PixelatedImage Blog

Ushuaia, Argentina, 2011.

After the woeful neglect of last month, I’m desperate not to leave you without something to put on your desktop. This is as fresh as it gets. Shot this this morning, and if you keep scrolling down to the blog post below, you can read more.

This is a 2560 x 1600 desktop wallpaper. Enjoy!

A short post to say hello. Unbelievable here. After 20 hours in the air I arrived in Ushuaia, Argentina and by 11pm was finishing dinner and the sky was just getting dark. I arrived to gorgeous light and Ushuaia immediately had my heart. This is a really great town. On the edge of the end of the world, there’s a frontier feeling here, but the restaurants and stores are great and the whole amazing place is nestled, like my adopted hometown of Vancouver, between ocean and close-huddled mountains. I slept until 4am when the light woke me.

This morning a small handful of us chartered helicopters and flew to a small glacial lake, and the hiking and exploring I thought I might never do again doesn’t now seem so far off. I walked slowly, and a little awkwardly, but the Black Diamond trekking poles I brought were worth their weight in gold. It’s still a little tough-going and things I once did without thinking are a bit harder, but getting back onto that helicopter an hour later I felt more exhilarated than I have in a while. In part because I’m simply here in this amazing place, and in part because I am finally working again. Andrew Zuckerman, in a presentation for the 99% Conference, put it well when he identified two key ingredients of the creative process as curiosity and rigor. Today was the start of, or the renewal of, a rigor in my work that I’ve not had for 7 months now.

Tomorrow around 4pm we get on the Ocean Nova and head to sea. The weather’s kicked up a little and I’m told anyone with hopes for a calm crossing of the Drake Passage should lower their expectations. Foolishly, I keep thinking, “bring it on.” I have a feeling I’ll regret those prayers, but what doesn’t kill you only gives you something to blog about, right?

This’ll be the last post until my feet hit ground again on or around the 10th of December. Thanks for checking in!

Not Antarctica. Iceland, 2010.

In a couple days I jump a plane to Buenos Aires, then Ushuaia, and from there a boat across the Drake Passage to Antarctica. I’m joining John Paul Caponigro and friends for the short trip to photograph the light and ice. It’s long been an ambition to photograph on all 7 continents, so before I turn 40 on December 24, I’m checking off the 7th continent. I’m a little nervous. I’ve packed trekking poles and hoping they’ll keep me somewhat upright; my walking cane sure won’t help.

So I’ve packed my Icebreaker woolies and Patagonia wet-gear, and as much gear as I can fit into my Think Tank Streetwalker Pro backpack – Two Nikon D3s bodies, Nikon 16-35/4.0 lens, Zeiss 50/1.4, Nikon 85/1.8, and Sigma 70-200/2.8 lenses, a handful of batteries, Four 64GB CF cards and a bunch of Singh Ray filters. No tripod. No flash. I’m still humming and hawing about my 24mm TS-E lens.

I’ll be gone until December 11, when I return and head into what I hope is the last surgery on my feet. I’m told it’s superficial – just the removal of a plate and shaving some bone, they say. Doesn’t sound superficial to me. Superficial is removing a hang nail, not shaving bones. Anyways, listen, things have been light around here but I’m really hoping to take you with me to Antarctica. I’m told there’s internet access on the boat and I’d like to fire off as many postcards as I can. In the mean time, Craft & Vision is doing a Black Friday blowout this Friday, including offering $40 Gift Cards for $20, as well as some great bundles. There won’t be a blog post, so just stay tuned to the Craft & Vision twitter feed (@CraftAndVision) And then on December 1st, we’re launching another ebook – and this time it’s absolutely free (but you didn’t hear that from me.) So tune in.

(Antarctica! I am SO stoked. Hear that giggling? That’s me. )

**Updated: Just re-read my materials (I’m not known for careful research) and it seems I can get email but there’s no Internet. So I’ll be posting my Postcards from Antarctica as soon as my boots hit land again and I’ve got a connection. Sorry.

This past year a number of beautiful books have rolled across my desk, none more beautiful than my friend Bruce Percy’s The Art of Adventure, 40 Photographic Examples. Bruce first caught my attention with his incredible podcasts – all of which he photographs, scripts, and records himself, including music he writes and records himself. His photographs are stunning and inspire me not only to photograph differently, but to travel farther, and get out into the light.

The Art of Adventure is gorgeous. It’s 88 pages, hardbound, and beautifully printed. The first edition is limited to 1,000 copies, and there are editions that come with limited edition prints as well.

I don’t know that I’ve ever recommended a book like this, but Bruce has done a beautiful thing here. If you love stunning photography or are doing some gift shopping for a photographer you love, you can  find Bruce’s book HERE. Sample images of the book are HERE. Finally, you can read the Preface, written by another photographer whose work has a strong place in my imagination, Michael Kenna, HERE.

Composition is about how we build our photographs. It’s not a subject peripheral to photography: it’s dead central. Or sitting slightly off-centre on one of the thirds. Unless you talk to Andrew S. Gibson about it, then the conventional rule of thirds gets a bit of a much-needed overhaul.

When Andrew sent me the proposal for his latest eBook, I sat on it for a while. I was in the middle of my own book about composition, and wasn’t at all ready to consider publishing someone else’s. But I’ve long believed that complimentary voices are stronger than competitive ones, so when I finally surfaced and read Andrew’s book, I was happy to see we were both writing about similar things, but in different ways and from different directions.

