Being Six

M. is six.

I don’t post a whole lot of personal stuff on this blog. Partly cos that’s not what most of you who visit here are into. Partly because you have to be a little bit careful about how much you share of yourself online, for a range of reasons.

Sometimes, though, it’s nice to be a little self-indulgent. And, well, this blog is about photos, as well as travel and aid work.

I shot this little set of photos (with one exception) during a little trip to the beach not far from where we live. I’m pretty new to this parenting thing, and it’s not without its challenges. And at times, quite frankly, it’s terrifying. But one thing I feel very strongly (not that I’d ever try and distill parenting into a catchphrase) is that one of my most important roles as a parent is to ensure that M. gets the chance just to be a kid. Not worry about all the things her mum and I worry about. Not work her tail off like we sometimes have to. Just play, and run, and laugh, and feel light, and free.

Just be six.

Because being six is about riding scooters on summer afternoons.

Being six is about having little buddies who are soft and cuddly…

…and taking them with you everywhere you go.

Being six is about kisses from mum…

…and not caring when hair gets a little crazy.

Being six is about bike-rides in the park…

…and icy-poles…

…and sticking out your tongue.

But best of all, being six means having someone there to make sure you can just, well, be six.

5 Tips for Taking a Really Great Travel Portrait

Portraiture is something I’ve increasingly aspired to as a photographer. I love a good landscape- in fact, my landscape shots are often what people seem to enjoy in my shots. Portraiture is a different skill-set though. While light changes over a landscape in such a way that you may only have a few minutes to get the shot you want, the challenge of portraiture is even greater- you may have just fractions of a second to capture the image that you have in your mind’s eye. On top of that, a really good portrait often communicates far more power and emotion to the viewer than any landscape; it’s the human element that makes it special.

The basic rules all apply, of course. You want to think about composition (the rule of thirds is a pretty reliable starting point), colour (one of the joys of travel photography are the different colour palettes you can find in both the natural and urban environments) and lighting (shooting in the tropics presents visceral challenges with regards to fierce overhead lighting, washed-out skies and high-contrast backdrops, but dust and moisture can enrich late afternoon sunlight to make it magical).

I’m sharing some specific pointers I’d like to suggest for taking a decent travel photograph. They’re not exhaustive, nor are they unique to travel portraiture, but I reckon if you can nail these, you’re well on your way to capturing the sort of image you’ll want to bring home and share with friends and family when your adventures come to a temporary halt. (I’ll leave it to you guys to decide whether these shots fit the title or not…)

Note: All these photos were taken on a 3-day field visit in rural Niger in September this year.

1. Create a Connection

This is true with any portrait. I find the most powerful portraits are those where the subject is looking straight down the camera lens. It can feel (as a viewer) as though the person is looking straight out of the photograph at you. To achieve this, you generally need some sort of relationship with the person whose picture you’re taking. It might only be a momentary one- a glance in the street- or you may have asked the person to pose for you.

In travel photography you’re often communicating across language barriers, but respect is universal, so always put it into action. Just pulling out a camera and shooting willy-nilly is a sure way to upset people. I rarely take a photo where I haven’t signalled my camera (usually pointed upwards) and waited for an inviting smile or nod, or made eye-contact with the person and waited for them to acknowledge me in some way. If I sense hesitation or hostility, I smile and move on.  Even asking in a foreign language, people usually get the idea of what you’re wanting and can communicate a reply.

While in photojournalism there’s a power and pathos that comes with shots of human suffering or deep emotion, I find the photos that people go back to tend to be ones where the subject is joyful. People are naturally drawn to beauty. With that in mind, have fun. Laugh with the person you’re shooting, give them a big smile, turn it into a game. That won’t work in all cultures: for many, having a photo taken is a serious business and they want to look their formal best. Kids, on the other hand, usually love it, and in many African countries they’re overjoyed when someone points a lens at them.

Earlier I’d asked this girl if I could take her picture, to which she’d agreed, and I got a really sweet little shot of her smiling shyly while clinging to the trunk of a tree. A few minutes later she came back to me with a cheeky smirk asking me if I’d take another photo, and when I raised my camera she giggled. I speak no Hausa and she spoke no French, but as you can see, the communication worked just fine.

2. Consider your Background

When you’re taking a portrait, the person is your main point of focus, but they exist in a context. In fact this is the major difference between travel (and candid) portraiture versus studio portraiture. With the latter, you control the background ahead of time. With the former, you need to manage it on the fly- itself a challenge that can be both satisfying and heart-breaking.

Background can become a part of your visual narrative, or it can distract from it, so think about the effect you want. Environmental portraits frame people in a shot with items that contribute to telling that person’s story. A merchant in a fruit stall, for example, may be best photographed standing with all her colourful pineapples sharply in focus. For this you probably want to use a wider-angle lens (not too wide, as wide angles distort images and can stretch facial features unnaturally) and a reasonably small aperture (f/8 and higher, light-depending). Again, the joy of travel portraiture is that backgrounds are often exotic and full of interest.

On the other hand, a child on a busy street may get lost in the clutter if you don’t defocus your background. Use a mid-range telephoto lens and open the aperture wide to get a really shallow depth of field, which naturally throws the background out of focus. Just make sure your point of focus is spot-on, or you may end up with a fuzzy subject too.

