dispatches

Another change of environment

The Minnesota Public Radio station interrupted All Things Considered with a severe storm warning. “Vicinity of I-90 and Co Hwy 12 in Winona County. Damaging hail possible.”

I was driving a remote circuitous route that my GPS unit determined for me (I never carry maps anymore), so I pulled off the county road on a wide shoulder by a farmhouse driveway. The storm in question was several miles to the northwest. Thunder growled continuously from all directions. Occasionally I'd see a clear bolt of lightning hit the ground, but mostly I saw flashes behind roiling dark clouds that look lifted from the stained glass windows of my hometown church.

I adore the Midwest, for just this sort of spectacle. Where I live has no discernible weather. One season blends weakly into the next and, except for the occasional November windstorm, nothing much happens in the sky. Here, the weather can kill you any month of the year.

I've lived in this part of the country at various times—college in Ohio, a year in Kansas, a winter in Minneapolis, a spring in the Michigan north woods—and I miss this drama. After I had my fill of the sky show (and as the rain started splatting), I got back on the road and appeared to drive into a car wash. The boundary between road and air disappeared into a violent wet smudge. Then, in a sudden instant, I crossed a boundary and the deluge became drizzle. The sky ahead was a benign pastiche of pastels, but in my mirrors it was a solid black.

Change of environment

I have ergonomized my work environment, and it didn't cost me a fortune. Ergonomics consultant Carol Nicholson (206-383-3740) came to my house, watched me work, got out her tape measure, took photos, and told me what to change.

The big, but simple adjustments were where my monitors sat, and how high I sat. I have a dual monitor system, and I have them to the left and right of the center of my desk. Carol made me choose one as the main monitor, and centered that one in my line of sight. She moved it a lot closer to me, and lowered it.

Then she raised my chair to the point where I needed to remove the pencil drawer of my desk, and found a couple of 3-ring binders for me to use as footrests. My keyboard is now practically in my stomach. She wants me to get a mini-Mac keyboard, one without a number pad, so that my mouse will sit closer to the keyboard. The only other immediate things she wants me to get is a soft gel wrist rest for the keyboard, and a footrest. She has a recommendation for a chair (an RFM Internet chair, model 4834, without armrests), but says I can wait and see how these changes work before committing to that expense.

I just worked for two days processing the files from the Stanford University shoot using this new setup, and survived the effort just fine.

What do I think of the iPhone now?

Jeff Carlson's column in Saturday's Seattle Times Personal Technology page is on his iPhone, a year hence. His opinion largely matches mine, which is that the iPhone is the best small portable tech device I've ever had.

Jeff is the classic early adopter, and he bought the phone at full fare when it came out. I'm a big believer in staying away from the cutting edge, as I've mostly been burned when I've not obeyed my own sensibility (witness the Drobo debacle). I also couldn't stand the hype surrounding this device when it came out, which kept the recalcitrant anti-cool part of me from wanting one.

But you know what I still keep saying? The hovercraft and those futuristic gizmos from the Jetson's cartoons, about how the future was going to be, about now? The iPhone is the first arrival from that world. It pains me to no end to mimic the Macinista's, but it's really that cool.

Jeff's first rave about the phone is the same as mine—ubiquitous Internet access. That I don't have to fire up the laptop to check my email on the road is a huge boon. I do some web surfing on the thing, but I haven't delved into the world of mobile-friendly websites, and Jeff's column gave me some great ideas to pursue.

I have no idea what he's talking about though with Twitter, a concept whose functionality utterly eludes me. Why would I want to know what coffee someone in my “social network” just ordered? I really don't get this one—can someone explain it to me? Or am I really just that old now?

I've also never considered the possibility of watching a movie on an iPhone. Isn't that what theatres are for? I'm also one of those dinosaurs who has never made an iTunes purchase either, and I get supremely annoyed when I plug in my iPod or iPhone into the wrong computer, and my entire music library is deleted from the device (I've since learned to check the “manual sync” box on everything I can find that has one).

Other annoyances. Battery life is abysmal, though I'm coming from an old, monochrome phone which seemed to hold a charge for months, apparently. With the iPhone it's pretty much a daily routine to plug it in, particularly if I'm on the road and using the web features a lot. I dearly wish there were a way to organize my email into folders with a POP account, but even more, I wish there were a way to delete the 80 messages a day all at one go. Right now it's a one-at-a-time chore. If my iPhone sits anywhere near my computer, the speakers pick up an interference hum. Yet if I'm charging my iPhone from the computer, it's sitting right by it.

