Everything is a photograph when you view the world through glasses shaped like big square picture frames.
Harry Cabluck and his large-format bifocals see things most of us don't.
He's a stand-in witness for the public, documenting the little moments of daily life and the great big flashes of history, too.
The career of this Austin photojournalist stretches over half a century, including four decades with The Associated Press.
He rode in President John F. Kennedy's motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and heard four, not three, shots fired. "Bam, bam-bam, bam."
He captured Franco Harris with the "Immaculate Reception" football that was just inches from the ground before Harris scooped it up and ran for the Pittsburgh Steelers' winning touchdown in 1972. (That photo hit the Wheaties box.)
He stood on a swaying footbridge over the wild Salmon River in Idaho with a 12-pound, 800-millimeter lens to catch an unaware President Jimmy Carter striking a Washington-crossing-the-Delaware pose in a whitewater raft in 1978. It ran front page coast-to-coast.
And Cabluck more or less owns the Texas Capitol, where female state senators compete to flirt with him and even governors obey his commands to look this way or move a scooch that way.
This new year brings a big change for Cabluck, a courtly man who never wants to retire. Ever.
He was laid off by the AP in December, another statistic in the shrinking journalism field, which lost more than 40,000 newspaper jobs in 2009. No more belting out "Delta Dawn" at the office.
His is a photo finish, though.
Without missing an f-stop, this color-blind photographer is launching a freelance career from his home near the South Congress Avenue shopping district that he shares with his wife of 46 years, Ellen Cabluck, a quilter.
His first assignments immediately came, naturally, from his beloved AP, which now has no permanent shooter in its Austin bureau.
Cabluck will be 72 in March and is a survivor of coronary bypass surgery. He's been shooting news photos for 50 years, working for 10 years at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram before joining the AP in 1969.
He wants to keep on keeping up with photographers 50, 40, 30, 20 or 10 years younger. He's still the "Dancing Bear," a pet name he earned by quick moves in center field at World Series games. His photo of Boston Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk jumping in jubilation after his historic home run that won the first World Series night game at Fenway Park in 1975 still hangs in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Cabluck is almost always the first photographer to show up at an event and the last to leave.
"I'm afraid if I stop working, my heart will attack me," he said.
Cabluck follows the old wisdom that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Anyone can push a camera button, so he spends hours thinking about shooting positions, preparing his equipment and double-checking schedules.
One of his award-winning photos shows then-Gov. George W. Bush and wife Laura with the Texas Capitol behind them as they ride on the back of a convertible in the 1999 inaugural parade.
What you don't see is the security agent tugging on Cabluck's belt. Cabluck had run into Congress Avenue from the restricted space allocated to the press.
"George, George. There's Harry!" Laura said to the governor.
"Have him turn around," Cabluck told her.
"George, turn around. It's Harry," she said.
Cabluck, in his EEE custom-molded black shoes, duck-walked away from the security guard long enough to get the prize shot.
Woe unto those who stand in the way of Harry Cabluck when he's out to get the picture.
Once, Bush was waiting inside the Governor's Mansion to show off his Christmas tree to the press. But Cabluck refused to go inside after a security officer delayed his entry and tried to keep his driver's license. He returned to the AP bureau to process other photos. But Bush wanted Cabluck at the mansion. He held up the press conference by phoning Cabluck to cajole him back.
Cabluck, displaying his wry humor, later hand-delivered to the mansion a photograph of himself with his driver's license taped to his forehead.
"Nobody ever sent me to charm school," Cabluck says with a shrug.
Cabluck, too, has taught a generation of Capitol comers and goers how to hold a press conference.
"It's Harry's Rule," said Tom "Smitty" Smith, director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization. "You have to have a visual that tells your story within 10 inches of your face."
Smith used to stand at the podium and point at a chart across the room. Cabluck scolded him each time.
