If Jack Burke, Jr. were a cook, rather than the 1956 Masters champion, renowned teacher of the game, and founder of Champions Golf Club in Houston, he might have written down that tidbit in the little black journal he keeps close at hand to record his random thoughts and musings on golf, and life in general. We youngsters tweet our little platitudes to our legions (or in my case, tens) of followers. Mr. Burke has been doing the same thing for decades. Only his pearls of wisdom go straight into that leather-bound notebook, only to make it out in public on the few occasions when he turns them into a memoir.

So where was I? Ah yes. Life lessons. A photography blog. Using Bisquick. Hang with me on this one.

You see, when Jake, my 6 year-old, is in residence Saturday mornings are pancake mornings (after our requisite sofa-bound dose of Phineas & Ferb, of course). I, being the diligent dad who also likes to cook, would much rather whip up the pancakes from scratch. Flour. Sugar. Baking powder. Eggs. Vanilla. Milk. Carefully measured, barely whisked, and left to stand to allow the glutens to bond into the perfect consistency. Flip them onto the griddle, let them go for a couple of minutes, and…

Rubber. Every single time.

Yup. No matter how hard I try, or how many times I type “fix rubbery pancakes” into the Google search box, I can’t get it right. A pinch here, a tweak there, a few teaspoons more, a quarter-cup less, and still nothing. One day I stumbled upon a half-empty box of Bisquick in the pantry. I felt bad. I mean, that’s taking the easy way out, right? 2 cups, an egg, and some milk. Stir it all up. Dollop it on the griddle.

Guess what? You can’t argue with success.

You might say the same about going through the trouble of setting up a 4×5 camera these days to shoot a portrait. Buying the film. Loading the holders. Setting up the clunky tripod and the even clunkier camera. Adjusting for bellows factor. Focusing on the ground glass. Shooting Polaroid. Refocusing. Changing film. Adjusting the light ever so slightly. Refocusing. Changing film again. Adjusting the pose. Refocusing (again). Putting yourself, and your subject, through this painstaking process (and speaking of processing, you have to do that to your film, too) when the damned autofocus 35mm DSLR lurks right there beside you and you just know that it would be so much easier to just pick it up and start firing away…

You wondered where I was headed with the Bisquick, didn’t you?

It’s certainly a temptation, this whole digital thing. And you know what? 99% of the time it’s the better choice.

But especially now, in a world where Nikon has convinced everyone that even Ashton Kuchar can wield a Nikon with one hand and instantly transform himself into a professional photographer, there’s something that shooting a 4×5 gives you that a DSLR doesn’t: Let’s call it gravitas. A sense that what’s happening is a little more serious than a snapshot. And with the right subject, it can pay off by completely changing the dynamic of a shoot.

The 4×5 was the right choice for someone like Mr. Burke–a man who doesn’t suffer fools, and who understands the importance of not doing something half-assed. We’ve developed a rapport that I think is in no small part based around my shooting with it. Every time I’ve photographed him–I think it’s going on 5 times in the past decade–I’ve pulled out a 4×5–originally a Horseman view camera, these days a Linhof field camera–and every time he gives me a little bit of shit about what a perfectionist I am, using those old-school cameras (this time I reminded him that the lens I was using, a 240mm Schneider-Linhof, was probably made the same year he won the Masters), shooting film, working so methodically. But he indulges me, watching me work and complimenting me on my thoroughness. I’m careful not to take up too much of his time, but he seems to understand. He takes the shoot seriously. He realizes, watching me fiddle with the camera, that he has a role to play, as well. He, too, is a perfectionist. He gets it.

So when I pick up the 35mm to shoot some backup frames (you know, in case there was a light leak in the darkroom while loading film, or in the holders, or in case the lab screws up, or in case you inadvertently set the “x” sync switch to “m,” or in case one of the other hundred things that can go wrong does, but you can’t find out until it’s too late), he’s already focused on the task at hand. He’s comfortable. And he doesn’t treat it as just some guy standing in front of him snapping pictures for a family album. If only for that, setting up the 4×5 is worth it.

Cameras are tools. But sometimes, the process can be the thing. Digital? Film? 35mm? 4×5? Fast and fluid? Plodding and methodical? They both have their advantages. And you can reap the benefits of both simultaneously.

