Jim Richardson

One for the Weekend: Of Moai and Tsunamis

Just a quick note while keeping up with the devastating earthquake in Chile. At the moment we are awaiting news of the tsunami that will hit Easter Island soon. It will be one of our first indications of what the rest of the Pacific might expect as the great wave radiates out from the epicenter off the coast of Chile.

Most of the people living on Easter Island are on high ground but I'll be hoping they are all safe this morning. But these moai know the effects of tsunami's very well because they were swept away in 1960 by the enormous waves after a 9.5 earthquake in Chile. They were subsequently re-erected. Testimony to the enormous power of tsunamis.

For the sake of everyone in the Pacific basin we'll hope this one is much less violent.

Posted via email from jimrichardson's posterous

Simple Solutions: When most of the light is right

There's a lot of light in the world! How about that for a gratuitous truism? But it's true, nonetheless, and I see a whole lot of photographers putting in a lot of work into lighting scenes that don't really need lighting. Well, at least they don't need a LOT of lighting. The light just needs a little tweaking.
This scene up in the warehouse of the Highland Park distillery in Orkney is a pretty good example. I was lucky and the good folks at Highland Park agreed to let me photograph the endless stacks of Highland Park casks snoozing away the years in their long wait to become one of the great whiskies of the world. I love getting into a whisky warehouse. The scene is always redolent of age and time, with dusty casks lined up into the distance. And then there is the aroma. Oh, my gosh! The "angel's share" slapped me in the face as we stepped inside. I stood there in a daze for a few minutes, just soaking it all in. Wow!

Finally I came back to my senses and got back to the job -- taking pictures. Usually warehouses are dim and this one was no exception. There were some small skylights but overall the light level was not too high. But it's important to distinguish between low light, which with enough exposure can be quite pretty, and bad light. This wasn't bad light. Overall it was quite soft and moody, just what I needed. But it needed a little help. Just an accent, maybe a little warmth someplace and it would all be quite nice. I could have gotten out the lighting kit, and started place strobes all over the place. I could have put a gold umbrella up front on the man pushing the cask. Then gone on back and added strobes amongst the rows of casks to light the background. Done a ratio fill on the other casks here in the front row. Just lit the heck out of it. And there are times when I would have done just that, depending on the job and what the picture needed to look like.
I didn't do that. Here's what I did. I asked them to leave the warehouse door open so some light could come in illuminating the front row of cask. Since it was a sliding door I could vary the amount of light so I didn't overpower the background light too much. Then I added my accent. I asked Kathy, my mostly patient wife, to hold my gold reflector in the sunlight outside and send a shaft of golden light onto the man with cask. It was just amazing how it brought the scene to life. I put my camera on a tripod and waited until he held still for a moment and shot the picture. Total time for setup? About three minutes. That's important. You don't always get unlimited time in a location. And your subjects often have limited patience. For the first fifteen minutes they are are a bundle of energy. After an hour of waiting for you to fiddle with yet another lighting option their eyes are dead and their feet are dragging. There are lots of ways to shoot a bad picture and that's one of them. I know because I've done a lot of bad pictures in my time.

Besides that, if you get into some place like a distillery you are going to have limited time, a couple of hours, maybe. In that time you'll want to shoot about six locations and get 10 to 15 pictures out of it. You might have to do a full lighting job somewhere along the line. If so, then get on with it. Just don't expect to get unlimited time to go all out on every picture.

It's really important to have a bunch of simple solutions in your arsenal.

Jim

Posted via email from jimrichardson's posterous

One for the Weekend: Bison Wanderings

Following on last weeks image of gentle eggs winning the prize, I was somehow drawn to this image of bison in South Dakota, quietly grazing their way across the grasslands, munching their way into the evening in their ungulate ways, alternating between chewing and thinking, a short walk, a bit of a laydown, and then when the light is gone, sleep until dawn. I have often wondered, when looking at this picture, why this congregation of bison doesn't like the congregations on the distant hills (and why those worshippers-of-the-grass appear not to like each other.) Some differing opinions on bison dogma? Or are we just seeing the naturally affinities of kinship playing out on the rolling hills.

Have a good weekend.

