PixelatedImage Blog

Northern Ethiopia, January 2006

I’m tempted to tell you this photograph has nearly nothing to do with me. It was shot, one of three frames, from the window of our beat-up Land Cruiser without slowing down. I saw the scene, knew there was no way I could get it, but tried all the same because I’m sometimes stubborn that way. Rightly, a great many of my images ought to be credited to a fast shutter and serendipity. In fact, I’d probably have a good deal more shots like this if I just got out of the way more often.

Trouble is, I think too much. I can give you twenty reasons a shot won’t work before I get the camera to my eye, and in so doing I lose out on moments like this that “would never work.” Often my thinking is a help - it works hand-in-hand with my intuition and complements the touch-feely or artsy-fartsy side. It’s helpful when dealing with technical things, like removing the lenscap. But give it a little room to move, give it too much license to control the process and suddenly there’s a hundred un-shot frames and my inspiration never gets a word in edge-wise. Think too much and the decisive moment is gone before you can react. And then the analytical side and the emotional side (the geek and the artist) are both unhappy with you and they take off for a bar and some single malt scotch to try to forget about you for a while.

I think as we grow up as photographers, as we “mature,” we lose a childlike willingness to experiment, to fail wildly, to try something for the sake of seeing what happens. I used to lie on my tummy with my old Pentax Spotmatic and a bellows unit and shoot out-of-focus raindrops on grass just to see what it looked like. And that was back when I paid for every precious frame of film.

Still, I’m glad it turned out as it did. We spent so much time in that Land Cruiser, saw so many children smiling, waving, running after us yelling “You, You, You, Youyouyouyouyou…” that this scene is as much about Ethiopia to me as some of the images I worked much harder for. More so because the two figures are children, and girls at that. Dotted all over the countryside you’ll see them carrying their jerry cans of water, large loads of twigs and firewood making them ant-like in proportion. More than 50% of the population of Ethiopia, like most sub-Saharan countries in Africa, are children. Many of them orphans. Still they smile, still they wave.

God, I miss Ethiopia.

Exif: Canon 20D, 17-40/4.0L @17mm, 1/1600 sec at f/5.6, ISO 400. Probably needs me to open it again in Lightroom and re-process it for better midtones.

February 2008, Mongolia.

This is one in a series of shots of this little boy that I return to over and over again. He packed more energy and personality into his little frame than any child I’ve met, and I’ve met many, many children. He had a look in his eyes from the moment we started that said “put your seat-belt on, Photo-man, because you are my plaything today and I am going to exhaust you before you can crank out 100 frames on your fancy camera. Think your camera focuses pretty fast, don’tcha?” And then the sugar kicked in, red-lined, and I started earning my keep. Eventually we wrapped him in that blanket like a burrito to slow him down. It didn’t.

What you do not see is the sparse frozen hillside and the pervasive smog of Ulaan Batar’s many coal-burning powerplants under which his family’s borrowed ger (yurt) tent sits. You do not see the poverty. I framed it that way because he doesn’t see it either, so pre-occupied was he with growing up, imagining that he was Spiderman, and chasing his beleaguered German Shepherd puppy. This little boy had great hope, imagination, and kindness. He almost came home in my duffle bag.

Almost anytime I speak of my job with others they ask how heartbreaking and difficult it is, and to be honest there are few trips that don’t find me lying in bed one night with tears rolling into my ears as I stare at the ceiling. But it’s equally true that on these journeys the time I spend with the poor teaches me more about those things I could never buy - hope, dignity, strength, even joy.

Exif: Canon EOS 5D, 24070/2.8l at 38mm, ISO 100, 1/100, f/7.0

Photograph taken for, and property of World Vision.

January 2007, Nizzamudin, Delhi, INDIA

This is one of the first images I shot in what has come to be my favourite countries. India is, simply, an astonishing place.

This is the shrine at Nizzamudin, a Suffi place of worship and one of the more magical places I’ve ever been. It’s a place where you can easily lose time and space and truly forget when and where you are. I was there with Matt Brandon - another first - and as he led me into this space I watched him speak with vendors and stall-keepers in his fluent Urdu, feeling very much like an outsider. So I put my camera to my face and quietly shot what came to me, feeling like I didn’t belong and hoping that hiding behind the camera would make me invisible.

This image, two men drinking chai adjacent to the shrine, sat in my archives for well over a year before I re-discovered it - a witness to the fact that images don’t always say the same things, sometimes they resonate only after they’ve sat with us for a while. Sometimes our expectations of what images we “should” have captured get in the way of truly seeing the ones we did capture. This is that image for me.

