Early morning

Points of view – Meeting birders – Meeting photographers – The Pantanal & Photography. (Map this!)

One of our favorite movies is Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon“. It relates the story of a murder from four different viewpoints, including the victim’s. I often think how applicable it is in everything that we do, from work to family to traveling. In the rainforest one person sees colorful birds and beautiful insects, another sees discomfort, mosquitoes and heat. Some people reverently see ancient deities in high mountains while others see an irresistible challenge beckoning to them. A hike can be done at a quick, uniform pace that brings color to the cheeks or it can be done at a deliberately slow pace to observe wildlife.

Observation Tower

At the Canopy Tower in Panama, we met avid birders. We are self professed “fair weather” birders, which means that we are interested in colorful tropical birds and tend to ignore the “little brown” ones. The birders took delight in every bird, of whatever shape or color. The little brown bird may have the most melodious call, or display very interesting behavior. By hanging out with these people, we learnt patience, the best birding spots and the enthusiasm for birds of every shape and size.

Sometimes, though, you are lucky enough to meet professionals who are experts in a particular area. And when these experts are friendly, outgoing and fun to hang out with, then you have really hit the jackpot. I will always remember the Pantanal as an extempore lesson in photography in the most amazing surroundings.

Rickety bridge

We had always wanted to visit the Pantanal after reading about it in the National Geographic. And what a place it is! Although most of the Pantanal consists of private farms, this actually adds to its attraction rather than detract from it. The Pantanal is much more accessible than the Manu Biosphere Reserve in Peru, and the wildlife much more easily seen.

The unpaved Transpantaneira road, 147kms long with 126 rickety wooden bridges, is overflowing with wildlife. Crested Caracaras and Chaco Chachalacas are a common sight on the road, while the bridges span areas of swamp pregnant with herons, egrets and caiman, which suddenly disappear under the water with an unnerving “whump”. Kingfishers fly all around you, tall Jabiru stork walk gravely to join their flock or sometimes put on a dance for no apparent reason. I will always remember the walk back to our hotel one rainy night on a road littered with caiman, reluctantly backing away from the black umbrella that our guide was waving at them.

On the Transpantaneira road.

But for me, the most enjoyable part was the long walks with the photographers, they, loaded with not one but two huge lenses and a monstrous tripod and us, with our smaller lenses and the relatively small tripod that they encouraged us to bring along.

Photography

There were frequent stops in the sweltering heat, patiently waiting for that perfect shot to capture the bird in flight or with the early morning sun lighting up its colors. We enjoyed gathering around beer or at meals chatting about the intricacies of the camera to get the perfect exposure. Under common interests, strangers can quickly become friends.

We had set out on this trip resigned to the fact that we would not be able to photograph birds with our small 200mm lens. Our time in the Pantanal with the photographers was the perfect natural workshop which encouraged us to try, to do our best with what we had. Photography, specially with a tripod, can be quite meditative, as you tinker with your equipment, making fine adjustments for your next photo, looking at a world magnified by the telephoto lens, beautifully lit up by the golden rays of the rising sun.

Capuchin	Caiman	Jabiru	Vulture

For more pictures from the Pantanal, click here.

In the rubble

Not so interesting – Diamond in the rough – Welcoming people – Herd instinct – Shades of gray. (Map this!)

There is usually a reason why certain spots are off the beaten path. Most of the time this is because there is not much of interest to be gained at that site or the trouble involved in getting there does not merit the payback in entertainment value. On the other hand, going to sites mobbed with tourists can be quite off-putting and most places cannot handle the large volumes of people wanting to see them. Rare is the site like Machu Picchu that can handle hordes of visitors and still feel uncrowded and spacious.

Employee housing

But still we persist, trying to find that diamond in the rough, that place of special value that few have taken the time to examine. Often times even these places are mobbed with tourists and the supposed diamond in the rough turns out to be a poorly cut zirconium. The most obvious case of this have been the supremely mediocre villages of the Guatemala highlands, full of noise, pollution, and little of natural and cultural beauty. Indeed, with the exception of Tikal and Volcan Pacaya, I would put the entire country of Guatemala in that category.