Jim

Posted via email from jimrichardson's posterous

Aperture 3.0 Alert (and a bit of shameless self promotion)

If you didn't already know I'm a big fan of Apple's Aperture. This powerhouse imaging program gets heavy use everyday at the Small World picture ranch. 

So I'm juiced that the new upgrade, Aperture 3.0 has been announced with a host of new features and a huge increase in functionality in virtually every area that working photographers need. I've been using the beta version for several months now and I can tell you the program is loaded with some great stuff. Besides all the things photographers have been asking for, the guys at Apple have thrown in a whole raft of features no one expected.

The Aperture site has a good page on what's new, with a raft of nice videos. Check out Bill Frakes video from the Hold County Fair in Nebraska.

One of those additions was really robust support for GPS geotagged images. When they first showed me what Aperture could do with geotagged images I was just blown away. I remember telling them "This is going to change everything."  I had a really good chance to put Aperture to the test and see what it could do when we went up to Nova Scotia for a shoot.  And now you can see the excellent video the Apple folks produced on this outing on the Aperture web site.  Take a look here: http://www.apple.com/aperture/

Besides the GPS integration there are several other standout features that working photographers will find welcome.  

• Brushes allow you to paint in virtually any adjustment. And then you can fine tune the adjustment as well.
• Slide Shows has become a really, really powerful tool. Video, sound, music, audio, movement, all integrated seamlessly inside Aperture for stunningly beautiful slide shows that can be export in a whole range of formats. Wow!
• Adjustment Presets give you great power to make your pictures suit your style. I'm making custom presets for each of my cameras so my pictures look just the way I want them to on import, automatically. 

And (as they say) there's more. If you really want a full rundown I'd take a look at David Schloss' excellent roundup of whats new and improved.  Go to the Aperture page on MacCreate, here:  http://aperture.maccreate.com/2010/02/09/aperture-3-overview/

So I probably sound like a fanboy, but I like the software and what it does for my workflow. But what really impresses me is that the guys at Apple really spend a lot of time listening to working photographers. And the results show it. 

Posted via email from jimrichardson's posterous

One for the Weekend: Good Eggs

I'll confess to a weakness for any country where they give such beautiful ribbons to eggs. In this case that country would be Wales and the event was the Anglesey County Show. Nice touch that the ribbons are bilingual.

Jim

Posted via email from jimrichardson's posterous

Volunteer Doctors at work in Haiti

After the disaster in Haiti our friend Dr. Pearlmutter from Boston joined a team of doctors and rushed to Haiti. Soon after that he started sending back reports to his wife Madeline who forwarded them to all folks who had been on our National Geographic Expeditions trip last year where Dr. Mark had been the trip's doctor.

The reports were so compelling I asked Madeline if I could create a blog to get them to more people. It's been rewarding to see what the good doctors have been able to accomplish.  And heartrending at times as we shared in their sorrows.

Dr. Mark is back and the news is that Nightline is doing a show on volunteer doctors tonight. They spend two days with Mark and his team at Hopital Sacre Couer.  It should be compelling.

But beyond that he sends this link from the folks at EnFocus Media. I don't know who the team was who produced this piece on behalf of Caritas Christi Health Care, but they deserve our thanks, too.  Good work. 

Posted via web from Dr. Mark in Haiti

Homage to the Lost Frames

©National Geographic Society

There comes a moment when it is time to move on.  You could say that's what this picture is about. 

The sheep, in their browsing ways, moving down the shore on Iona, stopping here and there for a moment -- a nibble of grass, a bit of a laydown -- and then moving on.  The growing darkness forced me to use a shutter speed that stretched on into the evening, catching the sheep both in stillness and in their moving on.

After telling the tale of each of the photographs published in my Scottish Hebrides story for National Geographic,  I want to share with you few of  images that, regrettably, were left on the cutting room floor.  Why? Because I like them.  Because I poured hours of intensity into making them.  Because they deserve more than just a hidden corner of my hard drive.  Because they also represent the discoveries of other photographers with my own experiments layered on.  

