Jim Richardson

Patterns - Of Our Workings

Without intention. Without plans. Like bees in a hive, humans create patterns on the land from their labors and toils, from their gatherings and their solitudes, from calculations and mere necessity. Without design great order emerges, from mundane tasks subtle grace arises. No blueprint is necessary. But the beauty is no less a miracle for the lack of a plan or a planner. 

Wheat harvest in Kansas.

Farming in Washington.

Sailboats at low tide, Edinburgh.

Whisky casks on Islay, Scotland.

Westray, Orkney, Scotland.

Sandhills ranchers, Nebraska.

Sheep sale, Lairg, Scotland.

Stone fence, Flint Hills, Kansas.

All images ©Jim Richardson

Patterns - Of Our Living

Chaos seems to rule our daily lives. The blizzard of problems, events, meetings, small triumphs, frustrations, chance encounters, dreaded confrontations, long-for moments of loving and bliss –– all of it overwhelms us and we are often left wondering what it all means. But from one step removed, just a few thousand feet in the air, the patterns are revealed. Somehow, in each little step of life, we make something larger, something more permanent that we intended, and something more orderly that we knew.

It is worth considering and it may even be comforting, if only for a few moments.

Chicago as the clouds drifted in from the lake.

Stromness in Orkney, Scotland, a very old whaling village in the North Sea.

 

The abandoned village on Hirta, St. Kilda, Scotland.

Central Park in New York City.

 

 

Hill fort and farms in the Aran Islands, Ireland.

 

A lone church on Egilsay, Orkney, Scotland.

All images ©Jim Richardson

 

 

 

Lucky! Just Plain Lucky!

Well, there's luck, good luck and then there's just plain dumb luck.  (And, by the way, I'll take all the blind dumb luck I can get if it looks like this.)

We got the latter when we turned the corner in Kirkwall, Orkney  a couple of weeks ago and saw the poor bloke wrapped up on a light pole by the harbor. 

We'd just picked up David Schloss at the airport to begin a few days of shooting. David had never been to Orkney and wasn't exactly sure why we had brought him all this way to a tiny band of islands out on the far northeast edge of Scotland. ("Couldn't we do some great photography a little closer to Edinburgh?",  he seemed to be thinking.)

Then we saw the "blackening".  This uniquely Orcadian (as Orkney folk call themselves) tradition takes the bachelor party to bizarre extremes.  The lads collar the hapless groom-to-be, drench him in treacle or some other gooey concoction and ride him around town for several hours on the back of a lorry (that's a truck to us) with scant respect for his dignity. Strapping him to a light pole with package wrapper seems to be an innovation of breathtaking brilliance. The lads are clever, even if they are drunk.

I'd seen a blackening years before when I photographed Orkney for National Geographic.  But this was over the top. His fiancee was putting on the public face of sympathy but I suspect she was having an inner laugh all the while.

And David was instantly convinced! We had come to the right place. He's a full blown fan of Orkney now. He couldn't get enough video and I had the trusty D3X cranked up. (Nothing like capturing scenes like this in really high resolution. When you see something like this is 24 megapixels really enough?)

It was a great way to start our travels. You'll be able to see more of our trip through Scotland and Whisky Country when David has his soon-to-be-posted Aperture workflow video posted on MacCreate, here:  http://maccreate.com/    

And keep your eye for the next blackening you see. You should be so lucky. But then you'd have to be in Orkney. 

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

Wherever you go, there you are - precisely

"Wherever you go, there you are."  Sage wisdom that I was all ready to credit to Yogi Berra (always a fairly safe thing to do when it comes to this sort of rubric) but it turns out to be sort of ancient, actually.  Putative credit for this bit of intellectual flotsam goes back centuries!

Never mind,  I have another question this morning. OK, sure, it's a truism and I'll not argue.  There your are.  But... how do you know?  Got any data? (Pundits without data are as endangered as polar bears these days.)

Well, here's how you know. You buy this amazing little device from the folks at di-GPS and attach it to your Nikon camera via the supplied cable.  Turn it on and within minutes it will find itself and start piping GPS data to each and every picture you take. Open that picture in Preview on your Mac and you can pop right over to Google Maps and see exactly where you were.  There you are, with data to prove it.