I think there is a chip in the thing that detects the age of the person using the phone, and makes using the keyboard progressively harder the older you are. I've had this phone for months now, and I can barely complete a simple Google query without two or more misspellings from hitting adjacent keys. As you can guess, my email replies from it are extremely curt.

I've had two occasions now where my address book/contact list has completely vanished. Whether it's an iPhone thing or a Macbook problem I don't know, but I've detected the problem both times when my contacts had vanished on the phone. I have a .Mac account, but I don't know how to control the sync directionality (and a Mac doesn't ask you, it just assumes it's smarter than you are) and I've been afraid of spreading an empty address book throughout my whole data set. I now carry a backup on a flash drive when I travel.

What has been a nice surprise is that my cell phone bill didn't go up. It's actually lower than on my old Verizon account.

Matzoh airlift rescue

Even if I am eating bagels during Pesach, it doesn't mean I'm deaf to the cries of the Matzoh deprived in San Francisco. My niece, Felicity, is hosting her Seder tomorrow, and the city is suffering the Great Matzoh Drought. Really. There is none to be found. So I FedExed her our extra supply from last week's Seder.

There was, apparently, considerable discussion on the receiving end about the larger ethical dilemma this shipment poses. What would Michael Pollan say? Couldn't this be a teaching moment during the Seder, where they reflect upon modern consumption patterns? What about the carbon footprint of shipping the matzoh by overnight air?

But what of the broken chain of tradition? What acceptable substitute could there be for a charoset and horseradish sandwich?

The box of matzoh I sent originally came from Israel. It seemed a minor global warming impact to send it the additional thousand miles.

My career's not over!

Working is the best physical therapy. That was my revelation for the day.

I had a little shoot for a local client, a couple of portraits for the annual report of a non profit. I had been dreading it actually, uncertain if I were up to the strain on my back. But I also wanted a test run, in preparation for a two day out of town gig next week. I wanted to know just how bad off I really was. I'd had a difficult night with a lot of pain, and truly didn't know how I'd carry my gear, or handle the strain of the shoot.

As it turned out, the three hours on the job were the best I'd felt all week. The hip belt took all the weight of the equipment (18 lbs), and I let the shoulder strap flop loose. Walking city blocks, engaging my subjects, being connected with my environment and my body felt terrific. Ecstatic even. I can do this, I realized. I handed my bag off to my client to carry, I wore the cameras on my shoulders, and I felt loose and limber and in no pain.

When I came home, I fell onto the couch and into a dead sleep for an hour.

Latest damage assessment

Boy, when you ask for advice, do you get it. I've put my story on a couple of listservs (ASMP-Seattle and freelance-seattle). "GET A LARGE BALL AND SIT ON IT!" was one (CAPITAL LETTER) suggestion. "Ditch the desk. Sit in an armchair, use a laptop." I got a referral to a fabulous Feldenkrais practitioner ("Wait until you're out of the acute crisis, and then let's talk," she said). One friend, a neurologist, had a great take on my drugs--

"What we say in the medical biz about prednisone and its cousins:

    1.    All the indications for these meds are present if we do not know what we are dealing with, and it’s getting worse.

   2.   These medications enable the patient to walk unassisted to the autopsy table."

So, here's what's working. The waking-up-in-agony-and-tears-at-2-in-the-morning phase appears to be over. I now just wake up in pain and agony at five in the morning, which I consider progress.

Neck traction is the modality that give me the greatest relief. About an hour after I make myself an inch taller, the neuropathy in the arm goes away. Tomorrow I take this equipment to my physical therapist, who will tell me how I ought to be using this gear so that I don't hurt myself.

My morning routine is completely altered. I used to consider it my duty as an Informed Citizen to read one or more daily newspapers first thing in the morning. I can't sit still now when I get up, so I am honoring my Gentile heritage by walking the half mile to the bagel shop and getting a coffee and sesame bagel with a cream cheese schmear (during Pesach, mind you), and walking back. My back feels great when I get home.

I have yet to spend any time at my downstairs workstation (with the three screens and the nine hard drives) since this acute episode began. I bought an Airport Express router so that at least I have 802.11n internet speed on the laptop, which seems to be ergonomically friendlier to use. Video editing, alas, is out of the question for the duration.