"He'd explain that what people are interested in are the faces of people and then the chart, graph or pictures that tell your story," Smith said. "If you have an interesting object next to your face that's inviting, then people will want to read the story."
Smith learned the lesson so well that it backfired one day.
He brought a fish and a kid's fishing pole to a Capitol press conference about the danger of mercury in fish. He figured the short pole would allow the fish to dangle close to his face as he spoke. He didn't count on the fish being too heavy for the kiddie fish line.
During the press conference, the line snapped, the fish flew and a curse word was uttered from the podium. Cabluck captured the moment. The photographer, however, was gracious enough to turn in the photo taken just before the fish got away.
Cabluck can be gruff enough to ram through interference, but he's generous enough to give someone in need the camera off his back.
In September 2008, he flew with Gov. Rick Perry to Galveston after Hurricane Ike hit. In the emergency command center, he found a drenched Erich Schlegel, a former Dallas Morning News shooter who had just begun a freelance career. Schlegel, working the storm for USA Today, had tried to get to Galveston in a 14-foot fishing boat but capsized. He was washed to shore along with a reporter and their ruined equipment. The Coast Guard brought them to the command center.
"I was in shock and almost in tears," Schlegel said. "Basically, I was a hurricane victim."
Then, he said, "the governor shows up in a helicopter and there was Harry. He was my little angel from heaven, literally."
"What happened?" Cabluck asked.
Schlegel told him about his watery ordeal.
"He immediately started digging in his camera bag and pulled out an extra camera and lens and (digital) card."
Schlegel used the borrowed equipment for two months.
"I just will never forget that," he said.
Cabluck, a former Army National Guardsman, is known for mentoring photographers. The so-called Cabluck School of Photography is a regular stop for many aspiring photojournalists.
Watching others is how Cabluck learned his skills. As a sixth grader, he became fascinated by his uncle's modest darkroom. So he joined the newspaper and yearbook staff at Northside High School in Fort Worth. He also started taking forensic photos of car wrecks because his family ran a wrecker service, and he often arrived on scene before the police.
He shot car wrecks and rodeos while attending Texas Christian University and Arlington State College (now the University of Texas at Arlington). But he never graduated.
The AP posted him to Pittsburgh; Columbus, Ohio; Dallas and Austin, where he arrived in 1989. He's taken photos of 10 presidents, every one since Kennedy. His were among the last images of JFK mobbed by crowds in Fort Worth before the president's assassination in Dallas a short time later. Cabluck has covered two Olympics (1976 summer games in Montreal and 1980 winter games in Lake Placid, N.Y.).
For more than 30 years, Cabluck has been famous among photographers for the 800-millimeter prototype lens he bought from the Ernst Leitz company. Leitz had used the lens to capture the 1968 launch of Apollo 8, the first mission in which humans orbited the moon. Cabluck calls it his "magic lens."
He's likely the only photographer you'll see around Austin with a lens that measures 39 inches. He shoots University of Texas football games from the end zone with the lens, which weighs 32 pounds with its custom case.
And it's the lens Cabluck lugged to a remote and rugged area of Idaho to take Jimmy Carter's picture. The camera was on a tripod but the bridge was swaying, the river was running, the boat was moving and "I don't know if I could feel my heart beating or could hear my heart beating," Cabluck said.
But when it was over, "I was pretty sure I had whopped the UPI guy," he said.
Cabluck is not a braggart. He even keeps his awards in a coat closet.
He just wants to make pictures.
"If they didn't pay me, I'd do this for free," he used to tell his AP colleagues.
"That always stuck with me," says former AP reporter Liz Austin Peterson, who now works for a nonprofit in Houston. "He was the epitome of someone who loved his job and was doing exactly what he was put on earth to do."
Photographers don't usually get second chances to make the perfect photo.
But Cabluck is taking this chance to shoot as many pictures in as many ways on as many days as he can.
Click.
dgamino@statesman.com; 445-3675
UPDATE: This story has been updated to correct details about the Bush Christmas tree incident.
