Perambulations

On Our Better Nature...

2012-01-17T13:07:00.001-08:00

"Sherwin Nuland, the clinical professor of surgery at Yale who wrote How We Die, writes in The Art of Aging, "Man is the only animal to have been granted the ability to continue developing during the later periods of life, and much of this depends on seeing oneself as the kind of person who can overcome the tendency to do otherwise."

"I look at what I write so I can see what I think."

2012-01-06T10:24:00.000-08:00

I read this article on writing and found much of myself in the paragraph from Jonathan Safran Foer:

"I begin with nothing and I unfortunately usually end with nothing, in terms of the day-to-day process," says Jonathan Safran Foer. "I’ve never had characters before I started writing. I’ve never had a moral. I’ve never had a story to tell. I’ve never had some voice that I found and wanted to share. Auden, the poet, said, 'I look at what I write so I can see what I think.' And that’s been very true for me in my process. I don’t have a thought that I then try to articulate. It’s only through the act of writing that I try to find my own thoughts. So, it can be quite scary because you know, it’s... there’s a kind of faith, I guess, that you have to have either in yourself or in the process that something good will come from filling blank pages."

Photojournalist Eve Arnold Dies At 99

2012-01-05T17:03:00.000-08:00

As Robert Capa, one of the founders of the agency Magnum Photos, once put it: Arnold's work "falls metaphorically between Marlene Dietrich's legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers."

Photojournalist Eve Arnold Dies At 99

Pondering 7 Billion

2011-11-01T16:12:00.000-07:00

(Maybe too many blogs? Today 12.19.11 I opened here to post a blog about journalism [coming shortly] and realized the below never was posted - still needs to be shared - maybe even more.)

Two years ago I took leave from GLOBIO, the children's education nonprofit I founded and was running (proving I don't hate kids - just kids having kids as well as people having them as some spasmodic knee-jerk reaction to wanting to be an adult.) I took leave to catch my breath, renew my love affair with creating images and rekindle my misplaced passion for writing. That was working I thought, but today I also wonder what it's worth divided by 7 billion.

I haven't looked up much since starting down the new road.

Great Ape Diaries is all consuming - writing, photography, thinking, traveling, and reflecting back and forward.

I'm only at the doorstep of the project, I'm convinced it will become The project of my life, (thus far.) It has every element I search for in a potentially great project, in fact it has them in spades: charismatic animals that look and act like us, orphans, threatened habitats, illegal trafficing, corporate greed, modern technologies, war, refuges, poaching, disease, the list goes on and on.

Journalistically I'm trying to remain open, open-minded, open-opinioned, as to where Great Ape Diaries will venture and what it will discover, and then this news:

U.N. Says 7 Billion Now Share the World

Today, because of that baby 7 Billion, I have been thinking endlessly about what that means for us, but especially about the implication for our other Hominidaes; those consuming my daily Google searches. Implication = resource use and abuse.

My thinking has had a reoccurring visual, a street scene from Goma: a squallered, muddy, human poverty-choked wannabe-town on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) border of Rwanda filmed this past summer, and featured in an online video report by VICE, regarding the technology addicted precious mineral coltan. In short Coltan (Columbite-tantalite) is a metallic ore comprising Niobium and Tantalum, found mainly in the U.N. acknowledged semi-lawless eastern frontier region of DRC. In fact, 80% of the world's known reserve resides there - so do most of the eastern lowland (Grauer's) gorillas. The mineral magic happens upon refinement. It's there that coltan is transformed into a heat resistant power which has the unique capacity for storing electrical charge. Exactly the kind of charge every cell phone and similar digital device requires.

(Coltan is one of several minerals being mined legally and illegally in DRC called 'conflict minerals' - more from this NPR radio story and from theWorld.)

Population, over-population actually, isn't about a cute little baby softly wrapped in the fluffy cotton of pink or blue, it's about that scene in Goma. It's about millions of people on the fringe of the wilds where great apes hope to survive; people fighting and killing for their own survival. Most struggle themselves to survive on a dollar-a-day -- seven to ten times less than mining coltan -- so the alternative seems clear. It's about a place where coltan mixes with hopeless dreams, and tattered refugee camps that throb painfully from a savage civil war hang-over, and nearby forests that are being blacked into illegal charcoal for cooking fuel. In not so many months I will be standing on one of those far-away muddy street, filming and interviewing those struggling survivors - I'm going to ask them about coltan and great apes. I'm also going to ask them about baby 7 Billion. Reality is that baby 7B was probably born in a similar village, hut, or back alley; I'll likely hear 7B crying in the dirty distance.