I'm still at an impasse as to how I'll carry a camera. I have a Kinesis shoulder harness, but it stresses the back at exactly the area that doesn't want any more stress. Again, my PT might have ideas on how to alter this gear. I suspect lengthening my straps and hanging my cameras from my shoulders is going to be the way to go. And I am arranging to have sherpas available on my remaining spring assignments.

What does it all mean?

I actually have a serious aversion to talking animals in media (if I could, I'd assassinate the Geico gecko), but I'm making a major exception in this case.

Why are there so many tulip photos?

Because the tulips are by the front door, and it's the extent of my mobility at the moment. I can take a Daily Photo in 30 seconds, and keep from breaking the series.

I am limited by another back problem, one which has left me alarmingly disabled. This time it's my upper back, with sharp, severe pain down my right arm. For five nights I could barely sleep from the pain.

It all started with my last deadline for final files for a client. 2500 images, processed in two long days. I felt my back be tweaky, as usual, after such long, uninterrupted hours at the computer. But then, the pain got worse. A lot worse. 

I've been treating it with chiropractic (which made it worse), with acupuncture (which did nothing), with cranial-sacral (which helped for a few hours), with massage, with crying jags, with nutritional supplements, with heavy narcotics (which made me sick as a dog—you don't want details). Finally, my doctor prescribed Valium, which relaxed the muscles enough that a physical therapist could manipulate my spine to give me, at last, some profound relief. For the first time in five days, there was no neuropathic pain in my arm. Robin likes me on Valium. I'm much less anxious. “It looks good on you,” she says.

A CT scan showed three vertebrae with alarmingly little room between them. I have a diagnosis now: moderate to severe disk degeneration in my spine between C-6 and T-1. Now, my neck has been hurting me for 30 years, ever since I regularly rode my bicycle across the country and back, in my twenties. Add to it a 30 year career of looping heavier and heavier camera bodies across my C-6 to T-1 vertebrae, and I have done some serious damage to my body. My profession has physically hurt me.

My brilliant PT says it will be a long road to full recovery, but she's confident that she can get me in good enough shape to finish out my busy spring season. Although I had been complaining about the 2 week interval without work that I found myself in right now, it couldn't have come at a better time.

A spine specialist looked at me and the scans, and said, “You're exactly on track for recovery. In fact, you're a lot better than most people in this situation.” He credits all the alternative therapies I've been pursuing. I credit it with being an entitled, middle class, educated health care consumer who can afford good health insurance. I'm one of the lucky ones. Most people don't get this standard of care, and it's not right.

What it will ultimately mean is a change in a lot of my habits. I suspect I can never again carry a camera around my neck—it'll have to go elsewhere. I've hired someone to make my workstation ergonomically correct. I'm looking at outsourcing my RAW processing, and figuring out if that can work in my business model. My digital fees fund the purchase of my computer workstations and peripherals, and I would need to replace that income stream. But if someone else is processing my files, perhaps I get to spend more time in the field, where the fun is. 

Don't get attached

There was a moment when I had 14 days filled in as shooting days for the month. Now it's down to less than half that. I thought I was getting on a plane to San Francisco Sunday, but this afternoon I learned that gig has been moved back two weeks. “I would hate to have your job,” says Robin, who basically fills in her appointment calendar a year in advance. “You're lucky to have the temperament you do.” Which is, basically, I can never make up my mind, so I don't mind it a lot if the universe can't either.

Though I wish I had more work, the chant of any freelancer, except when they have too much. There is not, I suppose, a happy medium. I am never so happy as when on assignment, though I am suffering at the moment from a stiff neck and a pain radiating down my arm, perhaps from slinging too many heavy cameras or, more likely, from straining at a computer monitor for too many uninterrupted hours. I had our “anarcho-puncturist” make of my neck and shoulder a pincushion, which seems to have helped a little.

John Goodin, from the dance band Contratopia, posted a blog entry about me photographing at the Glen Echo Friday dance, so I'm returning the favor. Those shots are up on Flickr, as are a posting from the previous weekend's Camp Wannadance. The great coincidence of that evening, was that John is on the faculty of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and I'll be shooting there in a couple of weeks. At last report it was about to snow there—one hopes that spring arrives before I do.

I really am an American

A notable sensation when whizzing down Washington, DC streets is the catch in the throat as you glimpse iconic national landmark after iconic national landmark. Oh, there's the Capitol Dome, there's the White House, the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial. The latter we took a cab to in order to photograph some students admiring the cherry blossoms, which are at their peak this week. We had to share the path with 80,000 other people however--finding a spot with any semblance of serenity took some doing.