If the background is unremarkable you probably want to use this technique too.  In the photo at the top of this page, the background was burning white sand- totally uninteresting and threatening to wash out the photo- so blurring it into white made the most sense.  This has advantages (declutter and an element of the abstract) but also disadvantages (the photo is placeless and has no context).

In this first photo, I chose to use a really shallow depth of field as the background was fairly dull, and I wanted the farmer to stand out. Using a small f-stop number (f/1.8) also means that the part of the shot that is in focus is REALLY sharp. The blurred green trees give just enough information to let you know you’re in the countryside, but don’t pull the eye away from the man’s wrinkled face.

In this next shot, the girl is standing against the wall, so both she and the wall are in focus. The wall is painted with a map of Africa. Although the girl herself doesn’t stand out quite so much from the background, the colours and textures are pleasing to the eye, and the map itself tells a story and gives the girl a context which (in my opinion) adds something unique to the photograph that might have been lost had she been against an empty or blurred background.

In this third shot, the boy is in focus while everything forward of and beyond him starts to blur out. There’s just enough detail, however, to give him a context- the cows, the harness and the water containers, as well as the rural backdrop. Because he alone is in focus he still holds the viewer’s eye, but there are other elements in the image that contribute to telling the viewer something about who he is and what he does.  Note: You could argue that this photo would have benefitted from a broader depth-of-field (something around f/4) to keep the cows sharp but still blur the background, and I’d accept that criticism, although I also like how isolated the boy is from everything around him; you can see just how precise the depth is by looking at how much of the yoke, front-to-back, is actually in focus before it blurs out.

3. Be Ready for the Right Moment

Facial expressions are fleeting, as are connections. If you’re in a place where you think you might see something interesting, have your camera out and switched on, with the right lens fitted, the correct mode selected, and your eyes scanning. You might be looking for a gesture, an emotion, or a fleeting glimpse of eye-contact. People may be moving. Think about your shutter-speed- will you be able to freeze motion given the light available to you? And think too about point number one and the importance of communication and respect; even in a crowded place, have you made eye-contact with the people you’re wanting to photograph, or made sure they’re comfortable with the camera? Stand-off lenses are all very well, but as a photographer you need to be asking yourself these ethical questions.

In both of these photos, these kids made eye-contact with me for just a few seconds where they were caught in a crowd of others. The children there had been watching me for some while and I’d been looking back at them and smiling, and noting those that smiled back at me and at the camera. I already had the aperture opened up so that when my opportunity came I knew I’d be able to isolate whichever children gave me a moment to photograph, and these two did.

4. Go for the Eyes

If there’s a cardinal rule in portrait photography, it’s this one. Eyes are all about moment and connection. They communicate emotion to the viewer, and a simple glance of a couple of degrees off-lens can make the difference between a missed opportunity and a wow moment. This is particularly true of close-ups.

For eyes, think about placement; rule of thirds is usually the way forwards here, so try and get one eye onto that sweet-spot at the intersection of the thirds-lines. An eye-line straight down the barrel is usually what I go for, and almost all of the portraits I’ve loved have involved that sort of eye contact. If using shallow depth of field, ensure that the eye itself is the point of focus. It’s all too easy to accidentally focus on the forehead or the tip of the nose, and even with a really strong facial expression, you’ll lose some of the punch of the image.

These two shots were both taken at a school in Niger (one inside the classroom and one outside), and they are both among some of my favourite portraits of all time.

5. Tell a Story

This is optional, but the difference between a techncially good photo, and a photo which makes people sit up and take notice, is that with the latter, they’re experiencing something new. The beauty of travel photography is that there’s always a story to be told, something new to see, something that’s exotic to the viewer back home, so try and think of what that story might be. A facet of daily life, a curious setting, some exotic produce, or just an unusual face that communicates a sense of place or time- it can be any number of things. Put this together with capturing the right moment and working on your background, and you’ll have a photograph that will really help you remember a place.

In this photo, I managed to combine moment, background, eye-contact and connection, and the setting was such that I’ve been able to capture a little slice of existence in this rural African village. Girls in Niger, as in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, are the ones mostly tasked with collecting water- even quite young girls like this one. Here, I love the colour, the bright light, her expression, and the pouring of the water all framed crisply against a blurred backdrop of other women and girls waiting at the well behind her (and again, contrast this with the image at the top of the page which has no background).

Travel photography- and portraiture- is a personal thing, and it’s up to you as the photographer to decide what you want to remember, and how. Really, if you take a photo, and it reminds you of something special, and you’re proud of it, that’s all that matters. I wish you all the best of luck out there, and most of all, I encourage you to have fun. If you’re not enjoying yourself with you camera, seriously, what’s the point?

Negotiating Extremes

The life of an aid worker is necessarily made up of contrasts. I deploy from a suburban home in a wealthy western city and find myself, seventy-two hours later, standing in a dusty village where people sleep outside and struggle to survive if the rains don’t bless them. I swap material comforts for long hours in a bumpy four-wheel drive, a temperate climate for one of the hottest on earth, and the companionship of friends and family for those of strangers- or nobody at all.