Chacabuco Theatre

One of the paybacks of going to a less visited place is that usually the people are a bit more open and a bit more willing to spend time with a visitor. In the town of Mompos, in Colombia, we were personally greeted by the director of tourism and given a long and enthusiastic explanation about all the little spots of interest in town. This warm and generous welcome was quite common throughout Colombia, until recently, an entire country off the beaten path.

The scream

And so we still persist, hoping that the beaten path is a result of herd instinct and that our unique and less traveled path will make all the difference. This is how we found Chacabuco. Not mentioned in any guide books and so far off the ruta normal that even the tourist office in nearby Calama knew nothing of it, I came across it while doing research on Chile’s nitrate ghost towns. In addition to being an ex-nitrate oficina, Chacabuco was also used as a concentration camp during the Pinochet years. I had to visit – maybe to find the phantasms of those who dared opposed an absolute regime, maybe to find the ghosts of a land raped by mining and drill baby drill.

A happy place

After the detention camp was closed down an ex-prisoner decided to keep the memory of Chacabuco alive and appointed himself as caretaker of the site. In an ironic twist of fate his own memory came under the assault of retrograde amnesia of Alzheimer’s disease. So we undertook a journey deep into the Atacama desert, hoping to meet an old man slowly going crazy in a place of hidden horror. When we finally arrived, hundreds of kilometers from anywhere, we found someone we least expected – a blond girl of slight build from Dresden, Germany, named Maria Schöne.

Chimney

If this were a television sitcom script I would greet Maria’s arrival about as warmly at that of Ted McGinley, but this is not a script and I found Maria’s story as interesting and fascinating as the one that brought me to this place. An architect interested in post-industrial design, she is dedicated to preserving the memory of Chacabuco and is the current administrator of the site. She is also suspicious of the motives of the old caretaker – large scale theft of materials from Chacabuco took place during his tenure and former prisoners that she has met do not recall the caretaker as a fellow internee.

Maria was extremely enthusiastic about the site and gave us a spirited tour, and she also stayed with us until sunset so we could get good photographs. In the evening she invited us to her place for dinner and we talked about Chacabuco, its past and its future, and how a girl from Dresden came to live in an isolated part of Chile.

Welcoming hotel

So as it is with most topics of substance the story gets very complicated and gray as soon as one scratches the surface. This is as it should be – a world without clear answers is ultimately a more interesting one for it is in that murkiness and lack clarity that we find space to form our own opinions and conclusions. As for Maria her research at Chacabuco led her to find Victor, a handsome Chilean man living nearby to whom she is now married.

Unknown Machine	View Window	Roof lines	Nitrate oven

Storage tank	Picture window?	Tree	Sunset

Golden Orb Spider

An Active Participant – To Better Macro Photographs

Macro photography requires concentration on technique and thus makes the photographer a very active participant in the picture taking process. With the wonderful cameras of today it is all to easy to just point the lens and click away and have the image captured within five seconds or less of having conceived it. Macro is very unforgiving of this quick approach – indeed it is difficult to capture a good macro image without significant thought and planning. In this post I will talk about some of the lessons learned from our new hobby, which are applicable to general picture taking as well.

Paying attention to the background: All too often a busy background will call away attention from the subject and ruin an otherwise good composition. Sometimes a background blur can solve this problem, but sometimes it cannot. While photographing this Buho Gigante I noticed that some reeds were causing a busy background, a problem that was fixed by simply holding a leaf between the reeds and the subject.

Canon EOS 20D, Sigma 180mm, 1/1.6 f/32 iso 100	Simplify Background!	Canon EOS 20D, Sigma 180mm, 1/1.3 f/32 iso 100

Capture interesting behaviour: Catching a lion yawning, or a monkey scratching will often make for a more interesting composition that a static picture of the same animal. Macro is no different. This butterfly larva likes to disguise itself as bird poo, pretty interesting in itself. But upon perturbation, such as that supplied by my finger, it raises itself up in a menacing pose and emits nasty looking orange antennae.

