dispatches

Travelling light

I’m packing for a week-long assignment. Here’s what I’m taking:

Canon 1Ds Mark II camera body
28-105mm lens
70-200mm lens
17-35mm lens
85mm f1.8 lens
50mm f1.4 lens
400mm lens
1.6x telextender
15mm fisheye lens
Backup camera: Canon 20D
17-85mm lens
Gitzo carbon fiber Reporter style tripod
Speedlight 580EX
Color filters for Speedlight
7 2gb cards and wallet
4 1gb cards and wallet
Sensor brushes
Blower
Cable release
Lens cloth and cleaner
67mm and 58mm polarizing lenses
Gaffer tape
Allen wrench and 10mm spanner, for tripod (have to pack these in checked luggage, or TSA will confiscate)
Mark II instruction manual
Sanho 80gb card reader and hard drive
Cords and charger for Sanho HD
8 AA Rechargeable batteries for Sanho
Alkaline AAs for Speedlight
Charger for rechargeable batteries
MarkII charger and extra battery
20D charger and 2 extra batteries
Power strip for all of this
Empty bag for dead batteries
Kinesis harness for camera
Lowepro Stealth Reporter 400 AW w/ waiststrap
Model Releases
Pens, Sharpies
Business cards, samples of work
Fujitsu Lifebook laptop computer
AC cord for laptop
Computer eyeglasses
Cordless mouse
12 blank DVD disks
Folder with client contact info, hotel and plane reservation, equipment list, wallet contents, TSA camera equipment rules
Book for plane (Thomas Friedman’s "The World Is Flat")
Map of Chicago

And, oh yeah, clothes.

After the Wedding

Last night as I downloaded the day’s images, I couldn’t let go of the notion that something was wrong. I was too tired to put my finger on it at the time, but this afternoon I compared the files on the CF cards against the portable hard drive that I used to transfer images to the desktop. My last card of the evening had a corresponding file folder on the portable, but no images in it. They didn’t transfer when I downloaded the card in the field. Yikes!

I hadn’t cleared my cards yet, so the images were safe. But only because I was paranoid enough to check. I still have a problem regarding digital as real, and reality is not helping to disabuse me of the notion.

The wedding was a nice small one, and short—only 6 hours on the job (I usually work double that). So many people came up to me and praised my ability to be unobtrusive and yet attentive and sociable, that I left feeling, yeah, I could do more of these. Weddings are one of the few gigs where the client gushes about the photos to my face.

I shot this one with the 1 Ds Mark II, which is overkill (16mp for photos that will be printed at 4x6), but I wanted to get familiar with using this camera on an assignment. I’ve been shooting with it daily since I got it in June (see the daily blog), but working with it for hours in a row is a different matter entirely.

I’m not in love with the Mark II, despite the stellar quality of the images it produces. It’s a heavy, ill-shaped beast of a camera (the viewfinder extends out from the rear of the camera, and pokes you in the belly), and I find it hard to handle. This is not a seamless extension-of-the-body camera like a Leica rangefinder. It’s too big for my hands and I have to work to just steady the thing. But get used to it I must.

One accessory that is essential for an all-day shoot is a Kinesis Gear X-harness. It’s a suspender-type strap with an X-cross on the back and chest and waist clips. With the camera set up with an Optechs strap (with the fastclips), I just clip the camera on and suspend it around my entire torso. There's no weight of the camera on my neck. It just feels like I’m dressed for a wedding wearing a rig that is more appropriate for rappelling off a cliff.

Digital vs. Analog in Print

Today the FedEx driver delivered my copies of the new Whitman College viewbook, for which I took the bulk of the photographs. It is an instructive document, as it neatly spans my transition from film to digital. When I shot the campus in the fall, I did so on color negative film. The spring shoot was with my 8.2 mp Canon 20D. It was my first major assignment in digital.

Boy, do the digital shots look better.

Even on the uncoated stock on which the document is printed (which can cover up a multitude of sins), the difference is obvious. The film (when enlarged to 9x12) is grainy, problematic with highlight detail (even though the client scanned from the negatives), and is mushy overall. The digital is crisp, even, plenty of shadow information (such as the paper stock allows) and nice, detail-filled highlights. Even one shot of students on a lawn, midday, harsh sun, worked out. I couldn’t have captured it on film. Digital raw capture had enough latitude to handle it.

Call me a convert. The next assignment, for the University of Chicago, will be on the Mark II. The file quality at higher ISOs is awesome, and will allow even more flexibility.