On the other end of the spectrum, of course, the newness and exoticism of the experiences we expose ourselves to form their own sort of extreme. My commute to work in the morning lasts about the same amount of time, but instead of driving down multi-lane highways, I walk on a sand footpath through a bustling African market lined with silversmith workshops, stalls selling used clothes, and a bird vendor with a giant cage full of pigeons (yum) and several smaller ones housing grey parrots. I immerse myself in the chatter of foreign languages- some of them known to me, most of them not- and equally foreign cuisine. The harsh semi-desert landscape is just another reminder of how different this place is from the one I currently call home- and how far.

***

On Thursday we travel to a second nutrition centre, again a couple of hours along sand tracks. The health centre is based out of a fair-sized bush town, and the place is teeming with women when we get there. We’ve timed our arrival earlier this time, and get there just as activities are starting.

It’s more of the same. Much more. Although the program has been running for a little while, we’re adding dozens of new cases of malnourished children to our roster in this location today, child after child meeting our criteria for malnutrition. The screening point is under a lean-to, a small patch of shade in the middle of the sand, and the women form a tight mob around it despite the best efforts of our staff to keep them in an orderly line.

While Mike and Cam go looking for stories, I watch the proceedings. I check out the screening point where the children are weighed and measured, all bustle and activity. I walk around to where the health workers are handing out the ration of nutritious paste for the severely malnourished kids from a darkened room- oddly quiet after the cacophony of squawking voices and wailing babies. Out under the trees, a second distribution is taking place for moderately malnourished children, where they receive a reinforced meal-mix which is poured out into a piece of cloth which the mothers then tie into a bundle and carry home on their heads.

I’m back to feeling a fraud again. Wandering from post to post, watching, asking a few questions, taking the odd photo and smiling at the mothers, some of whom try to engage me in conversation, which peters out quickly because I speak precisely no Hausa. I don’t feel like I’m doing anything useful. Just a token white guy with a camera. I feel like the mothers see my inadequacy. I’m a voyeur. A disaster tourist. Wretched insecurity.

Standing near one knot of mothers, I’m pulled aside by a couple of women who show their companion to me. She’s a young mother of twins, and herself looks haggard and unwell. She has two tiny infants, one strapped to her front, another to her back. They both look ill. The one on her front can’t hold its head upright, and it flops back unnaturally, eyes half-open and milky. I palm its tiny brown skull in my hand and lift it, and it feels both heavy, and terribly fragile. The difference between life and death is just a frail thread here.

I talk to the nutritionists, but we can’t help this woman. The children are too young- four months old- and the only thing we can do is press on the mother how important it is that she keep breastfeeding them. Her milk is far healthier and nutritious for them than any artificial produce we can give her, and at any rate, her little ones are too small to be able to safely digest the food we give to the kids in our program, who have to be a minimum of six months old.

The nutritionist spends some time talking to the woman, driving home how crucial it is that she keeps breastfeeding. It’s a huge challenge in Niger, where breastfeeding is seen as undesirable, and children are weaned far too early onto foods their bodies are not able to digest. I hope and pray that this mother hears the words and puts them into practice. It’s a terrible feeling to step away from a situation like that and feel utterly unable to help, but to leave these children’s chance of survival in the hands of somebody who may not want to take the action she needs to take.

The others are following up their own story, the case of an eight-month old boy who weighs what Mike’s son did at birth. He is so visibly emaciated that we all wince at the sight of him. He has spindly arms, so skinny that the definition of his bones stand out. His skull is round and bulbous, his lips drawn back over his teeth in a sneer, and there are vertical scars cut into the side of his scalp, a traditional talisman to hurry healing. Days later, we’ll still be talking about him.

We move on from the village in the early afternoon. It’s baking hot out in the open, and we retreat to another compound to have a brief lunch, struggling with an element of guilt as we do so. We’re all feeling a little flat after witnessing the morning’s activities. On the one hand, there’s an element of rejoicing that the team have managed to identify nearly a hundred new malnourished children who will now be able to receive treatment. On the other, it’s hard not to feel a heaviness seeing that volume of sick children. And although there are kids I’ve seen today that have their progress marked on their health-cards in ever-increasing weight-gain, the ones that haunt me are the ones, six weeks on, whose weight has continued to slide downhill.

We load up into two Land Cruisers and head back the way we came from Maradi. There’s a village, Zakara, about forty minutes from here we passed through in the morning. Mike and Cam really liked the look of it as a place to get what they call ‘GV’, or ‘General Vision’. Those are the background shots that help the viewer get a feel for what the place is like while the narrator, out of sight, talks about what is going on. Where the road enters the village, it narrows and passes between two mud-brick walls, a unique and atmospheric feel that the cameraman wants to capture.

We reach the village and, as is always the case in Niger, our arrival creates a little stir. The men are often found resting in lean-tos at the side of the road, keeping out of the roasting afternoon sun. A pack of kids draws up around us as we exit the vehicles and go to greet the men, looking for the chief so we can ask his permission to film. Well before we find him, Cam is an instant hit with the kits. Blond, at six-foot-five, and lugging a gigantic TV camera on one shoulder, he’s like a magnet dropped into a pile of iron filings. Within a minute or two, there have to be over a hundred kids knotted around us generally, and him specifically, all wide curious eyes and big toothy grins.

It feels like the whole village has come out to see us.