Chances are baby 7B will never know the word coltan. When its wireless day arrives it will communicate on a device future-formed, and coltan will be a historical footnote in the evolution of that device. My fear is so will wild great apes; in DRC that will equal bonobos, chimps and gorillas. On that fact it is difficult to remain journalistic, to remain open-minded.

Pondering baby 7B and her or his impact - specifically on the other Hominids - carries a flood of emotions that I'm certain will flow time and time again over these next few years - I'll work to remain journalistic - please excuse the occasional hint of anger, frustration and even a tear that may creep in.

GeoTracking – Canon’s New EOS 1Dx

2011-10-18T13:29:00.000-07:00

Overview from Canon:

“Canon has brought the best of the EOS-1D Series of digital cameras into one phenomenal model: the new flagship of the EOS line, the EOS-1D X*. Its full-frame 18.1 Megapixel CMOS sensor and all-new Dual DIGIC 5+ Image Processors deliver high quality image capture at up to 12 fps (14 fps in Super High Speed Mode) and a powerful ISO range of 100 – 51200 (up to 204800 in H2 mode) provides sharp, low-noise images even in the dimmest low-light conditions. An all-new, 61-Point High-Density Reticular AF and 100,000-pixel RGB Metering Sensor that uses a dedicated DIGIC 4 Image Processor, makes the EOS-1D X reach new levels of focus speed and accuracy delivering advanced tracking even for the most challenging shooting situations. Taken all together, the EOS-1D X’s improved HD video capture, numerous connectivity options, combination of processing power and durable construction, including shutter durability tested to 400,000 cycles, make it the ultimate EOS.”

Ya, just another camera body you say – but here might be the kicker (I’m hoping to get a system to test ASAP – then will report here as well as our Great Apes Diaries “the making of” blog.) Canon is also introducing the Wireless File Transmitter WFT-E6A and the all-new Canon GPS Receiver GP-E1.

Fire Time-lapse by Michael Durham

2011-09-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

Sharing a bit of wonderful Canon DSLR time-lapse work by my friend Michael Durham. He has been doing some amazing short-films for the National Park Service in the process honing some beautiful capture techniques. In his typically understated manner he sends me this email, "Recently While I was up on Mt Hood, I did some time-lapse of the fire up there. It turned out kind of awesome."

more on Michael's site: http://oregonwild.blogspot.com/2011/09/dollar-lake-complex-fire-time-lapse.html

The Poetry of Reality

2011-08-24T16:36:00.000-07:00

The Symphony of Science. Or you could call it the symphony of a simple, elegant, wonderful idea. Thank you John Boswell and all those great scientists and others responsible for the collaboration.

There is nothing I take greater pleasure in doing than sharing creativity - yes of course my own, but mine is but like one of four billion insipid flickering lights - and ultimately it takes a collaboration of stars to see a constellation. The Symphony of Science is the creative genius of composer-producer-creative John Boswell seeing constellations while the rest of us see stars.

"There's real poetry in the real world, science is the poetry of reality." Visit the Symphony of Science website and enjoy many, many more constellations.

The price for letting the world look through your eye

2011-08-22T12:20:00.000-07:00

Most days are filled with research and preparation on the latest, but in many ways my oldest project, The Great Ape Diaries. One element of that project will be to work with award-winning documentary film-maker Skye Fitzgerald. In our last meeting Skye discussed a film technique he would like to use. One where you, the viewer, will share my perspective as I create images, in the digital diary posts we make. Skye suggested I watch War Photographer, a film by Swiss author, director and producer Christian Frei.

Frei followed photographer James Nachtwey over the course of two years into the wars in Indonesia, Kosovo, Palestine, and Nachtwey's pursuit of poverty and famine, ostensively as a by-products of war. In addition to an exterior perspective on what Nachtwey was experiencing, Frei used special micro-cameras attached to James Nachtwey’s 35mm still cameras. The approach surrenders a feeling of not just being in his shoes, but in his 'other' eye. I shoot this way, with both eyes open, a technique a taught myself years ago--the better to see the world moving in and around the frame. The documentary is a decade old, but the personal "in-sight" point of view or POV remains fresh and refreshing, even in this iPhone Youtube consumed world.