While waiting for our couple to show up (it took them a half hour to park), I visited the Jefferson Memorial. Despite the Boy Scout troops and school groups and throngs of tourists, I found a kind of  serenity in this rotunda. And then I read the words inscribed in marble, and I was moved to tears. “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal...” And also, “...I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate that these people are to be free...”

On the west end of the reflecting pool is the Lincoln, even more moving in its simplicity (it is unfortunate the same cannot be said for the monstrosity at the other end, the WWII, which reeks of triumphalism and heavy-handed symbolism). On one side is inscribed the Gettysburg Address, on the other, his second inaugural speech. This one completes the sentiment in Jefferson's, only now Lincoln avers that God has seen fit to wreak his judgment upon the nation for our stain. It is a moving speech, worth the effort to plow through the nineteenth century syntax.

Visiting these pilgrimage sites I feel powerfully stirred in my patriotism, and my devotion to my identity as an American. Our country has an exceptional status in the course of human history, and these ideals, particularly when we are not living up to them, are worth fighting to preserve. These monuments of Washington, DC, they are the temples for our American secular religion.

Which one is it?

As a typical liberal, elitist, latte-sipping irony connoisseur, I eagerly await the April 1st edition of All Things Considered to see which is going to be the spoof piece. I am on the road, so I had to search the NPR site for this year's version. It took me five tries through the playlist before I found it. I thought for sure it would be "McCain Competing with NFL in Primetime," which was a true account of the NFL moving the season opening game to acccomodate McCain's acceptance speech at the convention. Really. Surely, then, it was going to be the "Oregon Uses Lottery Approach for Healthcare Insurance." Sadly, this one is true. "Colorado Flushes Salmonella?" Nope. Come on, it's gotta be the "Profile of a Superdelegate." No, this is one is typical earnest NPR material. Not even "Oil Executives Defend Profits To Congress"? An April fools joke if ever there was one.

They whimped out of anything remotely controversial, electing instead to skewer high-art music in "Fluegel's 'B-Flat' Starts On A Good Note."

The BBC, however, has a good one here. 

The One Minute Window

It seems to be a recent pattern around here--show up at the house, and you get a documentary about you.

The Anarcho-puncturist

The latest production. 30 minutes of capture, 6 hours in Final Cut. Wish I could remember all those shortcuts and commands we covered in the workshop.

The Photograph Within--postponed

I'm rescheduling our workshop, The Photograph Within, for early June.

The new version will have more review time, and new performance enhancement techniques from Robin. If you're new to this, The Photograph Within is a workshop on connection and attunement, namely, how to recognize your body's signals and quickly get into the zone of creative flow.

Details as we figure them out.

Balancing acts

It is spring back here in the Northwest. I came home to daffodils and the current bush in bloom and the pear and maple trees in leaf. Today at the Fill the sky was full of swallows, which made me inordinately satisfied. The swallows are back, which tells me that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the world is still set right. There was a lot of migratory activity, way too many Robins around to be local birds, and the ones on territory were having a fit chasing off the clueless out of towners. The winter ducks, like the Wigeons, are still thick, but there are big rafts of Bufflehead in the lake, and I saw a group of Ring-necked Ducks, which I have not seen all winter.

It is an interstitial moment in my busy spring schedule, between work last week in Chicago and week after next in DC. The last assignment is delivered. I can work on other projects, but it seems far too much time is generally taken up with managing the files. Just making sure they're all in their triplicated places and up to date. For my off site storage I use internal hard drives that I've replaced with bigger ones, which means some of my data is scattered across drives as small as 60gb. They're old style IDE drives, formatted for PCs, and I've been having a time making sure I still have a means to access them. My last external drive box bit the dust and I replaced it with a nifty USB to IDE cable, but for some reason the Mac is balking at reading these drives, or at reading more than one in a row.

I have a stack of newer SATA drives, since I've upped the capacity in my Mac Pro, and I have a decommissioned Drobo that once held four drives, and that seems to no longer have a place in my backup regime. It's going on Ebay. The Drobo is problematic and slow—I once tried to use it to back up one of my full terabyte drives, and it took 29 hours to transfer the data. Then I used a SATA cabled box, and it took under two hours.  So now all my data fits on seven hard drives, ranging from 250 to 1000gb. These will live across the street at my mother-in-law's house. 

So long as I don't spend entire days at these tasks, and I can get out and count the ducks and do my Daily Photo, life is in balance.