But what about the final images? I have to tell you, although it pains me to say it, most of the time the digital ones win out. The ability to work quickly and adjust little things–a tilt of the head, a catchlight in the eye, moving the camera angle to use the frame on the far wall as a vanishing point –helps enormously, and the free-flowing nature of that part of the shoot yields a much more spontaneous feeling. But we couldn’t have gotten there without using the old clunkers first. Sometimes you have to indulge the long, drawn-out, old-fashioned method first, even though you know the Bisquick pancakes are probably going to turn out better.

So when Golf World magazine assigned me to shoot a portrait of Dan Jenkins, I knew I didn’t have to worry about the sense of humor thing. For those of you not familiar with Dan’s in particular, he’s earned a well-deserved reputation for an acerbic wit that’s been honed over the course of a sixty-year writing career–in newspapers and magazines (The Dallas Times Herald, Sports Illustrated, Golf Digest), and in books (Dead Solid Perfect, Semi Tough)–and backed up by the simple fact that when you’re 81 years old and one of the world’s greatest living sportswriters, you really don’t have to answer to anyone or give a damn about kowtowing to their sensitivities. Lately he’s also become an accomplished twitterer (tweeter?), regularly spinning 140-character one-liners for Golf Digest (which owns Golf World), for which he also writes a monthly column.

There was one tweet in particular, though, that raised a few eyebrows… The 2010 Masters, South Korea’s Y.E. Yang is moving up the leaderboard, and then, from Dan’s lips to the Twittersphere’s ears…

“Y.E. Yang is only three shots off the lead. I think we got takeout from him last night.”

And so began a shit-storm of political correctness (or incorrectness, depending on your point of view) of exactly the kind that you’d expect in these days of heightened sensitivity (or insensitivity, depending on your point of view).

I’d met Dan once or twice before; we shared a house at the British Open one year and ran into each other in an airport or two coming back from tournaments, but I certainly didn’t know him well, and was a little intimidated. So we chatted a little. Talked about tweeting and technology and all that other stuff. Later on, we’d talk about what it was like to cover the great Texas teams of the ’60s, and about barbecue and about why Fort Worth is a great place to live and why Dallas absolutely sucks (and all the while, I would be mentally pinching myself to double-check that I was really standing in Dan Jenkins’ kitchen, talking to Dan Jenkins about Darrell Royal and Railhead Barbecue and why Dallas sucks). But before we got to that point, while he was still sitting at his desk, I finally got up the courage to broach the subject and just ask him flat-out if he’d like to have a little fun with the rest of the shoot. I told him what I had in mind. I told him what was in the front seat.

He leaned back in his chair and thought about it for a barely second. I’d like to think that I even detected a little mischievous grin. “Yeah, I’ll do it,” he said. “You know, some people just don’t have a sense of humor.”









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* The film part of the shoot was done with two Linhof Technikas (a Master Technika with a 240mm f5.6 Schneider/Linhof, and a Technika III with a 135mm f5.6 Schneider/Linhof) on TXP-320 film.The digital side of the take was shot with a Canon EOS-5D MarkII and 85mm f1.2 lens; black-and-white conversions were done in Adobe Lightroom.

** The pun went unnoticed at the time I placed the order. I feel pretty stupid about that.

My biggest complaint with a lot of things digital has always been that it cheapens our perception of what a good photograph is, and therefore later, what it should be. Images that wouldn’t make it past a first edit as “traditional” pictures suddenly take on a new life. People see an HDR image of an athlete and say, “that looks pretty cool,” losing sight of the fact that the background is crappy or the timing is off. We look at the latest desaturated, unsharp-masked portrait of some entrepreneur on the cover a business magazine and don’t even notice the total lack of lighting creativity. It’s too easy to use these technological tricks as crutches, hoping that the “wow factor” will mask the fact that the work, the image, the photograph, is, at the end of the day, pretty ordinary.

I’ve been playing around with the Gigapan system for a little over a year now, having been interested in it ever since my colleague Fred Vuich first introduced it to the editorial world with his stunning golf course work for Sports Illustrated. As a brief disclaimer, I was asked to be one of the beta-testers for the company’s Epic Pro system, which permits the use of full-sized SLR systems in the process. But anyway, I was looking for a way to digitally shoot and stitch a 270-degree panorama when I thought back to Fred’s work with the system. It worked–although the first attempt was not without its operator-induced problems. But I quickly realized when I showed the panorama to people that their primary focus, if you will, was not on the finished panoramic image, but the ability to zoom in on objects in incredible detail. This is accomplished because Gigapans consist not of one single file but of potentially hundreds, tiled and later stitched together in post-processing. Each “tile” in the panorama, if done right, is a high-resolution full-frame file of its own.

