You’re looking at the central section of the Winton Guest House.  Completed in 1987 for Mike and Penny Winton, the house was designed by architect Frank Gehry.  In 2002 the Winton’s sold the property on which the house resides.  Six years later, the current owner and St. Thomas came to an agreement about relocating the house from its current perch overlooking Lake Minnetonka to the Gainey Conference Center in Owatonna.

That’s when things got interesting.

This is the house as I saw it in February of 2008.  It’s actually comprised of five sections (you can’t see the garage from this view) and each one needs to be separated from the others, hoisted up on jacks, and slid away from the rest of the structure.  After that the sections need to be moved down a hill, loaded onto trucks, and driven to Owatonna on specified roads that can handle the weight.

If it sounds difficult that’s because it is.  The hill is quite steep and the ground itself tends to get soggy with even a small amount of precipitation.  And let’s not forget that the Mankato stone section at left weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 36 tons.  For just the single section.

My question from the start was, “How do you hoist entire pieces into the air and then slide them around?”

Turns out you do it by hand.

First you whack apart the foundation with concrete saws and jackhammers.  As you do that, you push jacks into the holes you just made.  Those jacks wind up supporting the house, and by shimming the jacks to one side and then cranking them by hand into an extended position, you can slide a section of the house away from the rest of the structure.

This is crazy stuff people (click the thumbnails below to see the full images).

Once you’ve got the house up off the ground and positioned where you want it, you build a sort of steel cradle underneath it.  That cradle will then slide along big steel girders using, essentially, gigantic roller skates.

The steel girders on which the section of the house will slide are angled up just a bit.  That means that when you start pulling the section along with a bobcat and one of the steel cables parts, the house section slides back to its original position instead of toward you in your bobcat.  Smart.

There were no issues like that on the section I watched these guys move.  Instead, after about 15 minutes of steady pulling, the final view looked like this:

That big hole in the foreground is the basement.  The section on the left side of the frame previously sat over it.  Straddling the basement are the two large steel girders on which the section slid, and underneath the section itself is the cradle.

Just four more sections to go.

And a hill.

Dr. Robert Kennedy is a professor for two departments, Catholic Studies and Business.  He also ran an Aquinas Scholars seminar when I was going to St. Thomas about film noir.  We took his photo for CAS Spotlight a few issues ago.  As often happens, we used a different photo, but I’ve always liked this one.

The room he’s in is officially called “The O’Shaughnessy Room,” but everyone just calls it the leather room because of all the overstuffed leather furniture in it.  It’s prime sleeping territory.  It’s also a decent spot to take a photo if you move enough furniture around.

That’s what I did here.  Then I dropped a soft box on a White Lightning UZ800 at camera right and took this photo.

Submitted for your approval, one, Isaac Rosefelt.  Rosefelt is former Tommie basketball star and you’re seeing him here as he celebrates a 2006 MIAC championship win.  The MIAC is the local Division III conference, and a championship win there means you’re headed off to compete for a national championship bid.

The lighting on Rosefelt is artificial - and for a good reason.  The UST basketball arena is an abysmal cave where photographic lighting is concerned (if you’re a spectator it’s just fine).  You have to shoot with a very high ISO in order to get a shutter speed that will freeze movement.  A high ISO means grainy, noisy images.  The light in the gym is also very flat.  Everything winds up being in the same range of tones which means it’s very easy for the players to blend into the backgrounds of the images.

Last year we installed a permanent set of photo strobes in the ceiling that are triggered with a radio.  Every time the guy with the transmitter attached to his camera takes a photo, the lights go off.  Using the lights means you can shoot with a lower ISO resulting in cleaner photos.  The lights are also focused on the court, not the stands, resulting in photos where the players “pop” off the background.

(As an aside, next time you’re watching a Timberwolves or Gophers game on TV keep any eye out for intermittent flashes during key moments.  The flash will be very brief and sort of even across the screen.  That’s one of the game shooters triggering the strobes built into those arenas.  Go, impress your friends with your new knowledge.)

