"Staying Afloat" Cover. Daniel Bayer / The Aspen Times ©2002

"Staying Afloat" is precisely the kind of teamwork that we enjoy at the Aspen Times.It is also one of the reasons I love this job.The editorial publisher, Andy Stone, the layout & design guy, Jessie Davis and I sat for About 20 minutes on Monday and cracked up at the cover ideas for the weekly edition. An often dull story visually needed a bit of zanieness we thought. Smashing a watermelon with a circus sized mallet crossed our minds."Nah! maybe later "we thought.Jessie ran out the door and bought a cheap used suit and shoes for $20. I had the blackout paper installed in the trusty 10 gallon aquarium by the time he got back. People at the pool thought we were crazy for lowering a cash register into the water & wondered why there was a tin can attached to a chain in the drawer.(a "magiver" shackle). This was loads of laughs and fun. I positioned the camera with the prism off and the lens at 17mm, horizontal in the tank thinking of really nailing the shot and just cropping the 100 speed film. 320th of a second at F5.6 was a full stop over. We shot about 5 rolls including some hilarious production shots along with a 10 frame sequence of him diving in dry suited with the half under and over technique. No photoshop, just a photo that made my boss smile huge and was a great closer to a standing room only show on Wednesday night.Jessie then used the ol stretch technique to give the regular image a funky length to it as my discretion twitched and placed the text in quark and made a PDF..viola! http://at.us.publicus.com/atw/index.htm