Good Form
Christian Parley
I saw the legendary California photographer Ed Lawrence at the Ram Tap Horse Trials event in Highway City. There he was again, down as low in the dirt as he could position himself, shooting just one frame off as the horse made it's jump.
His timing was incredible. He'd always catch the horse on it's way up, the back legs had just left the ground, rider in either the right or wrong position that would determine if the horse would land properly or not. Ed was a photographer. The working kind.
I'd actually met Ed years before when I was a photo lab tech at a west Fresno Kinko's Copies. He used to bring me his film to develop because, as he put it one day, "I like how you print my stuff, kid". There was no higher honor.
For decades, he and his wife used to process the 50 or so rolls of film he'd shoot in the day into prints, on-site, right out of the back of his station wagon before one-hour photolabs made that a ridiculous way to spend all your sleeping hours.
The next day of the two-day events, his wife would have a table out with all the 5"x7" and 8"x10" prints from the previous day's trials for the riders and their family's to buy up. They did. Nobody was getting what Ed was getting and nobody was doing was Ed and his wife were doing.
The next to last time I ever saw Ed was after I'd processed forty-eight 24-exposure rolls of Kodak professional Portra 160 into three sets of 5"x7"s. He picked them up later that night and slipped me $100.00 in a photo order envelope as he left. He hadn't done that before. The season was ending, he and his wife were heading back home, and I suppose this was another way of saying he liked the way I printed his stuff.
I left Kinko's shortly after that, never to run into Ed again, until I had the Ram Tap horse trials photo assignment for The Fresno Bee some ten years later. As I arrived to the event, I thought to myself, "I wonder if I'll see Ed Lawrence? Wouldn't that be a thrill!"
And there he was again. Low in the dirt, still getting the shot. He was old now. He was old when I first met him. There's no retirement plan for most working photographers. He was a little slower. He remembered me, but not like I remembered him.
I hung out next to Ed for a bit. Just enough to make him lose his rhythm, so I left. I went fifty yards over, got low in the dirt and waited for the horse's back legs to just leave the ground.
See more of the legendary Ed Lawrence's work at his site:
http://edlawrencephotocom.zenfolio.com/p151434745
A story on Ed Lawrence reproduced from the Los Angeles Times:
http://www.venturacountytrails.org/WP/page/14/