Photography Update

Anyhow, as we have been moving along, I've been trying to take better pictures, as that was one of the goals of this trip, to develop some skills as a beginner photographer. I've found that there are two modes of shooting for me: tourist snapshot mode, and artsy photographer mode. Most of the time, I find myself in snapshot mode, happily taking quick shots of beautiful things without being disciplined to ask myself about composition, exposure, or what I message I want the photograph to convey. I suppose there's nothing wrong with that, but then I don't need a fancy camera to do that.

In the few occasions where I am thinking about those photography things, I find I am really taking my time with the camera, thinking about the lighting conditions, and waiting for quite some time for the right moment before pressing the shutter. In almost all these cases, the shots turn out reasonably well. Of course, the shots posted on the website are significantly reduced in quality for bandwidth purposes.

I mentioned workflow before, and that is now down to a smooth routine. Almost every day I download the latest shots onto the laptop into daily folders. Then I go through the approximately 120 shots per day on average that I shoot (not much by most amateur photographer standards), deleting anywhere between 40 and 80 of them; poor composition, lens flare, duplicates, etc. I then select the best of the remainder, and copy them into another directory named by country. By the end of a country's visit, I will have anywhere between 100 to 200 decent photos; from this pile I'll select a few for the web pages, and others for potential printing when we get home. A few of the better "artsy" photos don't make it to the website because they don't really have anything to do with the country we're visiting. The nightly process of selecting and deleting seldom takes more than 15 minutes; the only really time-consuming activity is in the captioning of the pictures whenever I am about to develop a country's web page-that usually takes an hour or two.

Speaking of which, working on this new laptop has been such a pleasure compared to our previous machine. Yes, if you haven't been reading our blogs, another change of gear involved our computer, the first of which went belly-up in Pokhara, Nepal . (We now have a Panasonic Toughbook T1 that Lisa and Simon brought to us in Thailand, which will hopefully withstand the bumps better than our Sony Vaio.) The boot sector on the hard drive became corrupt, and we weren't able to access the computer any more. Fortunately, we were able to save almost all the data, as almost everything was backed up to CD; there were three days of photos in Kathmandu that were irretrievable.

One of those missing photos raises a bit of a controversy when it comes to ethics and photography. It is a picture of a funeral pyre in Nepal that has just been lit, with the body of the deceased on top of it, covered in a bright orange cloth. Off to the side of the burning pyre is a relative of the deceased, who was earlier preparing the body and lighting the pyre, but is now squatting with his face in his hands, weeping in sorrow. We were all fascinated with the event, but many people, including myself, were struggling with whether or not to take pictures, feeling that it would be somewhat of an invasion of privacy. Some people did, some people didn't. And although I did, I know that I would be annoyed with bystanders taking pictures of my grandmother's funeral. However, when I looked at that photo, it was far and away the most powerful image I had taken in the previous five months. One look at it produced an immediate welling in my throat as I recalled the emotion of the moment-indeed, it is probably only these "controversial" photos that can produce such an emotional response. I think that a successful photo must generate some kind of a response, whether it is admiration, disgust, wonder, or interest. I'm still struggling with this one.

Less controversial, but still a challenging task for me for me is taking pictures of people, especially when they are uncomfortable with the camera. I still haven't gotten used to the social aspect of people photography, where you sometimes need to get in people's faces in order to capture a good shot. Some experienced National Photographic photographers have written about how they talk people up, share stories with their subjects, or use little tricks to get people to laugh; I still can't bring myself to do much more than smile and point at the camera, hoping for a positive response. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; it's a barrier I will have to overcome if I want to get those really memorable face shots of strangers in strange lands.

Hopefully for the next six months I'll be able to tip the balance in favour of more quality photos rather than snapshots. At the same time, we want to document our trip as thoroughly as possible, at sometimes the things we do and see just aren't that photogenic but tell a good story. It will be interesting to re-read this column at the end of our trip and see how things turn out!

Special thanks to Scott and Rochelle for bringing all that gear back home from Malta and shipping the body to Canon; to Stacy for helping me with the 10D repair order and driving me around town looking for gear; to Ray, for hauling my new lens all the way to Nepal for us; and to Lisa and Simon for bringing our new laptop all the way to Thailand for us. Also thanks to Evelyn, Ken, Gunga, and Paul for all your help with getting the laptop configured.