A quick note of apology for my lack of posts recently but I’ve been shooting in Germany and the schedule left barely enough time to offload cards every couple of days (I did, of course, manage to make time for plenty of beer and brats). As of last night, I’m back home and facing a mountain of image editing. Lots to see in the coming weeks — I’ll share as I process the photos — but for now, I’ll leave you with this teaser from a path leading to the Monument to the Battle of Nations in Leipzig.
I can’t complain about my job. I try to but nobody buys it. Truth is, it’s a pretty darned good job. I get to stay at places like the Luxor Hilton (shown above) in Luxor, Egypt and take photos. Sounds pretty sweet, doesn’t it? Take a look back across that infinity pool in the other direction:
That’s the Nile beyond the pool and the palm trees and the Valley of the Kings lies just over that mountain.
No. It’s a pretty good life.
The downside is the upside. I never get to relax by such a pool. With beautiful light like this, you’d better believe I’m scampering around taking photos. Whether I’m on assignment or not, I have to shoot. It would be painful for me to sit on one of those lounge chairs and “relax.” Relax? Are you kidding me? No, I’ll take the 2:00 am wake-up calls and the long days lugging a backpack full of gear. It’s my job.
And I wouldn’t do anything else.
Update: Okay… full disclosure. I don’t ALWAYS get to stay in places like the Luxor Hilton. Need I tell you about the time I spent a freezing winter night by a river in a four-foot-tall plywood enclosure with a cardboard box for a toilet so that I could shoot some migrating birds? ‘Nuf said.
But I still think it’s a pretty good job.
Another portrait from Egypt — this time a potter taking a break to have some tea. I had a print order to run last week and sent this and my Chinese kite flyer along for a couple of 11x14s. I don’t often get prints made for myself but these two look really nice.
As usually happens, I’m having some technical issues just when I have the least time to deal with them. One of my terabyte drives is acting up so I’ve been shuffling the data off to other drives so that I still have two copies should it go down altogether. I’m on the road for the next week so I’ll have to finish dealing with it when I get back but at least my images are safe in the meantime. I think it may just need to be reformatted but it’s not going to happen today.
As usual, I’ll do my best to post from the road.
Photographing people in Egypt is not always easy. Many want “baksheesh” — typically a dollar unless they see you have more (on a side note, on this recent trip I heard at least one person refer to American dollars as “Obamas”). I don’t have a problem with compensating someone for taking their photo but in cases like this I find that it wrecks the moment. I saw a man in a turban at one temple standing in beautiful light until he saw a photographer lining up for a photo. He then stepped back into the shadows and held out his hand. Sure, the photographer could have paid the dollar and the man would have stepped back into the light but I doubt that posed shot would have been as good as a real, found moment.
Thus I was especially pleased with this man I found at the Temple of Seti I in Abydos. He was standing inside with strong sidelight coming in through the main temple door. I made eye contact with him and raised my camera as if to ask “may I take your photo?” He responded with a slight nod and didn’t change his stance or expression in the least. It was just what I wanted. I fired off a couple of frames and someone caught his eye as they came through the door. He turned his head toward them and I got this wonderful profile that I like even better than the original shot.
When I heard that there would be 23 of us riding in the same balloon basket for a sunrise shoot on the west bank of Luxor, I hesitated. That’s a lot of folks and I knew everyone would want to be on the edge for photos but I was assured that the basket would be large so I woke up pre-dawn on my Nile cruise boat, took a bus to another dock where a small open boat ferried us across the river to another bus, which took us past the Colossi of Memnon to our launch site just over the ridge from the Valley of the Kings.
The basket was just large enough. We were shoulder to shoulder but it worked. The only worry came when changing lenses as you pretty much had to do that over the side but I returned to the earth with all the lenses and caps that I had left with.
And the views erased any doubt over whether I should have gone. The pre-dawn lift-off, sunrise over the nile, the other 20 or so balloons in the air, temples and village life. Possibly my most productive hour of the trip.
One of the highlights of my recent trip to Egypt was an early morning visit to the Temple of Ramsses II and the Temple of Nefertari at Abu Simbel. Sure, it required a 2:30 am check out from my Cairo hotel and a pre-dawn flight to Abu Simbel, but it was worth it. Even the seas of tourists couldn’t break the spell of seeing a place that has lived in my mind since seeing the National Geographic article on the efforts to save the temple from the rising waters caused by the building of the high dam at Aswan back in the late ’60s. Here is a pdf with details of the relocation. Imagine the task involved in not only cutting up and relocating the temple facade to higher ground, but also the multiple rooms that had been carved inside the mountain.