Canon EOS 20D, Sigma 180mm, 1/50 f/32 iso 1600	Digital Stimulation!	Canon EOS 20D, Sigma 180mm, 1/125 f/3.5 iso 1600

Keep an eye on the Depth of Field: When working with a subject this close the depth of field reduces drastically, sometimes to a few millimeters. This can make part of the subject in focus and another part out of focus, causing an unpleasing effect. Decreasing the aperture from f/4.5 to f/11 increases the area in focus and eliminates this technical problem. This is a good time to pay attention to the ISO, as reducing the aperture may increase the exposure time too much for an active subject.

EOS 20D, Sigma 180mm, 1/100 f/4.5 iso 100	EOS 20D, Sigma 180mm, 1/250 f/11 iso 1600

All of the above tips point to one simple fact: pay attention when taking a photograph! I notice that when I am more aware I take better photographs (duh!).

For more pictures taken with the macro lens, click here.

Shreesh and the blue morpho

The Enchanted Wings – Patience – the nature of the macro lens. (Map this!)

“It takes a lot of patience to do macro photography”. Shreesh remarked, walking back from “The Enchanted Wings”, a butterfly garden in Copán Ruinas, Honduras. We had just spent three hours fiddling with our camera, the tripod with its Acratech ball head, the level, the angled viewfinder and the 180mm macro lens in an effort to photograph the butterflies.

Siproeta Stelenes	Close-up	Wings

I couldn’t agree with this notion. I felt that patience is required when doing something that one doesn’t like, e.g. dealing with bawling children or negotiating ugly politics at work.

Patience is the ability to endure waiting, delay, or provocation without becoming annoyed or upset, or to persevere calmly when faced with difficulties. – Wikipedia.

Papilio Cresphonles Larva disguises itself as bird poo.

But we love working with our specialty lenses; its not a “delay” or a “provocation”. When you enjoy doing something that could take a long time and may or may not produce great results, does that qualify as requiring patience? I felt that if it weren’t technically complicated, macro photography would lose something. I only discovered that I liked driving when we bought a car with a stick shift. As in driving with a stick shift, the macro lens demands greater involvement from the user, hence giving better control.

Unidentified butterfly

I had initially been against Shreesh’s idea of buying not one but two difficult to use lenses – the Sigma 180mm macro and the Lensbaby 3G (for special effects). I was concerned that composing a technically difficult photo could be frustrating when pressed for time, e.g., on a hike. Then I had an epiphany. Why not remove those parameters that make it so? Unencumbered by time and by conflicting goals we could take all the time we wanted.

Caligo Eurilochus (Larva)	Caligo Eurilochus	Close-up

We tested this out by going to the Japanese tea garden in San Francisco just to experiment with the lenses. It was a revelation. The very act of composing the photograph was delightful. Fiddling with the myriad adjustments in macro photography- ranging from the tactile adjustments of the various knobs on the ball head to the electronic adjustments on the camera – were almost necessary dues that had to be paid in return for the sudden revelation of hidden worlds that opened up before us. Even a simple flower was transformed into an object of wonder as the vague blur crystallized into previously invisible textures and features. We had discovered a new hobby.

For more pictures taken with the macro lens, click here.

San Marcos
Shores of Atitlan

Upside down – Gas Stations with guns – Power Vacuum – Stochastic processes

Just as the book is always better than the movie, pictures can’t do justice to a place. But sometimes the commonly expressed sentiment in the first sentence is turned upside down. In this upside down world the movie is better than the book, and the pictures not only do justice to the place but actually improve it.

Guatemala is a difficult place to be, and the beautiful pictures belie the stress and tension we feel here on a daily basis. Many travelers say that this place is no more dangerous than the other countries in Latin America but the impression here is rather different. Armed guards are everywhere, not just at banks and jewelry stores, but at fast food restaurants and gas stations. Hotels have multiple barriers between the entrance and the areas where the guests live. Armed robbery is commonplace as are carjackings and kidnappings.

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The rule of law here is weak and stepping into the power vacuum are narcotrafficantes and organized crime gangs. Judges can be intimidated, police can be bribed, and criminals can negotiate for their freedom. The main roads are dangerous but the smaller roads are also dangerous – it is very difficult to determine what the best security measures are!