The possibilities that such a system presents are enormous, but rarely do we see it used to its full potential. Rather, it risks unfortunately becoming a gimmick, treated by many (myself included, at times) as a means for a website’s viewers to play “Where’s Waldo” and not much else. The idea of a “digital crutch” is unfortunately as apparent here as with any other process; we all too often look at a Gigapan of a huge crowd at a stadium or whatnot and get so caught up in the ability to “find ourselves” that we ignore the dreadful light or uninspired composition, and miss (or excuse) the fact that the image as a whole is, well, not much of a picture.

What if that weren’t the case? What if the point of doing it wasn’t to just make someone ooh and ahh (don’t get me wrong, however, I want people to be as impressed with my photographs as the next guy), but create a good-looking panoramic image, and to aid us in telling the story we’re trying to illustrate through reader interaction, as well? That’s where this technology can shine, and where digital can truly claim to do something that film never could.

That’s why I was happy to have the opportunity to shoot a portrait of Alastair Johnston for Golf World magazine. Johnston, the former chairman of IMG and owner of what most consider to be the world’s largest collection of golf books, maintains what, in one heck of an understatement, he charmingly refers to as a “library” in several rooms of his home in the Cleveland, Ohio suburbs. The editors at the magazine wanted an environmental portrait of Alastair that showed the library, but they also wanted something interactive for use on GolfDigest.com. I saw this as the opportunity to use the Gigapan as the tool that it truly is, in a specific situation in which it could shine: Namely, to shoot a panoramic image of a confined space while at the same time allowing the viewer to absorb, at their leisure, every minute detail of the room and satisfy their every curiosity about the collection and its contents.

Oh, and to throw a portrait in as well.

The process was pretty simple: I used a Canon EOS 7D mounted on the Epic Pro unit, which was then placed on a tripod. The lens was a 70-200mm f4. (the 1.6 crop factor of the 7D sensor eliminates most of the vignetting caused by the use of a lens stopped down close to its maximum aperture, which is essential because the tiled nature of Gigapan images can accentuate any vignetting). The majority of preparation time was spent on achieving depth of field; I was trying to hold a range of about five feet to 30 feet which is a rather difficult concept when trying to also use the longest focal length possible–the better to achieve maximum close-up detail. I began at 200mm at f22, and after a series of test exposures at varying focal distances and focal lengths, settled on a focal length of about 150mm and a distance of about 12 feet at f22. Depth of field could then cover the nearest and farthest distances. Various other test shots determined exposure (2 seconds at f22 at ISO 400) and, after all of those determinations were made, the Gigapan was set up to shoot in the normal way–namely, by setting the top left and bottom right corners of the image, and setting the angle of view using the unit’s on-board software, and ensuring the system allowed enough time in-between its automated movements to allow for the long exposure time.

After that, it was just a matter of letting the Epic Pro do its thing. The machine computed that it would take a total of 286 frames to make up the 200-degree panorama, 22 columns of 13 rows. When it had finished shooting all of the necessary images in sequence 45 minutes later, it was time to call Alastair in for his portrait session.

Without moving the camera setup, I placed Alastair in position and told him to get comfortable because he was going to have to stay still for a series of 39 2-second exposures. My assistant, John Kieger, had set up a Profoto Acute head with a softlight beauty dish at camera right, but as we needed to balance the light with the existing tungsten in the library, we were only able to use the modeling light and, obviously, had to maintain an exposure consistent with the rest of the room. When shooting Gigapans I take notes to refer back to when processing, keeping track of the number of frames, rows, columns, etc., but this time it was for an even more important purpose: During the original shoot I had to make note of which columns would comprise where Alastair would later be standing, so that when we placed him into the scene, all I had to do was re-program the Gigapan to shoot those three specific columns. If all went well, during the stitching process I would simply remove those three columns from the original panoramic, and re-insert the three with Alastair in them.

As for the final, 2.65 gigapixel image? It worked–I think on every level: as an environmental portrait, as a panoramic, and as a truly interactive piece that really takes advantage of the capabilities of such a system, and puts them to a truly effective use.

