INTELLECTUAL RAG BECOMES MAGAZINE

I have somehow become the head photographer for Jordan's most cerebral magazine, formerly a weekly paper called Al Sijill. It happens to be an all Arabic magazine. The newspaper was very well respected, but under-purchased. Because of the latter, they now want to emulate the style of The New Yorker, and have changed their format to a monthly magazine. They have a few hurdles to overcome when it comes to photography. In both the above cases, with very little information about the articles the photos would go with, I was given ten minutes in the subject's office to take a suitable photo. What the writers expected was a simple on-camera flash shot with the subject at their desk. What they got was thirty minutes of me frantically trying to make an interesting shot in boring poorly lit offices. The top man is a very famous football coach here in Jordan. He led two teams to become world champions in 97' and 99'. The fellow below is a well known actor and playright. When I showed the writer the actors photo above he said, "no good, too dark!" Luckily the actor liked it. I hope I've learned enough tricks over the years to continue to be fast on my feet. If not, there's always on-camera flash.