips to Owatonna, I to shoot the interiors and Mark to shoot the exteriors. My work took a full day, but Mark stayed three days and two nights so that he could wake up early to capture the morning light, and stay late to shoot as the sun went down. It won’t take you long to see how timing makes all the difference. By late morning all that subtle shading and balanced sky disappear in a haze of harsh light as the sun moves overhead.

We got up early, ate fast food in sight of the Gainey dining room (the facility was closed while we were there, so no amazing Gainey vittles), and battled high temperatures and mosquitos to take these pictures. We’re under no illusion that it’s anywhere close to the hardest or dirtiest work here at St. Thomas, but do us the favor anyway. Sit back, set the slideshow viewer to full screen, and let us show you one last slice of summer.

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Brad gets strapped into the back seat. Notice how I get the much safer looking seat up front. This is as it should be.

There’s something about being a photographer at St. Thomas that feels just a bit like cheating. You work at an institution that is comprised entirely of beautiful architecture surrounding what is essentially an arboretum.

And every few years the place rents you a helicopter.

The last time was in 2006 and since then the campus has changed just a bit. With all the construction completed, it was time to go up again. Which is why, on a still-black September Sunday morning, videographer Brad Jacobsen and I found ourselves at Fleming Field in South St. Paul. Brad, toting a ridiculously heavy gyro-stabilized mount for his camera, had to get to the field 20 minutes before me to let the gyros in the stabilizer spin up. So when I stepped into the hangar, Brad was already getting strapped into the back of the chopper.

When I say “strapped,” I really mean it. When we do aerial photos we do so with the doors off of the helicopter. Since my gear is smaller I sit up front, wear a four-point harness, and simply twist at the waist to look out the open side. Brad, on the other hand, sits in the back with his feet on the skid of the helicopter and wears a full-body harness that attaches inside the helicopter.

Reasonably secure inside the chopper, our pilot, the incredibly calm and competent Jimmy Young, ran through his checklists, fired up the engines, and we lifted, doorless, into the morning air.

Ten minutes later we were circling the St. Paul campus in some amazing light.

See how Jimmy is looking out the window and not at me horsing around? That’s the sign of a good pilot. Actually, this seems to happen a lot to me.

Reports of a small stuffed animal making its way into the cabin for purposes of social media tomfoolery have only recently been confirmed.

Shooting from a helicopter is a bit of a mental balancing act. Thanks to the success of our 2006 shoot there were plenty of people who knew what they wanted from this flight, so in addition to directing the pilot, changing exposure settings to match the light (it changes from sun to shade as you circle the campus), and playing “Operation” with the frame of the chopper (if you take a picture with any part of your hands, head, or camera touching the side of the helicopter, you’ll get a blurry photo thanks to all the vibration), I had a mental checklist of all the requests I’d received.

We spent 45 minutes circling St. Paul before heading down the river toward Minneapolis. I’m a sucker for tall buildings, so passing by the skyline as close as we did left me with an experience that still makes me smile.

You can only fly around two sides of the Minneapolis campus thanks to all the skyscrapers, so 20 minutes of work downtown and we headed back to Fleming Field to put the doors on the helicopter and fly to the Gainey Center in Owatonna. We stopped off at the Owatonna airport where Jimmy landed, pulled the doors off, and dropped them in a field next to the taxiway.

After that it was 20 minutes of work over Gainey (being careful not to fly too low and spook the horses), back to the Owatonna airport to put the doors on, and then back to Fleming Field.

Aerial photography is one of the coolest things I get to do as a photographer, but until you get some images into the camera it’s also one of the more nerve-wracking. Circling the campus with the muted thump of the rotors breaking through the barrier of your headset, the occasional chatter of air traffic control, and the near constant slap of the camera shutter, you are being given any number of gifts – the light, the place, the opportunity. If you fail, the blame can only be laid at your feet – an indictment of your skill and of the care with which you received those gifts.

And to succeed means more than simply returning with a properly exposed image containing all the buildings people have asked you to shoot. It means showing people something they’ve never seen before or, perhaps even better, showing them something they’ve seen a thousand times in a way they’ve never seen it. That’s knowledge, and it’s why St. Thomas is here.

I’m grateful it’s a place photography can call home.

Editor’s note: St. Thomas Photo Services is making images from this post available for purchase here. As a way of saying thanks for reading the Newsroom, we’re offering 30% off of any order for two weeks. Just enter the word Newsroom (including the capital letter) in your shopping cart.

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When it comes to MIAC football, there’s only one rivalry that can truly be labeled: “The Big Game.” Other schools may stake a claim, but everyone knows “The Big Game” is when the Tommies take on the Johnnies.

Saturday in Collegeville “The Big Game” kicks off the MIAC schedule for both St. Thomas and St. John’s University. The Tommies have taken two straight from the Johnnies, and one can bet that the Johnnies will be pumped sky-high to avenge last year’s 63-7 thumping in St. Thomas’ O’Shaughnessy Stadium. (Ironically, the stadium is named after Ignatius Aloysius O’Shaughnessy, who got the boot from St. John’s and enrolled at St. Thomas.)

It’s been said that the game wasn’t as close as the score indicated, to twist a cliché, as St. John’s didn’t score until 4:10 remained in the game. Will the Johnnies avenge their ignominious defeat of 2011? Will the Tommies “three-peat”? Both teams are 2-0, the Tommies are ranked No. 6, and the Johnnies are unranked.

