Kia ora tatou:

Posts may be a little thin on the ground this week. I am away at the PSNZ conference in Wanganui, where I am giving a talk this Saturday am on going for honours. I  m areally looking forward to it. Trent Parke, the Magnum photographer, will be speaking, along with oither photographic luminaries.

For that reason, the posts may be a little thin this week. However I still get email on my BarackBerry, so any comments, arguments, discussions that you care to post will be uploaded to the blog. Note: I moderate every post, so you don’t get to see the spurious ones, offering all sorts of gross opportunities ( 13,700 of them to date).

Finally, this in. Today’s image is from the Fiji Times, captured while chatting to a friend on Skype yesterday. Fiji, in our back yard, appears to be heading down the same road as Zimbabwe ( I hope not).

Freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy. Quis custodiet custodies?

Nga mihi

UPDATED 14 April

For the trickster is the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town (the one where a little market springs up). He is the spirit of the road at dusk, the one that runs from one town to another and belongs to neither. There are strangers on that road, and thieves, and in the underbrush a slight beast whose stomach has not heard about your letters of safe passage.

-Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World.

These days it never ceases to amaze me how a chance conversation can start a whole line of new thought. I’d like to share one such conversation and the thoughts that have begun to emerge from it.

I have a friend, a little older than me (well, a lot older than me). I have enormous respect for him, both as a person and as a photographer. We get together from time to time, and share work with each other. I know he’s never going to read this article, because he doesn’t have the Internet, he doesn’t have an e-mail address, and he doesn’t own a computer. Frankly I can’t see him ever going there. Good on him. He uses film, and yesterday when we caught up, he told me with great joy how he had swapped his Nikon F5 for a Nikon F6. He was beside himself with delight, and waxed at quite some length about the wonders of the viewfinder in his new camera. To the best of my knowledge that makes only two people I know who use one.

When I flip open my laptop and show him what I’m currently going, he shakes his head in wonderment. He finds the capacity of the digital photographer to move an image in whatever direction seems appropriate a thing of wonder. He then turns to defending film. Really, he doesn’t need to, because it seems to me that what he is doing is entirely appropriate for him. Film has its own ethos, it’s own aesthetic and to pass some sort of judgement upon it (which usually includes the words obsolete or irrelevant) seems to me to do it a disservice. I drive a diesel vehicle, while most of my friends drive petrol cars. To say one is better than the other seems to me a pointless exercise. Both vehicles achieve the same purpose, namely to get the driver from point A to point B. To value one over the other really says more about the Speaker than it does about the topic being discussed. (more…)

I’m sure I’ve blogged about this somewhere else, but it’s probably time to revisit it.

I was catching up with a friend earlier this week, who does most of his photography off a laptop, and the conversation turned to the vexing question of backing up the Lightroom catalogue. He asked me how I did it, and when he realised my approach was somewhat more complex than his (it seems simple to me!), it struck me I should talk about it. So here is how I do it.

Firstly I don’t back up to DVD. I’ve given up on that, and here’s why. I run around 40 GB of memory cards, and I’ve known days where I have used the lot. So call me trigger-happy! I’ll admit it; some days I see things that excite me so much I want to shoot them, and often there are so many potential possibilities I shoot them all. Often I will shoot round the subject, varying my composition subtly. I can always throw it away later. So backing up to DVD, each with a capacity of around 3 1/2 GB is just not an option, unless I win the lottery, when I can afford to buy a warehouse to store them! Filing them for later retrieval is going to be a nightmare, especially given the read/write speeds of most DVD players. Blu-Ray is an option, but the price of the drives and disks makes it frankly uneconomical. Bang for your buck, hard drives deliver faster access, speed and more capacity. At least that’s the way I see it.

I use Adobe Lightroom as my primary cataloguing software. It has got so damn good (for the money it’s amazing value) that I pretty much don’t bother with anything hours. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve tried the opposition, but frankly at this point they don’t measure up. And I include Adobe Bridge. Essentially it’s a file browser with a hotline to PhotoShop. Lightroom on the other hand is a database with  processing stuff built on top. At the front-end, the downloading end, it makes downloading so easy that I’m happy to stay with it. What’s more it keeps getting better. So here is my process. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

This weekend, I will be teaching a workshop on Composition and visual design ( not the same thing at all).

While I was doing some research, I came across this video clip on YouTube, where master documentary photographer Sam Abell, who used to shoot for National Geographic, talks about the secrets of his compositional success.I learned a similar technique years ago when doing a workshop with Magnum photographer, David Hurn.

I strongly recommend it. It is so simple, and yet so effective.

Enjoy.