Virtual Expert: David Lundquist

David Lundquist of Cooperative Partners, Cenex Harvest States (CHS), is a perennial winner in AAEA's photo contest, and was runner-up Photographer of the Year in 2004.

1. The assignment I will discuss was one of five "stories" in the 2004 CHS annual report. The theme of the report and the annual meeting, held in early December, was "An Average Day." Each of these five stories illustrated a particular recipient example of our cooperative's goods and services.

The situation I will discuss took place in Ohio, and involved a CHS program where a number of soybean producers were contracted to raise a particular variety of soybean for the Japanese tofu market.

We met up with several people involved in the project, including Koji Hirose, the representative from one of the Japanese companies involved, who was on an inspection trip. With our emphasis on the end consumer, only one of the four photos we eventually used could be described as a "traditional" photo, that being Koji inspecting a soybean field with our company's representative. The goal with that photo was to get a candid type of shot, portraying the participants going about their "average day."

Of course, we took many pictures, and we were simultaneously video recording the situation, which became part of the annual meeting AV presentation. For the first time on a major project like this, I was shooting digital stills because an earlier test showed those images performed well converting to black and white for our report photo treatment.

The second photo we secured on the trip took place a day later at a popular Chicago steakhouse. One of our CHS employees involved in this pilot program had flown from Minneapolis to Chicago to meet Koji and discuss their business and next year's contract. Their business dinner was at a very nice, but extremely crowded, restaurant.

We had previously alerted and gotten clearance from the restaurant that we intended to take some photos during the dinner, but it was literally a challenge to even get between the tables to find a vantage point. While I had lugged along studio lights with umbrellas, what I did was set up a single small strobe atop a light stand and probably took no more than ten or a dozen shots until a waiter came by and said some of the surrounding guests had "commented" on the photography. As luck would have it, one of those few photos came out well, looking very un-posed, and became the full-page lead photo, which had been our intention.

The third photo was to portray a typical Japanese person preparing a tofu meal. We knew of a Japanese woman who was teaching her native language in a St. Paul high school. We met her at her downtown high-rise apartment, complete with a small and challenging-to-photograph kitchen. After I set up my studio lights, Kiyomi began the cooking process, going through the steps slowly, particularly cutting up the tofu and combining it with the other ingredients atop her stove.

The last photo was a bit of a re-do. I had photographed a hand with several soybeans in it during the Ohio trip. One of the Ohio people felt that the seed sample could be improved so he FedEx'd a number of seeds to us, just before our photo deadline, and I did a close-up studio shot of the seeds in a co-worker's hand. I lit it softly but directionally and tried to make sure that style-wise it fit with the other photos.

2. The approach to the annual report, including theme and the black-and-white photo treatment, was a collaboration among our ad agency, our company annual meeting chair Lani Jordan, and myself. In illustrating our "average day" situations, as each was a real live environment, you just had to go with the flow, but at the same time staying true to the overall direction.

3. I would say the restaurant was the biggest challenge. The logistics of the situation just made me grit my teeth, make some decisions on equipment, wade into this super-crowded restaurant, and start shooting. The people at our table were cooperative subjects, so that helped immeasurably.

4. How would I do it differently? Always a good question. Actually, the assignment came out well, given our situations, so no big regrets there.

5. Tips to live by: In outdoor photography, you need to work the light. Most often, early and later day sun creates pleasing results. But sometimes it's cloudy, or you are stuck in the middle of the day, so you need to figure out what you are being given and figure out the techniques to get things done. Those answers could include effective use of flash, getting out of the sun, using reflectors, coming back later in the day, or the next day if possible. And sometimes you need to realize that what the person looks like is not that important to the photo's message. In other words, if someone is crop inspecting/consulting or somesuch in the distance, a shadowed face may not make a difference.

I don't think there is just one way to relate to people, every person will do it differently, but I think a photographer needs to develop a way to go about their work. Having a bit a humor, getting subjects involved in what you are trying to convey through the photos, demonstrating that you are working hard but are enjoying yourself (and hoping they are doing ok too), those would be some of the things that help me.

6. My dad was a small-town dentist who enjoyed photography. We even had a black-and-white darkroom in the house, so I picked some of that up. I was a prolific drawer in the early grade-school years, and during the college years when friends and I would take freight train trips to Glacier Park, etc., I brought the camera. After a 4-year political science degree and a couple years off, I returned to the journalism school at the University of Minnesota. Just celebrated 25 years working in the evolving agricultural/business world.