Forget last year, forget the rankings, forget the record – they mean nothing when “The Big Game” is played. But don’t forget the history of this annual battle royal, some of which is pictured above, and some of which is posted here by Gene McGivern, UST’s sports information director.

Tickets for Saturday’s 1 p.m. game in Collegeville are $7 for adults and $5 for students. (Parking spots are gone by 11 a.m., so arrive early to avoid a long walk to the stadium.)

The game will be aired on WCCO AM 830 with Dave Lee and Eric Nelson on the call.

Go Tommies!

We’d spent the past two years defining a style for the media guide and poster. Most of that involved building a lighting and processing style around team leaders who would be photographed in the studio under very specific lighting conditions. Vangsgard would also use file photos of other team members in action on the field, cutting them out and layering them in with the studio shots. This year he and Caruso wanted to combine the two — action shots under studio lighting.

That presented a challenge. Our studio is too small to allow for most any kind of movement, let alone running and pass catching. Instead we hauled lights to Schoenecker Arena and set up a studio there, complete with runways of protective mats so that players’ cleats wouldn’t scratch the floor, a weight-lifting station so that players’ muscles could be pumped up as much as possible, and an iPad to wirelessly receive the photos so that Vangsgard could review them as we shot.

Next we had each player go through a series of plays related to their game-day positions, specifically coordinated so that they’d hit the peak of action under our lighting setup. That included passes thrown with pinpoint accuracy by quarterback Matt O’Connell so that the reception would occur under our lights.

What you see above is that five-hour photo shoot squeezed into a minute and a half. Below you see the results of that shoot where lighting and Photoshop processing have all come together.

Editor’s note: Depth of Field is the Newsroom’s photo and multimedia blog. In the coming months we plan to bring you some of the best of St. Thomas photography and multimedia–recent photos we like, selections from UST’s rich photo history, or our latest video project.

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Nothing happens.

Smiling, he picks up a vial of pale, yellow-tinged liquid in his left hand and pivots the light so that it shines through the glass sides of the vial. Instantly the liquid inside glows an intense aqua, reacting to the invisible UV rays from Serratore’s penlight. These are chemiluminescent molecules and Serratore is about to spend the next hour standing under my, very visible, photo lights and explaining to an increasingly confused photographer exactly what he’s spent the last three years working on under the direction of Dr. Tom Ippoliti.

Nick Serratore is a patient man.

On TV and in PR photography all things science must glow blue (thank you, CSI), so I stick a small flash, gelled blue, inside Serratore’s lab hood (essentially his glass-enclosed working area). The light will be tripped by a radio trigger mounted to my camera. When I push the shutter button, the strobe goes off and fills the hood with a blue glow (you can see it in the background above). Next I point another light, with the power turned way down, at Serratore’s face. We’ll take a variety of shots, some focusing on Serratore’s face, others on the chemicals he works with. By varying the power of the lights and the focus of the camera, I’ll be able to shift visual attention easily between the two. Finally a point another strobe at Serratore’s left hand, adding just enough light to keep his hand from becoming a silhouette.

I work with Serratore for about two minutes to get the vial and the flashlight into the right relationship with his face and we start taking pictures. What you see at the top of this article is one of my favorite shots from the session.

But we’re not done.

Serratore sticks an Erlenmeyer Flask inside the hood while I set my camera on a tripod pointed at the flask. When I give the signal he pours two vials of chemicals into the container. As soon as they touch they burst into the same aqua glow as the chemicals in the smaller vial did earlier in our shoot. But this time there’s much more of the stuff and it glows even brighter – for about 10 seconds.

The key to making a good image of these glowing chemicals is to balance the light they emit for that 10 seconds with the light from my blue-gelled flash. Too much power from my flash and I drown out the natural color coming from the flask. Not enough power and everything in the frame except for the chemicals goes black and the viewer loses any sense of place – including the outline of most of the flask.

Lucky for me Serratore gives me two chances – first with a demo mixture so I can set a proper exposure for the glow from the chemicals, then again with my strobes in place. That second attempt is what you see at right.

Nick Serratore? He’s headed off to UW Madison to pursue his Ph.D.  Me? I’m headed back to Loras Hall to file my images of luminescent molecules and Nick Serratore.

Editor’s note: Nick Serratore’s research was funded in part by a Summer Housing grant. He also traveled thanks to a Student Travel grant.

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Editor’s note: Depth of Field is the Newsroom’s photo and multimedia blog. In the coming months we plan to bring you some of the best of St. Thomas photography and multimedia–recent photos we like, selections from UST’s rich photo history, or our latest video project.

“Some images are here because of significance of the events or people they contain. Others are here because they show you the campus and its people in ways you may not have seen them before. Still others are here simply because they are a photographer’s favorite,” said Ekern, UST director of photography. “But no matter the reason we chose to include a photo, know that it was taken with pride and with gratitude for the chance to show St. Thomas to itself. We hope you like what you see.”

“Some images are here because of significance of the events or people they contain. Others are here because they show you the campus and its people in ways you may not have seen them before. Still others are here simply because they are a photographer’s favorite,” said Ekern, UST director of photography. “But no matter the reason we chose to include a photo, know that it was taken with pride and with gratitude for the chance to show St. Thomas to itself. We hope you like what you see.”