I wish the temples had never had to have been moved in the first place — the surrounding “mountain” has a Disney-ish appearance — but I’m glad to have had the opportunity to go inside without scuba equipment. It’s truly incredible the effort that went into saving these structures.
An explosion rocked the Khan al-Khalili bazaar in Cairo today near the Hussein mosque killing at least one — a French tourist. From the best I can tell from the varied reports online, it may have happened in the sidewalk cafe seating area seen in the background at the right of this image I took during my trip a couple of weeks ago. That’s the Hussein mosque in the top right. Here’s a link to the story on the BBC site. It was on CNN’s homepage earlier but has since been bumped for Oscar coverage. Such is the state of American journalism.
My wife and I often talk about our “almost life” — that life that we might lead if we had left the house 5 minutes earlier or been behind that car on the freeway instead of in front of it. So many things could send your life reeling in a different direction at any moment that it’s hard to fathom. Had my trip to Cairo been this week instead of two weeks ago… you get the idea.
You have to consider the dangers of any trip you take but you also have to be aware that things can happen to you no matter where you are. On the news this morning, I saw where a traffic accident had claimed the life of a local man. Also, a woman from a neighboring town had been killed by her ex-boyfriend. Things can happen to you anywhere, any time. That’s no excuse to take crazy chances but you do need to go about your life.
My heart goes out to the families of those that were injured or killed in this blast in Cairo. Unfortunately for the victims, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have been me, but it wasn’t. It was them and that was no fault of theirs. They were just going about their lives.
Back in the days of film, I shot only transparency — and in the latter days, primarily Fuji Velvia which was very contrasty and had rich, almost unnaturally saturated color. Transparency film was unforgiving and had very little dynamic range, meaning that it could only record a small portion of the range of lights and darks that you could see with your eyes. While digital still is far from being able to record an image with as wide a contrast range as the eye, it’s closing the gap. As I’m processing my photos from Egypt, I’m seeing that my new Nikon D700 has closed the gap even more.
I would have been hard pressed to get the shot above back in my film days. The sun was blazing and the contrast between the brightly lit stone in the courtyard of the Mosque of Mohamed Ali in Cairo’s Saladin Citadel and the shadows in the upper reaches of the surrounding arcade was huge. Still, with some minor tweaking in Adobe Lightroom 2, there is detail in every nook and cranny (reducing the image for the web has crunched the contrast a bit again but, trust me, the full size image has a ton of detail).
The camera doesn’t make a great photo, the photographer does. But a good camera can enable a photographer to capture scenes that would otherwise have been nearly impossible. I consider it a partnership. Technology is a tool like any other and I’m happy to make use of it.
update: I lost momentum on my Alamy goals while in Egypt. You can see by the chart below — the steady line is my goal of 10 images keyworded per day, the green line is my actual progress. I was ahead of schedule before Egypt but the flat section shows my lack of progress while I was out of the country. Time to make up for lost time now.
On my last night in Luxor, Egypt, I attended the sound and light show at Karnak Temple. I had heard that it would be crowded and that we’d be on the move, walking through the temple as it was illuminated, so I left the tripod at the hotel and hoped that the low noise of my new D700 would allow me to get what I needed. Now that I’m home and have the images on screen… suffice it to say that I’m impressed.
The shot above was taken at ISO 3200, f/2.8, handheld at 1/10 of a second with a Nikon D700 and the Nikkor 17-35. ISO 3200. With my D200 I would cringe every time I cranked it up to 800. There’s a bit of noise when you look at this image at full size but very, very little. Yes, I’m quite pleased.
Would a tripod have improved this shot? Sure. I could have left the ISO at 200 and had no noise whatsoever. But I have a whole variety of shots from this evening. I could compose and recompose quickly without the burden of the tripod. In the end, I think I came away with more usable images than had I taken the sticks.
Thanks, Nikon. I’m a believer.
It’s day three of my three-day trip home from Egypt. The day before yesterday I flew from Luxor, Egypt to Cairo where I overnighted before continuing on to New York and then Chicago where I stayed last night. One more leg to Kansas City this afternoon and then I’ll be home.
Lots more stories and photos to share. I’ll be fast-tracking these images for my stock agencies so expect to see more as I move through the files. I plan on using Lightroom this time rather than my usual Bridge/ACR workflow so I’ll share any observations I have regarding that as well.
It’s good to be (almost) home.