To me, blue skies are boring. I watch the weather reports and when it's going to be interesting out there, that's when I leave home with the cameras.
Stormy sunset on Mount Rubidoux, Riverside, California
Being There Now: The 60 Freeway Mastodon
Is there something in your life that you rush past every day wondering what's it's like up close? You never have time to stop and check it out, but you see it as you go by and wonder about it. For some it could be a store or a park or piece of street art or a building facade. For some Angelinos, for example, it could be the Hollywood sign. They see it from afar but and they have an idea what it might be like up there, but have never taken the time to go see it up close. They just wonder about it.
In my adopted home town, our Hollywood sign is an enormous rusty mastodon sculpture by the side of the 60 freeway. I pass it almost every day as I'm rushing off somewhere, have for years, always wondering what it's like up close. One day I decided to search for images on the internet. I thought it would be a good shortcut. But alas, it seems as if everybody just stands at the bottom of the hill with their cameras and tries to zoom in. That's not at all like being there.
Here's what it looks like in Google street view. It's a prominent landmark, but relatively far away, and for someone like me who loves monumental things, prehistoric megafauna, outsider art, metal, public oddities and roadside attractions, I finally had to grab my camera and go see this thing up close. And not standing by the side of the freeway and zooming in. I had to go be there.
I was not disappointed!
The sculpture is part of the Jurupa Mountains Discovery Center, a sort of combination amateur natural history museum and outsider art exhibit. They have this mastodon, plus a dozen or more monumental dinosaurs made out of various materials. They also have an excellent cactus and succulent garden, a gift shop and mineral exhibit, and some other seemingly random things.
I learned again a lesson I have learned many times before: don't just wonder about things. Go and find out for yourself.
Shoot 'n' Scoot or Stay and Play?
When I was just beginning to learn photography, I did a lot of what I call "shoot 'n' scoot." I'd go to a photographically interesting place, take a bunch of pictures in rapid succession, and then move on to the next pretty thing.
It took a while to learn to linger, to take in a scene, and see what happens. The good pictures from a shoot 'n' scoot are lucky shots; if you stay and get the rhythm of the place you're in, you'll have better success and learn much more.
If you're a beginner trying to improve your shots, try being slow and deliberate. Work with different settings, different angles, wait for interesting events and really "grok" a scene the best you can before moving on.
Shoot 'n' Scoot is fine for when you're a tourist or visiting places with your family. But when you're out in the field trying to make the best images you can, stay and play! One nice shot is much better than 100 ok pictures.
The Desert Winter
Every New Year's Day, Stephanie and I take a long day trip to the Mojave. It's our way to start the year with some calm beauty, because few places are as serene and lovely as the Mojave Desert in winter.
This year, New Year's eve was scheduled to receive bad weather--snow flurries and icy rain-- so we moved our annual trip forward a day. I always make a point to get out to the desert when the weather is going to be doing something interesting, because the more interesting the weather, the more interesting the landscape photography. In fact, if the sky is blue and the sun is high, my camera probably stays in the bag.
A fact about the Mojave that many people don't realize: its elevation varies wildly, from a low of 282 feet below sea level at Badwater to a high of 11,000 feet in the Panamint Mountains. Much of the Mojave is mountainous, and when it snows the elevation differences really stand out. One moment you can be driving in a snow storm, and a moment later you can be driving through a sand storm.
Moving our trip back a day to catch the weather was fortunate; the day was absolutely gorgeous and moody, the light at turns submarine and ecstatic. At its worst, in the wrong light, the desert can look stark and hideous, like a wound. But in the right light, it can be desperately lovely, full of promise and begging to be explored.
Happy New Year!
We hope you and yours have a great 2015!
Get Closer
The celebrated war photographer Robert Capa once famously quipped, "if your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough." It's an interesting and provocative thought, especially coming from a war photographer, for whom getting closer means getting closer to getting killed.
But Capa was right, of course. Many pictures would be improved by having a closer, larger subject or simply being cropped. This is because, like all art, photography usually benefits from simplification, from that clarity of communication that can only come when extraneous elements are excluded from the piece, and idea you are signifying with the picture is not subsumed in a flurry of unrelated shapes and colors, leaving the purpose of the communication fuzzy, its impact needlessly anemic.
So I try to leave out anything that isn't helping move us forward. This applied when I was writing poetry, where I laboriously pored over every single syllable, deciding if it was pulling its weight of if it had to go. And it's true of photography, but with photography, this simplification is difficult in a different way. Rather than making something from scratch, we're interpreting and communicating something that already exists. The tools for interpreting a scene photographically are pretty simple: we have focal point, framing, light and shadow, shutter speed effects, depth of field, focal length/angle of view, and distance. But putting those together into a provocative bit of information can be very tricky, and truly eliminating extraneous elements is sometimes impossible. When mindful of simplicity, framing and distance are the most powerful tools--the ones we usually turn to first.
As I approached the cluttered field of the air museum at March Air Force base this morning and saw how haphazard and scattered everything looked, with no clean backgrounds and no way to take a powerful photo of an entire plane, I remembered what Robert Capa said. Get closer.