Back in 2006 when this photo was taken, we didn’t have the luxury of a permanent installation.  Instead, I would haul a portable set of strobes over to the arena for each game, set them up, shoot the game, tear them down, and haul them back.  That meant arriving an hour before the game and staying an hour after.

I enjoy shooting basketball a lot more now.

Most of what you’ve seen on this blog so far are the slightly irregular photos I take.  To be sure, I shoot plenty of sports, a good batch of campus scenes at least twice a year, and some intricate portrait setups.  But the type of photo you see here is close to the most dominant category of work I shoot for UST - the safe portrait.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with it.  For instance you can see where I’ve played with color temperature a bit.  The portrait subject is balanced for the color temperature of flash (around 5000 K) which makes the tungsten ceiling lights (around 3200 K) in the background go a deep shade of orange.  But on the whole, there’s nothing extraordinary about it.  It’s just a good, solid photo.  Often, that’s just what the client asks for; believing that something too edgy or unique won’t fit well with the target audience.

It’s not where I have the most fun photographically (although I get to meet some cool people), but I couldn’t let this blog go too far with showing you the slightly less glamorous side of what I do.

I photographed Mickey’s Diner in downtown St. Paul for an article about environmental fiction writing in the English department’s newsletter (look for the Spring 2006 issue).  We used different photos in the newsletter so this one has never really seen the light of day before.  Time in the cold well spent.

You have to love fall light.

The front of the chapel was quite a bit darker than the rest of the building, so I took a single frame of the building and processed it in the computer twice - once for the portion of the chapel catching the light and a second time for the portion in shadow.  I then composited the two images.

The result is that nothing in the image has been moved or deleted, but two different exposures have been laid on top of each other to reduce the contrast between highlight and shadow.

The doors of O’Shaughnessy Hall catch some nice light on fall mornings.  In this case I chose to put more emphasis on the doors by using one of our new lenses - a Canon 45mm tilt shift lens.  Tilt shift lenses allow you to shift the plane of focus left or right, up or down.  So instead of the plane of focus running parallel with the camera’s sensor or film, it actually runs at an angle.  This produces the “slice of focus” effect you see here.

If you’re really interested, you can find out more about tilt-shift photography here.

Or buy your very own (purchases coming from this link support little ol’ me):

Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8 Tilt Shift Lens for Canon SLR Cameras

Most of the folks who read this blog are from Minnesota which means that most of you already know this is arctic explorer Will Steger.  I photographed Will for the latest issue of St. Thomas Magazine.  We went with a different photo for the cover, but I’m still fond of this one, largely because of what you can’t see.

The shoot took place on Will’s Mississippi River houseboat - a very small space.  In fact this portrait was taken in a corner about six feet by six feet with a seven or eight foot ceiling.  There is a strobe to either side of Will (and slightly behind him) and another strobe in a portable softbox just behind and over the top of the camera.  The background is gray paper taped to the ceiling with gaffer tape.

I’m used to doing portraits like this in a decent-size studio, so wedging all of that equipment into such a tight space and still getting the light I wanted was a challenge.  The fact that I still like the picture today means that I wound up doing something right despite the space limitations.

The other interesting thing about this photo is the reaction it gets when I show it to people.  So far, everyone under 40 really likes it.  Everyone over 40 (with one exception) doesn’t care for it at all.  I imagine that’s because the style I’ve used is one that came onto the scene about three years ago.

To be sure, my poll is hardly scientific.  I show someone the photo and ask them what they think.  My sample size is small too - I’ve shown this to about 10 people so far.

So if you’re moved to comment on whether you like this image, be sure to leave your age somewhere in your comment.  I’m curious to see if the trend continues.

Enter the code “BRoll” (be sure to include the capital letters) when checking out to get 25% off your order.  This discount is only good through Friday.

Prints from the St. Thomas photo store are for personal use only.  Any commercial usage is strictly prohibited. Duplication by means photographic or otherwise is also prohibited.

Not too much to say about this one.  Sometimes it’s best just to shut up and push the damn button.