PixelatedImage Blog

They say that among the best ways to learn is to teach. As much as I am passionate about photography, I am as passionate about passing along that passion. Teaching is one of my great joys, and one of the pay-offs is how much I learn while doing it.

This year at Lumen Dei I gave myself two assignments with which to challenge myself and sharpen my edge. The first was to use the Lensbaby that’s been sitting in my gear closet for two years. The second was to work on my panning.

Both were a lot of fun and reminded me of the importance of being aware of our ruts and climbing out of them. Photography, as much as it is a technical pursuit, is first an artistic one and subject to all the ruts and pitfalls as other pursuits. The expression of our vision is the end, the technique is the means, and the more we explore the means available to us, the more faithfully we’ll be able to achieve our end.

Learning to use the Lensbaby was a great deal of fun (and this should answer the questions I am getting about the selective focus on some of my images – a plain old, generation 1 Lensbaby.), but the panning was the exercise I enjoyed the most. By the end of our time together we were panning everything that moved. Trucks, people running, rickshaws, monks on motorcycles. The above is one of the first I shot, in Old Delhi as rickshaws whizzed past, piled high with schoolkids. The most I counted on one cycle-rickshaw was 10 kids.

Speaking of Lensbabies – have you seen the new line-up? I know the big players like Nikon and Canon get all the Photokina lovin’, but Lensbaby has announced some really cool new stuff, not the least of which is their new Composer lens and the Optic swap system. Check’em out here: Lensbaby.com. While the Lensbaby was originally just a toy to most of it, it’s beginning to become a serious tool – you know, if you like that kind of thing.

Stuck in a rut? There are few things better than an assignment that forces you to stir the paint a little, bring some of the less-used colours to the top.

Ron Carroll shooting the 7am call to puja at Thiksey Gompa.

After the Srinagar valley exploded in strife a couple months ago Matt Brandon and I made the difficult decision to re-plan the trip and we went to Ladakh instead. The two places, Srinagar and Leh, are in Jammu and Kashmir state, but couldn’t be more different. Still,  we had a really wonderful time.

Our first two days were in Old Delhi, though we welcomed the team on the same evening that Delhi was rocked by a series of bombs. Great welcome. The following two days we spent at Nizzamudin, Chandni Chowk, and Jama Masjid, shooting the people and places of Islamic Old Delhi. We shot alot, walked alot, and ate some spectacular food.

On our third day we took an insanely early morning flight to Leh, and spent that first day acclimating, talking Lightroom, and making final plans for what ended up being a really enjoyable time. Ladakh is a beautiful place. It’s extreme – high and dry. The altitude knocked us all around a little, but the trade-off was the beauty of the light, the remote and exotic monasteries perched on high ridges, and the friendly Ladakhis.

We shot in a number of great gompas, watching young monks chant, and old monks keep the younger ones in line. We wandered long sprawling villages and met the villagers, shooting as we went. We spent evenings doing image reviews and talking about composition.

One day we had a private cultural show at the palace, followed by a model shoot with great models in traditional clothes. Big thanks to our sponsors – Adobe, Evrium, Photoflex, Blackrapid, and Zink for providing prizes and support.

Matt Brandon sharing a print with Lama Lobzang at Chemray Gompa, via the Polaroid Zink-powered Pogo printer.

Our team was comprised of seven talented photographers, plus Matt Brandon and myself. The time we had together was truly a privilege. This is one of the things that sets Lumen Dei apart; we’re not uber-slick, but there’s a feeling of family that makes spending two weeks together a real pleasure. Learning, for many people, takes place in the context of relationships, and that’s how we run things.

Matt and I are already planning for 2009, and while I can’t release details yet, the plans we’ve got cooking are the most exciting yet. If you’ve always wanted to spend two weeks in an exotic place, shooting, learning, and laughing, we’d love to put you on the mailing list and get details to you when they’re announced. The site will now need updating, and that won’t happen at least until I am home from Kathmandu, but check Lumen-Dei.com for more information. Send an email to info at pixelatedimage dot com to be put on the mailing list.