But mostly I share them now because I think I owe them that.  Not only were they part of my life, these images particularly instructed me and helped me to see in new ways.  These new ways became part of my brain, part of the network of chemical reactions, part of my ongoing map in the ways of seeing.  In the future when I am lost again in the sights of our world, I might have a guide.

___

©National Geographic Society

In some ways the technique I used in this picture is a trick.  But in another way, it represents a way of seeing.  

I didn't invent light painting, the technique used in this photograph of the majestic Callanish Stones.  Photography, as most endeavors, is built on mining the past, seeing what other have done, learning from them,  and honoring their contributions by expanding their revelations. 

One of the photographers I have learned from is Dave Black. I'd like to think of Dave as an old master except for the fact that he is younger than me. But he is the master of light painting, the art of using a flashlight (that would be a torch to my friends in the UK) while photographing in the dark.  Dave has plowed this field for a long time and what he has created is just amazing.  Take a look: http://www.daveblackphotography.com/lightpaintings/index.htm

Somewhere in my subconscious Dave's lessons were with me that night at the Callanish Stones. This image of mine reveals a pattern in life and makes it visible to our brain. In that way, the photograph is not a trick but, rather, a window into another frame of time. I loved the way a little flashlight could bring the stones to life, how tall and assertive the central stone became with a bit of highlighting, and how the myriad layers of stone popped into a living texture with just a bit of sidelight.  I'll carry that night with me for a very long time. 

©National Geographic Society

But then experimental fervor took over, and I wanted to see how far I could take the stones' symbolism.  So I set up a flash on the central stone and took the camera off the tripod.  After the flash went off I proceeded to shake the camera violently during the remainder of the exposure. Thus, the stone was sharp because of the short duration of the flash exposure but the rest of the frame took on a very dreamy, out-of-focus look.  It turns out that how you shake the camera makes a big difference in how the background looks.  It was a thrill.

_____

©National Geographic Society

This picture never survived the layout skirmishes, and there is a good reason for that. Ours was a landscape story and this simply focused on the inn, Baile na Cille.  But I found the photograph's veiled mystery appealing.  I need to pay more attention to the art of leaving something to the imagination. 

_____

©National Geographic Society

I also need to pay more attention to grasses in the future. While on the Isle of Lewis among the dunes on the south side of Uig Bay, I made this image of the grasses whipped to a frenzy by the howling winds coming off the Atlantic.  This picture came about because of work I had done a couple of years ago in the Flint Hills of Kansas.  It was probably the first time I had looked on grasses as subject matter, not just inconvenient stuff between me and the real subject of my pictures.  In the Flint Hills, grass covers rolling hills as far as the eye can see.  On Lewis, grasses are partners with the sand, keeping the dunes in place. Mostly I was intrigued that the image could be so turbulent and angry looking, not just another scene of serenity and order.

____

©National Geographic Society

On the other extreme of the time equation was this image from the Isle of Skye.  I spent a wonderful two hours hunched over this water cascading down the rocks.  I had tied a flash onto a stick and extended it so that the flash's short exposure would stop the water's motion in all its intricate gyrations.  While on vacation in Cornwall the year before, I had experimented similarly, and it had reminded me of the incredible complexity of splashing water.  Sooner or later I'll find a story where this kind of picture works.

©National Geographic Society

And in this final image, I experience a melancholy that I cannot deny. I think of that pleasant day sitting up in the rocks on the Shiant Isles with the whole place to myself.  But not alone.  I was hunkered down, and it was only a few minutes until the puffins were landing four feet away, all funny-faced and curious in the way only puffins can manage. It was a enforced pleasure -- important that I do nothing, disturb nothing, just shoot and take it all in.  I don't know when I'll ever be there again on such a day. Mine is certainly not the greatest puffin picture ever taken, but it was a pretty good day by any standards.

- - -

These pictures and many more will now slip out of my everyday concern.  Some of the cutting room floor photographs will find a life for themselves in other projects; some may even find some measure of fame.  But some will never be looked at again.  I'll do my best to carry them with me, to learn the lesson and do better next time.

Thanks for following along

Jim

You can see pictures from the article and more on the National Geographic web site, here: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/01/hebrides/richardson-photography

Posted via email from jimrichardson's posterous