I’ve submitted one of my photos for inclusion in the next print edition of JPG Magazine, under the Zen theme.
It seems like a good fit to me, and it’s one of the photos that will be included in my show in February (more on that later).
So feel free to give me a vote.
Last week, our much-loved cat Arthur died. He was twenty. It’s hard to describe a cat so cool and revered that messages of condolence came in from four countries.
To say he’ll be missed is to risk being understood by several orders of magnitude, but he lives on in our memories, and fortunately in our photos.
Included here are three we like from the last couple of years, including two that capture something of Arthur’s relationship with our daughter – a blessing we’ll always be glad he lived long enough to bestow on us.
Godspeed, dude.
Not sure how they’re doing this, but B&H Photo Video have some great rebates going on Lexar pro-quality CF cards at the moment.
Like $40 rebate on the $45 4G 133x cards. That’s a 4G card for (effectively) $4.
There’s a limit of 3 rebates per person, but get over to B&H now to stock up. And no, I don’t get a cut.
Thanks to Charles Mann for the tip.
Alec Soth – the photographer who would have been perfect to accompany me on my ill-fated bike ride down the Mississippi (but that’s another story) – recently had a simple but brilliant blog post over at the Magnum Blog.
He asked 35 of his fellow Magnum photographers 2 questions:
The answers are fascinating, but one from Alex Webb really struck home:
Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. . . . Take photography on as a passion, not a career.
This view gets to the heart of the conundrum keen amateurs like me face when we start making some money from our photographs.
Last weekend I went out to Fort Marcy to watch the cyclocross event that some friends of mine organized. As a keen cyclist, I was happy to be there for itself, but I also brought my camera and took some shots.
It was the first time I’d shot any cycling, and so while I’m a long way from being Graham Watson, but I enjoyed it, and came up with a few lessons learned:
While talking to Chuck West, the pro photographer who accompanied us on the cattle drive (shown here – the cowboy photographer at work), he made an interesting point about the choice of lenses he’d made for the trip. (I was on assignment from a magazine to write an article about the trip, so only taking photos in an amateur capacity.)
He uses a Canon 5D
The 24-105mm clearly makes most sense on a full-frame camera, where you could go from genuinely wide to pretty zoomed, and so don’t need an additional wide-angle lens most of the time.
On a crop body like my XT, it’s equivalent to 38-160mm, which might give you some extra reach, but isn’t actually as useful.
If you were trying to cover around the same 24-105mm range on a crop sensor camera, I guess you’d go for the Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM
So even if you had a swanky new 50D, for this job you’d be carrying two lenses – maybe the pricey but good EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM
So I’m sitting in Ecco, my favourite cafe. It’s hard to believe what happened yesterday.
I’m a green card holder, so couldn’t vote, but I knocked on some doors for the Obama campaign, and like millions of people, made some donations.
I have my naturalisation interview next month, and it makes me very happy that I’ll get to become a US citizen under an Obama administration.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen. Now the real work begins.
(still working through some of the cattle drive pictures)
Out on the drive, the scale of the landscape often made it seem abstract. Without big landmarks, there was just land and sky – it felt a little like being out on the ocean. The lack of context made it even harder to judge distance, or to feel comfortable as part of the landscape (rather than just adrift on it).
But if you put some cattle and cowboys in the same landscape, then it all starts to make more sense. It’s still huge, but not you’ve got some gauge of its vastness, and a way into it that feels right. And iconic.
One of the things about being on the cattle drive was that it made me feel blind. We’d be out in the middle of a huge pasture, and Kim the rancher would say to Tim the working cowboy who was accompanying us something like: “You go on ahead over the next rise, head towards the windmill. You’ll come to a fence, then turn northwards and the gate’s a little way up there.”
Even when we got to the top of the rise, I couldn’t see a windmill, a fence or a gate. Not for half an hour. It’s partly that the gate might be a good four miles away, but it’s also that I wasn’t used to picking out details in a landscape at such long distances.
Which is why, I’m guessing, people built gates with high gate posts. So you can see them a long way off. Handy when you’re driving 50 pair of cattle and it’s getting dark.
Also handy for picturesque sunset shots.
To an outsider like me, cowboy gear always seemed a little like a costume. Not quite real, you know?
But after a week of riding and camping in all sorts of conditions, I now have a deep appreciation for my boots. Plain old Justin Ropers – the most unadorned, non-pointy, street-looking boots I could find, so I could wear them when I got home too.
The heel helps keep you in the stirrups, the slick (leather) sole makes getting in (and out in an emergency) very easy, and the high shaft helps with the chafing. And being pull-on, if things go very wrong and the boots somehow contrive to stay attached to the stirrups while you have to make a sudden dismount, there’s a good chance you’ll come right out of them.
And what else would you wear tramping through a muddy field, or sitting round a campfire after a long ride on a damp day?
I shouldn’t be surprised, really – the cowboy gear is as much a set of tools as anything else. Stuff that helps you do your job.
It’s the same with cycling equipment – an arena I’m much more comfortable with of course. It might all look funny to the outside world, but there’s a reason behind all of it. Except the faux-denim look (complete with fakey pockets on the back) for the shorts worn by the Carrera team in the late 80s, early 90s.