That POV is what Skye is interested in working out with me as we create The Great Ape Diaries - we'll discuss that more over the coming months on this blog. Our advantage of course is a wealth of new small HD video cameras like the Hero Pro. Still the challenge remains creativity and simplicity of communication, and that was the reward in watching Frei's War Photographer.

After some thought about the Academy Awards nominated documentary, I don't think it can be discussed outside Frei's microcam technique, although most online reviews and discussions are determined. Most of the online debate after the film debuted in 2001 were focused there, negatively and positively, on the age old reportage argument regarding war/tragedy: Is the photographer/journalist a cold and cynical chronicler, or should their humanity step forward and intervene in what they are bearing witness to? Or at the least step away from feasting on the pain and suffering of others? Words like vampirism, vulture, scavenger and leech were peppering the comments. Nachtwey's apparent calm translates as callous, his thoughtfulness as heartlessness, these have always been the leading volleys of critics. Unfortunately, to bolster their objections, there is one elongated scene in the German offices of Stern magazine where editors discuss an upcoming layout of Nachtwey's images in terms that translate into the hands of cynics; describing Nachtwey's horrors of war black and whites with adjectives like, "Fantastic" and "Ya, this great, terrific."

The micr0-cam I think does yield more than just a POV on the images Nachtwey creates, but on Nachtwey himself. As Skye has said to me, "I want to get in your head as you're back creating these photos." And any careful observation of the War Photographer I think does that. We, the viewer, have 96 mins of self-determination about what a war-photographer-kind-of-human James Nachtwey is or isn't. That kind of exposure causes me pause going forward on The Great Ape Diaries. A bit of fear. There is a price for letting the world look through your eye.

One of the last comments Nachtwey gives into the camera, and there are remarkably few, is regarding his role as image-maker in such conditions, "It's something I have to reckon with every day because I know that if I ever allowed genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul."

Again, critics may attack in their belief that "genuine compassion" begets involvement beyond the images, and Nachtwey's words are little more than hollow excuses, his soul was sold. But having met the man in an unflattering state, he is paying a price, and the images are a price to know reality. Nachtwey says earlier in the documentary about the genocide in Rwanda, "It was like taking the express elevator to hell." Never be so naive as to think that ride has no price. Having visited the suburbs of hell myself on another scale - no one else can fully judge the price.

*****

Finally this note. The sound track is as subtle and wonderfully done as anything you may never notice, but should. As someone said, "One of the most profound aspect I found in this documentary, is the use of sound. I think it's one of the best, if not most calculated sound editing ever done, since the film [is] supposed to focus on images."

Beauty in the Beast

2011-08-19T08:27:00.000-07:00

Technology is a strange beast - most of it is pointless - I mean we do really pointless, self-destructive things with it - the stockmarket, automobiles, weapons, GMOs, plastics, computers, cell phones - the list is seemingly endless; Crap, we justify as critical to our lives. After the emergence of a technology, it's refinement, maybe it's ubiquity, it falls in the hands of artists. Then, and only then, do we discover the beauty in the beast.

It never was just a phone - we just didn't quit talking and texting long enough to see

or go here Splitscreen: A Love Story

The above was shot entirely on a Nokia N8 mobile phone. Winner of the Nokia Shorts competition 2011.

When I'm Not Traveling - I Miss Traveling

2011-08-05T15:26:00.000-07:00

Travel - a passion for moving, learning and eating.

My alternate eyes and ears and soul in the world - Jenn - just shared these three short films with me. Damn I'm missing not traveling!!

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

PS - be sure to visit the Vimeo site to see all three films

Searching for gorillas, not gravel roads

2011-07-26T15:01:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who I cycle with regularly. His life is working successfully at being paid a handsome sum for a large international tech firm and avoiding anything that resembles work - this is his own admission not my summation - and et in as much cycling as skipping work will allow. On weekends when we make longer cycling days of it, a hundred miles or so, and more climbing than mountain goats do, we invariably end up on a road he thinks is 'good', invariably it is gravel. So we end up on our expensive carbon road bikes pedaling over gravel. Stupid. Why? Making life hard invites disaster - survive disaster it's adventure (which they then make into some cheesy reality show) - which he needs and has none of in the rest of his life. I think he looks at my career and wishes for a bit of that adventure cum disaster and hardship.

