dispatches

LA stories

Tonight we made it back to Seattle after a wedding extravaganza in Los Angeles. Elly made us dinner, and supplied us with fortune cookies from takeout earlier in the weekend. Mine read: “You may attend a party where strange customs prevail.”

The wedding was a big, traditional Sephardic affair, of my wife's third cousin's daughter. By coincidence, Miriam and Josh's photo, that I took, was on the splash page of the Yeshiva University website last week (they met there). The event felt like I was back in Washington Heights when I shot the Yeshiva U viewbook.

I watched the pro photographers at work. They were efficient and good, and at one point we talked shop. John Solano and his wife do 130 weddings a year. They obviously know what they're doing. “I don't know how to do anything else,” he told me.

My first thought was, how does he handle that massive data stream (he shoots RAW). Here's how: seven employees (“Though I edit every one,” he said). And a new 14 terabyte server.  Later I asked the bride's mom how much the photography was costing (answer: a lot more than I charge). I did a quick calculation, figured in the substantial overhead, and realized these people were not getting wealthy.

But they were pros—they knew to get close, they directed only minimally and didn't interrupt the natural flow of the event. Whenever I saw them shooting, I tried to steer clear and photograph my own way elsewhere. It meant I got to do my own weird shots of what, for me and many of the guests, was an exotic spectacle of a wedding.

There is a lot of dancing at an Orthodox Jewish wedding. It's segregated though, men on one side, women on the other, and a wall in between. An enduring photographic exploration of mine is dance as social cohesion, so I got into the middle of the men's circle. It felt like a rugby scrum in a mosh pit, filled with joyful abandon.

Here are some photos.

Wanna see my Thanksgiving?

I could see that this could get old, but here is yet another video. We travelled to Salem to be with family for Thanksgiving, and I documented the prep and the dinner.

It's also my first successful YouTube upload. The quality on YouTube is impressively bad, I must say. There must be a less destructive path from HD then through iMovie. Any suggestions anyone?

That West Coast rock-sea-sky thing: The Video

I got a good connection finally, and uploaded my "beach shots."

 

Still moving

I am first and foremost a landscape photographer. It is the modality I have worked in for longer and deeper than any other subject. So, it stands to reason that I would first turn my attention with this new camera toward the landscape. I also happen to be on vacation in a particularly gorgeous spot, the Oregon coast, so what else am I going to aim the thing at?

I am doing that thing that still photographers always do when they first pick up a video camera. They make still pictures. I feel my way through where I am, set a frame around something that interests me, and fire away. Except there's no discrete moment that is an abstracted image to be removed from the event. I am capturing something related to the experience of being in the place—the movement, the texture, the sound, the light, but most of all, a duration.

With still images we know that the final experience of the image often has very little to do with the source moment. Photography is a hugely abstracting way of snatching an instant from the stream, and looking upon it as something removed and very different. We often admire images precisely because they show us something we cannot see any other way.

I'm having a tougher time understanding how video works this magic. It's probably a wholly different order of abstraction that I have no understanding about yet, and so my initial forays are going to look naive and unstudied. They're going to look like what happens when a still photographer picks up a video camera.

It would be nice to be able to show what I did today to you. But that piece of the puzzle I haven't figured out yet. It's a 6 minute video. I tried compressing it to post here, but it looks like total hell, and even then the server times out.  I haven't even figured out the YouTube thing--anything I've tried to upload there plays for 2 seconds then quits. Like I said before, I'm at the bottom of a very steep learning curve. I'm daunted by the most basic of basics.   

Now the pictures move

I apparently don't have enough to do. I bought a video camera yesterday, a Canon HG10. There's no tape; it writes onto a 40gb hard drive. I spent much of today figuring out how to get the video out of the camera and onto my computer. Canon said one thing (you need to upgrade to Leopard), Apple said another (no you don't). I upgraded to the latest version of Tiger, and spent another fruitless hour until I figured out you had to put the camera on Play for it to connect. Duh.

I'm at the very bottom of a very steep learning curve. I haven't handled a video camera since one of those over-the-shoulder Sony units from 1973.

Here's my first reel, after I spent the rest of the day puzzling out iMovie.

 

Another sad chapter in the storage woe chronicles

You'd think there'd be an easy solution to this by now. I haven't found it. There must be thousands of us with terabyte-sized storage woes.  The latest effort is turning into another debacle.

I hired CreativeTechs to advise me on a storage solution. I don't have the resources to spring for their first choice (an Apple Xserve RAID ($8 to 12K), so I settled on their pick of a RAID box, a Sans Digital 5 bay. I had the Seattle Mac store install an eSata card when I bought the MacPro, so I was good to go.

