Cinema Verite translates literally to “film truth,” and refers to a mode of documentary filmmaking that came about in the late 50s and early 60s. Anyone set on capturing “the real” in adventure filmmaking could be helped by a healthy dose of this film history. You’ll certainly gain a greater appreciation for the role that the camera can play in influencing the events on screen.

ADR stands for Automated or Automatic Dialog Replacement. This is necessary when the dialog from the original production isn’t up to par, forcing you to basically “re-do” it. You get the person who spoke those original lines in a studio or sound booth, loop the footage on a screen in front of them, and have them sync new dialog to the footage of their moving lips. It can be a pain, but doing it can also add a lot to the project.

Mix is the process of combining all your soundtracks into one, with all the sounds blended together at their correct volumes, together with any equalization, filtering, and effecting of the sound to give you the desired end result.

Foley is sound motivated by on screen action, specifically movement. Foley primarily includes footsteps, doors opening, silverware, ice axes clinking, and on and on. It is generally recorded live by foley artists on a stage watching the on screen action.

Storyboard is a series of rough sketches outlining the scene sequence and major changes of action in your film or video. It’s a common misconception that you have to be able to draw to make storyboards. But with a little creativity and vision it’s possible to create storyboards without creating a work of art. Ultimately, storyboards are important because they save time, and therefore save money. WIth well thought-out storyboards the camera crew knows what to do on set – there is an established roadmap that keeps things tight.

Dailies refer to the raw, unedited footage shot that day (or the previous day). Reviewing the dailies gives the director a sense of how the overall project is going.

Pre Pro obviously stands for “pre-production.” Once a production has been greenlit (contracts are in, financing or payment established) you get organized. Create a schedule, hire the necessary crew and map it allout. In Hollywood they bring in the cast and do a read-through of the script. In my world we are lining up the gear, the travel, the athletes, guides, permits or other necessities for when we start filming.

Post Pro stands for “post production.” This is where a lot of the magic happens and it can take longer than the actual production itself. Editing, music, color correction, titling, packaging, versioning… there is a LOT to post production.

Photo©2007_Abir Abdullah

Abir Abdullah is a photographer who has spent years documenting fire risks in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In particular, the garment industry has been largely impacted by these fire. Since 2005, 600 garment workers have been killed in factory fires. Tazreen Fashion factory suffered a horrific fire in 2012 killing at least 112 people. Clients of this factory included global brands like Walmart, Nike, and Disney, making this incident a symbol of “the high cost paid by third world workers for western consumer’s fashion desires.” With his documentary project “The Deadly Cost of Cheap Clothing: Dangers in Bangladesh’s Garment Industry,” Abdullah hopes to raise global awareness and pressure these powerful brands to “pay fair prices so that labor and safety standards can be implemented in these factories.” This work will be on display for the the Alexia Foundation’s “Eyes on the World.”

Photo©2012_Sara Naomi Lewkowicz

In addition, work by photographer Sara Naomi Lewkowicz will also be a part of “Eyes on the World.” Her documentary project “Shane and Maggie: An Intimate Look at Domestic Violence” portrays an inside look at a couple plagued with domestic violence. Deviating from her original project plans upon witnessing one of Shane’s abusive outbursts, Lewkowicz followed Maggie during and since the incident. Lewkowicz plans to examine the effects of violence on both the abuser and the abused, as well as the child witnesses. Maggie fully consents to the project, hoping that it may help someone else escape a similar situation.

Photo©2011_Amanda Berg

Amanda Berg‘s story, “Keg Stand Queens” will also be featured in “Eyes on the World”. Based on the Convergence Hypothesis, women have begun to take on more stereotypically male roles in many different areas of life, including efforts to drink more lie men. Berg’s photo documentary project focuses on the cultural dialect of the “perverse equality” caused by binge drinking in undergraduate females. A college student herself, Berg began this project in the first semester of her junior year in college, 2009. Objectively documenting the scenes of parties, she examined the complex relationship young women have with alcohol. “Determined to document the moments female binge drinkers choose to discard or painfully reinterpret through language,” Berg will be exhibiting her work for “Eyes on the World” and giving a lecture on June 22nd at 4:00PM. Ed will be introduction her at both events.

Come out to support these photographers and the work that they do with the Alexia Foundation on Thursday June 20th, the opening night of “Eyes on the World”. Taking place at 25 CPW Gallery (at 62nd Street and Central Park West), the event will be from 6:00-9:00 PM. For those of you unable to attend the opening event, “Eyes on the World” will be on display from June 21-23. Please RSVP for these events: *protected email*

Reminder to apply. 

The
Audience Engagement Grant supports photographers to take an existing body of
work on a social justice or human rights issue and devise an innovative and
effective way of using that work as a tool for social change. We are looking
for projects that serve as interventions on pressing problems and provide concrete
ways for photographers, organizations, and their target audiences to create a
positive impact.

Apply
by June 18, 2013. For guidelines, visit: http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/grants/audience-engagement-grant

Doing a few teaching stints this summer in far flung places. In late June, head for the first time to So. Africa, and do seminars in Capetown and Johannesburg. Really excited. I have been to Africa numerous times, but never to the south, and I’ve alway been told amazing things about the beauty that abounds down there. Here’s a link discussing the trip, and the events. Hats off to Nikon South Africa for doing all the logistics and staging for the events!

In July, will be down at one of my favorite places, amongst dear friends, in Santa Fe.

I’m teaching for the National Geographic, and two classes in lighting for the Santa Fe workshops. The Nat Geo class starts on July 14 and is a week long exploration of all manner of photographic skills. The two lighting classes follow on the next week. One is a two day, small flash intensive, and the other a full blown location light class. Excited about the classes! Haven’t been to Santa Fe now for a couple of years, and Donald and I are already discussing which brand of tequila to investigate thoroughly.

Onto St. Lucia in August. Really special this year, as I am joined for the first week of instruction by David Burnett, and the second week by RC Concepcion. Intermingled with the ongoing lessons of flash I always teach, each week will be richened by the teaching of their specialties. David is the quintessential storyteller, a legendary photojournalist who will do lectures, critiques and walkabouts. RC will bring to bear his genius with post-production, HDR shooting and processing, quick and simple video skills, and basic Lightroom tips and shortcuts. On all days, I will be teaching about the language of light, and how it applies whether you are doing a journalistic look see on the streets, or striving for well lit, lavish travel scenes. David’s is the guest instructor for the week of Aug. 18-23, and RC comes in for the week of Aug. 25-30. Here’s the link for the weeks, and all the info. 

More tk….

    Umbria, Italy

At one magical instant  the page of a book –
that string of confused, alien ciphers–shivered into meaning. 
Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment,
whole universes opened. 
You became, irrevocably, a reader.
- Alberto Manguel

 Mandalay, Burma

Everywhere I go in the world, I see young and old,
rich and poor, reading books.
Whether readers are engaged in the sacred or the secular,
they are, for a time, transported to  another world.

  Bamiyan, Afghanistan

We are familiar with words describing images, but not so
familiar with images describing words and the
impact reading has on our lives.

Thailand

Garrett Stewart’s book, The Look of Reading:
Book, Painting, Text, explores the relationship of
reading and art.He points out that a wide array of artists from Rembrandt to  Picasso and Cassatt
and dozens more,over the past 500 years
have painted people reading and the “look of reading” on the subjects’ faces.

Switzerland

  Moscow, Russia

We read to know we are not alone.
- C.S. Lewis

India

A great book that comes from a great thinker
is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
- Pablo Neruda

  Yemen

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road.
They are the destination, and the journey.
They are home.
– Anna Quindlen

India

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
– Jorge Luis Borges

Burma

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
- Emily Dickinson

Turkey

Sri Lanka

Reading is everything.
Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something,
learned something, become a better person.
Reading makes me smarter.
Reading gives me something to talk about later on…
Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
– Nora Ephron

Japan

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly,
into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.
– Joyce Carol Oates

Burma

Italy

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
- Joseph Addison

India

We invite you to download our free Portrait app
with twenty-minute video 
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Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Lourdes, France

© Fred Pompermayer

There’s a place where everyone feels most “at home.” For some people (sadly), that might be the couch. For adventurous types, it could be in the jungle or churning white water. I’d like to think that for me, it’s on the mountain. I’ve got immense respect for humans who have made a decidedly unforgiving environment their natural habitat, which is why I turn the spotlight on big wave surfer and free diver Mark Healey. That’s him above in Tahiti, looking right where he’s supposed to be, in the moment and in life. Inspiring. [Great shot, too, by photographer Frederico Pompermayer. More of his work here.]

In his quest to paddle into the world’s biggest waves, Mark has had his fair share of near-death tosses, the most notable being his 2004 wipeout at Jaws (Peahi). In addition to Teahupo, he’s also taken on Mavericks and Todos Santos. Then of course there’s his free diving with sharks (he once grabbed the fin of a 15-foot Great White and held on for a ride) that has rounded out his image of a man who seems more comfortable in the ocean than anywhere else.

Since meeting Mark at a GoPro event last year I’ve been following him across a few channels. The man does the insane on the daily. I was fortunate enough to pin him down for a few minutes for an interview, which I’m sharing here.

And check out the vid at the bottom of Mark free diving with bull sharks.

What is the book on your nightstand right now? (Or recent favorite book…)
MH: ‘1421 The Year China Discovered America’

What is your idea of perfect happiness? 
MH: Acceptance of variables that are out of my control and appreciation of the moment

What is your greatest fear? 
MH: To lose my freedom

What character traits do you most dislike in others? 
MH: Entitlement

What quality do you most admire in a person? 
Mh: Honesty with others and themselves

What do you most dislike in yourself? 
MH: I can be pretty damn selfish sometimes

Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Why?
MH: I’m not sure if he could be characterized as a “hero”, but Captain Nemo from ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’  I feel like he is an honest character. Briliant, and driven by his principles, but flawed at the same time.

Who is your favorite real life hero? Why?
MH: Colonel Joeseph Kittinger – He did a lot to pave the way for early space exploration, but he’s most famous for his jump from a balloon at 102,800ft in 1960. Can you imagine what was going through his mind! Everything about that mission was a test, the success of which was anyone’s guess. That guy has some serious grit, skill and intelligence.

What is your greatest ambition? 
MH: To positively effect the world while I’m here.  I want to help facilitate a love and respect for the sea and our other wild places. You will only protect something you value. If I can help bring that information and those feelings to people who would have otherwise had no idea, then that seems like the best first step.

Favorite indulgence?
MH: A good Bourbon 

What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
MH: Still being alive!

What talent would you most like to have? 
MH: I wish that I could play the Sitar

What is your most treasured possession? 
MH: My dive mask

What is your motto or favorite quote?
MH: “We can not solve our problems with the same thinking we used to make them” -Einstein

What does a good day for you look like? 
MH: That’s a hard one, because it could look like almost anything. My life revolves around what the oceans of the world are doing and what access I have to different adventures, so there is almost no routine to my life. Almost any day you’re breathing is a good one, it’s just a matter of your perception of it. Happiness is a choice.

What does your training look like? 
MH: The bulk of my conditioning comes from actually doing my pursuits ie surfing, freediving, hunting. My more disciplined training usually involves (in this order of importance) flexibility-cardio-strength. Yoga, Gymnastica (a Brazilian thing), swimming, hiking, martial arts. Although, I’ve been getting most of my exercise breaking concrete and digging holes at my house. Nothing beats manual labor!

What’s the most challenging aspect of big wave surfing for you? 
MH: The mental edge. There are plenty of people that are in good enough shape, less that have the ocean knowledge, and far fewer that have the balls to execute when they are confronted with a black wall of water when they are paddling with their own two hands. That’s what separates the men from the boys.

What’s the heaviest hold down you’ve ever survived? 
MH: I was tow surfing Jaws (Big wave off of Maui) for the first time back in 2004. To this day it is still the biggest waves I’ve ever seen. It was late in the day and I was tired and cramping already. Ended up taking a digger on a 60 footer and blowing my eardrum. I had no equilibrium and I was held under for a really long time. My PFD (thin floatation vest) ripped in half and I had caught it in my hand as it was being torn off. That little bit of floatation was all I had to bring me to the surface. All I could do was hold on and wait for light. I started losing consciousness and my whole body was locked up in cramps. All the sudden it got bright white and I figured I was on the surface. My world was spinning because of the broken eardrum and I took a quick sip of air and foam before the next wave hit. I ended up taking four waves on the head before I was picked up and lost about ten minutes of memory. Had to puke so bad, but kept swallowing it back down because I didn’t want to look like a pussy. Hahaha! Good times!

What drives you? 
MH: Overcoming fears, the sense of accomplishment, being on the edge of what is known to be possible, the physicality, but I think the biggest drive is restlessness. I’ve just kinda always had the sense that I’m living on borrowed time.

What inspires you or Who inspires you? (Both or choose one)
MH: The freedom of wild places inspires me.  

To learn a little more about Mark, follow him across these channels:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

So I put up a beauty dish in what I’ve heard Greg Heisler refer to as “standard, regulation beauty dish position.” It was up and over the model, fairly steeply, to camera right. And it did its standard, regulation job. Nice light, mostly collecting around her head and shoulders and then fading down the length of her gown.

But, China being China, where rules are rules, we were pretty much stuck right where we were. Couldn’t really move around. We had permissions, but had already attracted a crowd, along with security personnel, and some of them were, well, wondering about all this.

Especially after I asked Steven, an excellent shooter/assistant who had volunteered for the day, to bring two speed lights running on SU-4 mode on a stand into the lake outside the NCPA. That was cause for consternation for all at hand, but it did give a tiny extra bit of frosting to the gown, if only in these few frames. Funny, Steven, after spending the day in the rain, and getting into the lake, never volunteered again. Last we saw him. Go figure.

We stayed right where we were, in the rain, for at least three hours. I got intrigued by the model’s makeup, and the exquisite nature of her face relative to the outfit, so I killed the Elinchrom and put up a tri-flash bracket into a large (150cm) shoot through umbrella, an incredibly cheap one I had found in Wukesong. I positioned this right close to me and the model, just by my right shoulder, and pulled out fast glass.

Shot this at 1/4000^th @ f1.4, with a 35mm Nikkor. Which is a big reason I occasionally defer to small flash over big—the facility of high speed sync, relative to limiting DOF. It’s handy, in a word, and the light is nice, and well, when you’re stuck in the rain in the same spot for a bit, might as well give your client two different looks at the same outfit.

Same rules applied when we went inside, this time working a wide approach, achieving a bit of drama, and then coming in with small lights and an 85mm to mask the fact that both shots were made from spots about 15 feet away from each other.

We ended the day with a quick set with the lovely Bella, who, in the grand tradition of fashion models, texted like crazy in between shots:-)

I have an acquaintance who’s a big time guy in the oil industry, and he has likened what I do as a location shooter to being a wildcatter in the oil bidness. And, he’s pretty much right. Locations are like looking for oil. You just keep drilling through them till you find something, and hopefully, don’t leave till the well’s dry. Trust me, some are dry right from the get go, and that’s a tough day. But there are some locations I’ve been back to repeatedly, literally for ten years or more, and I still can’t find the end of them.

Thanks go out to all the models, hair and makeup, my stalwart client, who obtained all these permissions, and especially to Bo Tao, the designer of these gowns. He has taken inflections from traditional Chinese paintings, and created gowns that are living, breathing works of art. I was astounded at his talent.

More tk….

More tk….

I was confident the lens would be sharp and perform well as I had already read early reviews.  However, since I am often temped to push the focal length by adding extenders, one thing I was very curious about was how it would work with not only the internal 1.4x converter enabled, but also when 1.4 or even the 2x converter is added externally.  I went out to one of my local wildlife spots and found a cooperative Great Blue Heron.  Here are some of my first shots with this new lens.  Needless to say, I am extremely pleased with the results!

Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias). Cooperative test subject for new Canon 200-400 mm lens. Shot with Canon 1DC on 1 June 2013. This image shot at 520 mm using 1.4x.

HERE IS THE REAL TEST:  200-400 WITH INTERNAL 1.4X ENABLED, PLUS THE EXTERNAL CANON 2X CONVERTER III = 1120 mm focal length.

See for yourself, but my feeling is that even with this 2x converter added, the quality is there.  In fact, though I haven’t done the side-by side test yet, I think this looks sharper than using my 600 mm f4 with 2x converter at 1200 mm.   Of course I had to manual focus this as at f11, autofocus does not work.  But for extreme situations when I really want the reach, this looks totally usable to me, and has actually exceeded my expectation for this lens, so I am extremely pleased with it.

Canon 200-400 mm f4 1.4 converter with internal converter enabled PLUS Canon 2x converter III. Great Blue Heron test shots with new Canon 200-400 mm f4 1.4x converter lens on 1 June 2013. Full frame view.

Crop of above image at 100% resolution. Canon 200-400 mm f4 1.4 converter with internal converter enabled PLUS Canon 2x converter III shot on Canon 1DC. Great Blue Heron test shots with new Canon 200-400 mm f4 1.4x converter lens on 1 June 2013.  Tripod, f11, 1/1000 sec, ISO 800.

Reminder to apply. 

The
W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography is presented annually to a photographer
whose past work and proposed project, as judged by a panel of experts, follows
the tradition of W. Eugene Smith’s concerned photography and dedicated
compassion exhibited during his 45-year career as a photographic essayist.

The
W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography was established in 1978
following the death of Gene Smith, the legendary American photo essayist. It is
today the most prestigious honor in documentary photography. Every year it
recognizes a photographer who has demonstrated an exemplary commitment to
documenting the human condition in the spirit of Smith’s concerned photography
and dedicated compassion. 

The
W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund, INC., a not-for-profit corporation qualified
under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, independently administers
the grant program that provides photographers with the financial freedom to
carry out or complete major photographic essays. For 2012, the amount of the
grant will be $30,000. An additional $5,000 in fellowship money will be
dispersed, at the discretion of the jury, to one or more finalists deemed
worthy of special recognition. Awards will be presented in a ceremony held in
New York City in early October. 

The
deadline for the 2012 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography is June 8, 2012. For more information
visit: http://smithfund.nielsencontests.com

A very interesting online Polish magazine, Aorta, has published in their newest issue the work of myself and James Whitlow Delano.

Irrigating a recently cut sugar cane field in Sao Paolo state, also known as the Emerald Desert. Brazil is the largest producer of sugar cane in the world.

Took in one D800E. Lenses were standard issue 14-24, 24-70, 70-200. On the exotic side, I took in my ancient 28 f1.4, a 35 f1.4, and an 85 f1.4. Done. My other camera was a (gulp) film camera, a Fuji pano, with a 40mm lens. I also had a little rangefinder, for wandering neighborhoods, which has not happened.

Not a recommended pack, truth be told, but I knew if the D800 went down, I could borrow some sort of Nikon here. So far, so good. One day of assigning to go, and everything has worked, though I did crack the viewfinder in the pano camera. Sigh.

Other stuff. Three SB-910 units, two Justin clamps, two PW PlusX units with cords, Lastolite micro speed light soft box, and an 8 in 1 umbrella, which just did squeeze into my suitcase. No light stands, or big shapers. No tripod. Three Iosafe external drives, cords, chargers, Lexar cards, readers, international power strip. The ever present Think Tank roller, and a Guru Gear backpack. Advil. Sunblock.

Given the new parameters of the production job I was facing, I recommended lighting to my client, citing a Profoto distributor here I hoped they would reach out to. They instead, unannounced to me, went out a bought a bunch of stuff, and sent it to my hotel room to make sense out of. There were some good things, like an Elinchrom Ranger, and a 59” Rotilux soft box. And a super boom, two stands of undetermined origin, no umbrellas, a small soft box with a Hensel adapter ring (that stayed in the box), a couple Manfrotto super clamps, which have gone unused, a pretty funky, spring loaded c-stand, and that’s about it. How to make all this work together as a coherent field kit?

Shopping! I went to this huge building, bulging with photo shops, called Wukesong. For three straight days, I was everybody’s darling in there. The amount of gear dripping from the walls in these bustling little shops is impressive, if strange of name.

First thing I did was purchase a couple of big rolling cases to go into the field with. My client did a smart thing, buying gear, but did not connect with the fact that you can’t take it in the manufacturer’s boxes onto location. Got two of the biggest rollers I could find. No names on the cases. Got two incredibly cheap umbrellas, a big reflective, and a smaller shoot thru. Grabbed a sizable beauty dish, and blessedly, found an Elinchrom coupler for it.

Dukes, a Beijing based writer/shooter, loaned me his Induro tripod, and I managed to find two camera plates for it. Gels? I found a sheet of “3200” in a shop that is the strangest shade of tungsten I’ve ever seen. Grabbed a generic reflector pan, as, strangely, the Ranger kit came without one. I had one sync cord that did come with the kit, and it has hung in there. Dukes also loaned me a circular reflector/diffuser that’s about two feet across.

But, my biggest problem was syncing with the Ranger pack. I had two PW units, but no way to plug them in, and there wasn’t a hope at Wukesong of finding PW to Elinchrom cords. I could have brought mine, but had no idea this was the lighting kit I would be presented with. So, I’ve simply been old school about it, hard wiring camera to pack when I can, and then radio triggering to an SB, clamped to the stand by the pack, and firing into the slave eye at low power. Rube Goldberg-esque, but it works.

Our Temple of Heaven day was typical, in that almost all the pieces came into play. We started in early morning  with a not great but not  bad quality of available light, and worked our way through beauty dish with a reflector, beauty dish with SB fill, beauty dish without diffuser sock, big reflected umbrella with two speed lights on TTL, and then, finally, good sunset light. We had two hours in the am with the monument pretty much to ourselves, and then two hours in the late afternoon, so we had to move fast. Stood down in the middle of the day, as the models would have been cooked in these gowns in the Beijing heat, and the Temple of Heaven is just chock-a-block with folks during the day. Many thanks to the supervisor who arranged all this! I met him, and thought, what a cool business card this dude must have: Supervisor, Temple of Heaven.

More tk….

