dispatches

Everything about sensor cleaning

Every possible method of cleaning sensors (scotch tape anyone?), pro and con, is on this website. I found this thanks to the Inkjetart.com newsletter, which is a worthwhile read.

My sensor cleaning solution? I don't. I've only ever left streaks when I've used brushes. I'm terrified of touching the sensor with a wet cloth. The most I'll do is use a blower. I pay Cameratechs $45 a pop, per camera, to clean my sensors before every assignment.

Novel problem

Here is yet another problem we didn't used to have.

I shoot with two 5D camera bodies. It saves on the dust issues, in that I don't have to change lenses as much, and I can cover a range from 24 to 200mm at a moment's notice. Last night I changed the datestamp on my cameras, as I had changed time zones. It was late, I was tired. I was an hour off between cameras today.

To complicate matters, the file numbers on one camera caught up with the other, so I couldn't just do a file number sort and rearrange in big batches. I had to grab groups of like and drag them bit by bit until there was some semblance of order in the day's take. Twelve hundred exposures had to be sorted manually.

Just like the old days.

Anatomy of a shoot

So, what do I think about when working on a shoot? What solutions go through my mind before and during the event?

My contra dance project is in a mature phase, in that I’ve worked in the environment for some time, and I’m deeply aware of the aesthetic and logistical issues I must consider before and during my shooting time. Last night I photographed the Monday contra at The Grey Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina.

When I walked into the hall I recognized that, wow, this is a cool place to hold a dance. It’s not a church basement or a school gym which, as far as contra dance venues go, puts me way ahead. This joint has character coming out of its pores—an open ceiling with all the woodwork showing, christmas tree lights strung in it (oh, are those going to look cool at a slow shutter speed!), and a really funky floor. The dance line is perpendicular to the band, a configuration I’ve not seen before, which might open up other possibilities.

I came in a little late, which was a disappointment. I like to talk with the dance organizers and the caller before I pull out the camera. Not a problem—I’ll dance. That’s the primary reason I’m here, of course, but it also allows the dancers to make a connection with me as a dancer before I start annoying them with my camera.

At the break I chatted up the band. "Cool. Sure, go anywhere you want." Now I had permission to hang out on stage. I showed my portfolio of dance shots to the folks manning the desk, and left the book there for others to browse through.

I started by taking pictures on the stage. That was where the most light was (the stage was lit! Hurray!), and it offered the best overview of the hall. I quickly found the best shot happened with the fiddler dominating the foreground. I now had to think about the background, the dancers. I had to wait until there was some interesting motion in the background (I didn’t want it to look like they were standing around, which can happen frequently in a contra dance), and I had to watch what my main subject (the fiddler) was doing. The musician to her left was an issue too—do I include him? I now have three moving elements of the composition that I’m juggling.

This is my basic premise with complex, dynamic situations. It’s not original—I stole the language from Sam Abell. Before something happens, I set the composition of my photograph. This goes here, this happens there. Then, I wait. When the bell goes off or, as with me, the sensation in my body tells me that it’s there, I begin to shoot. As the elements of my photo move, so do I. I start photographing as the action gathers, shoot through the event, and out the other end. Somewhere in there is the photograph.

I noticed that my fiddler was rocking with the beat of the music. She rocked from side to side in a regular, predictable pattern. I could pan that, I thought. I set my exposure at a quarter of a second, and started tracking her. When I felt in attunement with her motion, I started shooting. With blurry photos, as long as there’s one thing in the photo that is sharp, everything looks fine. If I’m following her, it means that the lights in the ceiling are going to streak. I know that’s going to look cool.

When I started photographing the dancers, I encountered a problem. The ceiling was white. It reflected a lot of light. My christmas lights weren’t streaking against a black background like I imagined (in this case, I was chimping the shoot, a practice I usually recommend against. But these were difficult conditions, and I needed feedback). I like to direct my flash upwards, using the slide-out card in the 580EX, or against a wall, as it’s less intrusive to the dancers. But I was lighting the whole ceiling in my shots. The only way this was going to work was with a direct flash on my subjects.

I shot away, but I felt nervous. I turned off the flash a good part of the time, to see if I could make something of the available light (hurray ISO 3200!). What I observed was, if I stood at the darkest end of the hall, I could use the silhouettes of the dancers against a brighter background, and the shots looked interesting enough to explore awhile.

I was right to have been nervous. When I got back in the line, a dancer berated me on the flashes. "I have a thousand dots in my eyes," he said.