And now, a couple trips to India later, this image more and more captures that time and place like none of my others. It captures for me the relationships, the gender roles, the way people take time to drink chai and talk and just “be.” It captures the agelessness of a place completely obsolesced by the modern world, and my longing to be in such a time and place where people slow down and move a little slower. It also pokes at my sense of injustice over the role of women in the majority world; reminds me of African women doing laundry or making meals while men sit lazily in the shade and talk the day away. Makes me uncomfortable, throws me emotionally off-kilter as I place myself on the floor beside those men and feel her presence there behind me. Makes me feel guilty, unable to enjoy my chai. Reminds me that while I’d left Canada thousands of miles to the west, I’d never really left my own culture. And maybe she had nothing at all to do with those men, though her proximity suggests otherwise. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but still even that is revealing. This photograph probably implies as much about me as it does them.

We stayed an hour or so, it felt like a day. We ate mutton on saffron rice at a first floor restaurant on the way out - one of the best meals of my life, I can still taste the mutton on my fingers and hear the din of the street below (should wash my hands and get my ears checked) Longing to return. Only 145 days.

Exif: EOS5D, ISO 800, 1/3200, f/2.0, 135/2.0 L lens. No idea why my ISO was so high. It’d been dark in the arcades and alleys, I was probably distracted.

Jodhpur, India. January 2006

Jodhpur is known as “the blue city” for the ubiquitous blue walls. The walls, predominantly washed with various shades of cobalt blue in the old city, lend Jodhpur a fairy-tale feel and the back alleys are a riot of blues, greens, and ambers. They are also home to an astonishing density of bicycles and scooters, which, it can only be assumed, multiply in the dark corners through mechanical mitosis. Overhead and always looming is the Mehrangarh fort, the hill fortress that both guards and dwarfs the town.

I shot this in the early hours of the morning. Dawn was only just beginning to break and the golden light of streetlamps was bathing everything in gold. It was a magical morning - my last for a couple days, as later this day I came down with a fever and went to bed whining and bitching about how much my throat hurt, etc., etc.

I had left the havelli without my tripod but found a handmade wooden ladder with four legs that nearly passed as stable and shot this little intersection of alleys until the dawn broke. Bicycles began to whiz past, and the day grew louder as the warrens and alley came to life.

It’s often about that time when I’m feeling about to give up and move on that something magical happens. Or when I am looking too hard. Almost any time other than the moments during which I am looking and waiting. This time a woman in red walked up the steps to the temple, wrapped her head and walked through the door.

This woman seemed to me a spectre, she moved softly and quietly, came from nowhere and vanished. The slow shutter speed necessitated by the low light gave me the effect I needed but didn’t have the time to be aware of.I shot about 6 frames hoping something captured the moment the way I’d seen it.

EXIF: Canon 5D, 17-40/4.0L at 1/5sec and f/9.0. ISO 800

Kathmandu, 2007.

This image is a result of pure dumb luck, as I am beginning to suspect the bulk of my images are. I was wandering the back alleys of Bhoda, just on the outskirts of Kathmandu, it was early morning, 6:30am, and the promised rainy season had just shown up. Truth be told I was in a funk - the kind that takes hold of me when I am in a place for an insanely short time and know that trying to feel-out the spirit of the place, let alone capture it in any meaningful way, is an insanely presumptuous task. It’s probably this very mindset that makes me manically search for the thing and which makes the thing itself so elusive. Trying too hard pushes the muse away.

Suddenly I looked up and saw this woman. Her fingers aren’t all there - there’re bits missing. You don’t have to look hard to see that life has been tough for her. She spent five minutes consumed by her devotion - lighting the butter lamps, swinging the incense, praying. She knew I was there, we acknowledged each other with a nod and a near-smile. I shot about 25 frames, my feet getting wet, no real sense of time. Mostly I just prayed she’d keep at her prayers long enough that my intrusion would result in an image that meant something, said something about her and her devotion.

You can’t plan these moments. They gobsmack you from your blindside. Slowly I am learning that creativity has its genesis in something, Someone, bigger than me - that it’s the process of seizing a small handful of convergent serendipitous elements the moment your muse taps you on the shoulder and says, “Hey! Wake-up! Look at that.” And in the in-between times when there is nothing to look at and you feel like your muse is off screwing around when she should be hard at work, those are the times when it’s natural to fret and stew about the images you’re currently NOT creating. But natural or not, that inclination has a tendency to stand in front of you, looming, and preventing you from seeing the moments that ARE there. Or that WILL be there, any moment, if we have eyes to see them.