I still remember explaining to Renan why he might want to try using a tripod and the concept of depth of field. That was 2008. Fast forward 5 years and Renan Ozturk has, in my opinion, become one of the best adventure and expedition cinematographers working today. Take a look at his latest reel and you’ll understand what I am talking about. Not only is he an extremely talented artist and climber, his vision, passion and motivation for creating beautiful and often surprising moving pictures goes beyond obsession. His work ethic and tirelessness in the field are already legendary among his peers. Aside from being an amazing filmmaker, he is also a great friend and I have been lucky to have shared quite a few exceptional adventures and mis adventures with him around the world. Hope you enjoy his work….

For the past three decades as I traveled the world on assignment, and
 have witnessed children working in fields, factories, ditches, tunnels,
mines, and ship-breaking yards.

Kabul, Afghanistan

The scope of the problem is vast.
Hundreds of millions of children spend their 
childhood working and do not have an opportunity to
play, go to school, or live in a healthy environment.

India

India

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together, 
and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty,
you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.
 -  Grace Abbott

Yemen

India

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies is, 
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are
cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
– Dwight David Eisenhower

          Philippines

Afghanistan

Nepal

The object of employing children is not to train them,
but to get high profits from their work.
- Lewis Hine, 1908

Mali
Woman and her slave

Burma

There is no trust more sacred than the one the world holds with children.
There is no duty more important than ensuring that their rights are respected,
that their welfare is protected, that their lives are free from fear and want
and that they can grow up in peace.
- Kofi Annan

Mali

Niger

Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets,
the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
- Anna Quindlen

Tibet

India

Burma

Kabul, Afghanistan

Nepal

The real solution is to improve the incomes of the poor and
provide their children with decent education.
- Carol Bellamy

India 

Child labour must not become the nation’s social safety net.
- Kailash Satyarthi

Bangladesh

There is no room for complacency when 215 million children are still labouring to survive and
more than half of these are exposed to the worst forms of child labour, including slavery and
involvement in armed conflict. We cannot allow the eradication of child labour
to slip down the development agenda — all countries should be striving to
achieve this target, individually and collectively.
- Juan Somavia

Afghanistan

Kandahar, Afghanistan

My blog seemed to run about once a month until last September and then I stopped. Not intentionally. I just had other things in mind, not all of them pleasant. I was working hard to finish a book of fiction and managed to do so in late October, just before Ani and I left Missoula the first week of November for the long drive back to Virginia. I had a professional set back around that time that caused me to flounder a bit, out of sorts with the way things and professional relationships sometimes work or don’t work. Then I started trying to concentrate on finding an agent for my book. All in all, I had no impetus for reactivating my blog. Yesterday changed that for several reasons. While reading the New York Sunday Times obituaries I saw that of photographer Wayne Miller, who died last Wednesday at his home in California. He was 94.

I first became aware of Wayne Miller in the 1960s when I was a photojournalism/ art student at the University of Minnesota. I was aware of Miller’s work as a Magnum photographer. I knew his book “The World Is Young,” that chronicled his children growing up, and about his work with Edward Steichen in a special Navy combat photography unit during WWII, and later, in the early 1950s, how he helped Steichen in organizing “The Family of Man” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.” The soft cover book accompanying that exhibit was one of the first photography books I purchased as a student. Married, and the father of four little ones, I wasn’t able to buy a lot of books but that one became well thumbed and still resides in my library.

I eventually met Miller at Visa Pour l’Image in Perpignan, France in early September, 2001. We both had exhibits and we shared tables at several of the group luncheons. In a profession where egos sometimes seem to scale tall buildings, I found Wayne to be a quiet, soft-spoken, unassuming man. His then recent book “Chicago’s South Side: 1946-1948,” was a collection of rich, straight forwardly seen black and white images of African-Americans taken where they lived and interacted. It seemed evident to me that these pictures could only have been made by someone who had gained a certain kind of acceptance. He took that acceptance and made it count.

In Perpignan, Wayne and I discussed the possibility of trading prints. I believe we did trade books, mine being “Portraits Of America,” a retrospective/memoir of my work in America published that year.

I didn’t follow up with any correspondence after we parted, he, I believe to go back to California, me to the Po River country in Italy to finish a Geographic assignment. And to my regret we never made that print trade. How I wish now that we had. Not long ago, maybe a year or less, I thought about Wayne Miller and wondered if he were still alive. Funny, when we met, I didn’t think of him as being old, I wasn’t sure just how old he was. I was surprised to see in the Times that two decades separate our births.

There were and are many photographers in and gone from the profession whose names are perhaps better known than that of Wayne Miller. But I’m not sure there are many with as much simple dignity and class as he seemed to exhibit in that brief time our paths crossed in southern France. That’s something nice to remember.

Late last night as I lay buried beneath the covers, filtering through unread sections of the Sunday Times, public television was showing a documentary called “Hold At All Costs,” a film about a June, 1953 extremely desperate, bloody Korean War battle. It was a horrific slaughter of young men on both sides of the fight for a hilltop called “Outpost Harry.” It is said this film “is about forgotten soldiers in a forgotten battle during a forgotten war.”

When the Korean War started in 1950 I was 13 and that was the month my parents bought me a new Olds Mendez trumpet from Schmitt Music in downtown Minneapolis. The Mendez was the top of the line trumpet made by Olds in Los Angeles. It cost $320.00, a lot of money then. My father didn’t make much, maybe never more than $95.00 a week in his life and probably not that much in 1950. By June of 1953 I was three months short of my 16th birthday, bagging groceries in a neighborhood super market but not really paying much attention to the war in that place called Korea. No one knew for sure but the Korean War would end a month later. When I think about it now, I missed the Korean War by just a handful of years. A decade later I was old enough, plus married with kids, to miss Viet Nam. My first generation children, now middle-aged, missed Viet Nam by a lot and my desire for our 25-year-old son now in grad school is for that same omission of exposure to war. I hope that’s not taken as unpatriotic, it’s just how I feel as a father and about the wars now in question.

“Hold At All Costs” is not an easy film to watch. In an eight-day series of night attacks, Chinese troops, many just youths, were slaughtered by relentless machinegun fire, napalm, and artillery fire called in on the hunkered down defenders’ own positions. American and Greek soldiers, many as young as the Chinese attackers, held that hill under a daily rain of mortars, and artillery fire, followed by brutally close, often hand to hand combat, in the darkness of their trenches and bunkers. Daytime pictures taken of the mangled, torn apart corpses literally covering the landscape between attacks, make some of our famous Civil War battlefield pictures seem almost peaceful and pastoral in comparison.

As the documentary wound to its end, the on-camera testimonies by survivors of those eight days and nights, both men and women, were heart rending as they described commonality of past and present grief. One elderly, white-haired veteran of the battle, sitting in his living room, his hands folded in his lap, says, “No words can adequately describe the noise, the dirt, the screams….” He can’t bring himself to add anything further, choking at the attempt.

To see and hear these men and women no longer young but with memories that seem to be still fresh, clutch at their emotions, trying to hold themselves together, was to feel what a Memorial Day memory may be for some of us and how hard it must sometimes be for so many to remember so much. We all have sad stories harbored in our hearts and minds. I’m deeply grateful I don’t have that kind and very much aware of those who do and the costs they have borne.

Reminder to apply. 

The
Pierre & Alexandra Boulat Association, created to promote the work of
Pierre & Alexandra Boulat and encourage the work of photojournalists has
created an award, supported by a CANON endownment of 8 000 euros which will be
given to a photo- journalist.

The
award is presented to a professional photographer of any age, sex or
nationality who wishes to cover a social, economic, political or cultural issue
in a journalistic manner, on presentation of a dossier, including the documents
and works stipulated in Article 6. The Award is given in order to allow the
winner to produce a story that has never been told but that the photographer
cannot find support for within the media. 

Entry
is free. The deadline is June 1st 2012
Application dossiers can be downloaded from agency VII website : http://viiphoto.com/association.html

Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth
plants something in his soul.
- Thomas Merton

Jodhpur, India

This moment is your life
- Omar Khayyam

India

Know the true value of time;
snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it.
- Lord Chesterfield

Monk at Jokhang Temple, Tibet

Life is not made up of minutes, hours, days, weeks,
months, or years, but of moments.
- Sarah Breathnach

India

At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things
that could have heppened but, didn’t.
The magic moments go unrecognized, and
then suddenly, the hand of destiny changes everything.
- Paulo Coelho

Ethiopia

Brazil

Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.
- Walt Whitman

Ethiopia

India

This moment contains all moments.
- C. S. Lewis

India

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment…
- Martin Luther King, Jr

Burma

Rejoice in the things that are present;
all else is beyond thee.
- Montaigne

Cambodia

Forever is composed of nows.
- Emily Dickinson

Tibet

Burma

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave,
find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of
opportunities and look toward another land.
There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
-  Henry David Thoreau

Thailand

Brazil

The dream was always running ahead of me.
To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
- Anais Nin

India

In a person’s lifetime there may be not more than half a dozen occasions that
he can look back to in the certain knowledge that right then, at that moment,
there was room for nothing but happiness in his heart.
- Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

India

We invite you to download our free Portraits app.
http://bit.ly/W91oMo

Borneo Adventure story by Russell and Jessica Laman as told to Ellen Lambeth.  Published in Ranger Rick magazine, March 2013.

And Russell even made the back cover.  We found this very large stick insect right near our camp, and Russell picked it up and was letting it crawl up his shirt.  When it crawled right up on his face, he didn’t seem to mind at all!

Russell Laman with large stick insect on face. Back cover or March 2013 Ranger Rick.

Conrad Anker. Photo by Jimmy Chin.

One of the best parts of my job is getting to meet and work with some truly amazing people. I never know who I might end up spending an hour, the day, week or month with. This is a space to catch up with some of the inspiring people and friends I’ve gotten to know over many years on multiple expeditions….or from just half an hour at a dinner party.

I’ve known Conrad Anker for over ten years now. In that time we’ve walked across the Chang Tang Plateau in Tibet, suffered our way up alpine big walls in the Himalaya, been on Everest together and sat for days in a portaledge waiting through snowstorms. People know him to be one of the all time greats as a climber and explorer, but I’ve gotten to see another side of him. I have yet to meet someone with more stoke, integrity and virtue in life. I’m convinced he’s had a drink or two out of the fountain of youth. His enthusiasm to live everyday like it’s the best day of his life, motivation for difficult climbs and engagement for the environment only seems to grow every year. I’ve learned much from him over the years through his friendship and mentorship.

I reached out to Conrad about doing a short interview. Here’s a your sneak peek behind the curtain of the climber.

What book is on your nightstand right now? (Or recent favorite book…)
CA: Into the Silence by Wade Davis

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
CA: Free of need, not of want, and living in a community built on kindness.

What is your greatest fear?
CA: Letting people down.

What character traits do you most dislike in others?
CA: Self absorption.

What quality do you most admire in a person?
CA: Integrity.

What do you most dislike in yourself?
CA: Impatience.

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
CA: Shiva (is this too heavy?)
Why?
CA: Creator – destroyer – the man in charge. Awesome bivy.

Who is your favorite real life hero?
CA: Maybe the Dalai Lama
Why?
CA: He stands for non violence and has witnessed a world of change in a changing world.

What is your greatest ambition?
CA: Old age.

Favorite indulgence?
CA: Nutella

What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
CA: Khumbu Climbing Center – Sherpa VoTec

What talent would you most like to have?
CA: Music – to play an instrument like a virtuoso.

What is your most treasured possession?
CA: The house we live in.

What is your motto?
CA: Be good be kind be happy

Favorite quote?
CA: “Nullum gratuitum pradnium.”

To learn a little more about Conrad’s life and adventures, check out his North Face page.

Photo © #1 Paprica Fotografia, #2, 3, 5 Candy Pilar Godoy, #4 Vinicius Matos, #6 Michelle Madden Smith
#1: subject from photo in book shows up for launch book signing in Rio, #2: magazines given away on soccer field in Cantagalo community in Rio, #3: young boy helps with a wall “pasting” of our book in Cantagalo, #4 and 5: neighborhood square in Tavares Bastos, #6: signing for Usain Bolt in Jamaica

PAYBACK

My schedule has been a bit crazy lately. Or maybe it always is. I have a really hard time saying “no” to stuff. Especially if it involves wide eyed youngsters who I can see are just craving some words of “wisdom”.

Of course this seems often strange to me, since I am craving words of wisdom myself!!

The recent marathon to Rio to giveaway a magazine version of (based on a true story) and then straight to Jamaica to work with Usain Bolt and 25 young photographers leaves me feeling like I just ran the 100 meter sprint and the mile on top of it. I was a long distance runner in my youth, so that mentality does come in handy for almost everything I do. You can always “kick it” just a little bit more even if you just can’t. Works.

My team of Eva-Maria Kunz, Roberta Tavares, Candy Pilar Godoy, Michelle Madden Smith, and Mike Courvoisier made it all work. Ever since I started Burn it has been the collaborative effort that rules. None of us can do much alone. Finding great collaborators will change your life if you have not already figured that out. I always tell my students, “find ONE person you trust” to help you with your work . To be a second set of eyes. To be an advisor. To kick you in the butt. Works.

Now I only do this post for one reason. As a story about inspiration. And inspiration is THE fuel for doing any damned thing. If you are not inspired, you might as well stay in bed. You need fire in the belly. Forget exotic places, the right camera. Without the “fire”, pasa nada.

Readers here know by now I come up with a lot of crazy ideas. Including the evolution of Burn in so many ways. Some (most) of my ideas do not work. Yet some do. Again, if you can complete one out of ten ideas you have, you are in the upper percentile of people who can FINISH something.

One of my crazy ideas was to giveaway half of the print run of (based on a true story) the magazine version. It was a crazy idea, it still is a crazy idea, and I did it and I “lost” financially and yet for me this was maybe the very coolest most successful thing I ever did. For sure the most rewarding. Sure I always “give” when I am shooting. Bringing back prints to people I have always done. Buying my subjects a cold beer or dinner or whatever I have always done.

Yet I have never been in a position to really really show the people where I was shooting exactly what I did. Most often they never knew. Never saw NatGeo or whatever magazine I was shooting for on a story. Yet this time I brought it back. As a thank you for allowing me to work in the Carioca community. Sure only a gesture or symbolic at best. Yet I could feel the vibe, the look in their eyes, the feeling of doing the right thing. After all (based on a true story) was not just a collaboration of my team but a collaboration with the subjects I photographed.

Segued right behind the Rio giveaway was a few days in Kingston, Jamaica with 25 young photographers aged 13-17 who belong to photo clubs around the island. The Usain Bolt Foundation and Samsung made this happen. These kids were amazing. Smart, focused, ready to learn, shooting well. We pulled an “all nighter” to get the prints made (thanks Mike, Michelle, Candy) for an on the spot exhibition of their work which was then viewed by Jamaica super hero Usain Bolt who also walked away with a signed free copy of (based on a true story)!!

Anyway, life is all one big circle. Yup, what goes around, comes around and a whole bunch of other cliches about paying back paying forward yada yada yada. Well all I can say, and I think my team would say, it is worth it, worth it, and worth it.

We are selling on Burn, and at Magnum, and at PhotoEye and possibly other venues the other half of the (based on a true story) print run…At the lowest price possible. The collector edition, now gone, was what it was and expensive by nature. Yet while I do like appealing to collectors my heart can never be elitist. The success of the collector edition paid for at least part of the giveaway and the sales of the second part of the print run should get us at break even point. Good biz? Nope. Yet the right thing all around.

And besides, “breaking even” if you are leading the life you love, and may help a few others to do so,  is a nice reward. What more to ask for?

So, I implore you to pick up your camera and do “your thing” and at the same time make it another person’s “thing” as well…Make it a two way street. Either with the pictures themselves. Or by passing on any knowledge you have to somebody else.

Give it away. Works.

~dah~

Video Storytelling for the website, CUNY J school

At the end of the semester, when I had graded all their projects I had these 5 lessons bobbling at the tip of my two index fingers.

Dear Video Storytelling for the Web Class

My thanks to you for all your hard work this semester. I’ve learned a lot from each of you and I’ve condensed a bit of what I’ve learned into the following 5 points which I intend to keep with me when I propose, shoot and edit my stories:

• 1) Remember the difference between a story and a report (note #25). Twitter does reports (yes, Twitter is not always accurate but hey, can you say Judy Miller?) I want to make my living doing stories. [ I "borrowed" this from Roy Peter Clark, a great writing/storytelling coach at Poynter]

• 2) Strong stories consist of actions that you can witness. (This is also true of strong written stories) Video is a medium of present tense storytelling.

• 3) Video needs visual evidence, that is, show, don’t tell. A talking head is not “showing,” rather it’s a boring way to accomplish “telling.” If you can’t “show” the story, video might not be the best medium to communicate your story.

• 4) Visual sequences are the grammar of video storytelling. “B roll” is like wallpaper: pretty or tacky but meant to be in the background. Write strong sentences; always capture compelling sequences with a beginning, middle and end.

• 5) Mobile is the future. Close-ups and Extreme close-ups have the most impact on a mobile device like your phone or tablet. Shoot close 85% of the time but remember to shoot one killer wide shot too.

Burma

The appetite for cheap clothing in the West is insatiable.
The people making the clothing  often pay the true cost of these items.
The scale of this factory in Burma is vast.
The sense that these workers are just part of an immense machine is
accentuated by the pink shirts they are obliged to wear.

Last month the world heard the tragic news
that more than a thousand people working at a clothing factory in Bangladesh,
were killed when the factory they were working in collapsed.

Burma

Labor disgraces no man;
unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.  
- Ulysses S. Grant

Yemen

Whether it is men fishing,  nuns washing dishes, miners digging beneath the earth, or 
working in the heat of a steel mill, work is universal, yet intensely personal. Millions work in order to survive, and for them,
there is no debate about how to achieve a life/work balance.  

Woman working in a field devastated by volcanic debris and flood waters.  Java, Indonesia

Shoe repair shop in India

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.
– Horace

 Mandalay, Burma

India

Your life is a journey, not a rest.
You are travelling to the promised land, from the cradle to the grave.
The Sunday at Home, December 7th 1854

Candy Factory, Kabul, Afghanistan

Mumbai, India

Gujarat, India

All happiness depends on courage and work.
– Honore de Balzac

Miners search for gems.  Hindu Kush, Afghanistan

The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

MKS Steelworks, Serbia

Japan

Working for long periods under extreme stressful work conditions can lead to
sudden death, a phenomenon the Japanese call karoshi. The word in China is guolaosi.

Landi Kotal, Pakistan

Bakery run by Afghan widows, Kabul, Afghanistan

Croatia

India

           Mumbai, India

Sugar cane farmer, Philippines

Everything yields to diligence.
- Thomas Jefferson

Drying coffee beans, Brazil

If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or
Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.  He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of
heaven and Earth will pause to say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.  
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Flower Seller, Dal Lake, Kashmir

Light, whether natural or artificial is an indispensable tool in achieving great images. To have more control of the look of my images I make a lot of photos with artificial light. I prefer to use big strobes either in large, light boxes or bounced off white flats when I want to achieve a nice, soft feel but if l am going after a “harder” feeling, I’ll use snoots or grid spots that keep my light source narrow and focused. On my recent trip to Cuba, I decided to try something different. I wanted to shoot some street portraits. I hadn’t been to Cuba in over eight years and I was interested to see not only how the country had changed, but also how the people had changed. I would need a smaller and more portable light source to emulate my large lighting scenarios – guerilla lighting in Cuba – very appropriate.

I immediately noticed that the Cubans I encountered were more forthcoming and talkative than those I had met on my last trip. There was no undercurrent of repression. To visually communicate this, I wanted my portraits to be bright and “open”, not dark or shadowy and moody. I was shooting with a Panasonic Lumix GH3 with the FL 360L flash and the 12-35mm f/2.8 zoom lens. Since the camera and flash work wirelessly, I was able to keep the flash off camera and out of the hot shoe. Before leaving for Cuba, I researched many different light modifiers for these small units. I decided on the Lastolite EzyBox Speed-Lite, a mini softbox, that is an 8.6×8.6 inch (22cm) square unit. I liked this unit because I could set it up quickly and it didn’t take up a lot of space when folded. A softbox this small, however can be a source of harsh light unless it is really close to your subject. In order to achieve the soft feeling that I was after, I gave the flash and softbox combo to one of my traveling companions and asked her to hold it very close (sometimes only inches away) from my subject’s face. Although this was probably annoying to my subjects, by placing the light source close to their faces the reflection of the light from their skin became very soft and diffused. And by adding a slight warming gel to the flash, I was able to achieve nicer skin tones. Keeping the light this close also creates a prominent catch light in the eyes, which draws the viewer into the portrait. I didn’t want to compete with sunlight so I shot most of my photos in the shade. By incorporating colorful backgrounds, I was able to enhance the feeling of the Cuban experience.

I set the strobe to work automatically with the camera through ETTL and varied my exposures using the camera’s convenient plus and minus strobe control. It took a couple of days of “Guerilla lighting” before I was able to develop a good sense of how to balance the flash and available light. In the majority of cases, I set the camera to underexpose the available light by half to a full stop.

The Lumix GH3 and the 12-35mm lens make a good, compact package that does not draw attention, which is one of the reasons I like working with it. When I added the soft box to the small Lumix strobe, I had a terrific, portable lighting system that enabled me to achieve the portraits.You can see these portraits and other images of Cuba here.

Every once in a great while, if you are lucky, during the course of your schooling, at any level of that schooling, you might intersect with a great teacher. And that teacher asks you questions, involves you, shapes your furious thoughts and aspirations, and calms the hubris of a young mind always teetering on the brink of the truly foolish action, like quitting the endeavor entirely. Good teachers open doors. They make sense of ramshackle, unformed thoughts. And by dint of their patience, and with the certainty of knowledge acquired over time, they allow the young student to become that which they might hope to be. Or, at least give it a shot.

Fred Demarest allowed me to become a photographer.

