Today’s shoot comes from a reenactment held this morning of the 1856 Battle of Black Jack, where John Brown began his war on slavery near what is now Baldwin City, Kansas — then just a camp along the Santa Fe Trail. I’ll leave it to the battlefield’s website to give the history. For me it was just a great morning of shooting (no pun intended). I’ve just had a couple of hours to begin sorting through the take, but here are a few I like so far…
Life continues to keep things interesting around here so I’ll toss out another shot from Fiji to keep y’all occupied as I dodge and weave. On my last day in Fiji, I had some time to kill and I spent a couple of hours wandering the market in Sigatoka. The place was filled with portrait potential. The light bounced around the stalls nicely and the faces were fantastic. Here’s just one. It’s a bit more “processed” than usual but I was experimenting. I’ll live with this version for a while but I have a feeling this might be a shot I come back to from time to time. It has a painterly quality that I like but I’m not sure it’s coming across at its full potential yet.
A week has flown by since my last post (busy, busy, busy!) so here’s a random portrait taken at a rodeo in Mexico. No rhyme or reason for posting it today other than I figured I’d better post something so y’all knew I was still kickin’.
The artist, Nall, in his studio and gallery in Fairhope, Alabama. If only I could be known by one name but I’m afraid Michael Jackson (the musician, not the beer critic — or maybe both!) beat me to that one. Please no suggestions for names that I could be known by…
A portrait of a man in a traditional military uniform in the beautiful small town of Grimma on the river Mulde (just east of Leipzig) during a quick stop on the way to Dresden. I’m afraid I was much like an annoying fly to this poor man, as I photographed him from all angles while he stood in the square. I was using my Nikkor 80-200mm zoom, so at least I was a distant fly. This angle with the fall color in the background against his blue uniform turned out to be my favorite. To be honest, he was a great sport and seemed more amused by the attention than annoyed.
In the afternoon of my second day in Thailand, I visited some highland villages north of Chiang Mai. The people who live in this area migrated to Thailand over the last few centuries from China and Tibet. My first stop was a working village that was largely agricultural but had a couple of small stands where they sold their traditional woven fabrics to the occasional tourists that ventured up.
I posted a couple of other shots from this village in an earlier post. The shot at the top of this post and those that follow came from another village that is more of a tourist-centered, cultural village. This felt like much less of a real, working village and more like something that was created to show off the crafts of each of several tribes. Each grass-roofed “house” had someone weaving or sewing on the porch. Among the tribes represented were the Long Neck Karen, whose women are known for wearing the heavy brass rings on their necks.
One can argue the merits of this second type of village. As tourism grows in an area, these types of villages are ways to present local cultures to tourists in a way that is easily accessible to travelers (no need to venture high into the mountains to some remote village with no services, for instance). That also reduces the impact of tourism on the real, working villages where people want to just live their lives and maybe don’t want tour busses rolling through on the hour. On the other hand, you’re hardly seeing the real way of life of these people in such a controlled display. It’s a form of packaged tourism rather than a true experience. I don’t have an answer for what is right but I do hope that, whichever route is taken, it is good for the local people. Tourism may be key to their survival as their old ways of nomadic farming become nearly impossible with the onset of modern development on all sides. The world is changing and I think many cultures are desperate to find ways to assimilate while keeping something of their own cultural identities intact.
The busy schedule of the last few days has left me with little time to post but I thought I’d share a couple of yesterday’s portraits of the Hmong people in highlands of the Mae Rim District of Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Continuing my review of the the past decade…
In 2002 I made my last major trip with with film — to Ireland. By this time I was shooting with a Nikon F100 and was just dabbling in digital with a Coolpix 990 (I’d actually had an Apple Quicktake earlier but never really found a way to use it professionally). I took around 250 or 300 rolls of film on this trip and — in those early post-9/11 days — begged for handchecks in Kansas City and again in Chicago to avoid x-ray exposure. I had already removed all of the film from their boxes but they were still in their transparent plastic canisters and kept together in a giant transparent ziplock bag. The handchecks involved taking each roll of film out of its canister and swabbing it before moving on to the next one. Repeat this process a couple hundred times and you’ll nearly miss your connection.
This was also my first international press trip (although still as a “spouse” to my writer-wife) and it was a whirlwind. We had left our home around 4:00 in the morning to catch our flight from KC to Chicago, then had an overnight flight to Dublin but neither of us were able to get any sleep on the plane. If I’m not mistaken, we were in the last row, center section, where the seats won’t recline because of the bulkhead that separates the cabin from the bathrooms. We landed around 7:00 a.m. and were picked up at the airport for a full day of touring. We ended up in Belfast that night, finally checking into our hotel around 11:30 p.m.
Thirty minutes later (and you can bet I was already sleeping) the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate the hotel. I’ve never felt so sick in my life. The next morning we found out that the alarm had been triggered by a member of our group smoking a cigar in their room. They never came forward to identify themselves so the rest of the trip became like one of those murder-mystery trips with everyone trying to figure out who was on floor 7 and who had been seen with a lighter, etc., etc.
It was a brutal schedule but we were rewarded with scenes like this:
I shot this across the road from our hotel while everyone else was getting their luggage loaded on the bus. Or maybe we were getting off the bus and checking in — I don’t know. I just remember running across a pasture to stand on a fence and get this shot before the fire went out of the sky. One thing about press trips: you can always be certain that the best light will occur while you’re either on a bus or inside a restaurant. If you want to be out shooting in that light, you have to be quick. (I also learned on a later trip that you should always stay by the bus until you’ve seen your own suitcase get loaded… but that’s another story.)
I loved Ireland and we had pretty decent weather during the whole trip. We went into Northern Ireland, up the Antrim Coast to the Giant’s Causeway, and then cut across the island to the southwest to the Dingle Peninsula and the Ring of Kerry. I’ll leave you with a shot from the Dingle Peninsula. This is nice and saturated on it’s original Velvia but I thought I’d knock the color back a little this time and go for something a little more subtle. It’s nice to have that flexibility now, not only with digitally captured images but also with scans from old film shots.
I’ll make up for a few days absent of posts by posting a few thousand portraits in one shot (anyone care to count them?). On my last full day in Guadalajara, I had the great opportunity to photograph the Romeria pilgrimage at the Basilica of Our Lady of Zapopan. Needless to say, they get a very good turnout. More photos to come.
I’ll toss a black and white in here to give your eyes a rest after that last post.