It’s taken me a while, and I re-learn this lesson with each assignment, but the more I embrace the times when nothing is happening, and the more I stop searching for what isn’t there - the more I start seeing what IS there. And that’s the only thing you can photograph.

Agra, INDIA. January 2007. I shot this image at the Taj Mahal. It’s one of several hundred I shot there and one of the only ones I like.

Shooting an icon like the Taj Mahal is tough. Shooting any icon is difficult, but the building reputed to be the “most photographed building in the world” is even harder. It’s easy to take a photograph of an icon, but very difficult to take an iconic photograph of a subject that is already iconic. This was my effort at that - to create an image that shows something more than the postcard view - to show the Taj as I see it - a monument that was once a living piece of history that is now the haunt of tourists and pigeons - a dusty monument that is no less beautiful but has, I suspect, lost the spirit it had when it was first built as a monument to a dead wife by a grieving king. Maybe I’m wrong. Lord knows there are many ways to perceive the Taj. What mattered to me was creating an image that reflected my vision.

So when I stumbled upon a maintenance man sweeping the dust and the pigeon feathers from the floor of the adjacent (north) mosque at the Taj, I knew I had my moment. I shot thirty frames as the sweeper moved back and forth. He kept trying to get out of my shot - trying to be polite and driving me nuts at the same time.

I metered off the sandstone arch and then adjusted so my histogram had as much data as possible without losing too much in the highlights. It was a very high dynamic range of light to deal with - in thos cases it’s best to get as much data as possible (ie, keep the histogram to the right without cliping too much) and then plunge the shadows in Photoshop or Lightroom.

EXIF data: Canon 5D, 17-40.4.0L @ 17mm, iso500, 1/250, f13. Image processed in Lightroom.

I shot this image on my first assignment for World Vision Canada. It hangs large on my office wall and reminds me of a time in my life that will remain a peak in my memory forever. It was shot in Malawi after three days of travelling just to get where I was going. It was my second trip to Africa, and my biggest fear was screwing up the assignment. Those fears faded once I shot this image. I realized that it was all coming together and if I could manage to pull off this shot I could just repeat it until I’d shot the brief and filled my hard drive.

The most amusing thing about this assignment, and all assignments of this nature, is the juxtaposition we are trying to present. The need is to capture an image that reflects, with total integrity, beauty, and hope, a reality that in some ways doesn’t truly look like this. African children do not have the luxury of treating their animals like pets, they do not cuddle with them, they do not name them cute names like “Sparkle”. They raise them, they breed them, they feed them, they kill them, they eat them. End of story. But for these families a goat represents great hope and it is a gift of astonishing proportions - and totally disproportionate to the money it takes us to give the gift. And so these images need to reflect that relationship. This one is my favourites.

What is most amusing is the list of shots I had to fulfill. Happy Child holding Rooster. Happy Child Riding Ox. Happy Child milking Dairy Cow. For the record, no african rooster likes to be held and they don’t take it lying down. No african ox would allow a child, happy or otherwise, to ride it. And african dairy cows are scary. So I revised my list. Happy Medical Worker Stiching Child’s Rooster Wounds. Happy Oxen Stampeding Village. Happy Dairy Cow Running for the Hills, Followed By Happy Child in Hot Pursuit. These assignments never turn out quite like you think. (For the record, no child was ever harmed in my shoots. The oxen did, however, stampede and nearly kill us all, but that’s a story for another time. Perhaps when the memory is less painful to me and my therapist says it’s ok to go there…)

In this case we were riding towards a farmstead, with a truck-load of school-kids in the back. As we passed a small group of huts I saw the kid (goat) that you see in this image. Young, beautiful, clean, and as I was soon to discover - very unhappy about his impromptu photo shoot. I’ve been told that a previous shoot like this ended with the goat eating the little girl’s (only) dress and having her burst into tears. So I was keen to avoid that. What I got instead was a truck load of children chasing the goat round and round a hut while the mother goat chased them and the local dogs followed suit. It was like some glorious scene from an African version of Keystone Cops and the adults sitting under the eaves of their huts had front-row seating to the premiere. I love - LOVE - the laughter these shoots kindle in people. And if it takes me playing the clown to so do, so be it.

We ended up catching the goat and getting off about 50 frames. The little girl was gorgeous, but shy. The goat pouted the whole time. The kids ran amuck and through the frame, the dogs chased each other - too riled up to stop. It was, in short, total chaos. And I loved every moment of it. The image itself gives no hint of what went on just without the edges of the frame. To me it’s a reminder of the nature of peace - that the chaos is only ever at bay for a short time - it’s always there just out of line with your peripheral vision, but it’s there. The peace and tranquility that this image evokes in me is only ever just a calm within the storm, not the absence of it. And that makes it all the more welcome when it comes.