I was a good student in high school, largely out of fear. If you didn’t perform up to expectations, or if you were guilty of conduct they deemed unbecoming, the Irish Christian Brothers would often remind you of their exacting standards with a good crack to the head or jaw. If my mother got wind of wrongdoing or lackluster efforts in the classroom, she would simply continue at home the job the brothers started in class. Hence, for the most part, I did well. I could tell you I possessed an eager young mind, keen on learning. I’d be lying. I just didn’t want to get the shit kicked out of me.

College arrived, and I was woefully unprepared. I don’t remember much of my freshman year. (Hey, it was 1970.) I traveled through college in fairly shiftless fashion, enrolled as a writing major in J-school, and was academically undistinguished. But then, I was required to take a photography class, in my junior year, and I instantly committed to another direction. Which meant I had to take another class, which was not allowed for non-photo majors.

Enter Fred Demarest.

Fred didn’t start the photography program at Syracuse University. But he came aboard when it was an infant, and he shaped it, designed it, taught the classes, mixed the chemistry, administered the budget and forged it into what it remains today—one of the top photo programs in the country. When he started, he thought he’d be there a couple years. He retired as chairman of the department, 34 years later.

About 1960, Si Newhouse came to SU with cash and a mandate to create the Newhouse School of Journalism and it fell to Fred to design the space for the photo program, which had matured into a full blown sequence in the context of the journalism school. It became, in the building known as Newhouse One, physically the biggest department in the school, with wet darkrooms, space for nascent color printing technology, and of course a studio. Fred wanted a story and a half for the shooting space, but the building folks told him it was two stories or nothing. He then negotiated the installation of a balcony, so students could experiment with bounced light. It remains today, as he configured it. “Lots of the other faculty members didn’t like the studio, because it was basically a big hole in the middle of the building,” Fred says now, with a chuckle.

Fred was close with Arthur Rothstein, whose work for the FSA defined his career. On Rothstein’s recommendation, the US military, who felt their photojournalists were undertrained, spoke with Fred, among other educators, and he designed for them what has come to be known simply as “the military program,” ongoing to this day. It has trained hundreds of combat camera men and women, who, after a year in upstate NY, are spun out to the far reaches of the globe, better equipped to tell the story of life in uniform.

It is hard to overestimate his significance as a photo educator. The program he started growing in 1956 has produced the likes of Ed Kashi, Clint Clemens, Stephen Wilkes, Seth Resnick, Clem Murray, Bob Sacha, and Eric Meola. He brought notable photographers such as Karsh and Larry Burrows in to lecture, enlarging and enhancing the student’s view of what photography could do. He believed fiercely, and still does, in the power of the picture, writing a significant tome for the ASMP he called “The Three C’s—Creativity, Communication, and Craftmanship.” All are linked, all work together. Important C’s to remember in this, the age of pictures that begins with a big, capital D.

You had to get to know Fred a bit to truly appreciate his gifts as a teacher. By virtue of his nephew actually going through the program, he became known as Uncle Fred, and given his status as Chairman, his admin duties often overwhelmed his time in class and presence in the lab. There were other profs more dashing and charismatic, to be sure. But none approached his skills at refining a young photographer’s intentions, and hooking raw, unhinged photo notions to the larger vehicle of a project or a story. He calmed you down, and redirected you. So quietly, sometimes, that at the end of a semester’s efforts, you would pat yourself on the back and think, wow, glad I thought to do it that way! And really, it was Fred, all the while, pushing you towards hoped for excellence.

Given the onus of chairmanship, he reveled in the Syracuse program abroad, where he could escape into the smaller setting of the photo program based in London, and spend a semester with 15 students, as opposed to lecturing 50 at a clip in an auditorium. That is where we all got to know Fred, not just as a professor, but as a friend. In 1974, I went with him to London, my first year of graduate work in photojournalism. He gave me nine free credits, and the London program paid me five pounds a week to run the lab and maintain the chemistry. It was there that I first really embraced the struggle to try to be good enough at this to actually do it. It’s a struggle that, trust me, is ongoing.

But, he opened the door to that wickedly wonderful, lifelong tussle with a camera. I didn’t have the grades or the portfolio to be admitted to the graduate program in photojournalism. I used to sleep in his Photo 302 class quite regularly, not a fault of his, but a byproduct of me burning not just the ends, but the entire candle my senior year, trying to graduate. He perhaps, in his patient and insightful way,  might have seen a glimmer, a faint hope.

Fred is 88 now, and still looks the same as he did all those years ago. He hired Tony Golden, who became the chairman after Fred. Tony has now given way to Bruce Strong. Time flies. The program remains strong, and has more students than ever.

I made the portraits above just a couple weeks ago, when Annie and I went to Syracuse for a brief stint. It was, perhaps, my way of thanking him. As a teacher, he gave me the benefits of his patience and wisdom, and withheld his doubts, which he no doubt had.

Your time with a good teacher is short, perhaps, but the gifts they give you last forever.

More tk….

Photo Courtesy of Tectonic Media Group

When I was living out of my car early in my career as a climber, I didn’t have much use for anything beyond the most simple gadgets. A can opener for tuna and beer was about as fancy as it got. But as my career evolved from athlete (aka dirtbag climber/skier) to photographer/filmmaker, so did my need for some gadgets in the field that help me do my job. Keeping data, power, cameras and communications up and running in the field and on expeditions requires a new gambit of tech “toys.” Here’s a handful that will help you stay light, fast and connected to get the job done. Enjoy!

HERO3: Black Edition
The Wi-Fi enabled HERO3: Black Edition is the most recent and advanced GoPro. This thing is 30% smaller, 25% lighter and 2x more powerful than previous models. What we’ve been able to capture in the field with these cameras is nothing short of spectacular. Versatile and rugged the Hero 3 is waterproof to 197′ (60m), capable of capturing ultra-wide 1440p 48fps, 1080p 60 fps and 720p 120 fps video and 12MP photos at a rate of 30 photos per second. It has built-in Wi-Fi, and a GoPro App which I’ve played with for hard to get shots – but it sucks battery power bigtime. I’ve used this on everything from big budget commercial shoots to the sual fun POV scenarios. It’s small enough that I don’t have and excuse to leave it at home, so it stays with me on all my travels and mini adventures as a super handy minimalist back up pocket video camera. There are some cool adapted lenses for it now too.

Satellite Communicator: inReach SE
90% of the Earth is not covered by cell service. But with this little baby you can send and receive messages at the ends of the earth and everywhere in between. Using DeLorme’s Earthmate App inReach SE pairs wirelessly with iPhone, iPad and iPod touch to access topographic maps and NOAA charts and to make text messaging even more convenient. I must admit, just like the impending universal wireless capability on airplanes, the fact that it is harder and harder to get disconnected is something that I have mixed emotions on. But either way, this thing is pretty damn cool.

Olympus OM-D E-M5
Part of the ubiquitous and burgeoning category of mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras, this 16-megapixel model is about a third smaller than the average digital SLR, but packs the same punch. This camera has received stellar reviews from many of my peers who like the weather sealed body and compact size.

iPhone 5
I think rumors of Apple’s demise are greatly exaggerated. The iPhone still rocks compared to all other options. The 5 has a bigger screen, better camera and is all-around faster than the 4S. And lighter. It might not always be the king of the smart phones – but it retains the crown for now.

MacBook Air 11-inch
On an expedition or at the airport, a laptop that weighs just 2.38 pounds, is a bonus. The laptop is a necessary evil in the field for me – data management and editing on the fly are part of the job. The lighter the better. And it fits in the airplane seat pocket. Bonus. Sporting two USB 3.0 ports is a must these days for backup and copying those batches of huge RAW files from the card to the computer. That being said, this works for basic photo editing, but you might want to bump to the new MacBook Pro 15 inch for video and more RAM/Memory and real muscle.

Solaris Foldable Solar
The Solaris 62 is great for the remote film crew or high-alpine expeditions. Harnessing the sun’s energy is super-tech – and some sort of solar set up is key to any remote work.

IMPEL2™
A renewable-battery system that charges nearly any electronic device through built-in USB, 12v, 16v and 19v outputs. This can be used for essentials like phone, computer or GPS or non essentials like music players or a portable video game.
Specs: Power storage capacity: 13,000 mAh Outputs: USB, 12v, 16v, 19v

Leatherman Wave

Photo: brian.ch / Foter.com / CC BY

The Leatherman Wave is not a new fangled piece of technology, although they have made some great improvements over the years. It is still a piece of technology I couldn’t live without. Last I checked it had about 16 different tools packed into the lightweight body, many of which can be accessed with only one hand. Used day in and day out – it’s no wonder so many photographers and explorers choose this tool to carry on their utility belt.

National Geographic Photo Camp – Uganda
Photo©2006_Ed Kashi/VII

VisionWorkshops is an organization that provides “programs free of charge to their students through generous donations from the community, foundations, and corporate sponsors. Theirr workshops inspire youth with positive role models and with opportunities to display their photographs and writings at galleries from Annapolis to Europe to India and the Middle East.”

National Geographic Photo Camp – Uganda
Photo©2006_Ed Kashi/VII

Recently VisionWorkshops has used photography as a means to challenge and inspire Hispanic youth through an anti-gang arts initiative. In addition, they have worked with young refugees as they get footing in their new homes in the US. VisionWorkshops is making a difference in our community and in the lives of individuals.

National Geographic Photo Camp – Uganda
Photo©2006_Ed Kashi/VII

You can make a difference, too. From 7:00PM on May 15 to 7:00PM on May 16th the Great Give online fundraising event will take place. During those 24 hours, you can donate to important charities, like VisionWorkshops, so they can continue making our world a better place.

“Meeting people from other cultures has taught me that you will not know how things look until you come closer to them. Then you will see a different picture that you can paint yourself by looking for light.”
– Mohammed Almarzoog, Saudi Arabia, Photo Camp California 2009

A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.
- William Arthur Ward

Tibet

Afghanistan 

A smile is the universal welcome.
- Max Eastman

Burma

Afghanistan

India

A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.
- Washington Irving

  An Indian tailor caught in the monsoon floodwaters in
Porbandar, India

Look back, and smile on perils past.
- Sir Walter Scott

Afghanistan

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.  
- William Shakespeare, Othello

Kashmir

Afghanistan

Cambodia

Every smile makes you a day younger.
- Chinese Proverb

Burma

Laughter is day, and sobriety is night;
a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.
– Henry Ward Beecher

China

Honduras

 Tibet

Celebration in Berlin, Germany

Peace begins with a smile.
- Mother Teresa

Afghanistan

Vietnam

The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress,
and grows brave by reflection.
– Thomas Paine

Burma

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but
sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

Afghanistan

Photo©2013_Ed Kashi/VII

The Berlin Fotofestival of 2013 will take place this summer from June 13th – July 13th 2013. The annual festival features photo exhibitions with work from up-and-coming as well as world leading photographers. In addition to exhibitions, there is a professional week program that addresses global change in photography, media and culture alike through the phenomena of the “connected camera”.

There are many calls for entries and awards for the Berlin Fotofestival. This year, as the popularity of mobile photography continues to grow, the Berlin Fotofestival is having an open call Mobile Photography Award for the first time ever. This international photo contest will be juried by Berlin photographers and photo editors, resulting in a selction of 40 entries to win an exhibition in Kreuzberg during the Fotofestival. Of the 40 exhibited photographers, there will be 3 series selected to win additional prizes, announced at the festival award ceremony on June 15th.

The deadline for entry in this mobile photography contest is May 10, 2013. Submit your best mobile photographs here for a chance to win up to 3000€ and your own exhibition.

Conversation with Joe McNally

David Alan Harvey: You and I met because we were in an educational environment, and here we are twenty-five years later, still in an educational environment earning our living as photographers.

I know some things about you, but I want to ask you a couple of questions that I don’t know. I don’t know exactly how you got started in photography or exactly where you got started in photography.

Joe McNally: It was accidental, as these things happen. I knew I wanted to be a journalist and so when I was in school I was literally forced to take a photography class in addition to my writing classes. I borrowed my dad’s old range finder camera. It was called a Beauty Light 3 and I did a couple of classes, and it worked for me.

DAH: In conjunction with your writing? Was it going to be supplemental to your writing?

JMcN: At that point I really decided I wanted to be a photographer, which as you know, back in the day, photographers weren’t really allowed to write anything for anybody (newspapers and what not) generally speaking. So, I stayed in school and I did a master’s in photojournalism.

DAH: Where was that?

JMcN: At Syracuse University. And then I came straight to New York City and my first very grand job in journalism was being a copy boy at the New York Daily News in 1976.

DAH: Oh, that would be an education!

JMcN: I ran Breslin’s copy when he was writing letters to the “Son of Sam”. You know, Pete Hamill was writing at the time.

DAH: Oh really? The classic.

JMcN: I used to take the one star, which came around about seven or eight o’clock at night. Tomorrow’s newspaper..tonight.. and I would go to the third floor press room. I would take fifty papers, put them on my shoulder…

I would not go back to the newsroom…I would continue down the stairs and go across to Louis East and then I would just start putting the papers out on the bar because all the editors were in Louie’s and they had phones, so they would phone in their corrections for the two star from the bar.

DAH: That was back when journalism was journalism.

JMcN: Yeah, it was pretty gritty back then.

DAH: Well okay, did you work for a newspaper? Did you shoot pictures for a newspaper after that?

JMcN: Well, I got fired by the Daily News three years in. I was a studio apprentice. I had made it to being what they called a “boy” in the studio. I was running Versamats and processing film for the photographers, captioning, etc. And I learned a lot about the business.

There was a great New York press photographer name Danny Farrell who took me under his wing. He said “Kid, you have any eye…I don’t think you’re going to make it here, but let me show you a few things”. Danny is a great man. He is 82 now…I just did his portrait.

You know, the Daily News kicked me out the door and I ended up stringing for the AP, UPI and the New York Times. That became kind of a full time gig for about two years.

DAH: How old are you are that point?

JMcN: Lets see, that would be late ’70s, so I am kind of in my late twenties at that point. I was born in ’52. And then, all of a sudden, I got this offer of the strangest job you can imagine. I became a staff photographer at ABC television in New York.

DAH: Really?

JMcN: And that was what introduced me to the world of color and light, because I had been a straight up black and white street shooter prior to that, and my boss at ABC looked at me and said:”We shoot Kodachrome. And we light a lot of stuff”. I was thinking at the time ‘I don’t even know how to plug in a set of lights!’. So thankfully, it was a job that routinely expected failure, and I routinely delivered.

As a still photographer for a television network you’re always the caboose of the operation, the last consideration…they are always doing TV first and foremost and you have to try to squeeze your way in to a set, like a television-movie set or maybe on a news set, shooting the anchors. Or shooting Monday night football. And the interesting part about the job, the things that kind of made me think about technique and be a little bit faster on my feet than I had been before is that I had to shoot everything in color and black & white.

DAH: You had to do both. Now these pictures are going as publicity pictures?

JMcN: Publicity pictures, releases to magazines, covers of television magazines, you name it. On the average week I would shoot sports…I would go down to Washington and shoot Frank Reynolds at the Washington Bureau, and then I would come back up and shoot Susan Lucci on “All My Children”. So it was fast paced, and it really got my feet under me in terms of color.

DAH: So you had two cameras… a black & white and a color camera.

JMcN: Yeah.

DAH: Sounds like my worst nightmare.

JMcN: Yeah, sometimes I would have four cameras at a political convention…I did the Reagan campaign, I did the political conventions and such because they would send me out. I would have four cameras and sometimes I would be juggling three ISO’s or what we used to call ASA.

DAH: So when I see you working now and I was listening to you yesterday talking to your students, and I see you working with your assistants…I mean you’ve got a lot of stuff on your mind. But I guess obviously you are used to it. You grew up multitasking.

JMcN: Yeah, kind of. For whatever strange reason I always allude to the fact that I got raised Irish-Catholic, and editors found out about that and so they knew I was intensely conversant about the whole idea of suffering. Being raised the way I was…if a day passes without some largely undeserved measure of suffering, it’s not a day worth living.

DAH: No good deed goes unpunished.

JMcN: Exactly. And then, if you know how to use lights even a little bit, editors sometimes will zero in on you and say “Okay, that guy is lights”. So, I ended up doing a lot of big production work for whatever weird reason. I did these big gigs for Life …They threw something at me once, a hundred and forty seven jazz musicians all at once. Largest group of jazz musicians ever assembled. It was a riff on Art Kane’s photo, “A Great Day in Harlem”.

DAH: Yeah, I remember that.

JMcN: And my boss at Life was a big jazz fan. And so he engineered this massively expensive thing where all these jazz guys came in to New York to recreate that photograph. We even found the kid who was sitting on the stoop in the original Kane photo, and was probably ten or eleven years old at that time. We found him as an adult and had him into the picture as well.

And one of the great honors of my career during that assignment was that they brought in G0rdon Parks to shoot the original scene on the street, and I got to assist Gordon.

DAH: Wow! Were you with Gordon up at Eddie Adams when he was there?

JMcN: Yeah..

DAH: Yeah, because we were all with Gordon there at one point because he came up there for two or three years at one point.

JMcN: Well, that was the great thing about the early days of Eddies, because Carl Mydans would come up and Eisie was there. Eisie would go the podium and lecture, remembering f/stops of pictures he had shot about forty or fifty years ago. The guy was just extraordinary. And that I think is why we still remain educators, because we grew up being mentored.

DAH: We grew up being mentored and then I think we started also teaching at the same time we were being mentored. I mean, both things were happening simultaneously I think.

Okay, it would be great to talk about the good ole days. They weren’t all that great, there were some negative things about the good ole days, but we both picked up the sense of an extended family that we have with each other. It’s amazing. I am seeing Heisler and you and Burnett here for example. And plus meeting a lot of new people, but neither one of us seems to be the type to dwell on the good-ole-days. I mean we are in the new days, and you’ve got young photographers, and people who want to move forward in the business, and here you are as the mentor. How do you account for that? What is that? What is that about for you, personally?

JMcN: For me it is a way to give back, to kind of return that educational base that I sprang from. That is certainly it. It is also part of the mix as a photographer. I always tell photographers now, if they ask, you have to have a lot of lines on the water if you’re going to survive. You shoot for sure, but we also teach, we lecture, publish books, do a blog, the whole social media thing…you have to be as broad based as you possibly can.

For example, I’ve got a couple of young assistants in my studio, and I say look, you’re future is very vibrant…a lot of people are saying doomsday stuff right now, but I think the future is vibrant, it’s just going to be very different from mine. Talk about multitasking! They have to be good on the web, they are going to have to know video, audio, all that stuff. They’ll have to be kind of their own multifaceted entertainment-information package. They are going to have to bring lots of skills to the party. We learned how to do one thing well, and that was how to tell a good story with a camera in our hands.

DAH: Right. Yeah, I never worried too much about the technology changes because I could see always that technological change took people out of every business. Look at radio. Television came along and a whole bunch of radio people just immediately died. And then others, like Jack Benny segued right into it. I never worried about it because I figured there was always some new way to tell the story.

JMcN: Exactly. Heisler was here and Greg being as smart as he is said something to me a couple years ago. He very wisely said:”Joe, this was going to happen whether we liked it or not. This whole digital revolution. So either adapt with it and change with it, or we sit at home and get angry”.

DAH: Well that’s right, and besides that you can still shoot film if you want to for yourself and the stories that you want to tell and the ways that you are going to work are the same. And, you’ve been benefited with a lot of things by the digital ages as well. I mean you’re not running Polaroids just now when you’re taking my picture. I mean those good-ole-days weren’t that great.

JMcN: No, there was a lot of hard work! And auto focus came in at about the right time for me and my eyes, you know. Things change and you have to change with it. I look now at the digital technology and the way its expanded and what you can do imaginatively, and I embrace it. I think it’s a beautiful thing.

DAH: Well, everybody is into still photography right now. Everybody is a photographer. It’s a common language, which means you’ve got a lot of people to mentor. You’ve got to be a huge influence. You’ve got an entire audience for your blog, there is a whole Joe McNally fan base out there and picking up all the time because people are really, really interested, and I think lighting is the big mystery.

They can take pictures with their iPhone, they can take pictures with whatever camera right out of the box, but the one thing they can’t do is light stuff. Tell me a little bit about how you look at lighting in the first place.

JMcN: Well, one of the first things I say if I am teaching is you’ve got to think about light as language. Right from the ancient descriptions photography…photo-graphos — the original Greek term — to write with light. Some people are a little surprised by this.

I say “Look, light has every quality you associate with the written word or the verbal expression of speech. It can be angry, it can be soft, it can be harsh, slanting. I mean all those things…it has emotion and quality and character. And you have to look for it”.

One of the things about if you work technically with light, for instance if you experiment with flash, one thing that also develops at the same time is your overall awareness of light in general. Just your sense of light keeps going forward. So the more you experiment, the better you are going to get, and the better you’re going to get with you means your confidence level raises. And if you are more confident you can approach your subject and your subject matter more confidently.

DAH: It’s not just technical because you are telling a story ultimately. You are saying something about somebody by the way that you light them.

JMcN: Exactly. I always say that when you’re lighting something, what you are doing is you are giving your viewer — who you are never going to meet, that person is looking at the Geographic or some web image a million miles away, and is never going to meet you — so you’re speaking directly do that person.

You are giving them a psychological roadmap to your photograph in the way you use light. You’re saying this is important, this is not so much…this is just context, look here, don’t look there. You are not there with your picture. The picture, all on its own, has to speak to them.

DAH: Great. Now that we’ve had this conversation I need to figure out how I am going to light you. I think I am going to use available light.

Well, I think people don’t think about me so much in terms of light, but I always appreciate it because when I was in high school I worked at a studio, so I learned basic studio lighting, and then of course with the studio closed down for the day, I’d make friends with these guys and say “Hey, can I play with the lights after work?”.

JMcN: But your stuff has such a beautiful quality of light. You have feet in all these worlds, you really do.

DAH: Well, I think it is because I learned at an early age at least how to use lights, and I think that helps me with available light because I do look at it the same way you look at light, I just tend to do it with a smaller kit. I am the emergency medical team, you’ve got the whole crew, you’ve got the hospital.

I am the EMS truck out there trying to save a life on the highway. You know, patch it together. You know, put a band aid over the flash, shoot through a beer bottle, do all these things. But it’s still the same thing.