This presents a slight problem. Cam was looking for an atmospheric shot of the mud-walled lanes. Quiet, shady, with perhaps a person or two walking in the background but otherwise, a scenery shot. Probably a couple of wide-angle takes from ankle-height. Right now there’s so little room to move, he couldn’t lower the camera from his shoulder without clocking two or three African children in the process.

We strategise. Cam isn’t the only one with pulling-power. I have a camera, and Mike’s famous in New Zealand. Surely that counts for something? I get people lining up for photos, and Cam tries to take a walk.

The crowd see the camera start to drift away and are onto him like a pack of Orcas on a wounded whale. Fail.

We take a walk up the street. By we, I mean the team, and the entire village. The mood is electric. People are laughing and smiling. We all think this is great fun. It’s not what we’d planned, but it’s totally out of our control and we know it. Trying to move this crowd would be like trying to stop a dust-storm.

I do a couple of walking shots with Mike when we get to one end of the street, and once again we try and draw the mob away from the camera to give Cam his shots.

“Let’s see what sort of pulling power we have,” Mike says, and we begin to trot away.

The crowd ignores us, locked adoringly on the fair giant with the funny camera, and we laugh hard at our total lack of appeal. When Cam starts to walk, the crowd surges with him. Their feet churn up dust which fills the air.

We reach the centre where the trucks are parked. I fit my wide-angle lens and climb onto the roof of one of the Cruisers to snap the crowd. This provides some entertainment, and the vehicle is quickly thronged. The colours are magnificent, and so are the grinning faces. Everybody is having a ball with these loony whites and their cameras, climbing all over vehicles.

Cam takes some more shots, ringed with children, then spies a donkey which a couple of kids have driven into the crowd. He kneels down to get some wide-angle shots of its docile face, and the whole village erupts in peals of belly-laughter. This is great sport. Children swarm the poor animal- and Cam as well, until he’s only discernable by the camera on his shoulder.

Finally, some of the men of the village work out that Cam wants some space, and let him into a compound, blocking the kids at the gate from following him. They then turn their attention onto Mike, George and I. We decide to try and create some space for Cam, so we take them for a little walk.

We start off, and the kids pour down the narrow street, running and shouting and having a great old time. They’re going to be talking about us for months to come. I’m feeling like a total cliche right now- a typical white guy in Africa- but actually, while village welcomes aren’t uncommon, I’ve never seen a spontaneous celebration quite like this one before. What’s overwhelming is the sense of innocent joy that’s being expressed in every direction. They’re genuinely thrilled just to have us.

We get to the edge of the village. We look at each other. “Now what?”

The kids are watching us expectantly.

“Okay,” I say, “Who’s going to dance for them.”

George looks at Mike, who’s a Maori and a rugby player.

“Mike,” she says, “Can you do the Haka?”

Mike shoots her a grubby look that says has no intention of doing the Haka in the middle of a dusty village, but it only takes a few moments of urging, and the expectant gaze of a hundred small Nigerien children to break him. He bends his knees, glowers at the crowd, and slaps his hands against his thighs.

“Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!”

The effect is stunning. These kids have never seen a Haka before, but they know straight away what’s going on, and within half a second, the ring closest to him are already mimicking him, slapping their thighs with much delight.

Mike does the Haka, and a hundred Nigerien village children are rapt.

When he finishes the war-dance with his leap, half of them jump with him, arms raised in exuberance, while George and I fall about laughing. Everyone cheers, almost giddy with excitement. The laughter is contagious. The joy is tangible.

We walk back to the cars. Dust billows into the air beneath the slap of two hundred bare and flipflopped feet. A couple of the braver kids reach out and touch the skin of my arm. It’s pale (by their standards, though I like my tan) and hairy. They giggle. I look down, and they are uncertain for a moment as to whether they’ve crossed a taboo. When I grin at them, the spell is broken, and a moment later my arm is seized by a dozen different hands, stroking it, pulling on it, giggles bordering on hysteria as they paw my skin.

We leave the village feeling like celebrities. The whole lot have shown up to see us off, lining the road, waving as we go. A bunch of kids chase the vehicles to the edge of the village. There’s a glow that remains in the car all the way back to Maradi- and for a long time after that as well. Days later, we all reflect on how Zakara was one of the best times any of us had ever had in the field.

***

We’d left the health centre feeling pretty broken by the heartlessness of life in the Nigerien hinterland. An hour later, and we were surrounded by happy cheering children and bouyed up by an unspeakable joy.

Every day in the field is special in its own way. I’ve had a lot, and a lot of them are memorable. Several of them I’ve written about on this blog.

This one was particular. Negotiating the extremes of sadness at the plight of critically-ill children, to the spontaneous celebration of Zakara, covered a spectrum of emotion I’ve rarely experienced in a single day’s work. And it served as a beautiful reminder of why, sometimes, being an aid worker can be an incredible privilege. Some days, I really resent what I do, torn away from friends, loved ones, simplicity and comfort. But not today. Today I know just how lucky I am.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Maradi, Niger

Fiji Babies

When you say the word Fiji, the sort of thing that comes to mind is generally some variation on this:

(In fact, the variation is probably a little more attractive than this particular beach, which is artificially created- and raked- on the edge of what would once have been mangrove swamps around the heavily developed Denarau Island)

Fiji, like many places that are high on the tourist agenda, is actually a bit of a melting pot.  It has rich bits and poor bits, pretty bits and ugly bits, and all kind of swirly dichotomies in the mix.  Its population, for example, is a blend of Melanesian, Polynesian, and Indian (or Indo-Fijian).  (The Indians were brought in as labourers to harvest the sugar cane crop, and stayed to set up businesses; they now make up slightly less than 50% of the population and were apparently an absolute majority before the coup).