I risked and lost. If one person told me, it means 20 others felt the same way. I must have felt the energy around me, which is why I stopped shooting after two dances. I tried to tell him that for most of my shots I didn’t use a flash, but I felt bad about it. It’s going to make me more sensitive the next time I’m in this situation, which is the best use one can make out of such criticism.

The selects are on my Flickr site.

PS. Since Monday I've been getting emails from dancers wanting to see more photos. Maybe everyone wasn't so annoyed as I thought.

Goings on

With all my travels this year my attention to local seasonal changes have a quality of artifical abruptness. My regular visits to the Montlake Fill are marked in intervals of weeks, not days. Last time I was there, the place was full of migrating Yellow-rumped Warblers and Robins, and the winter birds were still in force. This morning I heard not a single warbler, but the air was filled with swallows, which uplifted me to a degree that surprised me. It was cold and rainy, which usually puts me a good mood anyway, but to see the clouds of chattering swallows hoisted me into yet a higher level of joy and contentment. The world is all right after all, despite so much evidence to the contrary. The swallows are back.

The hills of Seattle have a faint glimmer of dusty green, that momentary blush of early spring that lasts barely a week before the trees are fully leafed out and it looks like summer. The garden is in its heady spring-forth mode, with promiscuous blooms and shoots everywhere, and it is beyond me to maintain it this season. I have hired a gardener, an intensely cheerful woman who speaks of my plants as though they have gender ("He would look much better against the stone") and is correcting my mistakes in placement by the attitude that plants have wheels and can be as easily rearranged as furniture.

I have a rare weekend to myself, as Robin is in Chicago at a board meeting. The cat is morose and depressed by her absence, and is more demanding than usual for me to brush her, which is apparently my only function in her life. The rest of the time she monitors the activity on the street from her window perch. Every person, every dog, every crow, every gust of wind is tracked. She’s the watch-kitty. If she were a person she’d be the nosy, sanctimonious old lady who gossips about all the goings on in the neighborhood.

Robin and I will have barely 10 hours together before I take off on my next shoot, back to Randolph College (previously, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College) in Lynchburg. I get in a day early, where I’ll catch a contra dance in Asheville, North Carolina. Stay tuned.

Photo Lucida jitters

Oh, it’s going to be another challenging Photo Lucida. I can feel it. I just spreadsheeted the list of reviewers for next month’s portfolio review in Portland, trying to decide which ones I want. Most reviewers have a line about the kind of work they want to see. There is an alarming overuse of the adjectives "conceptual," and "experimental, and frequent variations of "pushing the boundaries of what we know photography to be." Oh boy.

There are 60 reviewers on the list, over half are repeats. I’ve seen some of these people at every review event of the last 10 years--I call them the "photo mafia." Many of them have been supportive of my work, and have been following what I’ve been doing all these years. But there is a shrinking acceptance, and opportunity, for what we would call "traditional" styles and processes, and more attention to photography in the context of contemporary art trends.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It’s the way this world is going, and I’m not about to change the direction of the tide. I am organizing my portfolio this week, as it’s about the only time I have at home before I go on the road again. I’m changing course with what I’m showing (I had a rather disasterous Photo Lucida two years ago—it’s in the archives here), and I’m going with my contra dance project, which is what has much of my attention these days. The black and white silver print panoramics are staying home this time. That work is way too old school for this crowd.

New post at A & P

I have a new post, on the creative power of failure, over on Art and Perception.

Sothebys does Weston

The room was crowded at 11 in the morning. That morning there was an article in the SF Chronicle about the Sothebys auction of works from Maggie Weston’s collection. Two days only, at Charles Campbell Gallery. On one wall was a group of Westons, an Oceano Dunes (blessedly matted to show the whole image this time), a very early work, one of his attic portraits from 1921, and a portrait of Tina Modatti. Second from the left was a Paul Strand work from the Gaspe Peninsula, an absolute modernist masterwork of light and dark triangles, and stunningly printed.

There is no replacement for seeing work in the flesh. Some of these images we’ve seen reproduced over and over (a Diane Arbus "Twins" hung in a corridor, opposite a nude Charis on the Oceano dunes by EW), but there are two things going on when the show is live. One is obvious: you can see the real tones in the print. You can get your nose up to the work (if the museum or gallery will let you—they were peculiarly uptight about people doing this to glassed work at LACMA) and see the details and the flaws. There’s nothing so refreshing as seeing where Ansel Adams missed spotting out a dust speck. The second aspect veers into the spiritual and woo woo: the work has presence. You can feel something from a real live work of art, an original painting or photograph, that is never going to happen in an offset reproduction. I have been overcome with goosebumps and been brought to tears more than once in art museums. I step back a foot, out of the zone of the painting, and the sensation goes away. I step back, and I’m wrought all over again.