JMcN: Sure. Jimmy Colton, who used to be at Newsweek, which always had a smaller budget than Time but would compete with Time intensively, he would always say that Time was a hospital and Newsweek was a MASH unit.

DAH: I hadn’t heard that, but that’s an exact analogy.

So, I am looking at your assistants who seem to be about thirty years old, and you’ve got one who is moving into your first assistant position, and Drew is moving out on his own…so what do you tell Drew? And what do you tell the readers of Burn Magazine? What is the main thing they need to be thinking about? I know they’ve got to multitask. You have mentioned that already. What is the main thing they need to have going in their head?

JMcN: I think as they take a step into this market place, if you want to call it that, I tell Drew just concentrate on that which he loves, and work will eventually grow to you.

First of all, make it accessible. Too many young photographers think they have to go to Afghanistan to make their mark. I don’t think you have to do that. I think the best pictures live right around you, and are things you grew up with, and are things that you love. And for instance, Drew grew up with rock & roll, and he was a drummer in a band. They actually toured and what not, so he grew up in the world of music and he is absolutely passionate about that. So I said go for it! Do it. No matter the people who tell you, you can’t make a living being a rock & roll photographer…I think you can, because he is already working it in a way that is unique to him, and he is making strides, he is getting success.

The main thing to remember as a young photographer out there is that there is always naysayers, and there is a lot of them out there now, but when you and I broke in there were naysayers as well.

DAH: There have always been naysayers!

JMcN: There are always folks saying, “This ain’t what it used to be!”

DAH: With every move I ever made in my life, even my closest friends would say, “Harvey you’ve really fucked it up this time”. And then, a few months later they would say, “Harvey you’re the luckiest son of a bitch. How do you luck out like that?”. You know, they flip on it. And that is the same thing I tell photographers too. Do what you love, and then let it happen. Somehow it will happen.

JMcN: It will. And you’ll have to do stuff along the way. To me there is always food for the table and food for the soul. And sometimes, some jobs you’re going to have to do are food for the table.

DAH: Just do it.

JMcN: You’ve got to do it, swallow hard, go make yourself some money, keep yourself alive, so then you can feed your soul. It’s not all like roses out there, that’s for sure, it’s like a patchwork quilt, but you can make it.

DAH: Yeah, well you have and thanks for this conversation. It has been great to see you again.

Related links

Joe McNally

Joe McNally: The Estimable Mr. Harvey

Joe McNally, in front of the Burj Khalifa, tallest building of the world, which he climbed the same day this picture was taken

A long awaited firmware update is available for the Canon 5D MK III (available here). The update brings uncompressed 4:2:2 8 bit video from the HDMI port. 

It also improves autofocus capabilites. I’m downloading now.

Stephen Alvarez

Sewanee, TN

Wabi Sabi is a way of seeing the world that is at the heart of Japanese culture.
 It finds beauty and harmony in what is simple, imperfect, natural, modest, and mysterious.
- Mark Reibstein, Wabi Sabi

Tibet

Tranquil simplicity,
rustic elegance,
imperfect beauty…these are qualities that wabi sabi embraces.
Wabi Sabi:  the Art of Everyday Life,  Diane Durston

Cambodia

India

Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else.
Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment
given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view.
Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace.
-  Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

Cambodia

Burma

It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay, the epiphany of Wordsworth,
the wisdom of wabi-sabi: nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts.
– Paul Theroux

Iraq

Morocco

The beauty of wabi-sabi is rooted in modesty that is elegantly perceived.
The aesthetic pleasures of wabi-sabi depend on attitude and practice as much, or more, than on the materiality itself.
- Leonard Koren, op.cit.

Havana, Cuba

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
quoted in the Daily Good

Ethiopia

South Africa

The underlying principles of Wabi Sabi are diametrically opposed
to those of their Western counterparts, 
whose values are rooted in a worldview that
values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection.
- Andrew Juniper

Italy

For a lovely bowl
Let us arrange these flowers
For there is no rice
– Matsuo Bashō,  Japanese Haiku

Ethiopia

If you look closely at a tree you’ll notice it’s knots and dead branches, just like our bodies.
What we learn is that beauty and imperfection go together wonderfully.
- Matthew Fox

Nepal

Japan

Laos

To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.
- John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

View of Preah Khan, Cambodia

 A diamond with a flaw is worth more than a pebble without imperfections.
- Chinese proverb

Russia

OUR FREE APP:  http://bit.ly/W91oMo

My first port of entry to Africa, years ago, was Dar es Salaam, which literally translated, means “the abode of peace.” At that time, however, that was hardly my impression, as the heat, hustle and hot breath of a tough Indian Ocean port city in equatorial Africa jumps on you like a big wet dog, knocking you over and standing on you, paws on your chest, as soon as you get off the plane. My thoughts at the time were that you don’t really just “go” to Africa. You plunge in.

From Dar we traversed and overnighted in Dodoma, in more central Tanzania, and thence to a tiny place called Kongwa, where I repaired to a ramshackle, walled hotel called, as I remember, the Esso. At the time, the rooms were about one US dollar a night. My room was maybe 10 by 8, a box of cracked concrete and flecked with aged paint, with a sagging cot and a mosquito net that looked like somebody had put a shotgun blast through it. I repaired it, as best I could, with gaffer tape.

There was no running water, but I wisely made friends with the Swahili speaking chef, James, a truly decent sort, who I intuited understood a lot more English than he was willing to own up to. Sadly, this was not understood by my colleague at the time, a writer whose prose, attitude and jokes all, well, let’s say they stemmed from another era. Thankfully, he didn’t care for the accommodations, feigned an injury, and left quickly, saving all concerned further embarrassment.

James and I got along well, and at night, he would heat a large pot of water for me, which I would then mix with water I drew from the old oil drums that served as the main supply for the hotel. I would take this warm mix with me into a coop in the back of the hotel, scurry out the chickens, strip down and bucket shower after a long day in the field. It felt astonishingly good, after a day of dust and bumps out in the field, tracking to tribal villages.

I was there to document the efforts to stem the rising tide of trachoma in East Africa, which is an awful, painful way to lose your sight. I was working with a team from Johns Hopkins, and a researcher named Matt Lynch, a committed doc, and a great field colleague. We would ramble about, often in the company of an opthalmic nurse, Sydney Kattala, who is as close to a saint as anyone I have ever met. He rumbled his four wheel about the hinterlands of Tanzania constantly, going into the villages, and doing impromptu eye exams, and rough surgery, with the intent of relieving the scourge of trachoma.

There was, at the time, one source of electricity in the village, a generator owned by a fellow named Remtoulah, who ran the general store. He would run it all day, powering his shop. Matt and I would go every morning and each buy a large bottle of Safari beer, which we would then stash in Remtoulah’s cooler for the remainder of the day. Upon return, after a meal and clean up, we would sit in chairs, cold Safari beers in hand, and watch the amazing African night close in. Remtoulah, as he shut his doors for the day, would power down the genny, and all man made noise ceased. The night was like a big, black blanket, softly drawn up over your head, and the crystalline magnificence of the sky loomed endlessly, a real version of Pandora.

More tk…..

Lino Andreas Mayorga, 57, a month before he died from end stage kidney disease. He worked in the sugar fields for decades and had been receiving dialysis at home by his family. His son, Jimmy, 24, who worked in the sugar fields for 5 years, is now suffering from kidney disease as well, in Chichigalpa, Nicaragua on Jan. 9, 2013.
Ed Kashi/VII

 The Chronic Kidney Disease of unknown origin (CKDu) epidemic is effecting nearly 70% of some communities of sugar cane workers in Nicaragua.  The resulting fatalities of CKDu have left many families without a father and many women without husbands. As a result the community of La Isla has been nicknamed “La Isla de Viudas” – The Island of Widows. Research to discover the cause of this disease “is slow and is being hindered by widespread intimidation of local journalists and workers alike.” The sugar cane company will often provide the families of sick workers with a food stipend that in many cases gets revoked if the workers or their families try to speak out on the situation. Founded by Jason Glaser, La Isla Foundation (LIF) is an NGO fighting against the shrouding of this epidemic. LIF is striving to facilitate research to identify the cause of the epidemic, raise public awareness, and organize public health intervention.

Filmmaker Tom Laffay is working with La Isla Foundation in Nicaragua documenting the issue of CKDu in sugar cane workers. Laffay’s short documentary film “Solo La Caña” will be premiering at the Charleston International Film Festival on Friday April 26th, followed by a Q&A session. Tickets for the event are available here.

Joel Sartore, A photographer’s life from Joel Sartore on Vimeo.

A great video by my friend Joel Sartore.

Getty Emerging Talent
Award

To complement our Grants for Editorial Photography program,
we offer an opportunity for young photographers to receive mentoring and
support through our Emerging Talent Award. Applicants must be under the age of
25 or currently enrolled in a full time photojournalism program (please include
a signed letter from a faculty member, confirming this). Winners are added to
the Emerging Talent roster on Reportage by Getty Images.

To apply, please email a CV or bio and a website showing a
selection of your work to *protected email*.
If you do not have a website, you may email a low-resolution selection of 15-25
images as an example of your work. The total file size should not exceed 8mb.

The deadline will be May 1. All applications will be
reviewed at this time, and winners will be featured for one year. 

In
1996 the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund announced a new award, the Howard
Chapnick Grant, to encourage and support leadership in fields ancillary to
photojournalism, such as editing research, education and management. The Grant
was established to honor the memory of Howard Chapnick, and acknowledge the
value of his enormous contribution to photography.

The
annual $5,000 grant may be used to finance any of a range of qualified
undertakings, which might include a program of further education, research, a
special long-term sabbatical project, or an internship to work with a
noteworthy group or individual. According to the Fund’s Board of Trustees,
special consideration will be given to projects that promote social change
and/or serve significant concerns of photojournalism. The grant is not intended
to be used for the production of photographs, which will continue to be funded
by the main grant of the Smith Fund.

Deadline is May 2013. For more information
visit: http://smithfund.org/howard-chapnick-grant

This is Burma, and it is unlike any land you know about.
Rudyard Kipling, Letters from the East (1898)

Fisherman on Inle Lake with the Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda in the distance

Burma is referred to  as Amarapura, the Land of Immortality, and
Yadanarbon, the Land of the Gems.
Today it is known as Suvanabhomi, the Golden Land.

Mingun Pagoda

Burma has a uniquely preserved cultured in a unparalled landscape.
Rich in natural resources and virgin landscapes,
the country has unique features which set it apart from the rest of the world.

Golden rock, Kyaiktiyo, Myanmar

Yangon

Bagan, the ancient capital, where thousands of temples, monasteries, and stupas were built. 

Sittwe, Burma

Mandalay

Even the son of the foolish can be a sage ; even the son of a poor man can be rich.
Do not be contemptuous of anyone.

Yangon

Yangon, Burma

Monk reads Buddhist scriptures at monastery in Yangon

One who has knowledge is honored by others.
Strive daily to get knowledge.
- Proverb

Yangon train

Inle Lake

Monk walks through a Buddha statue workshop, Mandalay

For the temple-bells are callin’, and it’s there that I would be
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
O the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!
- Rudyard Kipling

Young Monk in Mandalay

In battle we need a warrior,
in a commotion a counselor,
during meals a loved one,
a wise man in an emergency
- Proverb

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

“Human beings the world over need freedom and security that they may be able to realize their full potential.”

Yangon

I am not thesis
I am not antithesis
I am dialectic
Just a contradiction
Patched up in palimpsest.
 - Portion of poem by Zeyar Lynn, Burma
Translated by Ko Ko Thett

Yangon

Yangon

Burma is  the most religious Buddhist country if measured by the
percentage of monks in the population and proportion of income spent on religion.

Yangon

Reminder to apply. 

The
Magnum Foundation and the Inge Morath Foundation announce the 12th annual Inge
Morath Award. The annual award of $5,000 is given to a female photographer
under the age of 30, to support the completion of a long-term documentary
project. One award winner and up to two finalists are selected by a jury
composed of Magnum photographers and the director of the Inge Morath
Foundation.

Submissions
must be made by April 30, 2013. For guidelines, visit: http://www.ingemorath.org/index.php/2013/01/the-inge-morath-award-2013-guidelines/

The
Photocrati Fund offers a $5000 grant to a photographer to undertake an
important humanitarian and environmental photography project. Our goal is to
identify outstanding photographers and to provide the resources necessary to
pursue projects that will have a tangible and positive effect on the world.

The
2013 Photocrati Fund competition will be open from Tuesday January 15, 2013 –
Tuesday April 30, 2013. Following that time, the applications will be judged by
our panel of distinguished reviewers. The 2013 Photocrati Fund award will
be announced in late June 2013. The grant winner will become a Photocrati
Fellow for the calendar year from the announcement of his/her award until the
announcement of the following year’s award.

The 2013 Photocrati Fund competition will run from
Tuesday, January 15, 2013 – Tuesday,
April 30, 2013. There is no application fee. For more information visit: http://www.photocrati.com/photocrati-fund/

Photo©2012_Ed Kashi/VII

Last year, Ed Kashi (VII) collaborated with the Open Society Foundations (OSF) to address the issue of Ethnic Profiling in Europe. Police in the UK frequently use stop and search tactics in attempts to combat crime. The usage of stop and search methods has increased, however, the effectiveness has taken a downturn. Very often the people who are stopped by police are chosen based on their ethnicity. Statistics show that in England and Wales, “Black people are stopped at seven times the rate of White people. Asians are stopped at twice the rate of Whites.”

Photo©2012_Ed Kashi/VII

Ed Kashi and Will Cohen of OSF conducted interviews with nine people directly affected by this issue, and Ed additionally created dramatic environmental portraits in the locations where these “stop and frisks” often take place. This project seeks to address the impact on people’s attitudes, what inequality means and how it is affecting people’s lives and society as a whole. To read the full report visit the OSF website and see the corresponding video on youtube. Ed and Will also produced work on this issue in France and Holland, so stay tuned for those additional parts of their project.

Photo©2012_Ed Kashi/VII

The man in red pictured above is Nick Glynn. Glynn has been a police officer with Leicestershire Constabulary for over 20 years. While off duty, he has also repeatedly experienced ethnically driven stop and searches.

I am heading tomorrow for Rio… Yes, again… For me, there will always be an “again.” Love the place. The ambiance, the life, the people, the whole “theater” that is Rio de Janeiro. For a storyteller, a dream come true.

Sure all cities have all kinds of life. Yet Rio has something special. Perhaps it is the pure physicality of it. It looks like an amphitheater geographically. The city is like a Shakespearean stage. Set between mountains and sea. The kaleidoscope of cultures spilling down on to the stage, the rich, the poor, the good, the bad, the lovers, the haters, the buyers, the sellers, the chosen, the lonely, and everything in between all blended together rather compactly on to this crescent beach. If you cannot find a story here, then you may just have no stories to tell. I swear with Rio you just can’t miss.

So I return for several reasons. First of all, I have no problem admitting that I can simply sit under an umbrella at Posto 9 and sip caipirinhas for the better part of an afternoon. Lazy as hell. No problem. Normally, I cannot sit very long on any beach without getting bored quickly, except for Rio where there is just too too much to see. Too much to feel. Too much to shoot.

The main reason I am going now however is to play out the promise that I made to this audience and to my Carioca friends. We have indeed printed a “magazine” version of my book (based on a true story), which is sold out.

A large format magazine version of the book will be distributed gratis by my BurnBooks team in Rio, primarily in the favelas where I did so much shooting. As a payback and pay forward gesture to the Rio community.

I was able to work inside of every disparate demographic group in Rio. All of them allowing me “in.” I was allowed in with official Rio and unofficial Rio. I had no agenda nor mandate other than to document each sub culture with integrity and honesty. I think they felt this, because they let me do it. So my appreciative payback time. As promised.

I always make prints for the people I photograph, or at least email them a photo. This I have done for 40 years wherever I was shooting. Rio was no exception. However, over the years, I was always shooting for mostly NatGeo and I had no way ever to actually distribute what I had done. A hard copy of my work in their community was always not really available for most of the people.

Now I can. Now I will. So we, my BurnBooks team, Eva-Maria Kunz and Candy Pilar Godoy, and my Rio friends Roberta, Renata Tavares and “Tonico” Monteiro (all characters in the book by the way) will create a few events in the next two weeks and give for free 2,500 copies of the  large format magazine version of (based on a true story). This is exactly half of our press run. The rest of the run will be sold at the lowest possible price to help us cover our costs for the giveaway in Brazil.

This whole process of creating (based on a true story) should I think be some kind of model for photographers who are confused about a future in photography. Not the details, just the idea of independence. We did this book 100% independently. We created the online “join us in Rio” for a buck99 for the shooting of the “character” part of the book, we built the book, designed the book, printed the book in Italy and then distributed it here on Burn at an ascending price range for collectors. Sold out. Why?

Well it was hand assembled, crafted to use the very best materials, innovative design, and with a unique story to tell. Sure BurnBooks is a “mom and pop operation”. A boutique store so to speak. Yet I personally will always feel compelled to not make anything elitist. Sure the book is crafted for collectors (I see myself as an artisan) and yet also either for free or for low cost to everyone else who might be interested. A win win game I think.

The big winners here should be you.

We are looking now at various projects by a variety of photographers to produce their books. BurnBooks is a very very small brand yet we have done now 5 books and sold them all out and taken some accolades along the way. So for sure we will now do books for other photographers. (based on a true story) was the only book we have done of my own work. I will make rare cameo appearances on Burn. I began BurnBooks by mentoring and promoting the “Yakuza” book project by my Burn colleague Anton Kusters, and following up with Burn 01 and Burn 02, “One Goal” by Allison O’Keefe (PDN award winner, Diego Orlando producer), and producing now “Beer, Bait, and Ammo” by Michael Loyd Young.

Soon you will be I hope pleasantly surprised to  see several new books being produced by BurnBooks. Some from iconic photographers you well know, and others by my reason for being here emerging photographers who deserve to be iconic.

So stay tuned. My (based on a true story) is about to become a true story.

-dah-

But lately, I’ve been using bigger umbrellas more and more in all manner of situations, and have been collaborating with Lastolite to perhaps produce a couple hopefully advantageous wrinkles in the lighting options an umbrella presents. We’ll see where that goes. But in the meantime, I’ve been having fun using speed lights, and firing them into umbrellas that are about the size of a small midwestern city.

Shot the above in Saudi Arabia a couple weeks ago, and the shaper is an jumbo Lastolite umbrella box type of light, the type with a soft piece of frosted material over the umbrella scoop. I’ve got three SB-910 speed lights on TTL firing into it, all hung on a ratcheting tri-flash. The results from this are generally soft and wrapping–a very easy going quality of light that has a lot of forgiveness in the shadows.

Now, could you do this with a single big light? Of course. Just didn’t have one of those with me. But the nice thing about having small, multiple sources pointing into this Sasquatch of a light shaper is that they do all combine to produce a large, lovely volume of light. And, given the vagaries and alchemy of TTL, I can send a signal to those lights via the commander flash, and they resolutely (well, sometimes reluctantly) follow me to f1.4.

The other thing about using small, position adjustable flash guns into a giant shaper is that if you need to sequester the light into a certain quadrant of that shaper, you can do it by clicking the speed light heads in different directions. Say you want more light being produced out of the lower scoop of the umbrella. Just take two of the flash units and click them downwards into that area. The effects are subtle, but definitely visible, thus giving you a another fairly easily accessible element of control over the broad brush of flash lighting you are painting the scene with.

At PhotoShop World in Orlando, and demonstrated this type of approach on stage, albeit with a big shoot through umbrella. Found a wonderful member of the audience, and asked her to come up.

From ten feet, it looked like this…

From five feet, it looked like this….

Then, by redirecting the speed lights inside the brolly, and pushing them towards the right hand side of the umbrella, the shadow side of my subject’s face opens up, just a touch….

Small adjustments inside a big light….more tk….

This is the first line of the first graf of the first post, and so far, blobbing has been extremely exciting. We couldn’t just sit by and let all the other Blobbers just post blob after blob, and not react. I mean, what are we chopped Liver? (You CAN enjoy chopped liver during Passover, but somehow it seems to take a back seat to gefilte fish, but that’s another story.) So we started blobbing, and it really seems easier than TYPING 101 Class: just let it flow, let it run, and you’re blobbing. Wow, we’re blobbing. Well, here we are, blobbers and happy to be here. This space in the future will be occupied by various observations, travel memoirs, rants, witticisms, and other wise uncorroborated opinion (apparently in blobbing, contrary to ACTUAL Journalism, you’re not supposed to either verify information, follow up rumors by checking them out for veracity, nor be sure what you’re saying is for real) which we hope will cause our readers and viewers (yes, as a photographer unleashed, images will find their way here too) to feel that Blobbing is the wave of the future. So enjoy We’re Just Sayin, because, after all, I mean, you know, We ‘re Just Sayin.

Correction:

Apparently it’s supposed to be BLOGGING not BloBBing, however given what we’ve actually read online, we think BLOBBING makes a whole lot more sense (see the original film The BLOB, 1958 and you’ll know what we mean). Come BLOB with us.

Iris Burnett ( political operative, novelist, world traveller, humorist, entrepreneur, mother, discount shopper  & now Musical Producer)
David Burnett (photojournalist, world traveller, beer gourmand, mimic, possessor of a keen eye and keen wit)

#1000:

The six international judges – Mary Ellen Mark (U.S.), Nair Benedicto (Brazil), Pascal Maitre (France), Santiago Harker (Colombia), Luis Weinstein (Chile) and Cristina García Rodero (Spain) worked 10 to 12 hours every day discussing, debating and making selections from the more than 30,000 photographs, 100 multimedia stories and photographic books submitted in 19 categories.

All of the judging was live streamed and engaged worldwide audiences through blogs, Twitter and Facebook. 14,417 people from 89 countries tuned in.