Oh yeah, that’s the other thing about Fiji.  It’s kind of under a form of Military Dictatorship Lite.

I’m faecetious about the thing only because when you compare Fiji’s to other coup-prone countries like recent bloodbath in Guinea, or the cuddly chaps who run Chad, Frankie (Bainimarama- who heads up Fiji’s junta) comes across as all kinds of benevolent.  Of course, for political opponents on the little archipelagic state (and for the Powers That Be in the Commonwealth, who have suspended Fiji, putting it into the same category of nations as Zimbabwe- God Bless Bob) this isn’t much of a laughing matter.

Digression.

At any rate, behind the touristy facade of Hiltons, Westins, Sheratons and Holiday Inns (or is that Holidays Inn?), there is a real country with real socio-economic disparity.  Again, compared to the levels of poverty and physical deprivation you find in Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s hard to get too excited about the situation in the Pacific (as I discovered during my time in PNG). Fiji really isn’t all that poor by comparison, especially with the huge annual influx of tourist dollars.  None the less, there’s a more impoverished side that most visitors don’t visit.

I was in Fiji for work (yeah, I have a crappy job, eh?), which I’ll probably tell you more about on a later post sometime in early August for reasons which will become clear then.  Part of that work involved checking out some of the local communities, and while it was interesting to take a wander round and see bits of Fiji I’ve missed before, I did, obviously, take the opportunity to do some clicking.  Just for a change.

This little series of shots I took at a village at the very end of the day, as the sun was going down behind the trees.  As such a few of my photos were a little blurry as I was shooting in moderately (though not extremely) low light.  As we came out of the village meeting house, there were lots of kids playing on the green, and when they saw the camera, they got very excited.

I took this first shot moments after bringing the camera up.  These little tykes over in the distance (I’m shooting on my 85mm stopped all the way down to f/1.8 here) took one look at me and dashed together into a huddle, grinning cheekily despite being 20m away from me.  I loved the effect- the kids in focus and the rest of the frame blurred out from the shallow depth of field- and the free-form mob they created.

(Click on the image to see the full-size pic, which will let you enjoy it a lot more)

After that I had kids rushing at me and it was a scramble to keep them off the lens.  The 85mm was useless for snapping group photos at close range, and at first as I backed up, they kept following me.  However I did manage to get this one shot which I really loved.  The framing is ‘imperfect’ in that I’ve lopped off the head of one lad, and a second is out of focus with the shallow depth-of-field.  However I love the expression on the face of the taller boy, and the sharpness of that image, and somehow the balance of the composition with the three heads just works.  Well, I like it anyway.

I managed a couple of group shots after that.  They’re a hit-and-miss sort of photo in that they can be boring, and they’re often less intimate than portraits of one or two people (see above), and the chances of getting all members looking at the camera are pretty much nil- especially with kids.  In this case the children all insisted on making hand-gestures at the camera, the value of which I’m not sure about, but they clearly meant something because from the largest to the smallest they seemed intent on doing so.  But these two shots I liked.  The first was taken on the 85mm, and the second on my 16mm (which on the full-frame Canon EOS 5D gives an enourmous wide angle).

A brief comparison of the two shots also tells you a little about the difference between telephoto and wide-angle.  While the children in both images are taking up about the same amount of the frame, you can see how the telephoto has sucked right in to (and blurred) the background, while the wide-angle has embraced a huge chunk of the village behind it.

Also, I love the waving hands of the little tyke in blue.

I was only in Fiji for 2 days (it’s my 3rd trip there so I didn’t feel too hard-done by), but I’m heading back to Fiji at the end of this month and I’m hoping for stacks more shots.  I will, predictably, keep you posted.

Frozen in a Moment

I went with friends A and M to the waterpark the other day.  We had a glorious sunny day (with a chilly wind), and M in particular was more excited than I have ever seen a child get- quite literally quivering with excitement at the sight of the coloured slides and water-drenched playgrounds, prancing like a pony on the spot while she waited for the sluggish adults with her to keep up (or not).  She had a great time.

Water makes for an awesome photography subject at almost any time- its textures, the way it changes, the way it plays with the light…  There’s a myriad of different combinations, each of them unique.

In a flash of brilliant foresight I took the WP DC-21 dive case for my Powershot G9 so that I had a splashproof camera.  In the case I don’t get as much control over shutter-speed and aperture, so I set it on Program, had it underexpose the shots slightly by default, and let the camera chose its settings.  In the bright sunlight, the camera compensated by choosing a fast shutter-speed.

I spent a bit of time at the bottom of some of the slides catching M and A as they hit the splash-tray at the bottom.  And splash they did.  Even the process of taking the photos was fun, as spraying water slooshed over the camera lens- and my nasal passages to boot.