Knowing where your photo was taken is incredibly useful and valuable. You can see one use by going over to my web site, JimRichardsonPhotography.com, where I have a map of geotagged photos from my latest cruise of the British and Irish Isles. But I'll write further about that later.  Right now just be aware that this is about the easiest way to get that data into your pictures that I have found.  There are other solutions but they all have some limitations.  For instance, by various means you can carry around a GPS device that will track your location during your daily wanderings, then marry its location data with the time you took your picture later when you download.  It adds another step to the process and is fraught with ways to screw things up, in my book.

And there are other on-camera GPS units, but they have serious shortcomings, too.  The trick is that the GPS unit needs to be up-and-running, to know where it is, when you turn on the camera. Most GPS units power down when your camera meter turns itself off.  Then you are going to be somewhere when you see a picture to take and you are not going to want to wait five minutes while your on-camera GPS looks around for satellites. Really, it can take that long.   One answer to that is to set your Nikon to the GPS option which, essentially, tells your meter NOT to turn itself off.  That's a real battery drainer.

The di-GPS has another answer.  The camera meter can turn off but the di-GPS unit stays on, constantly updating its location like any well behaved GPS unit.  Then when you turn on your camera or simply press the shutter release halfway to wake it up the GPS link is reestablished in less than a second. It does drain batter power some and you'll find you'll need an extra battery at hand on a long day.  But it is a very, very good compromise and I find it quite workable.  

If you are a Canon user you'll have noticed that I sort of jumped right over that little issue up at the beginning.  That's because the Canon cameras don't have the necessary slot to plug the GPS unit into.  (Sorry, I didn't do it.)  There is a work-around but you won't like it.  You buy the appropriate Canon WFT Wireless Transmitter for your camera and then you will have the necessary connection.  This will only cost you upwards of $750 (I said you wouldn't like it.)  You might just want to buy a Nikon D5000 (with provided kit lens) for the same money and be done with it, but I doubt that's what you'll want to do. ( If I were you I'd be calling up Chuck Westfall and asking him when Canon is going to get their act together. They do most everything else right.) 

Of course you don't have to do the GPS unit at all.  You can just go into Flickr or some other geotagging program and manually locate your photos on a satellite photo.  But telling your photos where they were taken is not quite the same as having your photos tell you where they were taken.  Not as accurate, either.  (And really, will you remember where you were five years from now when some stock agency asks where this photo was taken?)

One last point.  There's another, very simple, way to get geotagged photos:  just shoot them on you iPhone. Any picture you take on a second generation, GPS equipped iPhone is automatically geotagged.  Nice. 

So, there you are.  Precisely.

The Flint Hills are Calling

I can’t tell you how many times visitors to our gallery point to the picture of the lush, green hills and ask, “Which part of Ireland is that?”

With great patience (and infinite relish!) I then proceed to point out that what they are looking at is not Ireland, it is Kansas. Every bit as lush and green in the Spring as anything you’ll encounter in Ireland (and I’ve seen a bit of Ireland.)  

So right now, with the Flint Hills bursting into bloom, as the wildflowers make their stunning, delirious sprint to bloom and reproduce, I’m making my own pitch to anyone who hasn’t yet discovered it, that the hills are absolutely alive. We have come to expect this of other places.  We expect to be stunned in Texas Hill country, we expect to be blown away by the Sonoran Desert, and, yes, we know that Ireland will take our breath away.  They’re all beautiful (and maybe they’ve gotten good press over the years.)

So forgive me for getting up on my soapbox. It’s time for us Kansans to stop downplaying the wonders in our backyard.  So let me just say this: The time I had photographing the wildflowers of the Flint Hills matched anything I have encountered around the world.  And I’ve seen a bit of the world.  

But the wildflowers of the Flint Hills can’t afford to dally.  They’ve got real work to do and not much time.  Their business is the life and death to them and they’ll not linger waiting around for you to get out there in your own sweet time.

Good luck!

Workshop in San Miguel de Allende

I get a fair number of questions about my teaching and learning experiences for photographers. So I thought I would go on and fill you in as well as possible about the workshops I'm involved in and which workshops are right for which photographers. Later I'll give you and assessment of the photographic opportunities on some of the cruises I travel on for National Geographic Expeditions.