Nothing in storage, or anything complex with Macs, is ever good to go. First there was a long, complex configuration of the Sata box, with way deep geek knowledge required. It took many hours for the 5 750gb drives to format into a RAID 5 array, but I was told it would be a simple matter to point the Mac at it when it was done, create a volume, and start shoveling data into it.

Well, two more problems arose. One, the eSata connection didn't work. Two, the Firewire connection did, but the box was only visible as an "Unknown Device." After another $180/hr visit and a long consult with the Sans Digital tech support, we learned that there is an undocumented, but hard 2tb ceiling to the capacity of the box when using Firewire. You don't have that limit with an eSata connection, but the configuration switch to lift that lid is also an undocumented setting.

You can see why this is not ready for civilian use.

Then the eSata problem. Turns out the Mac Store never put in a driver for my Sata card. Also turns out it's a cheap card that may not have the capability to handle a RAID box. We got the card working, we created a volume on the box, and my tech guy left, assuming everything was fine and working. We disregarded the ominous issue of one of the monitors failing to boot up a couple of times. Just a fluke, right?

Tech guy's gone, I start transferring. After 5 minutes of dumping data into the box, it goes offline. Or the MacPro freezes and has to be hot rebooted. The box is unusable. My working theory now is that I need a more robust eSata card that is meant to be used with RAID, and it's on order.

So where are we at with storage? On the low end there is the Drobo, the only user friendly one in terms of set-up, but it only connects with a USB. It's slow to respond, it's slow to transfer data, and it often messes up my boot-up, even on a Mac. I've got more than 2 terabytes in it, and the Max OS yells at me every time I start the computer because of that. It's really annoying. I'm trying to get rid of mine, and I would steer anyone away from getting one.

On he high end there is the Apple Xserve, for the busy advertising photographer with the cash flow to support the overhead. I'm a busy editorial photographer. It's different.

There's nothing I see in the middle. Mine is a three thousand dollar doorstop at the moment, with an expensive meter that runs each time I have someone over to try and get it working. This just has to get easier. What we have now doesn't work.

Why I became a photographer: my father's work

I am a photographer because my dad was a photographer. When he was assigned to the Naval Air Station in New Orleans, starting in 1943, he shot a remarkable body of work of aircraft and ships and New Orleans scenes. I grew up looking at these photos.

I interviewed him this past fall and got some of the stories behind the making of these photographs. Here is the audio slideshow address.

http://www.dougplummer.com/slide_shows/neworleans/index.html

Your brain on photography: a podcast

Robin Shapiro, my wife, is one of the smartest people I know, and she has been watching my process for a long time. She's been reading a lot on neuroscience lately, and has some ideas about what our brains are doing when we get into the zone and make photographs. This audio file is a 15 minute snippet of our conversation on the topic.

http://www.dougplummer.com/slide_shows/brain/brain.mp3

Background on Robin: she is a psychotherapist in private practice, and a consultant to other therapists. She is the editor of a "best selling" (by professional book standards) book on clinical application of various EMDR techniques, EMDR Solutions: Pathways To Healing, published by W. W. Norton. Her blog is at Trauma & Attachment Therapy.

May we steal your photo please?

Well, at least they asked.

I got an email today that is edging me closer to pulling all my work off of Flickr. In it, a company, Schmap.com, said that they "selected" one of my photos for the "short-list" for inclusion in their Vancouver Guide. They got the photo off of Flickr. Here's an excerpt.

"While we offer no payment for publication, many photographers are pleased to submit their photos, as Schmap Guides give their work recognition and wide exposure, and are free of charge to readers. Photos are published at a maximum width of 150 pixels, are clearly attributed, and link to high-resolution originals at Flickr."

This is a commercial, ad-supported site, that is harvesting free content from Flickr. I declined their generous offer (they included a link and an easy check-box to remove the photos). I think maybe they're trying to behave ethically in a morally dubious morass. And they're probably right about the pleasure this gives some photographers. There is a enormous pool of people with shiny new digital cameras who would be tickled that someone likes their photo enough to publish it. Payment? Value? That's sooo 20th Century. All content should be free, right?

Skygeek alert

There's a new comet in the sky, Comet Holmes, visible to the naked eye. With the moonless nights upon us for the next couple of weeks, it should not be too hard to find. High in the NE is Cassiopeia, like a sideways "W". Go straight down from it, almost halfway to the horizon, until you see two bright stars.  Look for a fuzzy star to the left of the two, that all together make an equilateral triangle.  Details here, and a good sky map here. The best view is through binoculars.

It's not dramatic like Comet McNaught was back in January, and it doesn't have a tail in the way you'd expect (we're looking up it's tail, as it's headed away from us beyond Mars). But it's something new in the sky that's never been there before.