With the fast shutter-speed, the camera froze the sprays in beautiful moments of physical expression.  Strings of loosely-associated water-droplets hanging in space, great shimmering sheets of translucent fluid frozen like ice in a moment of time, and the beautiful fluid contours that to the naked eye break apart quicker than we can take them in, but captured by light sensors, remain like some crystaline architecture.

These shots are some of my favourites- made more fun by the bright colours of the playground themselves.  I’m especially fond of this last shot and the way M’s face is (by pure chance) framed by the tube of hurtling water.

Note: Click the photos to see more detail.

How to freeze splashes with the camera:

It really comes down to Fast Shutter Speed.  The faster the shutter speed, the sharper the droplets of water will appear (i.e. the less distance they will be able to move during the time the shutter is open).  Speeds around and beyond 1/1000th of a second will give best results.  Increasing the shutter speed obviously decreases the amount of light getting into the camera (a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second lets in half the light photons of 1/500th of a second- obviously) so you need to be able to compensate for this.  Shooting on a sunny day will allow faster shutter speeds (but you can’t always control this).  Increasing your aperture (to numbers like f/2.8) will allow more light in so you can balance the faster shutter-speed.  Likewise increasing your ISO (from, say, 100 to 400, which allows the image to expose 4 times quicker) also has the same effect.

Note the downsides.  Shooting on a sunny day can lead to high-contrast photos (bad for portraits, as a rule) and if you shoot into the sun, expect backlighting effects (like the black-and-white, above), lens-flare, overexposure or a loss of colour.  Increasing the aperture reduces the depth-of-field (the amount of the image front-t0-back which is kept in focus)- when shooting close to the subject you’ll find that as little as a few inches of the photo only are sharp, while the rest falls quickly out of focus- great artistic effect if you nail it right (or get lucky- see the last shot).  Increasing ISO adds ‘noise’ or ‘grain’ to a photo (depending on how good the sensor is) so shots may appear of a lower quality.

If you’re not comfortable managing your camera’s settings on fully manual (M) mode, and the automatic (A) mode isn’t giving you the results you want, set the camera to the time-value (Tv) mode, which lets you directly control shutter-speed while automatically compensating the other exposure values to give you the parameters you want.

Note that to get the right moment of splash and the best sprays, you need to get the timing right.  Pre-focusing the camera on the point of impact is your best bet.  Pre-focused, most SLR cameras are instantaneous so it comes down to your reflexes.  If you’ve got a point-and-shoot or compact camera, these have varying delays (even pre-focused) so you’ll need to be familiar with these.  Alternatively you can set the camera to multiple-exposure mode and hold down the fire button.  A good camera can take several frames per second (depending on the motor/drive and the format of the exposure (RAW, hi-rez JPEG, lo-rez JPEG) and can capture several shots of action to give you a good chance of getting the shot.  Most point-and-shoots have slower drives and often have long delays between frames so you could miss the fun.

Of course, you can just point, shoot and hope for the best.  That works too.

Just Another Public Holiday?

As a Kiwi it’s pretty hard for me to get too teary about Australia Day. Don’t get me wrong. I love an excuse for a good barbie and a few cold ones on a summer’s afternoon with mates in the back yard. And Australia has been a good home-base for me these past seven years (on and off). I’ve made some spectacular friends, think Melbourne’s a brilliant city to live in, and have a lot of fond memories of being here.

None the less, hailing from Aotearoa, I can’t help recalling my heritage which insists that I support just two teams: New Zealand, and anybody playing Australia.

However, in the vein of good sportsmanship (and let’s face it, for all the cross-Tasman vibes, we’re all good sports about it) I share the following clip which a friend of mine passed on to me some months ago and which came back to mind last night. If you’re an Australian, or just happen to know one, I hope you find this video as amusing as I do.

Happy Australia Day!

Tris

Notes:

1. This clip is actually taken from an Australian TV series called the Gruen Transfer, which uses creative panels to produce entertaining material to support and demonstrate theory and practice in advertising and marketing. The second clip (my favourite) is actually a spoof of a well-known New Zealand tourism commercial.

2. [Nerd Alert] If you pause the clip at 1:03, where the text says “0% Infantry” and shows a man walking in the mountains, that clip is in fact not shot in New Zealand, but shot in the Annapurna Sanctuary in Nepal. The mountain is Annapurna South, and if you don’t believe me, check out the second photo on my profile page and compare the mountain behind me with the mountain on the screen.

Yeah, I’m a total mountain geek…

Snowkiting: As Dumb As It Sounds

In my mind’s eye I hold the images I couldn’t photograph. We ride down a snowy ridgeline atop a range of hills topped by round, rolling crests, like a slow ocean swell frozen in place. The sky is a bottomless blue colour overhead that feels infinitely deep when constrasted with the brilliant white of the landscape. The wind is brisk and steady on my right cheek. To my left, a vivid green kite canopy hangs at the end of a taut twenty-metre line, about thirty degrees off vertical, locked in an open C-shape where the wind fills the foil. I am the third in four as we skim down the slope, our kites multicoloured variants of the same theme, the curious engines that conspire with gravity to drive us forward. I am leaning into the wind and carving my skis into the slope hard to hold my ground against the tug of the kite. The air is crisp and cold and pressing itself hard against my face. My body and my mind are focused on balancing the different forces pulling me down and across the mountain, and it’s exhilerating. As I look ahead, I watch Fabrice at the head of our line cut shallow ‘S’ turns into the slope where he plays joyfully close to a curled frozen windlip dropping forty feet into a gully below. He carves out into the wind, then snakes gently back again while his kite hangs static above him. We can see multiple peaks and multiple ridgelines, filling our vision from horizon to horizon, and we four are the only other humans we can see.