Years ago I was doing research for my first trip to document mountain gorillas in the highlands of the Central African Rift, the Virunga Mountains, where Rwanda, Uganda and then Zaire shared a steep, wet, green relationship. I was reading big mammal biologist George Schaller's The Year of the Gorilla in which he writes,

"Adventure implies hardships and accidents, which are usually the result of poor planning... Our expedition accomplished...what we set out to do without much trouble and,...without great effort."

I found myself reading that over and then over out loud. That made sense. Schaller got a heap of work done, work that eventually every mountain gorilla researcher and conservationist since, including Diane Fossey, has relied. The Virungas have enough gravel roads, neither Schaller nor I needed to look for them. In fact, we got over or around them as efficiently as possible, that left more time for discovering gorillas.

Over the years I have been asked repeatedly about the "struggle" and the sacrifice in becoming a photographer (now with success.) I know what they want to hear. They want an edge of horror, of pain, of suffering, something like what I recently read about Pablo Neruda:

At the age of 19, he set out to publish his first book. His family disapproved of his writing, so he chose a pen name: Pablo Neruda. He struggled to find a publisher. Eventually the Chilean Students' Federation agreed to publish the manuscript, but Neruda had to pay all the expenses. He said: "I had setbacks and successes every day, trying to pay for the first printing. I sold the few pieces of furniture I owned. The watch which my father had solemnly given me, on which he had had two little flags enameled, soon went off the pawnbroker's. My black poet's suit followed the watch. The printer was adamant and, in the end, when the edition was all ready and the covers had been pasted on, he said to me, with an evil look: 'No. You are not taking a single copy until you pay me for the whole lot.'"*

Heck, my first book came with a $15K advance, another $10K in corporate support, free airfares and four amazing years living in Australia and Papua New Guinea.

"without much trouble and,...without great effort." That's what I want to tell them. The plan wasn't super detailed, it allowed for adaptation and evolution, years following a twisting road through university bio classes taught me that. But it didn't include gravel roads. Struggle is stupid. Disaster is stupid. They waste time and time is precious if life is successful.

Recently I have begun to reconsider the struggle again, as I return my attention to mountain gorillas. One doesn't struggle traveling if you love traveling. One doesn't struggle writing if you love writing. One doesn't struggle learning a new language if you love learning and languages. Sure everything has a gravel patch, but you don't go looking for gravel roads.

*(His second book, published a year later, was a book of love poems: Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1974). This book made the 20-year-old poet famous.)

Who holds the copyright to a picture taken by a monkey?

2011-07-19T08:29:00.000-07:00

Interesting copyright thoughts in a short article about the macaque monkey picture I posted a few days ago in Always Better Lucky Than Good:

Who holds the copyright to a picture taken by a monkey?

Always Better Lucky Than Good

2011-07-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

Crested black macaque smiles for his self-portrait while using the camera belonging to photographer David Slater in an Indonesian national park

Sharp Isn't The Point

2011-06-13T11:10:00.000-07:00

The more I wade into the deep end of the digital photo pool and the ping-pong pixel rhetoric that consumes folks, I'm mystified by one simple truth about photography - sharp isn't the point - communication is. It reminds me of a conference I attended twenty years ago. The speaker, a very savvy photo agency director/owner launched this question from the podium: "What business are you in?" The stock photo business was under siege from the upstart digital (royalty free) wave that had yet to spawn the tsunamis Getty and Corbis.

The answer - you and your creators (photographers) are in the Communication Business.

The Haiti earthquake disaster, remember that? Doing some global water research I ran across the above image by Emilo for AP appeared on WorldNews.com in a story about cholera in Haiti - is it razor sharp? Who cares. It's sharp enough where it needs to be. Sharp enough, that's the point. What it really does it does exceedingly well. It does all that it is suppose to do - rip your heart out. It reeks of pain and suffering - sharply - and that's all that matters.