And so we wait eagerly; Kim and his entourage of three close friends (two of whom, his caddie and personal assistant, live with him) and three dogs lounge around the living room of what might be the ultimate bachelor pad, complete with the obligatory giant flat screen televisions, a shuffleboard table, and downstairs, a not-so-obligatory “movie room” with a $60,000 sound system and four queen-sized beds. As “SportsCenter” blares in a continuous loop, my assistant, Will Rutledge, and I fret about, marking time by coming up with one shot after another, setting lights, finding angles, pulling Anthony off of his bean-bag chair for five minutes of shooting here and there. We’re all waiting for the piece de resistance, but for different reasons.

Fortunately, Kim is a great guy who, in addition to taking the whole car delivery thing in stride, had no problem letting us stick around–I’m beginning to think he wants the car in the shot as much as we do, and my suspicions are confirmed when I overhear him on the phone with the truck driver: “You’re where? How long? Look, I need it here tonight for a Sports Illustrated photo shoot!” He’s extremely gracious, offering us the run of the house, but I’m content to try and keep out of the way lest we overstay our welcome. When the car does arrive some four hours behind schedule, via a giant yellow car carrier, Kim is like a kid on Christmas day. The light is fading fast, but we’ve already given up on that–Will has spent the past two hours rigging strobes and a suspending an overhead crossbar camera mount in the driveway, and by now I’m more hoping than resigned that we’ll have to shoot this in the dark. After what seems like hours, the car is backed off the truck, and Kim hops in. He motions for the others to do the same–he bought this particular car, he says, because all four of them could fit in it–and guns the engine. The car disappears around the corner of a quiet (well, until now at least) Dallas residential street. We’ll get our wish. It will be dark by the time they get back.

For the photographically inclined, the technical details:

I’m a huge proponent of the philosophy that “if you bring everything, you forget nothing,” and so we showed up for the shoot loaded for bear. I threw everything I had into the car, and rented a few things that I didn’t. But I’m also of the mind that just because something is on the truck, doesn’t mean you have to use it. The various shots from this assignment drew on a couple of different approaches, from using every single light, stand, and reflector we had (the car shot), to a couple of strobes in an outdoor setting (the pool shot), to an added, single continuous light source (the theater shot), to simply taking advantage of existing light and backgrounds (the individual portraits).

The car shot: Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 24-105mm lens mounted on a 12′ crossbar some 15′ in the air with the car parked underneath. Lit with Profoto heads in Elinchrom Octabanks on two sides and bounced fill in the front and back. Camera tethered to a MacBook Pro and fired remotely.

The movie theater: Available light augmented by a Profoto head with a beauty dish and 40-degree grid aimed at Kim, using only the modeling light as an ambient light source. Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 16-35mm lens.

The pool: 2 bare bulb Profoto heads balanced for ambient exposure. Polarizer. Canon EOS 5D Mark II.

Shuffleboard and the living room shots: All available light, which was abundant thanks to a wall of windows at the rear of the house. Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 50mm 1.4 lens (shuffleboard) and 16-35mm (living room).

Hallway portrait: Canon 5D Mark II, 50mm 1.4 lens, with a single Profoto head bounced off of a warm, terra cotta-colored wall at camera right, balanced slightly above ambient exposure, which was utilized for fill light.

Tight portraits: Ambient window light against a textured, painted wall in the dining room. Canon EOS 5D Mark II and 85mm f1.2 lens, pretty much wide open.

Canon EOS-5D Mark II, EF 85mm f 1.2L. 1/200 sec. at f8.

I’d just landed at the airport in Austin, on my way back from shooting a portrait of Oklahoma quarterback Sam Bradford for, of all things, Golf World magazine, when my phone buzzed with a text from John Bianco, the Sports Information Director for Texas’ football program. The gist of it was this: Texas was anticipating a high level of media demand for Colt McCoy during the season, and they wanted to take a day to make him available for portraits before the season started and he needed to concentrate on playing football. Since I was Sports Illustrated’s guy in Austin (or so he reasoned), did I think S.I. would be interested in getting a few minutes with Colt on Wednesday morning?

I tried to remember what day it was. Oh yeah. Monday.

I drove home and e-mailed S.I. picture editor Claire Bourgeois, who was handling all things football before her beloved hockey season started, and told her about the text. We’d be crazy to turn down the opportunity, she reasoned, confident that there would be something in the coming months that would necessitate our having the pictures in and ready to go. She pointed to a similar shoot she and I had collaborated on with Vince Young at Texas a few years earlier, which resulted in a multitude of uses for the magazine even though we went into it unsure of what we needed or wanted from it.