In October you will begin seeing the 2008 World Vision Canada Christmas Gift Catalogue. Some of the images I’ve taken this year actually turned out to be well-exposed and mostly-focussed. They will appear in that catalogue. Please get one, but don’t treasure it and hide it away. Thumb through it, dog-ear the pages, and buy as many goats, chickens, alpacas, deep wells, mosquito nets, as you can possibly buy. Your great aunt Sally doesn’t need another scented candle and your brother doesn’t need another tie. But these kids are dying for some of this stuff. Literally. Dying. Look at this little girl and tell me she’s not worth it. I’ve walked hand in hand with her. And hundreds of others, all just as beautiful. I can tell you from looking into their eyes and seeing them laugh and play and hope and dream - they’re worth it a hundred times over.

Please join me in kicking at the darkness that is extreme poverty. To find out more, please visit World Vision Canada, World Vision US, or World Vision International

EXIF data: Canon 5D, 24-70/2.8 @ 39mm, iso400, 1/2500, f2.8. Image processed in Lightroom.

Varanasi, India, January 2007

This is one of my favourite images. It was taken on a day filled with frustration and in the middle of that day this moment of serenity and joy was injected.

Varanasi is one of the holiest cities in India. It sits on the banks of the river Ganges, a holy river choked with polution, decay, the remains of the dead, and the rotting offerings of marigolds placed in the river every morning and night by the faithful. Along her banks run stone steps, called ghats, that descend into the river and form the meeting place between the Ganga and her devotees. It is a chaotic, noisy, colourful place crowded with people who come to pray, to wash, to sell, to buy, to teach and to be taught. It is all at once a beautiful and ugly place, a place of serenity and cacophony.

And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to shoot the place. People were resistant to having their portraits shot, or they wanted a little baksheesh (money or gift) for doing so. Or they had their own agenda. Mister, you want boat? Mister, you want flowers? Mister, you want exchange money? Mister, you want boat? boat? boat?

So I spent my time in Varanasi walking up and down the ghats at all hours. Early morning, late evening, high noon. Trying to get a feel for the place and to get an image or two that summed up not only the spirit of the place, but how my spirit felt and thought about the place. And then I saw this boy. He was leaping from one boat to another, as a paper kite fell from the sky (the sky was full of them), trying to gauge the trajectory of the kite, to catch it. My last frame was this one. He’d stopped and raised his hands as if in supplication, and he waited, motionless, for the kite to fall.

It fell slowly, like a leaf on the wind, and it missed his hands and fell into the water and dissolved. It was both a beautiful and sad moment, one that defined the city of Varanasi for me. I sat there a while and thought about it, about how sad it was that he’d waited and waited and jumped from boat to boat, only to have the kite fall without his grasp and dissolve. But the boy went back to jumping and waiting and jumping some more and something told me that it was the running and the jumping that mattered to him and that I was wrong to think the purpose was the kite itself. Much like life I suspect.

EXIF data: Canon 5D, 135/2.0L, iso800, 1/200, f8. Image processed in Lightroom with Split Toning, Vignetting added after basic exposure and levels tweaking. See my whole Classic India series on my portfolio site - www.pixelatedimage.com

Ecuador - February 2007. We were staying in Riobamba, spending most of our time somewhere between 12 and 14 thousand feet in altitude. At this altitude the sun burns you even when it’s out of sight for days at a time. On the other side of this image is a bald, sunburned, photographer looking like a burn victim with leprosy.

One of the unique World Vision projects in Ecuador involves Alpaca, a Llama-like animal that is as useful as it is beautiful. It is also, for those of you tasked with photographing an alpaca with a small child, a skittish animal who doesn’t like white guys with cameras.

We spent most of this day with mind-numbing headaches bouncing around the country-side looking for the shots we needed - not an easy task as it always involves the uncommon combination of cute baby animal with cute kid, both of whom need some measure of patience. After driving further and further into remote valleys - impossibly green and surrounded by blue sky and volcanoes spewing ash - we finally arrived in this gorgeous spot, not only feeling distant from any place we could finger on a map, but feeling distant, too, from the time we were used to. It felt a little like walking in a theme-park from a Michael Crichton novel, like somehow we’d arrived in a place where nomads and transhumant people lived in harmony with their flocks and each other. No email, no cell phones. Just the land and her children.