What you see is what you get

Giusepe Cade, "The Meeting of Gatier, Count of Antwerp, and His Daughter, Violante, c. 1787

After my assignment I stopped off at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has free admission on Thursdays after 5.  The place was crowded, so I allowed myself to bypass many of the more congested galleries, which were invariably the French Impressionist Greatest Hits rooms. What I was looking for was something that I needed to see at that moment.

My strategy for a museum is to enter a gallery, glance at all the masterworks begging for my attention, and feel which one, and only one, of them is calling me at that moment. This is the one painting, or sculpture, or artifact in the room I will lavish with my attention.

In this case, I was gravitating towards groupings of people. I am photographing people a lot lately, and I suppose I needed some advice on how to proceed. Every compositional problem you encounter, someone has solved it before you. You need not reinvent the wheel. In this case, I found some novel solutions in some 17th and 18th century works that I had never noticed before.

On the way, through the subway-platform-cum-art-gallery rooms, I had to pause at some Monets. No one I can think of handles light, particularly hard midday light in a landscape, better than Monet. How does he make it work?  Then there's the compositional uniqueness of Degas. Even when he's not fawning over dancers, he comes up with a way of arranging the frame that appears explicitly photographic. It's no surprise that Degas was also an ardent photographer.

We do not work in a vacuum. What we choose to expose ourselves to affects the art we make.

Edgar Degas, "The Millinery Shop, 1879/1886"

Joy of environmental portraiture

A location photographer's stock in trade is his/her skill in environmental portraiture. If you get hired by a magazine, 95% of the time that's the gig—photograph someone (usually some white guy in a tie) in an environment. Like their office. Or their workplace. If you're lucky, you get to drag them to someplace that has some metaphorical association to the story. Like the risk management expert that I perched underneath a maze of highway overpasses, back when stories of them collapsing was in the news. For a cultural instant it had the frisson of a dangerous place to be, and it worked for the story.

This week I'm photographing some typical hyper-achieving Uchicago students/graduates in something that resembles what they do. A playwright on a stage, looking beyond the fourth wall. A couple of improv artists, pretending to be gargoyles. A violinist-composer, who brought in some friends (viola, cello, harp) for a faux performance for the camera.

In each instance, what was the most wonderful aspect of the encounter was getting to spend a little time in someone else's world. The playwright was a “little communist baby” in Poland, and we had a wonderful discussion about the role of paranoia in the current political climate. With one of the improv guys we mixed up our jackets, which were identical, which made me either totally cool or him totally nerdy. When I had them looking over a balcony I said, you know, this is a reprise of the Beatles Blue Album. The reference went over their heads, which allowed me to tease them about their lack of cultural literacy. With the musicians I had a lot to talk about, mostly in musical arenas beyond their direct experience because I'm such a folkie and they are all classically trained, and we riffed on the differences between the traditions.

What I tell baby photographers is, don't get a photography education. It's only a skill set, and it changes every five years anyway. Get a liberal arts education. Learn everything you can about everything. Your job, if you choose to stay in this profession, is to be curious for a living.

Throw away your old blower

"What have you been doing with your sensor?" asked Bill at Cameratechs. "There was soapy gunk all over it."

I take my cameras in to be cleaned before every assignment. The only cleaning I ever do myself is to blow the dust around with a blower. I won't touch a sensor with a pad or a brush--I've only ever made them dirtier that way. The professional cleaning is just another business cost for me.

"I haven't been anyplace particularly dirty," I said, meekly. I felt like I was being chided for poor hygiene. If I'm someplace dry, like an overheated building in winter on the East coast, I will run the shower for a few minutes to knock down the dust level in the air, then clean my sensor in the bathroom. "That wouldn't do it," Bill said. "It looks like something greasy was blown onto the sensor."

And it was me blowing it on, I figured out. It's my air blowers, which I've been packing around in my camera bags for years. Who knows what kind of crud has built up inside of them?

When I picked up my camera I also bought a new Rocket blower (with the fins trimmed off so it'll pack easier). When I got home I threw away all my old ones. 

Digital Journalist has new Platypus videos up

Dirck Halstead has posted news and videos from the Houston and New Orleans Platypus Workshops, including a blow by blow report from yours truly.

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0803/the-platypus-workshop.html

The good ones

This link will take you to two stellar videos that came out of the Platypus Workshop. John Lehmann and Peter Power, from Canada's Globe and Mail, shot and produced these post-Katrina stories. Whatever it is that they put in the water up there, I want some.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/survivingkatrina