Reading the local newspaper one is treated to gory tabloid spreadouts of the latest carnage. A multiple homicide here, a kidnapping there, violent demonstrations, the list goes on… The locals here jokingly refer to the periodical Nuestro Diario as the Muerto Diario. After a while it just wears you down!

So what is it that makes Guatemala so violent and other places not so? There is much more poverty in India, parts of Mexico are impoverished and it is a Latin country, but neither make the traveler feel so unsafe. Is it the big difference between rich and poor? Unknown, I guess there have to be some places in the world that are required to be unsafe, a probabilistic distribution that is natural and normal.

Yet another beautiful day in wine country

Exposition on documentary vs. creative photographs. The Panasonic Lumix is a good choice for documentary photographs.

During our past trips and photographic excursions we discovered that our photographs fall into two categories – those that document events and those that are created as an expression of art. Of course, there can be and there is considerable overlap between the two but each style requires very different equipment considerations. It is difficult to be spontaneous with large camera bodies and lenses. Everyone has photo albums full of birthday parties, anniversaries, and celebrations, all documenting good times and milestones. Rarely are these photos taken with bulky gear and big lenses, and almost all are unpublishable and hastily taken. But in the end these are the ones we cherish the most, pictures of loved ones we may have lost or from whom we have become estranged, pictures of us in joy and celebration.

Panasonic Lumix LX-2 with Leica lens.	The rear has a 16:9 LCD to match the sensor and navigation controls.

The Lumix came in very handy for occasions like an impromptu dinner with friends at Cha Cha Cha, a fundraiser for the Steampunk steam house, a stroll to the City Lights bookstore, and the dusty environment of Burning Man.

The Lumix is a little bulky for a slim point and shoot but it offers a lot of creative control for such a small camera.

In the Japanese Tea Gardens

Gardens of the World – A Walk in the Park with LensBaby.(Map this!)

In our quest for the outdoors, we often ignore beauty in our own backyard. The San Francisco Bay Area is so full of picturesque hikes that we rarely visit the beautiful parks that the city offers – Golden Gate Park with its Japanese Tea Garden, the Arboretum and the Conservatory and the small but pretty Yerba Buena Gardens set amongst the busy downtown cityscape.

Italian statuary in the Medici villa, Cereto Guidi

Almost everywhere we try to bring the beauty of nature back into an urban environment by creating gardens. Since ancient times, gardens have been intricately woven into all aspects of human activity – to beautify and “naturalize” our homes, to create a spiritual sanctuary for meditation, to link this world to the beyond in mausoleums. Our fascination with nature has led to the neat geometric patterns of the formal European gardens, the traditional beauty of the Japanese or the amazing aesthetic of the Persians best seen in the Taj Mahal. New ways of expression continue to be invented as seen in the famous gardens built out of refuse in Chandigarh, India by the genius gardener Nek Chand.

Japanese elements of water and stone

These thoughts came to mind during our frequent visits to the Golden Gate Park to test our latest acquisitions, the LensBaby 3G and the Sigma 180mm macro lens. I had, as usual, rolled my eyes at yet another one of Shreesh’s time consuming and expensive dreams when he sent me a link to an extremely seductive photography site Juza Nature Photography. While contemplating this amazing (and geeky) site, I realized that this would change the way we view photography. It will no longer be a manic struggle to extract lenses during a five minute rest stop on a hike to capture memories for later reminiscences. It will instead, be the reason for the hike itself. As we sat sipping tea in the Japanese gardens in Golden Gate park I felt content to be free of the need to reach a “destination”; to have all the time in the world to photograph the beauty surrounding me.

Our experimentation with the Lensbaby 3G’s macro feature (below).

Canon EOS 20D, Lensbaby 3G+4x Macro, 1/250 f/4, iso 100. Japanese Tea Garden, San Francisco	Canon EOS 20D, Lensbaby 3G+10x Macro, 1/160 f/4, iso 100. Japanese Tea Garden, San Francisco