The beauty of all this aside, I was sure that we were chasing the impossible. It seemed so entirely unlikely that in this place (and this time) we’d find a young alpaca and a young child.

And then Juan summersaulted down the hill with his dog, Clever, and began wrestling with a young alpaca. He mugged for the camera and kept the alapaca where we needed it. When we took a break he went back to wrestling with Clever, leaving me the distinct impression that their relationship was something more like brothers (secretly I still believe Juan was raised by a pack of wolves). It was magical. Juan’s mother looked on, dressed in the coarse-textured, woolen clothes and traditional hat that her people have been wearing perhaps for centuries. She smiled abashedly, not sure what she thought of me and my camera, shy when I pointed it in her direction and asked if I could take some pictures of her and Juan together.

It is these incredibly human moments I love about my job. There’s the language barriers and awkwardness and asking people to pose for a photograph made by a technology they don’t understand to appear in publications they’ll never see, but when you approach all that as just a goofy game, and you relate to the people with kindness and respect and humility, you emerge with better photographs. Best of all you emerge with moments of connectedness that span the distance and the time - moments of profound humanness.

Post-script. While shooting this the alapaca herd was doing it’s best to multiply its numbers, completely abandonning discretion in the process. See that distant white blob to the left of Juan’s head? That’s a couple of Alpacas in mid-activity with a third one standing over them - the third was either refereeing the match or waiting to get tagged in or simply checking technique - I’m not sure. But the bellowing and whining coming from the mating alpacas made shooting with an altitude headache even harder, and more amusing.

EXIF date: Canon 5D, 24-70/2.8 @ 24mm. iso400, 1/320, f14 and a staggering amount of post-production in Photoshop to get the dogs out of the picture.

I like my images to speak for themselves, but there are times I wish I could say more, and judging by the emails I get asking for details about this image or that, there’s a few nutters out there that are willingly asking me to give them my thoughts and opinions. So be it.

Introducing Without The Frame - The Story Behind the Image. It’s a chance for me to speak personally about some of my favourite images, to sound off on them, their impact on me, and the context in which the image was taken. It’s a grab-bag, really. So here we go.

Ethiopia, January 2006 with two friends. We were travelling this iconic country engaged in an exercise in irony: creating a cookbook in a nation known ostensibly for famine. But Ethiopia is much more than that, it is a mountainous, extraordinary country of rich culture, beautiful and diverse people, and an incredible history. In that one sentence I’ve used more modifiers then Hemingway in his entire career, but that’s beside the point.

This shot is taken high in the Simien Mountains, if I have my Ethiopian geography right. We’d just spent orthodox Christmas in the holy city of Lalibela, a day set in my memory as one of the most unexpected and unforgettable - a town filled to busting with pilgrims and beggars, priests and saints. Sometimes all 4 in one person. Everywhere, white robes contrasted with the red rock-hewn churches still in use after a thousand years, still infused with a sense of the sacred; mystery around every corner. And clinging to it all, and to us, the mingled scent of incense and feces, dust and diesel.

We’d left Lalibela reluctantly, our itinerary mercilessly tight with only myself to blame. As we clattered along the hairpin roads, the washboard surface beating our too-old Land Cruiser to pieces, we came upon this plateau - wide open and empty, dirt and golden chaff as far as you could see, until it dropped over the edge into the nothingness of the canyons and valleys. We stopped in the middle of the road to stretch our legs and pee, when out of nowhere this shepherd, (a goat-herd, technically) wandered with his little flock of bedraggled goats. He was young - perhaps 12, and wrapped in the green cloaks one sees on seemingly every shepherd from Addis to the border. He stopped to satisfy his curiousity, then blew his horn and wandered on.

I think of this boy often. He is typical of what one sees in Ethiopia. Typical of sub-saharan Africa too - most countries share a population that is 50% children - orphaned, many of them, by the HIV/AIDS pandemic and other plagues - famine, drought, genocide, bad governance - or the too-common fatal mix of all of them. Around every bend you see children carrying firewood, fetching water, driving goats or cattle. Can’t help but wonder where the parents are, but if you think too long about it you realize they just simply aren’t. Or they’re buried beneath the fertile soil. You’d think it would yield a greater crop, so nurtured is African soil with the blood of it’s children and the bodies of their families.

Still, it remains a bright and hopeful place. Perhaps that’s the way dark places seem - the points of light always seem brighter therein. That horn you hear is calling the sheep to order, but I can’t help think it’s also a clarion, a call for something more from those of us who have it.