San Miguel is pretty much what I always thought Old Mexico should be.  This is the second year I'll be going back to this colonial Mexican city for a National Geographic Expeditions photography workshop. Last year I had no idea what to expect but every day presented really great opportunities.  The very first day I fell in with a wedding party at La Parroquia, the church towering over the main plaza.  Another day I arrived at the church to find a pile of band instruments lying unattended outside the front door. Presently the musician came out of the mass, picked up their instruments and began leading a pilgrimage through the streets.  I followed them for miles.

Everyday seemed to have such surprises in store for me.  And the food isn't bad either.  Americans started coming here after WWII when GI's found they could study art here on the cheap. It's still a magnet for thousands of Americans.  Easy to understand why.  It's a great place to live. 

This National Geographic Expeditions workshop is great for anyone who wants to explore a new location with their camera, and get hands on instruction while they are at it.  Mornings are spent in the classroom for editing, teaching and critiques. Afternoons have planned photo sessions in and around San Miguel. Evenings are free for your exploration (and the great dining.  Did I mention the food!)  I'll give a lecture one evening at the main theater, an event open to the public.  

Photographer Raoul Touzon will join me on the faculty, bringing a wealth of knowledge to the mix. These workshops are great fun and are probably less intense that workshops aimed at full-time professionals.  Almost all levels of photographers can benefit from the experience.  Some familiarity with your digital SLR is a great benefit, and you should be comfortable downloading and editing pictures on your laptop before you get there.  Aspiring professionals can benefit, too.  It's a good place to build porfolio, but this is mainly a shooting workshop.  Don't come expecting in-depth digital workflow or high-end PhotoShop lessons.  

Right now safety is on everyone's mind and Mexico has it's problems. I've been doing some looking around and it seems that the situation is as I suspected. The problems we hear about are mostly along the border with the US.  That's not San Miguel which is in central Mexico. The US border is 500 miles from San Miguel at it appears that life in San Miguel is just as conspicuously safe now as it was when I was there last year. I felt safe wherever I went. Walking the streets at night was perfectly all right. And women in our workshop felt the same way. I'll keep an eye on it as time goes by but right now I've got no reservations, outside of the usual precautions that are always prudent when traveling in foreign countries.

You can find more details by going to the National Geographic Expeditions site here:  http://www.nationalgeographicexpeditions.com

I hope I see you there.

Jim

Ethics and Whisky Photography

Some years ago Tom Kennedy, then director of photography at National Geographic Magazine, gave me my first assignment in Scotland. What a gift. I've returned to Scotland over and over, and relished every minute of it.

Out of a profound sense of journalistic duty during that first assignment I gave myself the task of learning all I could about the whisky industry.  That led me, by and by, to the Lagavulin distillery warehouse on the Isle of Islay, a heavenly job if ever there was one. The "angel's share" waft heavily over us as we stepped into the musty warehouse, lined with rows upon rows of whisky casks, quietly and patiently biding their time till the whisky was just right for bottling.  In the case of Lagavulin that would be 16 years.  (And nothing less.)

After getting the shot all lined up and the lighting set and tested the stillman pulled out a hefty sample of the aging single malt and took a wee sip, noting that all was well and it could go back to sleep. Then he turned to me and asked if I'd like a sample my self!  Well, yes, actually I would. It was wonderful, even if it was only 15 years old.  Then the sample, germs and all went back into the cask (where the alcohol would have another year to make sure it was all quite sterile and safe.) 

But I'm haunted, all these years later,  by the journalistic ethics of taking that wee dram. Should I have refused?  Should I have payed?  Was I corrupted? (Actually I had been corrupted long before that.) These are the things I ponder as I sit here tonight, dreaming of the distilleries of Islay, nursing a wee dram of the Lagavulin, and trying in vain to muster up a healthy dose of guilt.

Fear Amongst the Roman Ghosts

Down in the basement of the Treasurer’s House in York, England is a simple, bare room which has taken on great fame among those who are convinced that ghosts move amongst us. It was here, in 1953, that laborer Harry Martindale was working away when a whole platoon of Roman soldier ghosts marched through. Harry’s encounter is one of the most famous ghost sightings in this English city which prides itself on being the Ghost Capital of the World. That’s all well and good, except that I had to take a picture of the place for Traveler’s story on York. The truth is that, for all its fame, it’s just a bare room down in the basement. Not much there for a photograph. I thought my goose was cooked on this one. The smell of fear was everywhere and it was coming from me.