Working closely with the Latin American photojournalism weblog nuestramirada.orgPOY Latam has become Latin America’s largest and most prestigious photojournalism contest. Its founders and directors, Pablo Corral Vega and Loup Langton, have gathered a team of like-minded idealists committed to promoting and advancing Latin American photojournalists and their work. They hope to continue to produce the contest every two years, each time selecting a different Ibero-American judging site.

We ask for your help in sharing the results of the contest. Don’t hesitate to write if you need additional information or to request a press kit.

Congratulations to all of the winners!

Vida cotidiana (individual)

Primer puesto: César Morejón, Ecuador
Segundo puesto: Rodrigo Abd, Argentina
Tercer puesto: Gustavo Jononovich, Ecuador
Mención de honor: Tomás Munita, Chile
Mención de honor: Edson Caballero, México
Mención de honor: Adrián Portugal, Perú

Vida cotidiana (serie)

Primer puesto: Edson Caballero, México
Segundo puesto: Alejandro Cartagena, México
Tercer puesto: Alejandro Kirchuk, Argentina
Mención de honor: Runa Photos, Ecuador
Mención de honor: Tomás Munita, Chile

Noticias (individual)

Primer puesto: Guillermo Arias, México
Segundo puesto: Felipe Dana, Brasil
Tercer puesto: Fernando Borges, Brasil
Mención de honor: Daniele Volpe, Italia/Guatemala
Mención de honor: Wara Vargas Lara, Bolivia

Noticias (serie)

Primer puesto: Tomás Munita, Chile
Segundo puesto: Mauricio Lima, Brasil
Tercer puesto: Javier Arcenillas, España
Mención de honor: Musuk Nolte, Perú

Retrato (individual)

Primer puesto: Alejandro Cossío, México
Segundo puesto: Lunae Parracho, Brasil
Tercer puesto: Henry Milléo, Brasil
Mención de honor: Alejandro Cossío, México
Mención de honor: Mauricio Lima, Brasil

Retrato (serie)

Primer puesto: Orlando Barría, Chile
Segundo puesto: Nelson d’Aires, Portugal
Tercer puesto: Ivan Kashinsky, Estados Unidos/Ecuador
Mención de honor: Tadeu Vilani, Brasil
Mención de honor: Henrique Manreza, Brasil

El medio ambiente (individual)

Primer puesto: Miguel Sierra, México
Segundo puesto: Sergio Moraes, Brasil

El medio ambiente (serie)

Primer puesto: Santiago Arcos, Ecuador
Segundo puesto: Jessica Pons, Argentina
Tercer puesto: Pedro David, Brasil
Mención de honor: Pedro Armestre, España

Deportes (individual)

Primer puesto: Jorge Silva, México
Segundo puesto: César Morejón, Ecuador
Tercer puesto: Gustavo Cherro, Argentina
Mención de honor: Lucas Ninno, Brasil

Deportes (serie)

Primer puesto: Nacho Doce, España
Segundo puesto: David Ramos, España
Tercer puesto: Rodrigo Cruz, México
Mención de honor: Juan Gonzalez, Chile

Fiestas, tradiciones & religión (individual)

Primer puesto: David Airob, España
Segundo puesto: Christian Ugarte, Perú
Tercer puesto: Miguel Mejía, Perú
Mención de honor: Victor Otero, España

Fiestas, tradiciones & religión (serie)

Primer puesto: Joaquín Sarmiento, Colombia
Segundo puesto: Jean Souza Lopes, Brasil
Tercer puesto: Myriam Meloni, España
Mención de honor: Simon Plestenjak, Eslovenia/Brasil
Mención de honor: Jordi Cohen, España

Vivir con las drogas en Iberoamérica

Primer puesto: Valerio Bispuri, Italia/Argentina
Segundo puesto: Tomás Munita, Chile
Tercer puesto: Alejandro Olivares, Chile
Mención de honor: David Vexelman, Perú
Mención de honor: Felipe Dana, Brasil

Multimedia

Primer puesto: Luis Angel, Colombia
Primer puesto: Gustavo Pellizzon, Brasil
Tercer puesto: Colectivo BajaAlta, México
Mención de honor: Walter Shintani, México
Mención de honor: Ramón Ángel Acevedo Arce, Chile

El mejor libro de fotografía

Ganador: Stephen Ferry, Estados Unidos/Colombia
Mención de honor: Josu Trueba Leiva, España
Mención de honor: Marcelo Buainain, Brasil
Mención de honor: Sergio Carvalho de Santana, Brasil
Mención de honor: Gilvan Barreto, Brasil

El fotógrafo iberoamericano del año

Primer puesto: Tomás Munita, Chile
Segundo puesto: Mauricio Lima, Brasil
Tercer puesto: Felipe Dana, Brasil
Mención de honor: Javier Arcenillas, España
Mención de honor: Esteban Felix, Perú

Entre lo real y lo imaginario

Primer puesto: Enrique Serrato, México
Segundo puesto: Eduardo Valenzuela, Ecuador
Tercer puesto: Santiago Hafford, Argentina
Mención de honor: Cassio Vasconcellos, Brasil
Mención de honor: Pedro Silveira, Brasil

Premio Nuestra Mirada sobre la Clase Media

Primer puesto: Janet Jarman, Estados Unidos/México
Segundo puesto: Sub Cooperativa de Fotógrafos, Argentina
Tercer puesto: Jorge Saenz, Argentina
Mención de honor: César Morejón, Ecuador

Premio Carolina Hidalgo Vivar de Paisaje Humano

Ganador: Alberto César Araujo, Brasil
Mención de honor: Felipe Barboza, Brasil
Mención de honor: Pedro David, Brasil
Mención de honor: Maria Cristina Ribeiro de Paranaguá, Brasil

Reminder to apply. 

Our
mission is to be an efficient and innovative fund raising foundation that helps
globally to promote, support and match humanitarian and travel photographers to
NGOs and other humanitarian causes that need their story told. 

Founded
in the USA in 2010, Focus For Humanity is now a Singapore based non profit
foundation that supports amateur and professional humanitarian and travel
photographers in perfecting their craft through providing a series of workshop
grants, scholarships and fellowships to work with underfunded NGOs as well as
providing mentoring schemes with leading humanitarian and travel photographers.

Each
year we aim to give out a minim of 8 grants per year. Depending on how our
fund-raising has been going we may opt to give out more grants. Choose form the
three different types of grants that the Foundation offers each year.

Deadline
varies. For more information visit: http://www.focusforhumanity.org/workshop-grants/

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and
tolerant of the weak and strong.
Someday in your life you will have been all of these.
-  George Washington Carver

Mexico City

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
good and ill together.
- William Shakespeare

Afghanistan

The great use of a life is to spend for something that outlasts it.
- William James

Japan

May you live every day of your life.
- Jonathan Swift

India

Afghanistan

This boy has never held a book in his hands, has never attended school, and has never known
a life without the threat of violence.

Morocco

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
- Rabindranath Tagore

Afghanistan

Brazil

India

Brazil

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
- Boris Pasternak

India

Afghanistan

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
- Rabindranath Tagore

India

The potential possibilities of any child are the most
intriguing and stimulating in all creation.
- Ray L. Wilbur

South Africa

South Africa

United States

India

South Africa

 South Africa

A the end of your life, it’s not going to matter how many breaths you took,
but how many moments took your breath away.
- Shing Xiong

My opening comment, when I view a location foray such as I describe above about to go off the rails, is often something along the lines of, “Shutter speed is your friend.”

I shot both of the above for Kelby Training video that came to be titled, Making Pictures in Bad Weather. Trust, me, I didn’t head to Tampa with that title in mind. But it turned out that we were trying to shoot through the tail licks of an offshore hurricane, and hence, we bagged a lot of the locations, and found shelter. That class ended up being one of the most fun classes I’ve taught for the Kelby group. It was a hoot, and was just like being on location for a magazine and needing to get it done ’cause the editor who assigned us doesn’t give a rat’s ass if it’s raining anvils. You have to shoot pictures, and shoot through all manner of shit.

The two pix above were shot in the same tiny bathroom, and these views of that little room have very different feels to them. And the differences do stem from the different qualities of light. But, what enabled the difference was shutter speed.

First pass. Window’s glowing and available light dominates the room. One hot shoe flash employed, on the hot shoe. It’s cranked backwards and flying the light up the wall I’m leaning against. It fills the shadow side of the model, just a little. It’s running at low power, no light shaper, except the stock in trade dome diffuser. It bounces partially off the wall and partially off the ceiling. Adds detail, and that’s about it. It fulfills the classic definition of a fill light: A light you don’t notice until you turn it off.

Below is camera info.

And here is more specific flash info, off Nikon software….

The second shot is darker, moodier. No glowy window, and fairly heavy shadows. Reason for that is I chucked available light, and put a Quadra flash out in the rain, cloaked in a baggie, firing off a radio, with no light shaper. It is about 5 feet from the frosted pane of glass, and it’s just a simple blast of light. The frosted glass becomes my light shaper. And because I don’t let any available light in, all the exposure comes from the flash.

Again, camera info.

No coded flash info here, as it is a third party flash, and doesn’t communicate with the camera. But the Quadra is providing all the light, and is well within its power range and capability.

The flash style, power and direction are truly different, to be sure. But the real difference, to me, in the two shots is a simple shift in shutter speed. The f-stops are quite similar. Shutter speeds aren’t. In the open, window blown away version, the shutter speed is 1/8th, and in the more controlled, moody version, the shutter rang in at 1/250th.

Shifting the shutter enables the game of ratios, which is a game forever played on location. You walk in, and you observe what light already exists. Then you factor how much, or how little, of that light plays into your photo by cranking your way through the shutter speed dial. You can allow the natural light to dominate, and thus making your flash a bit player, a reserve coming off the bench, and not the star. Or you can use the shutter speed to snuff the light entirely, rendering darkness upon the land, which you then replace with custom made flash treatment.

A game we always play. What exists, and, what do we layer over what exists? The flash we bring to location can be an unseen infiltrator, a thief in the night. Or it can be a thundering herd. The thing to remember, always, is that the determining factor in how many flashes (if any at all) we take out of the damn trunk is the existing light, and it’s volume and quality.

As as  location “flash photographer” the most important light you always wrestle with is the ambient light. And when it comes to ambient light, shutter speed is the judge and jury, and your friend.

More tk….

For the technically minded, the gear used above was Nikon D4, 14-24 f2.8, 24-70 f2.8, Sb-900 speed light, and Ranger Quadra.

While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
- William Wordsworth,
Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

Burma

Italy

Burma

Italy

India

Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something,
or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we’re invited to read.
Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a
band of hikers will make themselves heard.

Nepal

But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails,
the solid and dependable apples,
this heap of rumpled books,
this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver.

India

These are resolutely still, immutable, poised for a forward movement that will never occur.
The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen.
Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over,
like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does,
as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so,
and things fall into being,
tumble through the progression of existing in time.

Burma

But the still life resides in absolute silence.
― Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

Cambodia

Laos

Italy

Cuba

Burma

Burma

India

Italy

Italy

Thailand

Still Life
Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car.
Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour.
Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new hay crops, swaths of new hay laid in the sun.
A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the post-office never blink an eye.
A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black wall map, never blink an eye.
A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his place at a window with the
serenity of a bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass whispering.
- Carl Sandburg

Kansas, United States

Burma

Cambodia

India

Still Life
Sublime, serene
Found arrangements
Formal compositions.
Which is which?

The above photo of Olympian Shane Hamman, who is often referred to as the strongest man in America, was a hard won photograph. It wasn’t a tour de force technically, and it wasn’t days in the making. It was simply, as always, difficult to liaise with an Olympic athlete as he or she is in training for the games.  Anything outside of their strict practice regimen, such as a photo shoot, gets assessed thoroughly, and the time allotted to such adventures is small indeed. The pic of him leaping, for instance, was done in a very short amount of time. He could only launch his massive frame in the air perhaps seven or eight times. That means the whole take is just a few frames, shot on 4×5. He was also gracious enough to give me time to work out another scenario, below. 

The leaping picture was published by Nat Geo, and the magazine liked it well enough that they considered making a poster out of it at the time, and using it as a “subscriber inducement.” I talked it out with them and pointed out that really constituted a commercial application of the photo, and I did not have a commercial release. They would have to go back to the athlete and negotiate such a permission. Ya gotta be careful, and respectful, about this stuff. They eventually opted out of doing such a poster.

Just recently, as happens in the wild and woolly world of the internet, we stumbled across the jumping pic being deployed, without our permission, as a promotional effort on the part of a commercial enterprise. This is hardly a first, of course, in terms of our pictures, or anyone’s pictures. There are those out there in electronic publishing who deem that, as my editor Bill Douthitt at Geographic wryly puts it, “Content wants to be free.” We, uh, don’t subscribe to that theory.

Alerted to the incursion by Lynda Peckham, who has an amazing eye for details and keeps the studio on track, Lynn, our ever elegant and precise studio manager, wrote the offending party a letter, and I thought her explanation was so calm and so lucid that it was worthwhile sharing here. (Lynn is the grown up at our studio, and takes the lead in situations like this, and keeps everyone calm. Drew, Cali and I were already in the chopper, in camo face paint , planning refueling stops, etc. But her civilized, reasoned approach prevailed.) Her letter is below.
Thanks for your email, and for the removal of the image from your website.

You seem to have your own interpretation of the law here. Yes, you are right, there are many other folks who have infringed on Joe’s image of Shane, for their own purposes. But the photo of Shane is a small example of the hundreds and hundreds of others who have committed this crime with other work of Joe’s, and other photographers’ work as well. Just because images show up on a google image search does not mean that they are free for the taking. It’s the curse of the internet.

For someone like Joe, who has a career spanning 30 years, shooting for National Geographic, LIFE & Sports Illustrated, amongst about 100 other clients, and is a well known photographer, his work has of course had wide dissemination. In the last 365 days, for instance, there have been well over two million page views of his website. It’s thus a bit difficult to keep up with all of the rip-offs that are going on whenever he posts images. We can’t be watermarking every single file, given the volume of work he outputs, and in so many avenues for distribution. I’d have to hire someone to just sit here in the studio and do nothing but track down all of the people out there who have technically “stolen” these image files.

Most infringers, like yourself, blatantly feel that they can get away with it, while others are just oblivious to the laws involved. You might think that usage on a blog or website, that isn’t directly bringing in revenue that you are profiting from, exonerates them from infringement. Not the case. The fact of the matter is that the image(s) in question are, in fact, helping the infringer to market and promote their company, or, as you noted, 

“My only intention for using it was to promote the sport and training methods of Olympic Weightlifting…”

Hence, a promotional effort, on your company’s behalf. As a spokesperson for “Olympic Weightlifting”, you are bringing your information to the readership of your blog and website, which they find intriguing and interesting and continue to come back for more. No matter how innocent you want to portray your side of this, it still comes down to marketing and promotion for your company. We have many inquiries from companies who understand the law, and by conducting themselves in an ethical manner, they inquire about the licensing fee to use an image on their website.

When you say that if you posted a photo yourself or someone else online and found it being used in an unauthorized way, my immediate response to that is…. if it’s a photo you took of yourself, or had a non-professional photographer take it and didn’t have a problem with it, well then, no worries. But if you snapped a photo of someone else (hence you own the copyright to the image file) and that image was used in an unauthorized way, the person you need to worry about (other than yourself being infringed upon), is the person you took the photo of. Without a model release from that person, you could very easily be sued by that person – especially if they wanted no association what-so-ever with the company that ripped off your photo.

 I could go on and on, but no need for me to give you an unrequested “photographic business practices” lesson

On another note, I have nothing but respect for your pursuit to educate your clients and blog followers in the world of fitness and strength training. It so happens that I have four family members who are professional trainers and live to promote the field, so I totally have reverence.Anyway, glad we settled this matter peacefully. Not that I expected otherwise. Anything harder than what we did would require time, expense, and aggravation

Best, Lynn

A bit of his correspondence below:

Lynn,

I appreciate you taking time to explain the situation. I am fairly aware and do agree with everything you stated. I guess for us daily bloggers and even worse the FB crowd, we get used to posting and sharing whatever is available and assuming others will do the same. Desensitized I guess you might say. I have been asked to remove a handful of things over the last 5 years and I always do if I improperly used someone else’s material, as I did in this case.

I apologize for the inconvenience  I caused you in having to contact me on the issue and again appreciate your solid explanation.  I will think twice about what I’m “stealing” in the future.

As the parole board said to Hi McDunnough (on several occasions)….”Well okay then….”

The gent in question does seem like decent fellow, and the whole thing was conducted amiably. But in his response there were a couple, well warning bells, I guess you’d call them. The term “fairly aware,” for instance. Just like you can’t get a little bit pregnant, you really can’t be “fairly aware.” When you swipe someone else’s photo for your own use without their permission, that’s a full state of awareness, right there. Likewise his syntax, using quotation marks around the word “stealing,” which presumably softens the term, and makes it kinda, sorta, like, maybe stealing.

Sorry. When you take something that’s not yours, that’s stealing. No quotations marks necessary.

More tk…..

A water saturated landscape during the wet season at Piccaninny Plains Widlife Sanctuary on the Cape York Peninsula, Australia

I am on my way home from a three-week trip to Australia’s Cape York Peninsula on assignment for National Geographic magazine.  Believe it or not, there are still places in the world without easy internet access and this was one of them.  Now that I am back in contact, I will share some new images from the trip here and via my Instagram feed over the next week or so.

This ongoing project for Nat Geo has the goal of documenting the landscapes and unique biodiversity of this remote part of Northeastern Queensland.  Last year I made two expeditions here in the dry season, and I now returned to cover what it looks like in the wet season, which looks dramatically different in places.

Above is an example shot from a low flying helicopter:  This is Piccaninny Plains Wildlife Sanctuary, where I photographed the parched dry landscape in September.   Now the same area is dotted with potholes full of water while storm clouds with more water loom above.

You can look back at my Instagram feed to see earlier shots from Cape York in the dry season, and stay tuned for some more new photos over the coming days……

The collective memory of that conversation was immediate, and we both laughed. As Dave said, “Twenty years later. Still standing!”

Dave’s still standing, but he’s hardly standing around. He has embraced the internet as a publication of choice, and built an audience for his ongoing blogs and Instagrams. He believes fiercely in the mentoring process, having been fiercely mentored himself by the legendary Rich Clarkson at the Topeka Capitol Journal. He launched Burn Magazine,  an “evolving journal for emerging photographers,” which offers funding and grants for new work. And he creates award winning, limited edition books of his own efforts, combining his ever prescient sense of the moment with various technologies from the Iphone to rangefinders to point and shoot cameras. His sprawling imagination and wonderful sense of light have merged into the digital world in fine fashion.

When we both grew up photographically (though the notion of either of us being grown ups is the subject of debate in some quarters) the interface, the structure we had to plug our pictures into were magazines. We had to wait by the phone, and hopefully it would ring. An assignment would be born, and our pictures then offered up to the judgement and whims of others. Later, sometimes much later, the fruits of our labors would be seen in print. So it went, for many years. Now, of course, the pictorial conversation is quite immediate, with the gap between the click and the delivery down to literally seconds. I’ve been a photog for many years, shooting all manner of film and pixels. Probably the most viewed photo I’ve ever shot was an Instagram I made a couple weeks ago from atop the Burj Khalifa. It was everywhere, literally, before I even climbed back down the tower. We live in a fast world, and now, our pictures keep pace with it.

Dave’s digital conversations, via his Instagrams, are also quite immediate, and personal. His recent posts have been prompted by the death of his mother, Maryanna. He commemorated her in a picture, naturally.

His posts harked back, for me, to the death of my mom, which I wrote about a bit. I disclosed that I knew I would never see her again, so during my last visit, I made a photo. She died while I was in Singapore. That’s the life of a photographer. Sometimes you’re not there for some of it.

Dave continues to update from the gathering of the Harvey clan, and the celebration of his mother’s life. My heart goes out to him, and his family. 

Photographers. Sometimes we can’t find the words. But we can, most of the time, find a picture.

More tk….

A facebook app called photos at my door -if given permission- lets your facebook friends create and purchase printed merchandise with images from your facebook photos. 

Details here and here.

I’m not certain how this can be legal, but if you don’t want your photos turning up on other people’s coffee cup and mouse pads go to Facebook Settings / Apps / Apps other people use and make sure “My photos” is turned off. 

Professional Photographers, this is a pretty good reason to watermark your Instagram photos. Whether you know it or not your IG pictures are being copied and re-posted by other social media users. A visable watermark doesn’t prevent the copying but it does allow your photo credit to travel with the image. If your photo is going to end up on a coffee mug without your permission at least you should get credit.

Stephen Alvarez

Reminder to apply. 

We believe that photojournalism is a powerful tool for
telling compelling social, political and cultural stories. We also understand
that creating and managing world-class photography assignments requires time,
freedom, support and considerable resources. 

That is why we continue to offer the Grants for Editorial
Photography, which in 2013 will provide five total grants of $10,000 each to
photojournalists pursuing projects of personal and journalistic significance.

Since its launch in 2005, the Grants for Editorial
Photography celebrate and support independent photojournalism, evidenced by the
many dynamic and compelling projects completed over the years.

The Grants for Editorial Photography will be awarded through
our annual application proposal process, with applications being accepted
beginning April 1, 2013 and will require a 500 word summary of the project
proposal, a short bio, and 20-25 images. Specific uploading instructions will
be made available when the application portal is opened on April 1.

Feel free to contact us with questions about our Grants for
Editorial Photography and the application process at *protected email*. Or
visit http://imagery.gettyimages.com/getty_images_grants/overview.aspx

Photo©2010_Ed Kashi/VII

Photography has a very special power to inspire change. Photojournalists documenting worldwide issues bring home new perspectives on other cultures and concerns. Spreading the word in a way that reaches people on another level is critical in catalyzing action for change.

Blue Earth is an organization that supports photography that makes a difference. Their mission is “to raise awareness about endangered cultures, threatened environments and social concerns through photography. By supporting the power of photographic storytelling, [Blue Earth] motivates society to make positive change.” Be that change in people’s opinions, actions, or policies, Blue Earth is helping to change things for the betterment of our world. Providing resources for photographers, sponsoring projects, and hosting events to spread the word are all part of what this organization does. From the fruits of their labors, Blue Earth has helped to raise almost a million dollars towards issues commonly “overlooked by traditional media.”