Big thanks to this year’s team – Deb, Johanna, Brandi, Rosane, Ron, James, and Kesh, for throwing in your lot with us, for allowing us to share our passion with you, and for being so flexible with the changes in itinerary.

I got into Kathmandu yesterday afternoon to torrential rains, the dying fury of the monsoon, and a bandh. Arriving back in Bhouda was like coming home, though we were greated with an immediate power outage and a long walk down puddled streets in the dark to get dinner at what last year was the Cafe New Orleans and is now just called Flavors. Walking through the streets, monks backlit by the occasional passing car or motorcycle, candles lighting the shop stalls, and all the while the scent of incense and rain – I love it here. Feels like coming home.

As I write this I am posting images from a series I did while in Ladakh. I’ll be posting more over the week but this one is how I felt about the place. It includes images from Leh, Tingmoscam, Chemray, Wanla, and spots in between. The treatment reflects the very earthy colour palette of the place – an impossible range of browns – and suggests the relationship I saw everwhere between people and the earth, even their faith-life was earthy, not divided into compartments as it so often is in the west.  Ladakh is progressing, and while that brings good changes, it also brings lamentable ones, not the least of which is their loss of culture and the creeping sameness of the west. All the same, it feels ancient, stuck in time.  Check out the series HERE on my portfolio site – follow the gallery link to Ladakh.

We took our team to Thikse this morning, got there as the sun crested the ridge and struck the gompa. We spent several hours shooting the morning puja and all the activities surrounding it. Can’t tell you how much fun it is to be shooting here, in this place, with the incredible team of photographers we’ve assembled. Yesterday we had a private cultural show up at the palace, followed by a model shoot with 4 models in traditional clothing and a whole mess of Photoflex light discs. Too much fun.

Near the beginning of my photographic journey I was given two books – both of them by Freeman Patterson. The first I have recommended several times here, Photography and the Art of Seeing, the second is Photography For the Joy of It. Re-reading them now I suspect they are at the very centre of who I’ve become as a photographer.

I want to leave you with a quote from Patterson, and the recommendation that you add Photography For the Joy of It to your reading list. Here’s the Amazon link. And here’s the quote:

In making photographs, two things are important above all others – the subject matter and you. Photographs are what happen when you and the subject meet, and you use a camera to describe the meeting. A photograph is a visual description of the relationship between the subject and the photographer; and a good photograph is one which clearly shows the character of the subject while revealing the photographer’s response to it.

If you think of a photograph in this way, you’ll find your personal direction as a photographer emerging and becoming clearer. Sometimes it takes a while to understand what’s happening, and to decide upon what you expect from the relationship. Good relationships require a lot of give and take, and a lot of hard work. But the process of coming to know yourself through interaction with someone or something else is very satisfying. In the end, you get the picture – of both of you.

If things have gone the way we’ve planned, I am still in Ladakh. We overnighted in Leh last night but will be heading out to a more remote village today, overnighting there after photographing in the village for the evening, then back to Leh tomorrow. We fly to Delhi on Saturday ending the Lumen Dei tour. I fly to Kathmandu on Sunday, the 28th, and will be – should be – back online shortly thereafter with an actual update. Thanks for hanging in there with me through this last few weeks.

Leh, Ladakh, is almost 12,000 feet in the air. You almost touch the sky here. It’s desolate here, an impossible gamut of browns on the ground and blues in the sky. Crumbling buildings where the two meet. You don’t need a polarizer, the sky is already an unlikely blue, the clouds suspiciously perfect. The Lumen Dei team has been here a week, jeep trekking from one small village, to another, and having an incredible time. We’re now back in Leh, a sleepy town that is cut off by snow for half the year, and next to the villages we’ve been in, this feels downright metropolitan.

This is a short one, I’m hoping I can fire it off from an internet cafe up the road. We fly back to Delhi on the 27th and say our good-byes there. Then I move on to Kathmandu for a month. I’ll be sad to see the team disperse – we’ve bonded so well, had some incredible moments, seen some gorgeous photographs come out of our students. Matt and I are throwing around ideas for next year and the possibility of running two trips instead of two. We’ll keep you posted.