BEYOND THIRDS is an eBook about taking composition past the so-called rules. It’s a thoughtful, practical book about the way we build our photographs within the constraint of the frame. When I first started studying composition I was frustrated by all the disconnected discussion about leading lines and balance, conversations I felt I was dropping into the middle of, never quite knowing what the authors meant. Andrew’s book is free from that pretense, and what I like about it most is his intentional decision to move past the so-called rule of thirds, and to treat that rule with some suspicion. Anarchy has a place in art, and if there’s one thing we’d do well to question, it’s WHY we keep using these so-called rules. BEYOND THIRDS does that.

If you’re looking to probe into questions of composition a little deeper, BEYOND THIRDS is a great place to do that. It’s not encyclopedic, but like all the C&V titles, it’s meaty without being pedantic or academic, and I think that makes learning, and making this kind of teaching our own, much easier.

Special Offer on PDFs: Use the promotional code BT4 and you can have the PDF version of Beyond Thirds for only $4 OR use the code BT20 to get 20% off when they buy 5 or more PDF ebooks from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm PST November 19th, 2011.

Mangroves in the waters just outside my front door in Roatan. Spent 20 minutes last night sitting in the warm shallow waters. Gitzo Ocean Traveler tripod, small aperture, long exposure, Singh Ray Gold’n'Blue Polarizer, and a gin on rocks waiting for me beside the hammock 30 feet behind me. For all my bitching about how hard this craft can be, including my last post, there are days it just all comes together. Hard to do anything but be grateful right now. These are the days I love my art more than almost anything.

Hello from Roatan, in the Bay Islands of Honduras. I’m limiting my movements to snorkeling and reading in the hammock and foraging for nuts and berries at the bar, so if this is all you hear from me this week, that’s why. Please don’t send search and rescue, I like it here. Yesterday I left Oaxaca far earlier than I’d have liked to. Here’s the stuff I scraped off the inside wall of my heart while I reflected on this trip.

Last year I traveled back to Kathmandu, a place in which i feel very much at home. Despite this ease-of-being in that visually rich place, I wrestled with finding anything remotely close to a vision of the place. I wrote about it publicly here on the blog and was flogged by at least one reader who felt my angst was exhausting. Generally that kind of feedback discourages me, can even flatten me for a day while i regain my perspective, but in this case it’s given me something to laugh about for over a year. Man, if my angst exhausts you, you should try being me. I need a nap just writing about it.

I don’t do angst. I do hope. But I understand, too well sometimes, what it feels like to be an artist. If you pick up a camera in order to simply play with large lenses, make perfect exposures, or gather material for your latest cookie-cutter over-texturized HDR photographs and this week’s Flickr love-fest, then I understand why you might find my honesty about my own life as an aspiring artist a little wearying. But I hope to one day be a visual poet whose work echoes more clearly the voice in his mind and heart. And that journey isn’t easy.

In the six months since my fall in Italy I’ve had high moments. My photography is not among them. I’ve now been back in the field, walking through the world with tentative steps, in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Mexico. What I had hoped would be journeys of renewal have been anything but. I’ve had long days of pain, fallen over gravestones during the Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, had my cane stuck in the mud of Laotian rice-paddies. Mostly I’ve just laughed, because I get a little stronger every day. What shows no evidence of strengthening is my nerve. I’m slow. I can’t move the way I once did. I can’t squat or kneel on one knee without looking like a slapstick performer and falling over. I can’t get where I want to be to make the photograph, or easily carry the gear I need to make it.

But if this sounds like a building storm of pity, it’s not. It’s simply the recognition of a new reality. A reality, like yours, that is full of constraints. But while art flourishes in constraints, it does not do so easily. I am slowing down. I am back in school. And like many of my own students, having a melt-down on the first day of a workshop, I’ve come back to that place where nothing – nothing – comes easily. What has this new reality given me? Time. It has slowed me down. It has forced my hand to the making of the photographs I truly want to make, and while I’m still failing in those efforts, I’m learning.

I was in Oaxaca last week for the Day of the Dead. I don’t think I emerged with a single photograph of the festival. Instead i made some still-lifes, and a few portraits. I shot less than 500 frames, almost none of them even close to my hopes. In the past, I might have judged this a failure, but in the face of feeling like I might not be able to do this anymore, like my best work is behind me, or that I just won’t make the same photographs again, these few portraits are new, faltering steps back towards my art. And I’m right: I won’t make the same kinds of photographs. They’ll be different, because I am. And as long as they’re honest, I’m hoping they’re also going to be stronger. Slowing down isn’t a bad thing. Less so-called “keepers” isn’t a bad thing. Honest photographs matter. Hard-drives full of images don’t.

My friend Fernando. (I can hear the drums…)

Everyone I know rides the ups and downs of creative life, beaten around by our circumstances, our failures, the latest work of that photographer whose talent we secretly envy. Sometimes it’s just the disparity between what we see in our mind’s eye and what we’re capable of creating with the camera in our hands. I don’t know a single so-called pro whose work I respect that finds this always easy. Rewarding? Profoundly so. Difficult? Also so. Your work will be judged on what it is, not what it isn’t. It will resonate beautifully with people who don’t know how hard it was for you to make it, and even more for the few who do.

Huge thanks to the amazing people and new friends who shared last weeks adventure in Oaxaca with me.

Having a fantastic time in Oaxaca, Mexico, though we didn’t get back to the hotel last night until 4am, so we all took a little longer to get moving this morning. It’s an amazing place, here. Feels very safe. The food is incredible and the spectacle of Day of the Dead is really fun, if not a little creepy at times. There’s some amazing talent here with us on this adventure; and we’re having really fun time together.

The first two postcards were both shot with an iPhone, straight out of the camera, and some great window light, the last at Casa Oaxaca with the D3s and an 85/1.4. Wish y’all were here!