On our first day in the Southern Alps, our guide told us,

“The very best days of my life have been snow-kiting, and the very worst days of my life have been snow-kiting”.

Having spent a little time in the backcountry, I could guess at what he was alluding to, but it wouldn’t take very long at all for me to discover what he was hinting at for myself.

Snow kiting is a curious sport. Of all the ‘extreme’ sports that I’ve taken part in at various points of my extended adolescence (off-piste skiing, rock-climbing and abseiling, mountain-biking, tandem skydiving, white-water rafting and kayaking, and a variety of other activities), snow-kiting is certainly the one that best fits the ‘extreme’ tag. It is the most technically challenging by far to learn, and it is also the sport which I reckon offers the greatest chance of inflicting a serious injury on yourself. That said, on the occasions when it all comes together, our guide’s comment rang true. When it works, it’s absolutely fantastic.

The sport of kite-surfing has become recognizable over the last decade. Largely replacing the sport of windsurfing/sailboarding among the younger generations, it is an iteration of the same activity, where participants strap a [smaller] board to their feet and use a ‘kite’- a wing or sail canopy flown at the end of a series of lines, which can either be a foil or with a lightweight inflatable frame. The kite hangs in the wind, and by flying the kite back and forth (the kite is a structural wing), lift is produced which allows the kite-surfer to travel back and forth on the water- and, when they’re good enough- catch some pretty good air as well.

Snow-kiting is more or less the same sport, only adherents use a pair of skis or a snowboard as their ride. Then they do the same thing back and forth on a hillside rather than the open sea. It’s a subtle shift in medium, although in fact there are several key differences that make snow-kiting considerably more challenging to master (in my inexperienced and inexpert opinion).

The first and most obvious change is that snow is not water. This may sound like a silly observation to make, but it has some fundamental implications. You can’t drown in snow, for example. You can, however, break bones. Or snap them. Or shatter them. You can also bury yourself in avalanches, if you get onto the wrong slope. Which isn’t really a lot better than drowning, apparently.

The next difference is that you have to add a whole third dimension of travel. Kite-surfing generally involves going forwards, backwards, and side-to-side. This is all influenced (obviously) by wind direction. In the mountains, you also have the uphill and downhill elements. Travelling uphill is harder (in terms of the resistance you get from gravity). Travelling downhill, easier. Travelling uphill downwind is okay because you can get the kite to pull you up it. Travelling downhill allows you to move upwind- an advantage you don’t get in the sea so much. However travelling uphill upwind is near impossible as you’re fighting both gravity and the wind. It’s probably a losing battle. And travelling downhill downwind is quite simply terrifying.

You got all that?

The third big difference is that the land features affect how the wind travels. Subconciously we’re all vaguely aware of this. Standing on a hilltop you get more wind than standing on the downwind slope of the hill. Wind accelerates as it goes over the top of an obstacle, and can be channelled around an obstacle, so wind direction in gullies can be unpredictable, and the wind speed itself can drop off altogether. So you have to think not just in terms of how to travel with the wind, but also where the wind is likely to be strong or weak. You might be sailing quite happily along a ridgeline, but if you drop into a little valley the wind can evaporate and you’re left with a long steep climb in deep snow dragging your kite and skis back onto the hilltop to relaunch.

It’s really fun. I did it a lot.

In addition, you add in all the complications of regular backcountry skiing. Terrain hazards like rocks, crevasses and cliffs. Varying snow quality and surface (we spent some time skittering over frozen windcrust one evening, which was every bit as much fun as it sounds). Avalanche risk (this year is said to have the most extreme avalanche hazard in living memory in New Zealand right now). And the sheer remoteness of the locations you sometimes play in (though in this case we were mostly within easy striking distance of a lodge).

I think the challenge of snow-kiting appealed to me because it really was the confluence of two already-challenging sports. When you get riding, you have to think about all the elements of skiing: speed, direction, slope, hazard, surface condition, controlling the skis, etc. On top of that, you have to think about the kite: wind speed, direction, how it flows with the landscape and how to pick your route, which direction the kite is pulling you, whether the kite is diving or climbing or static, and so forth. All at the same time. It’s sensory overload coupled with multitasking to the max. One of these days I’m sure it will all become automatic and instinctive, but I have to say at this point in time, it’s exhausting.

And of course, with this sort of complexity, there’s lots of opportunity for it to all go horribly wrong. Launching a kite in strong wind is a pretty scary prospect as it can be quite hard to control, and more than once I ended up having my kite yank up into the air, yanking me horizontally across the landscape on my face. When you crash out skiing, most of the time you hit the snow and decelerate (though most of us have experienced brief high-angle incidents where this doesn’t hold true…). However when you biff hanging on to a kite, you have the initial impact- driven by both gravity and wind- but while gravity eases off, the wind doesn’t.

