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10/29/2008 10:15:00 AM
Still photos are the passion of a photographer on the move
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Written by Bill Maurer
Television viewers across the country who tuned in to the television news program 20/20 on the ABC network one Friday night in October watched an interesting segment on the economic conditions in rural Nebraska.
That was less than two months after those watching "ABC's World News with Charles Gibson," the nation's most-watched prime time news show, saw Republicans reacting to the selection of Sarah Palin as the party's vice presidential nominee at the national convention in St. Paul.
Many of those same people had spent a Sunday morning a few months before watching Tim Russert interview former Tennessee senator John Edwards on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The common link between those three highly popular television network news programs was an Urbandale man, Tim Bloomquist, owner of Professional Video in Clive. Bloomquist was behind the camera for each of those segments, the man responsible for producing sharp, interesting footage in Nebraska, for capturing the excitement generated by the Alaska governor, for making sure viewers caught the sharp exchanges between the storied Washington journalist and the man who was at the time seeking the Democratic nomination for president. It was the second time Bloomquist had run the camera for a Russert-Edwards exchange during the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. It was the last time Russert, who later died of a heart attack, and Edwards, who later dropped out of the race, faced off on television.
"I enjoy doing the freelance news stuff," says Bloomquist, whose main work is producing television commercials and videos used in marketing and training. "When the networks need someone to call when news happens in the Midwest, they often call me."
While ABC and NBC news operations are most likely to tap him for freelance work, he has also generated video that has been seen on Fox News, CNN and CBS. The freelance video work occupies anywhere from a quarter to half of his time.
"There's a lot of news in the Midwest. Farm news, university news, political news," he says. The Iowa caucuses and all the politicking that preceded it last year kept him especially busy, some weeks eating up three or four days.
The Des Moines native, 47, has been doing television photojournalism since he graduated from North High School in 1980. Paul Rhodes, then the lead anchor and news director at KCCI, hired Bloomquist for a summer job, which turned into a 13-year gig.
"Channel 8 allowed photojournalists to do a lot of freelance work on the side," he says. "I was getting so much business that I thought we could make a go of it on our own." So he and another KCCI employee started a small production company, which Bloomquist bought after five years.
Business is good, and he has two full-time employees assisting in the production.
Bloomquist is well-known, locally and nationally, for his video work. He's won awards, both when he was a "shooter" at KCCI and since he started his own commercial studio. But his true love, "my passion," he calls it, is still photography.
His reputation in that area is known across the country. Locally, however, few are aware of the talent he shows with his Canon camera. It's that still photography work dsm focuses on in this occasional series featuring local photographers with lofty reputations who are rarely recognized at home.
Bloomquist's love of photography started when his parents gave him some darkroom equipment. He was 12, and the bathroom was his darkroom until he put one together in the basement. He shot photos through junior high and high school, and then came Rhodes.
"I gave up still photography to concentrate on the video work" and his studies at Iowa State University (his major was telecommunications arts, his minor journalism). "The negative for me with photography was the darkroom mess. It was too much of a hassle. I didn't want to do it."
But when digital imaging became perfected, when he could make still photographs and not have to fiddle with the chemicals needed to develop and make prints, he was ready.
"I jumped in with both feet," Bloomquist says. "I bought the latest, greatest cameras. I shot around here and I went to workshops," and then he headed west, to some of the most scenic spots on the North American continent, where he photographed landscapes-places like Death Valley, Grand Canyon, the "Four Corners" area where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada meet in the desert.
"I've always loved landscapes," he says. "I love being outdoors. I love going to beautiful places, watching the sun rise, watching the sun set-as long as the weather is decent."
He loves it so much that he leaves his wife Barb, daughter Emily, 18, and son Lucas, 15, "three or four times a year, for four or five days at a time," to head out to capture the light, the shadows, and the fog play across arches and plateaus and spiraling pines that result in images even Ansel Adams would envy.
The first landscape workshop he attended-"f/8 and Be There"-was led by Steve Kossack, a widely known landscape photographer from Arizona. Besides Bloomquist, only two others participated, so the Urbandale man and the instructor were able to get to know one another well. From that association grew a side business that Bloomquist operates out of his Clive office.
In conjunction with Kossack, Bloomquist produces "Steve Kossack, Photographing the Great American Landscape," a series of DVD's that are sold worldwide-"at least half of them outside the United States," he says. Besides giving instructions on where and when to be in position to get the best photographs, the series includes Web links to maps and equipment that would benefit a landscape photographer. Sales of the instructional videos, he says, "helps offset the costs of my passion."
Though Bloomquist normally heads west for his photographic adventures, he has produced a number of works of landscape art in the Des Moines area and around Iowa. Some of them are exhibited at Terri's Fame Shop in Urbandale; others are posted on his Web site-TSBphotography.com.
He sells prints, too, but he doesn't head out with the idea he is going to make a picture that will sell.
"I don't do it for the money. I do it because I love it," he says. "Landscape is my love."
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