Something of the sort happened to me with a group of early French primitive landscape photographs, also at auction. I’d never paid much attention to this body of work in reproduction, it never spoke to me. In this room, it was shouting out my name. Weird, evocative, moody, these works had resonance big time. Cuvelier couldn’t bring color to the work like his contemporaries, but he could bring a melancholy to the image like no one’s business.

Link to the Chronicle article here. They've got photos of some of the works I mentioned (but they cropped that Oceano Dunes shot!)

Look, I can be Edward Weston too!

I’m a sucker for these places. There is nothing like an eroded sandstone beach to bring out the rock-sea-sky photographer in me. I have a grand time in shapely erosion. Yes, I know, there is no original statement I can make from this material. It’s all been done before, and how, especially here. The name of this particular beach: Weston Beach, at Pt. Lobos.

I work so hard to extract form out of complexity, to put myself in a difficult natural environment and try and tease something out of the mess. I finish with a kind of mental exhaustion and spiritual exhilaration. Then I get on this beach, with the layers of color eroded just so to suggest, well, anything you want. I point a camera, anywhere. There’s a composed abstraction. I move two inches. Another. And another. The light is the kindest light of all, fogbound and soft. I might as well be shooting fish in a barrel.

Since I can’t quiet the voice in my head that is yelling, "What are you doing this for?" I just give it license to prattle on, judgmental little art snob twit that it is, while I go have a grand time slumming on the beach making my mini-Weston-Bullock-White masterpieces. I know, of course, that they’re not masterpieces. I’m just having a fun time seeing cool forms and capturing the experience. Robin looks through the take that evening, and says, "You know, they’re not leaving me with anything.I’m used to your pictures having more resonance." Looking at the work, I’d agree. They’re as easy to look at as they were to take.

You can see a batch on my Flickr site.

Remembrances of birds past

The morning fog, so moist and comforting, has been replaced by dessicating Santa Ana winds and unrelenting sun. My hike yesterday was in the wind and the bright, in the Simi Hills at the Sage Ranch Park. It’s interesting how landscapes feel like they either touch something deeply personal and familiar, even if they are foreign, like the coastal scrub and sycamore groves of the coast, or feel alien and exotic, like the wind-seared sandstone of these hills just 30 miles inland. Maybe it’s just weather, and the wrong ions in the wind. What I had been looking forward to, and missing because of the wind, was the birds of a new environment. This landscape was bereft of birdsong.

I hauled along the Xpan on this hike, and boy, was I rusty. I have become so fluent and unconscious with my seeing through the digital that it was a shock to erect a tripod and compose a skinny rectangle through a rangefinder viewer again. With color negative film I have a chance at capturing the extreme dynamic range of this landscape (that dratted sun again) at which digital fails so readily. As it was, however, my exposure ratio between the formats was about 10 to 1, and I didn’t even finish out the roll of film.

I came into a sheltered riparian area, and there, finally, were the birds. Familiar ones now, House Finches and Oak Titmice and Lesser Goldfinches, and then, a song from long ago: a Canyon Wren. I remember this bird from my desert years, and there is nothing like a bird song from another time to take me back, to recall all the times and places this descending cascade of bell tones was in my life. Bird song is the ultimate mnemonic for me, as powerful as scent.

Outdoor cure

I appear to have reached my capacity for viewing art. I am going through museums of world class collections with a weary and disinterested eye. The antidote is the outdoors.

I am working through the "Day Hikes Around Los Angeles" guidebook. Yesterday I was at Temescal Canyon, just above Santa Monica, a sycamore and oak canyon with slopes of dense chaparral. Before embarking I was faintly nervous about mountain lions, which are becoming a menace around here. As it turns out, the only menace I faced was being run over by the trail runners, which conveniently served as protection against a lion attack. What kitty could resist chasing after a running prey?

The air was filled with the song of Wrentits, which filled me with nostalgia for when I first started birding in the early 80’s at Pt. Reyes Bird Observatory. They were one of my study species, and I sought out their nests in the dense brush and poison oak. This is also about the time when I started my "Stick Picture" series, and hiking in the California coastal scrub landscape made me realize how this particular landscape, and my immersion in it during a key interval in my life, is so primary in this body of work. I spend a lot of time in these kinds of places wherever I go because that’s where the birds are. Years of subsequent birding means I grew a big piece of my brain that can parse out the signal-to-noise ratio. That love of chaotic compexity, and the rewards of sussing out wrentits and skulky sparrows in the mess, have leaked over into my photography.

There’s a selection of photos from Temescal Canyon over on my Flickr site.