Next month, Blue Earth will be hosting the Collaborations for Cause event, on April 26-27th, at which Ed Kashi (VII) will be delivering the keynote address. This event will be an opportunity to start meaningful conversations between a variety of people striving for change. Furthermore, this event is also a fund raiser for the organization. The money raised goes towards keeping Blue Earth in operation and thereby supporting positive change through visual storytelling on imperative social and environmental issues.

Register for Collaborations for Cause to join the conversation on making a difference.

Slovenia

Tibet

Afghanistan

There is no grandfather who does not adore his grandchild.
- Victor Hugo

United States

Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.
- Welsh Proverb

Mali

A grandparent is a best friend, teacher, cheerleader, and counselor.

Sri Lanka

Something magical happens when parents turns into grandparents.
Their attitude changes from “money-doesn’t-grow-on-trees” to spending it like it does.
- Paul Linden

Italy

India

Philippines

Our grandchildren accept us for ourselves, without rebuke or effort to change us,
as no one in our entire lives has ever done, not our parents, siblings, spouses, friends,
and hardly ever our own grown children.
- Ruth Goode

Tibet

A house needs a grandma in it.
- Louisa May Allcott

Germany

It is as grandmothers that our mothers come into the fullness of their grace.
- Christopher Morley

Burma

If nothing is going well, call your grandmother.
-  Proverb

Lebanon

The best place to be when you’re sad is a grandparent’s  lap.

Italy

Grandchildren are God’s way of compensating us for growing old.
- Mary H. Waldrip

Kashmir

“I miss him still today: his long, whiskery eyebrows,
his huge hands and hugs, his warmth, his prayers, his stories,
but above all his shining example of how to live and how to die.
– Bear Grylls, Mud Sweat and Tears

India

 India

Reminder to apply. 

First
announced a year after the Center for Documentary Studies’s founding at Duke
University, the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize was created to encourage collaboration
between documentary writers and photographers in the tradition of the acclaimed
photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor. This
year, the CDS is proud to re-launch the Lange-Taylor Prize, which supports
documentary artists who are involved in extended, ongoing fieldwork projects
that rely on and exploit, in intriguing and effective ways, the interplay of
words and images in the creation and presentation of their work.

The
winner will receive $10,000, a solo exhibition at the Center for Documentary
Studies, and inclusion in the Archive of Documentary Arts at Rubenstein
Library, Duke University.

Submissions
must be made by March 31, 2013. For guidelines, visit: http://documentarystudies.duke.edu/awards/dorothea-lange-paul-taylor-prize/how-to-enter

Reminder to apply.

Joy
of Giving Something, Inc. (JGS) established in 2009 an ongoing international
quarterly contest that encourages artists to share their unique perspective.
Quarterly winners will receive $1,000 and their work will be featured in a solo
exhibition at the Forward Thinking Museum. Annual winners will receive the JGS
Artist Award in the amount of $5,000 and their work will be featured in a solo
exhibition at the FTM.

Submissions
must be made by March 31, 2013. For guidelines, visit: http://forwardthinkingmuseum.com/contest/photography.php

Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing.
To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.
- Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

India

Finland

Constant attention by a good nurse may be
just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.
- Dag Hammarskjold

Russia

Sometimes we must yield control to others and accept our vulnerability so we can be healed.
- Kathy Magliato, Healing Hearts: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon

India

Finland

A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings … cannot be a scientist;
he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist.
This means that in order to be a good doctor
a man must also have a good character, that is to say,
whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must
love his fellow human beings in the concrete and
desire their good before his own.
- W. H. Auden

Afghanistan

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
– Rumi

Afghanistan

United States

India

South Africa

Healing is best accomplished when art and science are conjoined,
when body and spirit are probed together.
-Bernard Lown, M.D.,  The Lost Art of Healing

Singapore

Wounding and healing are not opposites. They’re part of the same thing.
It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others.
It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people.
It is our loneliness that helps us to to find other people or to even
know they’re alone with an illness.
― Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

Morocco

India

South Africa

The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years:
the power of the human hand.
- Abraham Verghese, M.D., TED Talk

Russia

India

Brazil

Brazil

India

Brazil

Surgeons must be very careful. When they take the knife,
underneath their fine incisions, stirs the Culprit — Life!
- Emily Dickinson

India

Today, Time’s LightBox is featuring a compilation of images about the Iraq war, both there and at home, assembled from the past ten years. This poignant collection is an intense look into many perspectives from different points in the war. Experiencing these images captured by a variety of photojournalists, puts together for us a vivid and moving look into the past ten years of the Iraq War.

View these images and accompanying first-person accounts behind the photographs, “A Decade of War in Iraq: The Images That Moved Them Most” on LightBox.

Photo©Ed Kashi/VII_2005

By: Jennifer Larsen, 22 (Studio Assistant)

On a photo expedition like this recently completed one in the Galapagos, you have to come up with the right combination of photographic equipment to carry and the best way to carry it.  Unlike a National Geographic Magazine assignment, where I might be working with a lot more equipment, and able to hire porters and perhaps even have a dedicated photo assistant, when I am accompanying a Photo Expedition as one of the photography instructors, I am of course carrying my own equipment around every day just like the guests on the trip.

Most people opt for a pretty lightweight outfit for the on-the-go type shooting that we do on our walks ashore every day.  A good setup would be to have two bodies, and have one mounted with a wide to medium zoom like a 24-105 mm, and the second body with a telephoto zoom like a 100-400 f5.6, or a 70-200 f2.8 plus teleconverters.

I did use that setup on some hikes, but I often chose to carry a bit more.  I am used to lugging around a lot of gear and it doesn’t slow me down much, and I do like to have a bigger lens with more reach.  While it is true that in the Galapagos, you can often get very close to the wildlife, it is also usually not permitted to leave the trail, so longer reach can sometimes really help when you are at lagoons with flamingos, or places like that.

I came up with a really comfortable setup for carrying around the gear described below.  I don’t like a huge photo backpack that fits everything.  It’s too heavy when you have it on, and if you set it down and step away, then you will invariably need something from it like a teleconverter or a battery.  I like the combination of a belt system for keeping the essentials handy with a slimmer backpack for the big lens and body.  I have found a set of bags from ThinkTank that fit my working style very well.  So what I carried ashore in the Galapagos what you see in this image on some lava rock on Fernandina Island:

Photo equipment I carried on my Galapagos shore excursions.

Belt-Pack system with:

Canon 5D-III, 16-35 mm f2.8, 24-105 mm f4 in large belt pouch (Camera fits in the pouch without lens on with the two lenses.  I take it out and mount a lens on as soon as we are ashore, or even sometimes shoot from the zodiac if conditions permit.)

70-200 f 2.8 – in lens pouch

1.4x and 2x converters and spare batteries and cards, polarizing filter in another belt pouch that always sits right on my right hip for quick access.

Long lens backpack with:

Canon 1D-IV mounted with 400 mm f2.8

Water bottle and rain hood go in side pockets

Another pouch attached to the outside of this pack has my video viewfinder and mike.

With the use of the teleconverters in this outfit, I have coverage from 16 mm to 800 mm with just four lenses, which means I am ready for just about anything.

There was plenty of light to shoot hand-held most of the time, but on some hikes I also carried my tripod especially to do a little video shooting.

Note that all these ThinkTank pouches have built in rain hoods that are perfect for protection from the spray on zodiac rides and the occasional rain shower.

I personally didn’t even know there was a waterfall in Yosemite, until I went there with Moose. During those halcyon days of the Digital Landscape Workshop Series, I was brought along pretty much for comic relief, and to teach some lighting and portraiture out there in the great beyond. I would mostly sleep in the van during those early morning roll outs, tumble out of the door when they woke me, then stumble along a path to some great natural wonder. Inevitably at the better known of these places, there would be some lone, grumpy, shivering soul already there with a 4×5 Wista field camera on a wooden tripod, with his shot staked out and a baleful glance towards anyone who might infringe on the sovereignty of his composition. This person would always take a rather dim view of the arrival of 40 or so enthusiastic DLWS’ers, and their eyes would grow dark and menacing under their hooded Carhart all weather, all terrain, camo overcoat. I always felt safe though, ’cause we had Kevin Dobler with us. Kevin’s such a good guy, with such friendly demeanor, he would invariably win the individual over and all would be well. The fact that Kev’s the size of a large barn door might have helped, too.

But, courtesy of Moose, I got to really see some of the true natural wonders of the US, and I’m forever grateful. They are not places any right minded magazine editor would have ever sent me, given my asphalt upbringing. And, I did get a firefall.

Moose and I will be at PhotoShop World in April, but not together this time. Scott K and Kathy Siler I think looked at the fact that during our historically mutual Safari Pre-Con, we were basically just making fun of each other, and in general cutting up. So, like unruly kids in class, we’ve been separated. He’s doing an airplane thing, which is cool. (He can’t do a critter thing, ’cause it’s Orlando, and all the wildlife there is animatronic and sing songs.) I’m doing a portrait thing, all day, the Tuesday before PSW officially starts. See you soon, Moose!

More tk….

A paragraph from Rope Dipomacy

In such an authoritarian society, to control one’s own destiny is a rare and precious thing. For independent-minded human beings, it’s the essence of life itself, and it’s a feeling that consequential sports like climbing deliver in significant measure, for by and large the vertical world exists beyond government. In it, individuals conform to rules of their own making—and bear the oft-times harsh consequences of their mistakes.

“It is very difficult to live here,” said Shaima Shadman, one of our ACI host climbers, explaining how most Iranians cope. “Everybody has two lives, one private, one public. The government knows about it. They have them, too.”

A lovely 36-year old woman whose warm, brown eyes and careful, withdrawing smile demonstrate the tensions of her existence, Shadman was raised in Mashaad, a conservative city in northeastern Iran. She trained as a computer engineer and worked five-plus years in Tehran. But she found being in an office stifling and abandoned her career for a world that gifts her the freedom to act in accord with her true person, where “everything is nature: sun, rain, cloud, snow.”

Shadman now works as a climbing guide, radiating quiet strength. Although most of her days are spent on Damavand, Iran’s highest peak, which she climbs about 35 times a year, she recently led a group of her countrymen to Annapurna base camp, in Nepal. Fixed to her aluminum water bottle was a sticker of Rosie the Riveter. A reticent smile and furtive nod communicated that Shadman knows exactly who Rosie was and what she did. Shadman told me that she dreams of exploring the world’s great ranges. “Mountains is free land,” she said. “Everybody in the mountains is member of this same country.”

 

Read about Greg and my month long journey through Iran in Rope Diplomacy available for Kindel here. Iphone and other formats here.

There’s an interesting conversation going on over at The Atlantic about working for free. The talk is among journalists, but it’s not much of a stretch to bring it into the photography (or really any creative) space.

It started last week with journalist Nat Thayer, who was asked by The Atlantic website to repurpose a blog post for free. The original article, “25 Years of Slam Dunk Diplomacy: Rodman trip comes after 25 years of basketball diplomacy between U.S. and North Korea”  was posted on NKNews.org. After it was published, an editor from The Atlantic emailed Thayer to ask if he would be interested in adapting a version for their website – for free.

Thayer took to his blog and posted his correspondence with the editor.

“We unfortunately can’t pay you for it, but we do reach 13 million readers a month,” said the editor in her email to Thayer. “I understand if that’s not a workable arrangement for you, I just wanted to see if you were interested.”

To that Thayer responded: “I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children…Frankly, I will refrain from being insulted and am perplexed how one can expect to try to retain quality professional services without compensating for them.”

Read more at Photoshelter

RENAN OZTURK // CINEMATOGRAPHER // REEL 2013 from Camp 4 Collective on Vimeo.

Take 3 minutes out of your day and watch Renan Ozturk’s 2013 show reel. It is a wild ride around the world.

Screen shot of Kris-Belle Paclibar-Mamangun, dancing as Titania. Picture shot by her husband, JoJo Mamangun.

While there I also wanted to come up with some pix that were distinctly Filipino. From my first visit some years ago, I fell in love with Jeepneys. They are a cross between a classic Jeep and a bus, and thousands of them ply the streets of Manila everyday. They are privately owned, so there’s no one Jeepney quite like another. Some are crusty, working vehicles. Others are the technicolor dreams of their drivers set to wheels, festooned with decals, ads, sponsor logos, skulls, mascots of American sports teams, slogans, images of the Virgin Mary, you name it. A rough equivalent would be a NASCAR that moves slow and carries passengers.

I was wrestling with the notion of working a Jeepney into a picture when JoJo mentioned that Kris was 4’11′. I thought for a moment. And the phrase, “hood ornament” came to mind. The elements came together rapidly: The Jeepney, the dancer costumed as a fairy, and an urban Manila street scene. Not to mention a sublime makeup artist/stylist in Barbara Bennett, who can spin a costume out of her brain in short order.

Forget shooting a pic like this at midday in Manila. The tropical sun just bakes your pixels and your brain. We used the bad light to scout a good location, got hooked up with a local security patrol, and waited out the sun. When we were edging towards good light, we rolled the Jeepney into position. Right in the middle of the street. Unobtrusive we were not.  This is what it looked like to start. Then we got to the lighting.

When you’re thinking about spreading some lighting around the streets, anywhere, it’s best to think of it in pieces, and take it a step at a time. Don’t think about the whole thing, and lighting all at once. Put up a light, check it out. See where you’ve goofed. Hopefully, fix it and check again.

Light the dancer first. Her light is an Elinchrom Quadra flash, firing into an indirect 59′ softbox, from camera left. I went with a big source as it’s a wide picture, and the light has to be far away. But, even from that distance, the indirectness and size of the box still conferred good, soft, directional light on my subject. It rests on a C-stand fitted with a mini-boom. A pile of discarded bags of cinder blocks dumped in front of a construction site sufficed for sand bags. First piece of the puzzle done.

Below, the talented Milk Mendoza, a Manila based photog and assistant, stands in for Kris.

The Jeepney as light source. In situations like this, when you are shooting wide, and lighting a scene, something actually in the photo often has to be a light source. The Filipino version of Kesey’s Magic Bus was perfectly suited to this purpose. I installed four SB 910 Speedlights in the back passenger area, and one up front in the cab, all gelled full CTO and semi-bounced into the ceiling of the vehicle. Had one wired with a PW3, and the rest fired on SU-4 mode. The glow those lights produced made a great deal of headway lighting the street.

(There are those who will question 5 Speed Lights over one big flash head. Fair question. I would submit that in this instance, spreading the light base with various small sources gave me more control over the reach of the light and the consequent spill of it onto the street. Personal preference. Also, I only had two big heads. So, as always we used the the best lights–the ones we had.)

Backlight the whole deal and then ask the barbecue shop to move their grill up the block near that flash so some smoke would occasionally drift over it to uh, flavor the light. Full CTO on a Quadra in the way back. Raw flash head. Spews all over the street. Livens the scene. Also on a PW3.

Backlight the dancer. SB-910 Justin clamped to the back of the Jeepney roof, zoomed to 200mm, and flared, hard, right at the dancer’s wings. SU-4 triggering mode, firing off the Quadra backlight. This was a concentrated light. Not a full CTO, as I remember. About half CTO.

Taillights! Two SB units, on SU-4 mode, red gelled, and played out onto the street, simulating brake lights.

Make sure you have security.

Because you know you are going to draw a crowd.

Stay focused even though there’s a lot going on around you.

Stash whatever flashes you have left in the shops. Full CTO, full power, SU-4 mode. Bounce into ceilings of the shops, to make them come alive. Work with the shopkeepers to pull any light bulb they have to the front of their shops instead of the back.

Make sure you get a couple’s portrait.

And make sure you take care of the talent.

And, make sure you drive the Jeepney in downtown Manila traffic. Always a bracing experience. Driver let me run the thing back towards the hotel for about twenty minutes. Double clutch, standard H on the floor, rolls in second gear. Non-stop fun.

Shoot the whole scene on a D800E, with 24-70mm lens zoomed to 32mm. 1/25th at F5. Hi res camera to emphasize the details of the costuming. And, we’re done!

Most production pix shot by the excellent Manila photog, Milk Mendoza. Huge thanks to Kris and JoJo, and Barbara Bennett, whose imagination as a makeup artist and stylist is endless. And thanks to the amazingly gracious people in the Filipino photographic community, particularly Edi Huang, who is the grandmother of Filipino photography. Her passion every year puts together Photo World Asia, held in Manila, and she has  created the opportunities I’ve had to visit this amazing city. I was doing a ring flash demo with a model, so I asked her to step in.

What wonderful people. What a gift photography is. More tk….

David Alan Harvey: On Getting Lucky by Brandon Li

David Alan Harvey: On Torture by Brandon Li

David Alan Harvey, micro Documentary for Gallery 64. Santiago. Chile by Galería 64

David Alan Harvey: Photo Rio, NatGeo Channel by Bryan Harvey

David Alan Harvey: Capturing Cuba by Bryan Harvey

VOGUE ITALY: Masters

Ira will be leading a photography expedition to New York City at the end of April.

Brimming with towering skyscrapers, historic parks, vibrant ethnic enclaves, and the colorful bustle of street life, New York City presents photographers with an endless array of subjects. Photograph the environs of Ground Zero, and Battery Park City with its views of the iconic Statue of Liberty. Capture the diverse architecture of fabled Fifth Avenue and the sights of Central Park, and complete a portrait assignment in the lively neighborhoods of Chinatown or Little Italy. Photograph the sunset from the top of Rockefeller Center, the iconic Brooklyn Bridge or bustling South Street Seaport, and the new High Line Park in the early morning light.

This workshop is designed for amateurs who are interested in improving their digital photography. All participants must bring a digital SLR camera, a laptop computer, and software for organizing and presenting images. The workshop is limited to 25 participants.

For more information please go here.

The entire collection of prints will be auctioned at a private event, LOOK3 IS 6 — BENEFIT AUCTION GALLERY, in Charlottesville, Virginia on March 15th, to raise money for the next six years of LOOK3 and beyond.

SUPPORT LOOK3
To support LOOK3 and make a bid on Gerd Ludwig’s image, click HERE

To view the whole list of LOOK3 photographers participating in the fundraiser, you can visit the LOOK3 IS 6 official event page.

ABOUT LOOK3
LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph is a celebration of photography, created by photographers, for those who share a passion for the still image. The Festival features exhibits and on-stage appearances of three “INsight” photographers, as well as exhibitions, outdoor projections, workshops and interviews over three days and nights.

Billed as “3 days of peace, love and photography,” the Festival is designed to bring together the international photography community and create opportunities for attendees and artists to share images, ideas, and to be inspired.

Our efforts to document UAV stuff led us to an abandoned warehouse in Boston, where a drone called Skate was undergoing tests and observation. Built as an ultralight weight alternative to bigger drones such as Raven, the Skate basically comes in a box, and a child could most likely put it together. It’s a bunch of styrofoam like material with propellers and a camera, and when you start the props, it just leaps out of your hands.

Well, trying to photograph this flying piece of foam was harder than catching a fart in a bag. The thing would generally head in the direction its controller headed it, but honestly, its flight pattern reminded me more of dropping a baseball card from the top of a building. It would waft, wiggle, flutter and float. I went chasing this sumbitch around a warehouse with a camera in my hands and a flash on a pole, until I realized how utterly ridiculous that was. See below for a truly memorable frame.

Holy shit. I was in big trouble, and I knew it. The warehouse was spectacular, and the Skate was essential to the coverage, and I walked in there feeling confident. After its first couple of flights, though, my heart plummeted, until I realized that the one singular thing about this drone was that you could catch it by hand. The bigger military drones had to crash land on the ground and get picked up in pieces and reassembled. This puppy would fly, roughly, into someone’s paws. It was the one way I could show difference in this unit, as opposed to the others, which was good information for the reader. And, it was one way I could get the thing to fly into my camera, instead of having me chase it like a lunatic with a D4.

I had no idea it would be the closing image. None. Decisions like this are made above my pay grade. I was happy enough with this result, to be sure, and I urged Bill Douthitt, my editor, to put it forward. For me, it signaled just a bit of difference. The hands humanized the scene, and made it a bit odder than the rest of the coverage, which de facto was a bunch of pictures of machines flying over something or other. Bill, in this rare instance, went along with the notion. Generally, he simply listens to my fevered reasoning, smartly advises me to stay out of it, and tells me my best resort, if I’m going to be that emotionally wrapped up in my work,  is to find the nearest bar. I hate to admit this publicly, but he’s a brilliant editor, and he’s almost always right. Which is why I generally refer to him as the Dark Lord of photography. When I go on assignment, I call, and in my best Orc-like voice, I simply ask, “What does the great eye command, sire?”

Below is a production shot of the approach.

After seeing these, Bill offered the wry commentary about me generally doing my best work when I don’t look through the camera. Which in fact I didn’t on this shot. Nor did I use live view, as handy and obvious as that would seem to many. I generally know the feel and field of the 24-70 I had on the camera at the time, and, sort of going back to my rangefinder camera days, I prefer to have both my eyes outside the camera, judging the approach and size of this vehicle as it approached my airspace. I would just click when if felt right.

Below is a grid of info submitted to Geographic with the raw file.

Of course the controller is not seen in this frame, being hidden by the outstretched hands. And of course, I went to the trouble of lighting the controller. Sigh….

More tk….

In conversation with Ed, influential Italian photo editor, Chiara Mariani of Corriere Della Sera magazine recently commented on this incredible amount of talent. Photographers represented by agencies such as Pietro Masturzo with  OnOff Picture in Rome and Roberto Salomone of Controluce in Naples are among those making an impact in the world of Italian photojournalism. Mariani also recognizes independent photographers making their way onto the scene ranging from nature photographer Stefano Unterthiner to the portraiture of Maki Galimberti to the paparazzi work of  Massimo Sestini. Photographers of all backgrounds are making an impact ”Every year an average of six Italian photographers get a World Press Prize.”