In a best-case scenario, you keep control of the kite, drag through the snow a short distance, then regain control of the [still airborne] kite and pull yourself back to your feet. Or lie there for a few minutes to catch your wind while keeping the kite lazily floating. In a less-good-case scenario, after you crash, you also lose control of the kite. The kite dives towards the ground, and for a few seconds all the power comes on to the kite, accelerating you across the ground in whatever state you happen to have landed, before finally hitting the snow. If you’re lucky, it’ll fold and stay there. If not, it can keep dragging you downwind- into and over anything that might be in your path- until you have the presence of mind and physical ability to reach your break or, in a worst-case scenario, your emergency release cord.

Also fun.

The recovery can be a hoot as well. The foil kites we were mostly flying were controlled by a bar with four fine lines on it- two front lines (left and right), and two rear lines (left and right). These lead to a bridle with two dozen connection points and a number of pulleys and knots and other fun string-related paraphenalia, all of which hang neatly from the kite while in midair, and get horribly, horribly entangled when it crashes and twists. I’m not great at untying tangled knots in fine nylon cable at the best of times. Doing it in ski-gloves in a gusting 20-knot breeze (which keeps tugging the lines) when the air temperature is –4 and I’m having to trudge through knee-deep powder in heavy ski-boots is a long, long way from my idea of fun. One particular afternoon I spent an hour and a half detangling my lines from a single messy crash.

But there were moments- prolonged, beautiful moments, I should add- where it all worked perfectly. Like those runs we had up on the Old Man Range a couple of hours out of Queenstown, out in the middle of nowhere while the wind took us up and down the gently angled slopes of the ridgeline. Or enjoying the soft powder of our first few days on the edge of the Pisa Ranges, when the power comes on and you lean right back against the wind so that you can reach out an arm and drag it in the snow if you feel like, with the kite hanging fully-charged a few metres off the snowpack downwind, and you glide, almost weightless, across the slope. It doesn’t yet come to me with the ease of downhill skiing, but I have to confess that kite sports have me solidly hooked, and I can easily see why being a competent snow-kiter would be one of the most rewarding sports out there to master.

 

 

Photo Note: All photos by me.  None actually of me.

The Photographer’s Dilemma

One of the tragedies of being a photographer is that you’re usually the one behind the camera, and don’t end up with many photographs of yourself. I’m not at all camera-shy. In fact I’m perfectly happy when somebody points one at me and offers to take some pictures. It doesn’t happen very often. Less when the activities you get up to revolve around being in camera-unfriendly environments such as salty lagoons or windy beaches (lately, at any rate). Less still when the people you hang out with get to know you as the photographer and are either too shy to take their camera out, or simply rely on you to do most of the shooting. At any rate, I don’t seem to have too many pictures of myself, and almost none of me in action.

This has proved to be a nuisance at work, particularly on the occasions where our comms/media folks have wanted pictures of me for publications or the website. “Don’t you have any pictures of you in the field?” they ask. They tend to want something which shows me wearing our organization’s logo, surrounded by a throng of happy poor children in some third-world slum. Never mind the fact that half the places I end up these days seem to ban taking any photographs. I keep telling them to deploy me with a photographer. After all, it’s not like I can take a photo of myself. And at any rate, most kids are frightened of me. I think it’s the beard.

So it was rather nice to have some photos taken of me by my friends Scott and Sarah, sitting in the boat while I was doing some wakeboarding. Using a newly-sourced Canon Powershot G10 (I add, being the Canon affectionado that I am) they snapped these shots of me having fun on the water, which I’m quite pleased with. So, thank you Sarah and Scott- all photo credits for these ones goes to you.

And with that I promise I’m pretty much out of wakeboarding photos now…

Splashing Out

Wakeboarding is a lot of fun. I don’t mean to go on about it. It’s not like I’m a professional wakeboarder. I’ve had two lessons. I can just about ride toe-side and I’m certainly not comfortable riding with either foot forward. It’s not even a new passion in life (though I get a real kick out of it)- I’m still a skier (snow) at heart… and attempting to branch into kite-sports. But, well, I guess it’s one of those sports which, because it involves spending time watching your buddies from the sanctity of a motorboat, there’s time to play with the camera. Hence some photos.

You’ve seen the regular shots, of course. I like them for the water patterns. But as with all good outdoor sports, the shots of someone looking cool and [possibly] looking vaguely like they know what they’re doing, are only made perfect by the pictures of people biff. And biffing hard.

I share these shots for my own entertainment. And for my good friend Aaron “Huh, we appear to be lost in the mountains again” Mackie (of backcountry skiing fame), who never ceases to be amused by the sight of a good wipeout.

This is my buddy Scott, shot over about a second and a half worth of losing it:

This is also Scott. We felt this impact from the boat. A sort of audible “whumph” as he nailed the surface of the lagoon. He didn’t get up too quick from it. My personal favourite feature of this shot is the lone ski, skittering along the surface of the water, sans rider:

And this is me, courtesy of Sarah in the boat. I figure it’s only fair to share the love…

Monoski

The day before I left my last posting we went back north to do some more wakeboarding.  Here’s a handful of shots I took from the back of the boat while Scott was playing on the monoski.  If these bore you, skip right past to something more interesting, I promise this isn’t all I have on this site.  There are lots more regular posts coming, I just wanted to share some of the shots I liked.