New Orleans Horror Story

Here is a link to a print version of one of yesterday's This American Life segments, a first hand account by two paramedics attending an EMS conference, and subsequently trapped in New Orleans: http://www.wnyc.org/discuss/soapbox.html?message_id=64182

Why it got so bad

If you want to know what actually went on in New Orleans last week, listen to This American Life on NPR this weekend. What transpired there, on top of a natural disaster, was a war against the poor. Why didn’t those poor black people leave the Superdome? Because the National Guard would shoot you if you tried. The response to Katrina cannot be seen in totality without seeing that virulent racism was part of the reason why it got as bad as it did.

Digital and Creativity

I was in the often-crowded lobby of Panda Photo the other day, talking with Stephanie Felix about my switch to digital. It’s a small space, and quickly others joined in the conversation as it turned to the effect on creativity that digital poses. This has been my big surprise with the switch—I did not expect that I would grow as a photographer because of digital. It’s just another tool, right? And it’s a huge hassle to learn how to use it. But, for me, it has foreshortened the feedback loop that is inherent in the creative process. In any image-making process you have to learn how intention matches with execution, and develop the vision to see through the process to the other end, the image that results from your efforts. Digital allows a shorter loop for this kind of course correction. And it is improving my photography.

I’m not one to make much of the tools used to make an image. A camera is a camera is a camera. Any camera/len/film/process combination is going to result in a certain ability to present a certain kind of imagery, and deepening the relationship with your tool, no matter how sophisticated or crude, is going to deepen the content and meaning of the image. This is a formalist speaking—the form structures the meaning. I once thought digital was just another kind of camera, but it is really another entire kind of relationship with image.

Anyway, I was mentioning how my daily photo blog has strengthened my connection with what I experience, as I carry a camera with me everywhere now, and deal with the resulting images within hours, instead of days. One of the employees chimed in, "Photography only distances you from the world."

I can see the point, and know how to disagree with it now. Yes, if you’re only a witness to the world, standing outside of it to record it, life can have a way of passing you by without your involvement. You can be overly engaged with equipment and miss where you are. You may use taking photographs as a way of keeping the world at a safe distance, unengaged. It is not an inherent part of the photographic stance, however, much as Susan Sontag proclaimed otherwise in On Photography (I read that book in college, and subsequenly had to drop my camera for several years. I realize now that I didn’t have to.)

My ethic toward photography now is to insert it in my experience of the world as I engage it. Usually, I am in a deeper relationship with the moment precisely because of a heightened attention to it, because of my camera. There is this interesting dance that goes on, being simultaneously a participant and a witness, that is the result of deep seeing. Being only one or the other often means being less aware of where I am or what I’m experiencing. Together, at its best, it results in an image that has the fully realized power of the conscious moment.

Vacation from the News

The one side-benefit of the President’s visit to New Orleans today is that it’s kept me from staring at CNN all day. I can’t stand the sight of the man. I don’t want my blood to boil any more than it already has regarding our impotent response to the disaster in the Gulf.

  Instead I went on a birding break. Running errands downtown, I thought, if the bridge is clear, I’ll head over to Marymoor and look for the Buff-breasted Sandpiper. Which is how I ended up in soccer field Lot B next to two tiny women staring at a bird gleaning insects in the grass on the edge of a gravel parking area.

Buff-breasteds are a mild rarity on the West Coast. A few show up every year, generally on the outer coast, but this was a first King County record. I hadn’t seen one in twenty years, and that was two thousand miles to the north on their breeding territory in the Arctic.

  I was a volunteer for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, part of a tundra bird study. Amid the exotic avifauna of the tundra—Semipalmated and Pectoral Sandpipers, Long-tailed Jaegers, Snowy and Short-eared Owls--the Buff-breasted Sandpiper was a queer mystery bird. Its build is pigeonlike, but with an erect and regal bearing. I’ve never heard one make a noise, but on the tundra the males were conspicuous in their breeding dance, or more accurately, their breeding tai chi pose. They stood motionless with wings outstretched, in a small lek, two or three males occupying a territory between our tent and the Arctic Ocean, a half mile distant. I found one of the nests, hidden in the dense, low tundra grass, and a clutch of chicks less than a day old huddled together in the soft depression.

Seeing birds is like a mnemonic to my life, and seeing this bird in a gravel parking lot, a world and half a lifetime removed, took me back to the sights and sensations of a rare and precious place.