Portraits of Vince Young shot in 2005. Even without a story at the time of the shoot, each of these has run as an opener to illustrate four separate stories in various issues of S.I.

Just as with the Young shoot, since there was no real “hook” to it, I wanted to give the magazine a bunch of different things to choose from. And with McCoy’s Heisman Trophy chances (and therefore the potential late-season demands on his time) at an all-time high, I wanted to ensure that we had taken care of a bunch of potential scenarios–for example, use in an in-season feature, in a Heisman-winning story, and perhaps in a year-end commemorative issue. I decided that it wasn’t out of the question to get three distinct shots done, if I played my cards right.

On the other hand, it had the potential to be a busy day for him and I was anticipating limited shooting time.  I’m also a firm believer in not wasting my subjects’ time. Especially here; I live in Austin, I cover the Longhorns regularly, and I have a good working relationship with the Sports Information staff. I like to think that’s partly due to the fact that they know, based on years of working with me, that when I show up for a shoot I come prepared, work within a schedule–usually theirs– and do whatever I can to stick to it so as not to waste their time or that of their athletes.

So anyway, back to the three shots and playing my cards right. Doing that starts with finding an assistant who knows what he or she is doing, and I was lucky in that Andrew Loehman, Austin-based assistant extraordinaire, was available. He and I have worked together a lot over the years, and it’s reassuring to have someone as good at anticipating and executing on the set when it’s crunch time. Knowing that I was going to be working with a very competent assistant then allowed me to plan the shoot out with that in mind, and know exactly how to effectively budget my shoot time.

Uber-assistant Andrew Loehman on the set in the visitor's locker room at Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. The black background for shot 2 is at right; the lockers for shot 3 are behind me. Note the black foil-wrapped flourescent fixtures at the top.

For the three shots, I decided on a full-body, seated, more formal portrait, a rather tight headshot with a black background and, based on Claire’s request, something more environmental involving lockers and/or a wider locker room picture. I’d never been in the visitor’s locker room before, so I’d be winging it–but adapting to a location is something I like to think I’m pretty good at, so I wasn’t too worried. From there, it was just a matter of sketching out in my head how I wanted each shot to look in terms of mood and lighting, and then to figure out a way to position the sets and the lights to be able to shift between them as quickly and effortlessly as we could.

The seated shot would be the most complicated; for starters it would be strobed, and the remaining two shots would be made with ambient light (more on that later). Additionally, the background was huge–a 20×30-foot gray muslin from Gear Rentals in Austin that would take a lot of room–not to mention patience–to set up. So I decided to set that as the first shot.

After getting the background into place, I worked on camera position. I wanted to try a few shots on 4×5 if I had time (yes, just for the hell of it), and since the camera had to be fixed for that, we started there. Andrew and I positioned full- and half- apple boxes at the appropriate spot in the 4×5 frame, and Andrew sat in as I looked on the ground glass, shifting him into exactly the right spot. Once established, we could set the lights.

The main light for the shot came from camera left, a Profoto Acute head in a silver beauty dish with a 40-degree grid. This would be aimed directly at McCoy’s face. While I love the hard, specular quality of the light from this modifier, the falloff is distinct and immediate, rendering the remainder of the set (and the lower half of the body) indistinguishably dark. While I wanted to emphasize his face and the burnt-orange jersey, I still needed to have some detail in the rest of the frame. To solve the problem I placed another acute head in an 8-foot Elinchrom Octabank directly behind the main light, and dialed it down to a two-stop difference from the main light. This provided just enough detail in the shadows while retaining the lighting emphasis on the face and jersey. It also meant that the background was lit just enough to go to dark, brownish gray rather than black. Nevertheless, we hid another Acute head, with a 10-degree grid and aimed at the backdrop, behind the apple boxes and disguised the head cable inside the natural folds in the backdrop. This provided a bit of separation between subject and background. After shooting a few Polaroids (both digital and the real thing), we added a bit of white cloth as a reflector to camera right to open up the shadows on McCoy’s face a bit.

Canon EOS-5D Mark II, EF 85mm f 1.2L. 1/40 sec. at f2.