So, what’s in the water? Mariani thinks ”the quantity and quality of Italian photojournalists depends partly on our school system, which is still not specialized (and many criticize it for it) and which gives the possibility to be interdisciplinary. Which to me is essential.”

Although the beautiful Italian landscape makes for great scenery for photojournalism and the school systems seem to nurture the development of photographic talent, Mariani admits the difficulty in pursuing a career in photojournalism in Italy. “I do admire those who start this career  with  passion, who are totally aware they have chosen a difficult path. To them, all my respect and gratitude,” says Mariani. A combination of good conditions for photographic growth and raw talent, makes for great photojournalists coming from Italy today.

The soul has an interpreter – often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter – in the eye.
- Charlotte Bronte

The eyes have one language everywhere.
- Proverb

India

Peshawar, Pakistan

The eye is the jewel of the body.
- Henry David Thoreau

Peshawar, Pakistan

Almost nothing need be said when you have eyes.
 - Tarjei Vesaas, Norwegian Poet

Omo Valley, Ethiopia

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me;
my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
- Meister Eckhart,  1259 – 1327

Girl in Kandahar orphanage, Afghanistan

These eyes tell the stories of children around the world.
They speak of war, deprivation, and loss.

Rajasthan, India

Umbria, Italy

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world.
-  William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

Rajasthan, India

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rajasthan, India

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
- G. K. Chesterton

Lhasa, Tibet

Nuristan Province, Afghanistan

The eyes speak of things we dare not say.

India

Bagan, Burma

Cambodia

Pakistan

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
-Henri Bergson

Niger

The eyes are the most powerful social signalers that we have and hence are
sometimes called the windows of the soul.
- Glen Wilson

India

The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 – 43 BCE

Srinagar, Kashmir

Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.
- Heraclitus of Ephesus, 535 – c. 475 BCE

Yangon, Burma

United States

Lourdes, France

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to
look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
- Henry David Thoreau

Colombia

Eyes have their own universal language, and no
interpreter is needed.

Afghan refugee in Baluchistan, Pakistan

Mali

The eyes can do a thousand things that fingers can not.
- Persian Proverb

Afghanistan

Please visit our website:  http://www.stevemccurry.com

Mali

 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id589821521?mt=8

Back to 1980, when Iran held the hostages, and the attention of virtually everyone in this county. 444 days! It was endless for us, unimaginable for the hostages. I was there at West Point when they came back on buses from Stewart AFB, but those chromes have been lost over time. Managed to hang onto a chrome from lower Broadway and the ticker tape welcome home parade. I shinnied up a light pole with my cameras and perched, quite uncomfortably, on a traffic sign for several hours as the parade made its way. Thankfully, it was quite cold, and  my ass just froze, so I was able to ignore the fact that I was basically giving myself a street sign wedgie. My positioning, and the inclusion of Liberty St. was, of course, not an accident.

I wasn’t in Iran for any of it, of course. I was just a pup photog, a staff still shooter for the ABC television network. My weeks consisted of shuttling around, making pix of network anchors, Monday Night Football, Susan Lucci’s new relationship on All My Children, and the like. (It’s been fun this week, being at Gulf Photo Plus, with all the wonderfully talented instructors. David Burnett, who did the true signature work in Iran at the time is here, and I showed him the picture above. He checked his computer, and came up with a terrific picture he shot of the same parade. He was about five blocks north of my position.)

I also covered a fair amount of politics, working the conventions, the Reagan campaign, and his inauguration. (Always been jealous of photo enthusiast Howard Baker in the background, and his angle.)

Roone Arledge, ABC’s maestro of sports and news, launched a late night news program called Nightline, specifically in response to the hostage crisis. It was helmed by an estimable journalist, Ted Koppel. I got dispatched to Washington to make pictures of Ted as a newly minted anchor. We got along well. (I endeared myself by grabbing his Nikkormat camera, damaged since his days covering Vietnam, from him and getting it repaired by Marty Forscher in NY.) Little did we know that, spurred by this singular, ongoing news event, both he and Nightline were about to become a long running journalistic institution.

I shot this (rueful shake of the head here) with all I had in terms of lights, which at the time were one Dynalite head, and a couple Heiland slave units, which were subtle as a lightning strike and about as controllable. And of course, my setting consisted of highly reflective, bulbous TV monitors galore. Did my best. Guessed at everything. Had no Polaroid to proof the shot with. Just set up the lights in what appeared to be a logical array, shot a roll of Kodachrome, and hoped for the best. The picture, upon release, ended up getting wide play, largely because Ted had become the definitive, reasonable voice of entire evolving crisis.

Below is my high tech lighting case at the time, a holdover from the NY Daily News. Still have it. I think at this point, if I were an equipment case, I would look a bit like it. Battered, well traveled, held together by tape.

Next week, I get back to parsing out the current Geographic story, talking about the closer image, the cropped images etc. I’ll ask you guys to be the art director in a couple of picture choices.

More tk….

There were 433 applications that the judges narrowed down to six, and then selected Abdullan’s proposal and portfolio as the best of the best. The other finalists, in no particular order are freelance photographer Christian Werner based in Nordstemmen, Germany;  Robin Hammond is a 37-year-old freelance photojournalist born in New Zealand and based in Paris. He has been part of the photo agency Panos Pictures since 2007; Noriko Hayashi is a Freelance Photographer　based in Tokyo;  Alvaro Ybarra Zavala, 31, is a Getty photographer based in Spain; Jenn Ackerman is a freelance photographer based in Minneapolis.

In the Student Category, here are the winners:

First place student scholarship winner.  Sara Naomi Lewkowicz is a graduate photojournalism student at Ohio University. She wins a full-tuition scholarship to study photojournalism at the Syracuse University London Program in Fall, 2013, plus a $1,000 grant to produce her picture story and a $300 gift card from Dury’s Photo for equipment and supplies.

She had her winning work on domestic violence featured by Time Lightbox earlier this week.

Second place student winner Dijana MuMinovic is a graduate photojournalism student at Ohio University. She majored in photojournalism at Western Kentucky University and is now a freelance photojournalist doing work for the Athens News. She wins a half-tuition scholarship to study photojournalism at the Syracuse University London Program in Fall, 2013, plus a $500 grant to produce her picture story and a $250 gift card from Dury’s Camera.

Award of Excellence winners are Syracuse University junior photojournalism major Andrew Renneisen, Syracuse University graduate photojournalism student Annie Flanagan, and Mumbai-born Souvid Datta who is a third-year student at University College of London, studying International Relations and Law

Each Award of Excellence winner receives a $1500 scholarship that can be used to pay part expenses to study photojournalism in London in the fall semester at the Syracuse University London Program, or for any Momenta Photo Workshop and a $500 cash grant to help produce their proposed stories.

121 students applied to the competition this year.

Photo©EdKashi/VII_2013

Featured today in VII Magazine is Ed Kashi’s multimedia story that he shot for the Global Post, “The Great Divide”. This story explores severe cases of economic disparity in different parts of the world. The work focuses on how “income inequality impacts local communities and therefore reflects the greater issues facing societies with widening gaps between their rich and poor.” Ed shot examples of this divergence in Bangkok, Thailand and Connecticut. Julie Winokur of Talking Eyes Media produced the multimedia piece.

Stills from this project can be viewed in this photo essay. The complete archive can be viewed here. 

Photo©EdKashi/VII_2013

A Galapagos Sea Lion swims upside down at the surface in Tagus Cove, Isabela Island.

26 Feb 2013

Today’s highlight was snorkeling along the coast of Tagus Cove on Isabela Island.  This is a famous anchorage where not only the ship ‘Beagle’ on which Darwin travelled anchored, but many other ships over the generations have made a stopover.  The cliffs of this cove drop straight into the sea and offer fabulous snorkeling with Green Sea Turtles, Flightless Cormorants, Galapagos Penguins, and the ubiquitous Galapagos Sea Lions.

One sea lion in particular was very relaxed and curious and approached me many times, taking a close look at the dome port on my camera housing, allowing me to get the shot above.

We are now officially announcing the Emerging Photographer Fund for 2013.

An award of $15,000 will be given as three different grants. 

Burn will give $10,000 to one photographer, plus two grants of $2500 each.

The deadline for having your essay submitted here for consideration is May 5, 2013.

Each intended to get a photographer going, and with efforts on our part to create more funding to finish an essay, depending on what the photographer produces.

The whole point of these grants is to support emerging photographers in our craft. All types of photographers. This is not a photojournalism grant, nor an art photographers grant, but could be garnered by either or both. We just want to support committed authored photography of any ilk. Please click here and see who has secured this grant in the past and who our jurors have been.

Preface

Indian Summer day’s spent in the backyard of our home on Pratt Boulevard in Chicago or after the age of 9, climbing through genip trees with my friend, Andy Adams, I would easily return home coated in sweat, dirt and disgust, never pondering whether a bath was necessary nor desired.

My mother (in a heavy Viennese accent) would always utter in sheer disgust:

“SCHWEINHUND!”

No idea why there’s a coconut on my head, but I sure remember playing hard in that Bustedfinger t-shirt and those mode Bay City Rollers shorts. Photographed by my mother in the backyard of our home in the Bahamas, 1973.

Direct translations — “PIG-DOG!”

I was often called a Schweinehund.

Playing was my job.

Bathing, only a notion in the inconsequential rhythms of childhood.

Which brings us to today.

The last month — more specific, the past 43 days in Ethiopia while on assignment for National Geographic — my mother’s voice resonate incessantly in the internal dialogue any time a rare reflection exposed me:

“Look at you, covered in dirt! Look at your clothes! Stink to high-heaven! John, go take a bath — you’re a SCHWEINHUND!!”

Photography and Bathing

On many photo assignments, we often don’t have daily access to bath. Having covered more hard news and wars than my heart cares to recall, such deeply emotional events end up being periods of time where survival is principal. Food and water, secondary. Shelter measured by floorspace. Bathing, occasional.

For my naturalist colleagues at National Geographic, brilliant photographers like Michael “Nick” Nichols, Tim Laman, Steve Winter, Paul Nicklen, Christian Ziegler and so many others, bathing must also be inconsequential — these photographers live for weeks in the bush or on floating icecaps to enlighten all of us to care and sustain the natural world around us. Accessibility to use a bar of soap is surely equivalent to that of hygiene opportunities while documenting conflict; It will happen when it happens.

In reality, animals will repel from photographers if cloaked in a bouquet of chemicals so why bother.

A sniper couldn’t sniff the stench of Irish Spring (a brand of American soap) from a few meters away, let along care. You’re only in their sites, hoping they have poor aim.

More distinct, conflict photography thrusts in motion waves of endorphins, allowing to overcome your dearth of cleanliness — days (and nights) are connected to getting home alive.

I’ve gone long periods without bathing while covering revolutions and war, rarely perceiving my filth, torn clothing nor repugnant stench.

Back in 2005 I did a story for National Geographic on Malaria. We went to five countries for this project — Peru, Zambia, India, Tanzania and Kenya. By far the most uniquely challenging was urban malaria in India. Here wandering through the streets of my favorite city, Kolkata. If I do remember correctly, there was access to a shower later that night, thankfully. Photograph Courtesy of Anil Chandra Roy

Keeping distracted via the power of opiate receptors hasn’t worked on this assignment for National Geographic in the Horn of Africa when it comes to bathing.

This story is not a fast breaking news event or a story occurring in a city or town. It’s a continuous journey where my task is to present a narrative based upon a span of time that is 59,850 years older than photography. Throughout this fascinating process, I’ve walked over 50 miles (80 kilometers) through deserts and ancient lava fields, driven over 7,000 miles (11,260 k) on nonexistent roads, doing both in an ever present cacophony of heat and dust.

Abundantly sweating is the norm.

Expanses of time to mull limitless potent — and nonsense — abound.

None of this is difficult. Rather, it simply goes with the job.

Exposed over the previous 43 days in this rather unique wandering (where the nearest hotel or even water is hundreds of miles away), an entirely experimental process occurred which inspired this story, a tale of truth wrapped around human existence, history, a forgotten reality and yes, a bit of photojournalism.

I hope you will be enthralled, as I have, to realize that at times, we all stand before the mirror of our ancestors, our great grandmothers and grandfathers of roughly 2,500 generations past, when they walked 60,000 years ago out of the Afar region of what is today, Ethiopia — not carrying a bar of soap.

Afar

Traveling overland since early January in the remotest, most inaccessible regions of Ethiopia — the spectacular Lower Rift Valley of Africa — has been an character altering experience.

More specific, this nonstop journey has taken place in a region of The Rift known as Afar. This area is populated mostly by pastoralist nomads.

My favorite time of day while living amongst the Afar’s was when the livestock would return back to the village from grazing. An epic event rarely seen anymore in our modern world of cattle farming and processed foods. The dust these goats toss up is right out of a film, of course you become coated in it.

Afar could be viewed as a nation uniquely its own. Afari’s have a completely different language, incomprehensible to their Ethiopian sisters and brothers. Entirely different customs and history.

Due to invisible lines which most often segregate rather than unite — borders — a vast majority of the Afar people (well over 1.5 million) call home an extensive portion of an already extremely diverse nation called Ethiopia (formerly known as Abyssinia). Afar is roughly the size of the U.S. state of both North and South Dakota. Maybe larger. And the Afar diaspora stretches well beyond only Ethiopia, spreading deep into both Eritrea and Djibouti.

A key element lacking in this part of the world is the one item which no human can live without.

Water

As astounding as this landscape has been, existence is mixed with a heaping toll of suffering for the inhabitance of Afar due to water scarcity.

An Afari elder recently told me something dreadful which began 20-30 years ago (think climate change) — rain no longer falls.

In one village, Sudumta, I stumbled upon over 50 men, heads bowed to the ground towards a dried riverbed. Coincidence or sheer divine intervention, the exposed floor of the river and their prostration of reverence was in the direct trajectory of Mecca.

They were praying for rain.

Not a drop of water had fallen from cloudless skies in well over a year.

Desperation and God is all that was left.

It’s so dry in the Afar region, sand tornadoes are a regular occurrence.

What little water does exist in this part of the Lower Rift comes from holes, 10 ft (3 meters) deep, levels of liquid is so negligible, a thin pan is deftly scrapped across wet dirt, daubing mouthful-amounts of silt-brown liquid into a slightly larger container — a repurposed jerry can that once contained cooking oil.

This modest amount of liquid is their only drinking water.

Using such scant recourses for bathing would be inconceivable.

Supplies

Let me preface a earnest dose of reality — I DO like to bath!

Long gone are the days when Andy (my across the street neighbor in the Bahamas) and I could play till soiled beyond recognition.

Knowing such water scarcity was the tragic norm in this part of Ethiopia, we did carry our own jerry can’s of water upon the roof of the LandCruiser, used (and only enough) for cooking.

Melesse, the driver, on the roof getting fuel. On the left are two jerry cans for water which were used for cooking and cleaning dishes. Remaining part of the roof rack held two spare tires. The interior of the LandCruiser was chockablock of sleeping gear and camera kit, with barely enough vision for going in reverse.

Transporting enough water for 3-4 people to bath — Yonas Abiye (Ethiopian translator), Melesse (driver), Habibi and Indris (Afar guides) and myself — would require a small tanker in tow. Completely impractical.

What additional water we did carry was bottle water and those too were often in short supply.

Bathing quickly became crossed off any known To Do list for days.

Even weeks.

Evolution

When bathing water was available, it primarily manifested at grimy hotels frequented by truck drivers which incessantly ply the main artery that links Ethiopia to the outside world: The Port of Djibouti. Such brilliance liquid access occurred three or four times in the last month.

As disgusting to those of us living in the developed world might take the next phase in this narrative, you will be astonished to know that our bodies were never designed to be bathed as often as we do today.

Here begins an experiment, one which wasn’t by choice, rather a natural evolution brought upon by environmental changes (lack of rain):

Most of the land near to lakes looks as this, cracked and dried due to a year without rain. Somehow I lost my Merril hiking shoes, having to use a pair of Croc’s and a pair of dress shoes. Both shoes are now ruined.

Day 1: Fresh clothing. Hair and skin are clean. You feel nearly buoyant.

Day 2: Clothing has received a few stains — gravity is not my friend when eating — and though no longer as buoyant, a sweaty shirt, trousers, and yes, the same underwear, don’t seem all that dreadful to keep using, knowing even if you did change clothing, within minutes you’d be covered in Afar dust, so why bother.

Day 3: Only by day three do you begin to sense (from our developed nation mindset) that physical needs might be going awry. Disgust manifests, yet you keep a forward presents, knowing once again that donning anything clean would not solve the problem due to daily dust storms and relentless heat (I don’t travel with more than 3 changes of clothing and a few extra underwear).

Within a few days a shirt is soiled, forming shapes and patterns I never thought possible.

Day 4 and 5: One’s will becomes tested. Clothing by this time is completely covered in grim, dirt, food stains. Perspiration causes your outerwear (and inner) to conform to your torsos. Frustration turns to giddiness in this state of disrepair. I began considering the only remaining clean clothing as precious items to conserve — they were all I have left.

Day 6-10: Here began the unique part of this unorthodox, unplanned, process of human understanding — once I reached day 7, 8 and definitely day 10, the notion or more so, the need for a bath evaporates – both from my consciousness and torso. It’s not that you become unreceptive to your hygiene condition — thank goodness there were few mirrors where I’ve been the last month. Rather, a natural occurrence happened — my body began to self-clean. The sweating pores of my skin — and I will stress again, continual sweating pores — began to push out, then off, most of the grim build up. Yes, clothing at this point is reaching a state of ruin, however my skin no longer smelled. Only the clothing did. Airing shirts/trousers/underwear on a tree limb each night for donning a slightly less soiled t-shirt and shorts to sleep in, the following morning my skin smelled fine. The hanging clothing, fused stiff on the tree, is what repulsed.

A great evening’s rest was had while sleeping in the tent on the grounds of a small restaurant in Dalifagi. Now by around day 10, my clothing (hanging in the tree) became sculpted works of art designed by gravity, fused by sweat.

Day 11 and 12: Just shy of two weeks, or 12 days to be exact, I became completely one with my new self. My shirt and trousers from REI were now defiled by the harsh conditions of the Afar region, appearing as shop rags in a garage rather than material to be worn by a human. Yet astonishingly enough, my skin was relatively clean and didn’t smell. By some natural process that clearly we’ve forgotten we possess, the rancid notion of filth wasn’t so much about me — sure, I didn’t smell like a Lancôme counter in a department store — but rather, the outerwear. We seemed, by my unscientific study of self, to have build-in self-cleaning systems, which clearly evolved from millennia’s of basic environmental conditioning. No question, there was surface layers of dirt, but large areas of skin that were coated in dust and grime a day or two early would be no longer visible, likely caused by natural body sweat because I never had access to water nor ever pulled out a towel.

After 12 days with no access to water for bathing, I was surprised the fine folks at the Harmony Hotel allowed me in the door. Here on a brief trip back to Addis Ababa for a new (third) car, it felt mighty strange to bath and shave.

When I did finally bathe on or around day 12 (there have been two-cycles of 12 day non-bathing travel), it felt exhilarating yet at the same time, offsetting.

Which made me wonder; Were we humans actual bathers 60,000 years ago when walking out of Africa?

Did we bathe 10,000 years ago?

2,000 years past?

Did my great grandmother and great grandfather bathe in the late 1800′s?

Now ensconced in the first (somewhat) legitimate hotel in well over a month — the mildly renovated, Hotel Dar es Salam, located in the heart of Djibouti City, Djibouti — I had to do the research.

Reality

For those of you who have a clean-self fetish, brace yourself —

We humans rarely ever bathed until just 100 or so years ago.

Here with a brief overview on the history of human bathing:

“The baths at Louèche,” by Hans Bock the Elder 1597 — Interesting how painting during this time only showed the lovely scenes of life (or religion, war, etc) but little on how the general population lived.

10,000 – 60,000 years ago — From the origins of our collective beginnings in Africa (yes, we are all African), very little information exist from this era regarding bathing. An article in the New Scientist has shown that Neanderthals may have learned how to sail or float across seas far sooner than humans, however the chances of Neanderthals caring about bathing would likely be nil. After walking and driving through much of our collective humanities original existence the last 40+ days, water 60 millenniums ago was nowhere near as scarce as it is today in Afar, Ethiopia, However observing the landscapes (from a relatively decent knowledge of geology), I could surmise fairly accurately that potable (drinkable) water was not abundant here at anytime in the last 1-2 millions years. There is evidence that fresh water existed but most are now dried lake beds. What was odd is how Afar people today do not actually live next to water sources. There are a few lakes (one very large and very close to where we began this walk in the small village of Herto Bouri), but no one seems to live next nor near to them. Such a practice of living so far from water might mirror our relatives of 60,000 year-old who also may have chosen to live away from large bodies of water (unable to swim?), seeking potable water either by only walking great distances or finding water in shallow wells and streams. Today, most of the nomadic Afari’s choose to live 1-3 miles (1.6-4.8 kilometers) walk away from the nearest water source. Is this due to disputes with neighbors over water rights, making sure no one group of people have greater access to precious water over another? I could never get a meaning answer from the countless Afari’s I asked on this topic. This lack of access to water is an misfortune and suffrage for millions around the world. My friend, Lynn Johnson, produced a powerful essay on water slavery for National Geographic a few years back titled, Burden of Thirst, illustrating just how difficult it is to gain access to water throughout much of Africa and elsewhere on earth — a labor that is borne on the women. Surely such access to water 60,000 years ago wasn’t much better. In fact, lack of water may have even led to our collective walk out of this region for greater liquid assets.

5,000-10,000 years ago — By this time, soap hadn’t even been invented nor considered. Once again, the historical record is scarce this far back. A meaningful hypothesis would indicate not much had changed in the realm of hygiene nor passion for cleanliness between say 5,000-60,000 years ago. Maybe for the extreme elite, bathing was taking place, but for the masses, likely nonexistent. Survival was of far greater importance.