I should be back online after the 28th. See you then.

I never saw the movie from which I stole the title for this post. So you will forgive me for the gratuitous appearance of Yoda on the button. The concept is pretty easy to figure out. And it’s one that I think we’ve all got an obligation to live by.

Think for a moment about the joy that you derive from your photography, and how much your art has given to you. It’s likely that even the most self-taught among us have many people who have influenced us in some fashion, taken time for our questions, written a book, churned out a regular blog – anything that put you where you are today with your craft.

For me it was my mother’s co-worker who gave me her late father’s Pentax Spotmatic. Or Bob, my next-door neighbor, who gave me a box of darkroom equipment and some Ansel Adams books, in exchange for a night of babysitting. It was Mr. Harris, the highschool photography teacher who knew i was only taking his course to gain free access to the darkroom, and like a co-conspirator he enabled my addiction. It was the guy who ran the AV department in college who let me use the darkroom and the chemicals and paper at no charge, saying he’d ask me to shoot for him occassionally as payment. It’s been other photographers who let me assist or pick their brains, or who offered kind critiques of my work, or who sat and listened to my hair-brained ideas.

I am who I am as a photographer because of them, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. The best way I can say thank you, apart from saying Thank You, is to pay it forward. I’m guessing you too have been on the receiving end, and I know you have something you can give back to the photographic community. Teach a class, give away some of your old gear to a highschool student, send a cheque to Kids With Cameras, shoot for a non-profit free of charge. Whatever it is, pay it forward.

This craft has given so much to so many of us, let’s keep the love moving.

If everything is going to plan I should be in Ladakh right now, with the Lumen Dei team. We’ll have just arrived on a 5am flight out of Delhi and over the Himalaya. Today is slated to be our acclimation day, so we’ll pass it getting up to speed on Lightroom 2. Tomorrow we shoot in Leh, and the following day begin a 4 day jeep trek around the more remote spots in Ladakh.

Another day in Old Delhi, had a ton of fun shooting. My self-directed assignment today was to work on my panning, which resulted in several hundreds of blurry rickshaw photographs. But I got a couple that worked nicely, this one among them.

Tomorrow we’re up at 2:30am and off to Ladakh. I’m out of touch from now until at least the 27th, but have a couple more posts scheduled in the interim. See you when I’m back.

I love my job. It’s not always easy and today didn’t feel very productive. Alot of grumpy people, but given that it’s Ramadan and they’ve been at it for two weeks, I’d be grumpy too. But this little guy made my day. The post-processing is too heavy-handed, but I’m heading to the airport to pickup the remaining folks on the Lumen Dei team and from here on I’ll be too busy to post, but I thought I’d leave you with this little guy.

Things in Delhi are stable, metros are running, but you can’t help looking over your shoulder.

Hi folks – a quick note to let you all know we’re fine. I have a lot of family and friends that check in here when I travel so this is the easiest way to say we’re ok.

Delhi was rocked last night by a series of bomb blasts, one close to our hotel. Matt Brandon and I were lecturing at the Himalayan Club at the time – had a great evening despite it all. Unfortunately this is, in some senses, business as usual for India. But we’re all well, the Lumen Dei team is arriving in trickles (welcome to Delhi, keep your head down). We begin tomorrow, will spend two days shooting in Old Delhi and Nizammudin, then head to Ladakh at 5am on Wednesday.

Last night I was struck by how normal all this is. Had this happened in the US people would be glued to a news channel like CNN and there we would sit, wringing our hands. Here, we just all went to dinner and had a wonderful time. It’s not that there was a lack of concern, but people who live with this all the time generally live without so much fear as we who only imagine it. My father once told me to be careful as I travel. A former UN peacekeeper, he knows whereof he speaks. But I’m no longer sure he’s totally right. I think in light of constant realities like this, life becomes more valued, not less, so time is too dear to be spent in fear.

We’re well here. Thanks for checking in.