The Mission Inn
Every year at Christmastime, our local Landmark, The Mission Inn, decorates with a superabundance of colored lights. It's lovely and it brings people in from miles around to enjoy. You have to go at dawn, however, if you want to get photographs without throngs of people in them.
The Most Serene Republic
The Salton Sea in California’s Colorado Desert is a remote, mysterious, sometimes disturbing country. Created by an engineering accident in 1905, it’s now the largest body of water in California (over 375 square miles) in the middle of one of the driest places in North America. In the mid 20th century the Sea experienced a frenetic land rush and tourist boom that long ago went bust. It became too saline and too smelly to support tourism. Fish died en masse. The sea flooded towns and then withdrew, leaving a corrosive, odiferous mud on everything. People left and never came back. Today, there’s almost nothing there except crumbling, abandoned infrastructure, broken and burned things, rust, trash, piles of fish and animal bones, and teeming flocks of migratory birds. Oh, and a couple of very tiny, very tenacious towns. But more than any of these things, the Salton Sea is made of miles and miles of blank serenity. It’s an empty spot on the map.
Nowadays, most of the few tourists who go to the Salton Sea on purpose go to photograph the scattered derelict buildings on the shores of the Sea, the feeling of armageddon, to capture in a titillating way futility and despair; or they go to see the rich and amazing bird life the Sea supports.
I go because I think it’s actually one of the most beautiful places on Earth. There are many such places, I know, but this one is mine. My most beautiful place on Earth. I have come here many times when I need to be reminded just how spiritually rejuvenating nature can be, and when I want the feeling of being truly alone to feel right and clean and inevitable. I don’t go to the armageddon shores anymore. I keep driving beyond them, beyond all the worry and loss, until I’m right here, where I took these pictures; my most beautiful place on Earth.
The Desert's Little Humiliations
The desert is full of little humiliations. It's so much bigger and stronger and more patient than anything man tries to impose on it. Yesterday Stephanie and I visited the Mojave to refresh our memories about just as how everything we put to sea eventually gets thrown back onto the shore, broken and fading, every imposition we make on the desert is similarly ephemeral and puny.
Big Head
A "ball head" is what landscape photographers use to connect their cameras to tripods. It's the business end of a tripod, and good tripods are crucial to landscape work. Ball heads must be smooth, reliable and strong. You don't want your heavy camera flopping down, you want it to remain pointed exactly where you aim it, even when you have a very long, heavy lens attached to it. Consumer-grade ball heads are prone to failure. Even when they work, tend to creep a little bit after you let go, changing your composition. Right now I can't think of anything more annoying.
Serious ball heads for serious photography tend to cost serious money... typically from $400 to $1,000. They are precisely machined by hand from expensive materials and manufactured in small quantities compared to consumer products. But recently as I was looking for a new head, an alternative came to my attention: the Sirui K-40x. This head is significantly less expensive than its competitors, yet seems to have all the quality, strength, fit, and finish it needs to do the job and be unobtrusive.
Like most professional ball heads, it comes in a soft case that doubles as a protective cover when mounted.
This head has only two control knobs: a friction clutch and a panning lock. The friction clutch employs an integrated governor that allows you to set the minimum friction so that even when loosened all the way, the head won't allow the camera to flop around, but will allow it to be precisely positioned.
The one-knob solution to setting the friction works perfectly, and removes the annoyance of trying to figure out in the dark which knob to reach for. It is a major improvement over two-knob heads and I will never buy another ball head without this feature. Set correctly and unlocked, you can smoothly position the camera without any play, yet have enough firmness to keep the camera from falling over. The friction is firm but smoothly yielding and the composition can be framed precisely. Plus, you can't accidentally remove all friction from the head; it will stay at the safe minimum. When you lock it down, it responds with remarkable solidity and doesn't creep from where you placed it. (Cheap heads change position minutely as you tighten them.) The smaller panning lock works as expected and because of its size and location, it can't be confused with the friction clutch in the dark..
Like other professional ball heads, this one is large (the ball has a 54mm diameter) and relatively light. It's made from a block of machined aluminum. Small ball heads are fine for casual use and wide angles, but longer, heavier lenses with more magnification require bigger, stronger ball heads like this to steady the camera completely and prevent blurry pictures.
At the top of the ball head where it meets the camera is a clamp designed to hold the Arca-Swiss style quick release plate which is screwed to the bottom of the camera. This is a simple screw mechanism, reliable and convenient. On my camera, rather than a quick release plate, I have added an L bracket. It also fits in the clamp on the ball head, but allows me to mount the camera in either landscape or portrait mode. It also prevents unwanted rotation of the clamp where it meets the camera, which can happen with heavier lenses... the plate begins to unscrew itself from the camera when there is torsion.
L brackets should be custom fit for your exact camera model... never buy a generic L bracket as it will only cause annoyance and you won't use it.
This then is the Sirui K-40X professional ball head. Only time will determine if it can last for years like other professional ball heads. Sirui thinks it can, which is why the head comes with an astonishing 6 year warranty. So far, I'm very pleased with this crucial piece of gear, not even accounting for the reasonable price.