2,000-5,000 years ago — It wasn’t until almost 5,000 years go (or around 2,800 BC) that soap was invented in ancient Babylon. However, by 2,800 BC, our ancestors would have already reproduced nearly 2,000 time. Whether one believes in evolution, creationism, etc (this is not a story on such a topic so let’s not debate this here!), the reality is this; Producing that many offspring would allow our skin to develop/evolve to a point of never needing such an item as soap, let alone regular bathing. Another significant aspect of migration to keep in mind is this — humans didn’t all walk out of Africa and straight to Babylon. We wandered in all directions, creating specific cultural communities in other parts of Africa, onward to Europe, Asia then into the America’s, reaching the tip of present day Argentina about 17,000 years ago. In China, the first signs of bathing began only 3,000 years ago. Ancient Greeks — the most prolific bathers during this time — where one of the first to create bathing centers, the oldest discovered in a palace complex at Knossos, Crete. The Romans also seemed to have switched on to bathing around this period of time. Why and what caused this sudden interest — only within very specific locations across the planet — still seems a mystery. One thing of for certain, until this era, humans (us), didn’t give a darn about personal cleanliness.

800-2,000 years ago — Here is when things get interesting. By the fall of the Roman Empire (which began around 470 AD), bathing went out of fashion. There were ritualistic/spiritual bathing within nearly all religions during this time: Mikveh’s in Judaism, Baptism or the act of becoming cleansed/purified, blessed in Christianity, ablutions in Islam (the act of washing feet, hands, face/head) before prayers, etc, all these and more were indeed taking place around this period (the earliest in Judaism). However regular bathing was far from the norm. During the Medieval era (476-1460 AD), it’s a common myth that we didn’t bath. We DID, if you had money. The rest of us only bathed 1-4 times per year, max.

100-800 years ago — Before the great plagues in Europe (especially the Black Plague between 1348 and 1350), few in Europe, except the wealthy, bathed. But when the Black Death hit, there was some consensus that maybe this plague — which killed roughly 75 million Europeans — might be caused by the lack personal hygiene practiced at that time. Suddenly people (those who could afford it) began to bath. Ironically, cleanliness was not the reasons for the onset of the bubonic plague — it was flea-ridden rats that spread death. After this tragic period, pretty much the entire European region returned to non-bathing. On a positive note, the most cleanliest culture at the time (around the 1,400′s) was in Mesoamerica. People there at that time, both the elite and the commoners, bathed each afternoon. Why they caught on to such levels of hygiene while few other societies did not, I do not know.

Trivia

Here’s a few bits of interesting trivia from this era I didn’t know till doing my post non-bathing research:

How often did Queen Elizabeth I bathe in the 1600′s? About once every few weeks.

How often did European peasants (the vast majority of our relatives at that time were peasants) between say 1200 till 1800 change their clothing? Rarely, maybe a handful of times per year.

How often the people bathe in the United States between say 1700-1850′s? Rarely, especially in colder regions such as where I now leave, New England.

Poverty was likely a key factor as to why our ancestors never bathed. The costs for such luxuries as soap were simply far out of reach.

Depressingly, the weight of poverty even today (2 billion humans live on just over $2 USD per day) continues to hinder access to soap or regular bathing.

If you’ve ever traveled to developing world, you will have tragically come across children, even adults, wearing your long discarded sport jerseys or a t-shit with the words “Al’s Auto Parts” meandering around a market. Chances are it’s in tattered condition, never changed nor washed for years.

In the developed world — where we have everything times infinity and we’re still not happy — we’ve become rabid bathers, driven especially by the marketing campaigns from the billion-dollar industry of cleansing products, all telling us we’re less human, less gorgeous, less a person until we look like someone in 30 second commercials and fashion magazines.

As wonderful as it feels after a bath, in many way’s it’s not healthy for our skin.

Our ragging desire — and the hundreds of dollars each year we spend on self-cleaning products — only really manifested with the arrival of indoor plumbing, or in the last 100 or so years.

The forgotten astonishment of being able to turn a knob and the near miracle of water pours — hot or cold — is, in the sense of time, a strand of hair in sense of calendar years.

Astonishing indeed, yet taken so extremely for granted.

At this moment, we’re wasting water at an alarming rate. Not by drinking it all up.

Rather, we’re wasting extreme levels of precious water via the need for more swimming pools (take out the chlorine, it’s your personal Roman bath), our desire for green grass in places where vegetation was never meant to grow and yes, by incredible water usage for bathing — on average we use 7 gallons (26.5 liters) of water per minute when taking a shower using a regular fixture.

28-36 gallons (98-136 liters) for a bath.

40-55 gallons (151-208 liters) to run a conventional cloth washing machine.

Not saying we need to revert back to Medieval bathing practices!

The point that I discovered via self analysis, our environment and culture observation (most Afar people today still only bath once a year) is this — maybe those 15 min showers some of us take could be cut back to 2 minutes.

And if you skip a day without bathing, we’ll be fine.

All that anti-bacterial soap and whatnot, use if you wish, however our bodies need bacteria in order to learn how to fend off common diseases. We’ve gone berserk in the last two-decades turning our homes into mini-sterile hospitals — thanks in part to the multi-billion dollar cleaning industry for convincing us we all must be living in sterile bubbles. And to think we fell for it.

Some serious laundry had to be done after a few weeks in Afar. Yes, I changed my clothing a few times (I have multiple sets of the exact same shirts and trousers, though only three sets with me) but without regular access to bathing water, the clothing pile grew until reaching the Galafi border in Ethiopia. I paid extra for this load to be washed (by hand, no washing machines here) — they were so filthy the women cleaning them needed 2 boxes of detergent.

Astounding as it may seem, by natural development, it appears our bodies (not our clothing) were design in many way to be self-cleansing.

Strange, I know. But just experienced it.

Conclusion

It was indeed mighty hot in Afar for the month I photographed in this extremely unique and remote part of our world.

From 9am till 4pm, the air and land was a searing skillet of heat. No shade except for the thorny wayone (Procopis) bush or a shadow cast by a large rock, natures sundial. There was no relenting till evening and even then the wind blew desert dust everywhere.

The National Geographic/VII Photo agency office, attached to a traditional Afar home. Perfect editing area, sheltered under a Noah Tent from the relentless hot sun of the Afar region.

During this time, I felt I’d become in a small way, Afari. My new Afar friends skin didn’t smell any different than my own, seeking comfort in the conformity. Yes, their clothing was a bit dirty but oddly enough, nowhere near as dirty as mine.

Most important, they were extremely proud with what few things they had. These are pastoralist, whose wealth and success is not measured by what type of car they drive, designer clothing they wear or latest gizmo that’s all the rage (most could care less about my MacBook Pro or even cameras. Only the iPhone struck their fancy because the screen was so bright, it could be used as a flashlight at night).

Value and self worth is based upon their livestock, which provide food and drunk (milk), the two main sustainments of life.

Does this mean the Afar’s do not want a better life?

OF COURSE THEY DO!

Every human being seems naturally wired to seek improvements and a better life. The different has always been in having opportunity, a clean environment, education and freedom to choose.

For the Afar, such opportunities — most especially the environment — seems stacked against them.

Epilogue

Don’t let my kids read this story!

Like all children, the notion of being told to go take a bath is simply not in their lexicon till reaching the age where that hot guy or cute girl in the third row in science class begins to catch their fancy.

This was the view of my ceiling while sleeping three nights on the ground next to a wayone (Procopis) bush outside of families home in Haramfaf Bouri in Afar. Without electricity for hundreds of miles in any direction, the lanterns of the sky are spectacular, remind of just how small and insignificant I am.

No longer traveling or sleeping in the desert regions of Afar, out in the open under a staggering ceiling of stars, using a tent or in a truckers hotel with an alleged bathing stall that resembles an abandoned outhouse, it’s still incredibly hot here in Djibouti City.

My days now are spent wandering the streets with my wonderful new friend, Abdul, who is my driver/translator.

I very much miss my friend, Yonas Abiye, back in Ethiopia, however my friend and brilliant driver, Abdul, and I have hit it off as if known each other a lifetime. Here Abdul is navigating with me over an ancient lava field somewhere in central Djibouti.

Like in Afar, we’re avoiding the heat (translated into Photolingo: bad light), working a few mornings but heavily in the afternoons and well into the late evening when the vibrancy of the city is on display. There’s even air-conditioning in my simple windowless room at the Hotel Dar es Salam — although I can stay in basically any hotel in the city, I despise wasting even NG’s funds on characterless hotels costing hundreds of dollars a night just to rest my head for 6-8 hrs.

There’s even a communal shower down the hall, and can you believe it…it rains hot water.

Even a sit-down toilet.

Life is good.

Only thing missing is my family, whom I miss dearly.

By the way, yesterday  was my wife, Anastasia, and our 20th wedding anniversary.

Being on the road as much as I am, it sure helps having a partner who understand what we do — and she’s put up with me for 20 years! Sending love from the desert yesterday on our wedding anniversary from the outskirts of Djibouti back to the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY — and I promise you that in a few weeks time I’ll returned to the Berkshires all showered, in a clean pair of clothing!

All my best,

Reminder to apply. 

Magnum
Photos and HP established the Magnum Expression Award in an effort to raise
awareness and inspire change through photography. There are no limitations on
the subject matter of your submission. The judges will be looking for
compelling projects that go beyond surface level to provide fresh and engaging
perspective on the chosen subject.

Deadline
to enter is February 28, 2013. There
is no entry fee. For more information visit: http://www.expression.magnumphotos.com/expression_award/index.php?p=rewards

Remember to apply. 

The
purpose of the Aperture Portfolio Prize is to identify trends in contemporary
photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition. When
choosing the first-prize winner and runners-up, Aperture’s editorial and
curatorial staff look for innovative bodies of work that haven’t been widely
seen in major publications or exhibition venues. Previous winners and
runners-up include Michal Chelbin, Latoya Ruby-Frazier, Alexander Gronsky,
Sarah Palmer, and Jordan Tate, among others. The first-prize winner receives
$3,000 and has his or her work exhibited at Aperture.

Submissions
must be made by February 28, 2013. For guidelines, visit: http://www.aperture.org/portfolio-prize/

Reminder to apply. 

The annual Conveyor Exhibition Grant is a unique opportunity
for photographic-based artists to engage with the community at Conveyor Arts to
curate, print, and hang a solo exhibition at United Photo Industries in
Brooklyn, New York. In the weeks leading up to the exhibition, recipients will
have consultations and printing sessions at Conveyor Studio in Jersey City.
Grant recipients will also have the opportunity to give an artist lecture in
the gallery during the exhibition dates, as to sit on the panel of the Conveyor
Exhibition Grant next year.

Apply by February 28, 2013. For guidelines, visit: http://conveyorarts.org/pages/exhibition_grant

Having just come out of the Masters program in photojournalism at Syracuse University, and thus having been steeped in the elegant, erudite legends of Steichen and Stieglitz, I was amused, and mildly appalled at this rough around the edges piece of advice. However, that street-wise NY shooter knew what he was talking about. When you do get that picture, the one you come for, and you know you got it, something happens. Your head pings, your heart skips, your lungs catch abruptly. Or something happens elsewhere, as he indicated. I guess that’s just a matter of one’s personal physiology as it relates to the welcome emotional relief that knowing a good picture has been made bequeaths to you. It’s like the sound of the shutter nailing that frame constitutes a momentary overload, and your circuit breakers trip inside of you, somewhere.

Sometimes this just happens, almost effortlessly, in the course of a coverage. Sometimes, it’s a pulled tooth. I did a telescope coverage for Nat Geo not too long ago. (I’ve shot telescopes for Geographic twice now, and these types of coverages are like being an extra in the opening scene of Les Miserables. It’s heavy lifting.) I got sent to the world’s largest binocular telescope up on Mt. Graham, in Arizona. It was bad weather, and the scope could not be opened, but we had a deadline, so I went, met an assistant there, and we proceeded to light the interior of the chamber.

I knew this telescope was important to the story, but I also knew this would most likely not fly as a lead. Too confined, too busy. A lot of work for a picture to never see the light of day, and the work is not particularly joyous at that point, because I’ve been doing this long enough to know, at least occasionally. as I’m shooting it, that the picture, as my dear friend and editor at NGS Bill Douthitt tends to say, “is going to Toledo.” His phraseology for a pic that is on a train out of town, and ain’t coming back.

So I went back. Chalked off the first go round to an exhausting scout. I pushed the notion that the pic was outside, looking in, not the reverse. My ever patient studio manager and production guru, Lynn, drilled through the reams of paperwork required to get a 175′ boom crane truck up Mt. Graham, which is a National Park and an endangered species area, and we blocked it into the side of the hill, went up and shot what turned out to be the lead.

Occasionally, your work in the field is such a blur, that you make the lead pic and you don’t know it. Sports Illustrated sent me to Japan for a month to shoot Japanese golf, and I was met in gracious and ceremonial fashion by our Japanese hosts, who promptly whisked myself and Gabe, my assistant at the time, off to a huge welcome dinner. Jet lag of those proportions does not mix well with high end, exotic Japanese style cooking, and Gabe and I gamely, honorably, muddled our way through a Daisy wheeled panoply of fish with the eyes and heads, spicy brains, eel and the like, and then…..we were brought to a a famed, multi-tier driving range in downtown Tokyo to do a shoot!

I don’t recall shooting this, actually, as my head was just as much of a blur as the foreground golfer, which I shot with a flash mix, which of course endeared me to everyone at the range. They got their revenge for my flash affronts when Gabe and I were given what we dubbed “the bat shield,” and allowed to walk out in front of all the golfers to shoot back at the grandstand. One of them almost took my ear off as I poked camera and lens around the screen to make pictures. I didn’t know it, and I of course continued to shoot for a month, but I had the lead photo within hours of stepping off the plane.

And then of course, you can be utterly clueless. (Numnuts strikes again!) That’s when you need an editor. For the pic up top, it was our first day in the field with multiple UAVs. We had three, which was a good thing, ’cause two of them didn’t work. It was a shakedown day, opening day, sort of, and I wasn’t overly concerned at the non-performance of our flying machines. It was cold, and getting dark, so Drew and I set up a small flash on a paint pole, and started just making some sort of picture, somehow, out of this day in the field that was an absolute bust. Ziggy, our intrepid UAV pilot, hovered his Micro-kopter out in the middle of a lonely agricultural road, and I shot a few frames, and we called it a night. The lead photo was in the camera, but I didn’t know it.

My editor Bill, at Geographic, and I share an unfortunate fascination with all manner of bad movies, science fiction, comic book characters. As our wives remind us, if we could just download the committed to memory dialogue of movies from Dirty Harry to Predator to Monty Python, our upstairs decks might actually clear enough to do something productive. But, his dark fascinations do play a role. In this pic he saw something–I don’t know–UAVs meet Twin Peaks, or here’s the UAV scouting for the imminent zombie attack. Anyway, he brought it forward, and the magazine gave it a stamp of approval, and it became the lead. I had zip to do with that process. The only stupidly smart thing I did was put my camera to my eye and keep shooting on a day when all was basically lost.

Tech specs….Flash on paint pole, w/ dome diffuser, camera left. 14-24mm lens at 15mm. D3S camera. 1/80th at f5.6, ISO 800. Below is a shot as it lands, so you can see why I had to look up at it. If I referenced the ground, the shadow from the flash becomes too prominent.

More tk….

Amy Toensing launches an Urban Refugee kickstarter, support her project here.

Reminder to apply. 

The
Open Society Foundations invite photographers to submit a body of work for
consideration in the Moving Walls 21 group exhibition, scheduled to open in New
York in the fall 2013. The Moving Walls exhibition
series
showcases documentary photography that highlights human rights and social
issues that coincide with the Open Society Foundations’ mission. Moving Walls
is exhibited at our offices in New York and Washington, D.C. 

For
participating photographers, a key benefit of the program is to gain exposure
for their projects, as well as the social justice or human rights issues they
address. In addition to a $2,500 honorarium, photographers receive their
professionally produced exhibitions at the end of the exhibition tour in New
York and Washington, D.C.

Deadline
for submissions to Moving Walls is Tuesday, February 26, 2013. To apply, go to: apply.movingwalls.org. 

It was an interesting and difficult story to shoot, as they all are in their own way, but this one had the extra fillip of balky technology and temperamental flying machines. We shot a range of these contraptions, from winged drones the military flings into the sky by hand (think of a quarterback slinging a sixty yard Hail Mary as the game clock winds down) to tiny, bug-like flyers with wings based on the anatomy of a bee. It was also the first story I think I ever shot where I couldn’t, because of technical difficulties, shoot the central premise of the coverage, which was the notion of a UAV photographing another UAV in flight. More on that later.

The prompt for the story was the sudden newsworthiness of drones in general, and not so much the highly sophisticated types flying over theaters of war, but the off the shelf, over the counter, basic kit flyers that just about anybody can buy. You need training to pilot these things, but they are compact, relatively easy to maintain, and they are popping up in all sorts of endeavors, from movie making to agriculture to real estate. Which in turn has prompted the FAA to blow some loud whistles about regulating these whirligigs flooding our already crowded skies. Further, the embrace of this new technology by law enforcement, and the fact that they can easily maneuver around bearing high res digital cameras, has pushed some buttons on the whole privacy front.

What I’m going to do over the next week or so is pick apart this story–what went right, and what went wrong. I’ll do a BTS on both the technique and the wherefores of the coverage. I’ll show what ran and what didn’t, and try to offer up a rationale for what the editors do with a story and why. I’ll try to walk through the various locations and ideas and techniques that lead to a picture that hopefully pertained to the story line.

We’ll see where it leads. More tk….

In an interview with Ed Kashi (of VII Photo) conducted by Andre Hermann, Ed discusses some of the ups and downs to mobile photography based on his recent personal experiences. Addressing the volume of photographs in our society Ed Kashi is quoted, ”we’re just creating, creating, creating, this tsunami of imagery,” and consequently, “each individual image alone might not have the same value.” However, this constant output is also what creates the draw. In a society so consumed with images, the ability to immediately communicate with an enormous audience is changing the way photojournalism effectively connects and impacts individuals as well as society.

The conversation touches on a wide variety of intriguing topics in the realm of mobile photography, including Ed’s personal commissions, changes in the industry, and the infamous Instagram terms of service debacle. Andre Hermann closes the interview with a statement that may quiet some concerns of professional photographers against the mobile photography movement. Ed agrees that although the accessibility of iPhoneography provides for virtually anyone to document life’s events, ”the iPhone is not a magic key for everyone to become a photographer over night…in the end its still just a tool.”

Racing for a plane during the summer olympics at Newark Liberty Airport in Newark, NJ.  © Ed Kashi/VII

 Just a reminder that the deadline for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition (WPY) is looming: February 25^th. As many of you already know, the WPY competition is the world’s premier contest for wildlife and natural history photographers and I’m honored to be among the judges this year.

 Last year, the winning images were seen by 850 million people. The idea of bringing that much attention to your cause, or the issues you’re documenting should be reason enough for entering. The logo below will take you directly to the submission page. Best of luck to everyone! 

- Steve Winter

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you,
but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach,
because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
- Frederick Buechner

India

India

Words are easy, like the wind;
Faithful friends are hard to find.
- William Shakespeare

Yemen

Afghanistan

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
- George Bernard Shaw

Vietnam

Nor need we power or splendor, wide hall or lordly dome;
the good, the true, the tender- these form the wealth of home.
- Sarah J. Hale (1788- 1879)

Baluchistan, Pakistan

Italy

Friendship is one mind in two bodies.
-Mencius, Chinese philosopher, 4th cent. BCE

Karelia, Russia

An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship.
- Spanish Proverb

Peru

There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home
that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating
virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.
-  Winston Churchill

Honduras

What can you do to promote world peace?
Go home and love your family.
- Mother Teresa

Tibet

There is only one good-looking child in the world, and every mother has it.
- Chinese Proverb

Afghanistan

The two things we can give our children are roots which firmly anchor them,
and wings which allow them to become independent.

India

Yemen

There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends.
I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.
 - Jane Austen

Paris, France

A true friend freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly,
takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably.
- William Penn

Fiji

Yemen

New York, United States

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/portraits-by-steve-mccurry/id589821521?mt=8

A stunning collection of nearly 200 portraits from
 around the globe.
Browse the collection and visit people from fifty
 countries 
without leaving your home.
In addition to many of McCurry’s most iconic 
photographs,
this striking collection includes a number of
 never-before-seen shots.
Other highlights include an interactive timeline and map, plus a twenty-minute 
behind-the-scenes interview,
and an assortment of
 ephemera and keepsakes McCurry has collected over the years. 

India

Wildlife
Photographer of the Year harnesses the power of photography to promote the
discovery, understanding, and responsible enjoyment of the natural world.

Now
in its 49th year, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition provides a
global showcase of the very best nature photography. The competition is
co-owned by two UK institutions that pride themselves on revealing and
championing the diversity of life on Earth – the Natural History Museum and BBC
Worldwide. 

The 2013 competition is open until 25 February 2013. For more information visit: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/wpy/competition/index.jsp

I have been fortunate and humbled over the years to see how my work could have a direct impact on the lives of my subjects. I want to share one such example here, as a reminder of what we can do as individuals as well as to acknowledge the power of organizations like PROOF.

If anyone doubts the power of still images to inspire action, I recently had a beautiful reaction to one of my images on the Niger Delta that appeared in the February 2007 issue of National Geographic. A woman named Betty, from upstate New York, was moved to action by my photograph of the boy carrying a smoking goat (see above). She has since sent him $500 and wants to send more so he will go to school permanently. The boy’s name is Paulinous Uko, 14, and he has 5 other siblings and lives in a very poor and rough slum of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He works in the Trans Amadi Slaughter, the largest abattoir in the Niger Delta, where he helps move the burnt carcasses of goats and cows. It is a horrible job in a nightmarish place. Betty was inspired by the image to figure out how to help him. She contacted my studio to obtain a copy of the picture and then went about, through her local church group, finding him through local church groups in Port Harcourt. It’s quite an amazing story and one that reminds me of the importance of this work, the goodness of people and the power of photography to catalyze change. Below are two images of Paulinous, one with a local nun and the other with his family in Port Harcourt. Betty obtained these images during her correspondence with him.