From there we would move on to the tight portrait. I wanted a very shallow depth of field for this, to emphasize both his eyes and the Longhorn-logo eye black tape that he wears during games. To achieve this, I’ll use my favorite portrait lens, a Canon EF 85mm f1.2L, and shoot it almost wide open. To the right of the first set, we set up an eight-foot square black duveteen backdrop, at a slight angle off of perpendicular. This was in keeping with my desire to maximize our efficiency. Now, after we finished the first shot, all Colt had to do was turn about 70 degrees to his right while I walked around the Octabank (so that it, my new main light, was now camera right), set my white balance to tungsten and bumped my ISO up to 400. Andrew simultaneously shut down the beauty dish and background accent light, and turned on the modeling light on another head which we’d pre-positoned and snooted to light his hair. Using the modeling lights only, I took care of shot number two. The whole shift from one set to another took about 10 seconds, plus another 20 to get the eye black on.

About halfway through this shoot, though, I noticed something interesting–one of those things you don’t really plan for but just seems to work out nicely. I asked Andrew to rummage through my case and grab a 12mm extension tube–extension tubes are something I started carrying regularly a few years ago when golf assignments began calling for quick detail shots of equipment; now they’re something that sit in the bag most of the time but when I need them I’m glad they’re there. This was one of those times. After shooting a bunch of frames to ensure there was something sharp (hair’s-breadth depth of field and a 1/30 second shutter speed are never a combination to inspire confidence), it was time to take care of the last shot.

The "grab shot." Canon EOS-5D Mark II, EF 85mm f 1.2L, 12mm extension tube. 1/30 sec. at f2.

Canon EOS-5D Mark II, EF 85mm f 1.2L. 1/60 sec. at f2.

Since I’d never seen the room, the wild card was the locker shot, and it was with a great deal of anticipation that I walked into the room in the morning. I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised. It was old-school, with gray mesh lockers large enough to sit inside, set in rows long enough to provide some perspective and depth. And better yet, a row of lockers could be positioned directly behind the Octabank light position for the first and second shots, meaning that essentially all McCoy had to do was get up, walk 5 feet to a new position in one of the lockers while Andrew spun the light 180 degrees. It was slightly more complicated than that–in the pre-shot tests we determined the shadow would be a little harsh, so we had to improvise a way of hiding some gold reflective fabric inside the lockers for a bit of fill, and we set some props in specific locations for a little depth in the frame, but on the whole it was pretty simple.

There was one problem with the available light approach used for the last two shots, however: nobody could figure out how to turn off the lights in “my” portion the locker room. Switches were nowhere to be found (trust me, we looked); the maintenance guys insisted it could be done but it would have to be done remotely and involve not only a huge amount of time and effort, but also turning off all the lights in the room–not an option with two other photographers working in the room. But to leave the lights on meant contaminating the tungsten modeling lights with the awful green of flourescents. Thank God for black-wrap, and lots of it. I like to travel somewhat light–I bring a ton of gear but I’m not the kind of guy who travels with a grip truck–but I always have two full rolls of the stuff buried into one of my light stand bags, and we used every square inch of it to cover whatever was affecting our frame.

Linhof Master Technika, Schneider APO-Symmar 210mm f5.6, Kodak Portra 160-NC film. 1/400 f 11.

Other than that, it all went off without a hitch. Just that little bit of troubleshooting, while a rather large pain in the ass at the time, turned out to be well worth it in the finished product. Given the choice I’ll always take the more organic look and feel of controlled ambient light over strobe for my portraits, what with the shallower depth of field, more natural expression and uninterrupted flow of the shoot, and having the right tools–not to mention the right people–on hand to make that happen was essential.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering–we were done in fifteen minutes.

The folks at Smitty’s were incredibly accommodating, giving us access to every part of the building, the interior of which is coated with a deep bronze patina brought on by 70 years of smoking meat inside the building, which started as a general store and butcher shop with a barbecue pit in the back. Available light doesn’t get much better than this, and I soon realized that cracking out the strobes I had brought with me would have been a sin on the magnitude of putting sauce on Smitty’s signature brisket (you don’t need it, trust me)–or, for that matter, using a fork to eat it. Smitty’s isn’t big on entertainment, though; they prefer to keep things simple. So it was fitting that Marty brought his Dobro along, picking and sliding effortlessly through improvised bluegrass licks, entertaining the locals during their lunch hour with the soft acoustic twang of the resonator as I let the light do its own thing and shot away.