LOOM - a brilliant "little" film

2011-05-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while you see something that just makes you pause - a little piece of brilliance - such is Loom. Magical film-making. Maybe more magical film-thinking!

As the creators say on their website:

"But it’s the point of view that creates an intense relationship between the hunter and its victim. There is much more to explore, much more to feel if one takes the time to really experience the content of a split second."

Flooding Fiction

2011-05-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

Yes, those are rushing Mississippi River flood waters - a torrent pouring virtually harmlessly into Lake Pontchatrain. No, no one is losing their home, business or life in front of them. Officials opened the Bonnet Carre Spillway a few days ago to prevent flooding of New Orleans, Baton Rouge and more importantly (in some folks minds) the endless number of chemical plants and oil refineries that edge the immediate shore behind the Levees between Baton Rouge and The Big Easy.

I'm in Louisiana to document the Mississippi River flood waters for National Audubon Society (more on why it's important to a bird group in a later posting.) Just saw a CNN report this morning from Morgan City, Louisiana - about 85 southwest of New Orleans. The reporter was standing in front of a old house I looked at yesterday, but decided not to photograph because it just wasn't all that dramatic, the flooding around its raised foundation. The owners were working, unrushed and jovial, to jack it up six feet to save it from possible rising waters. They told me they needed to do it anyway, save the place from future river rises (in this case the Atchafalaya River that rolls past waterfront Morgan City.) CNN put their reporter in hip-waders and had him stand in a foot of water with the house behind him reporting - it certainly had the visual feeling of impending doom - yet I know exactly where the camerman was standing - s/he and camera were plenty dry, as was the rest of Morgan City behind them. Good reporting or flooding fiction? Maybe just not the "whole" truth. Actually more the "misleading" truth by not showing the whole story. Oh well - the difference between media and journalism.

What was most frustrating is this is a network (CNN) that has its star anchor/journalist, Anderson Cooper, doing a spot on his nightly AC360 program in which he exposes others for not telling the truth, or "misleading" the truth. A bit hypocritical?

Undoubtedly there are people impacted by the most dramatic flooding of the Mississippi River since the record floods of 1927 (great book about that event - Rising Tide by John M. Barry) which created much of the levee building mess we are in today and altered the life of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, and ultimately the entire Mississippi Delta. And those people do indeed need there stories told. On a larger scale we need to be discussing now, while this is front and center in everyone's sights (thank you media hype) that this river, one of the three greatest river systems in the world, and worth more billions of dollars to this nation (in addition to sculpting much of its history, physically, politically and economically) needs help and attention.

A few peanuts of wisdom

2011-04-27T12:15:00.000-07:00

"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today; it's already tomorrow
in Australia."

- Charles Schultz

Pictures of the Year: Winning images from 2010

2011-04-23T06:27:00.000-07:00

Pictures of the Year: Winning images from 2010

San Francisco to Paris in 2 Minutes

2011-04-12T16:44:00.000-07:00

SF to Paris in Two Minutes from Beep Show on Vimeo.

how we got here?

2011-03-22T08:01:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder how we got into this mess? Ya know, wars, oil disasters, whirlpool economics, over-population, consumption happiness, well you get my gist. I do. Sometimes I think that it's because I have a habit of wading into it, this mess. I decided several years ago to become a photographer of the mess; thinking by illustrating it I could help make sense of it, and maybe, just maybe, shift the path.

It's hard to explain - how we got here - even harder to illustrate. A few folks at the Post Carbon Institute with the help of a white board and a magic marker (this kind of thing takes magic) thought they would give it a try, and a hope. I think it's worth 300 seconds of your life - to consider your life on Earth - for all life Earth.

Looking for a medical photographer

2011-03-03T10:16:00.001-08:00

Hi Everyone,

I am looking for a photographer - medically trained - who has a "body" of work and is interested in creating new work - and would like to collaborate with me on a major project examining the Earth and Human Body.

If you are or know such a person please feel free to email me at gerry@gerryellis.net and put in the subject line - "human body"

Thanks - Gerry

World Press Photo Contest 2011

2011-02-18T16:06:00.000-08:00

World Press Photo recently announced the winners of its 2011 photojournalism contest. Top honors went to Jodie Bieber for her image of Bibi Aisha, a disfigured Afghan woman, taken for Time magazine. A non-profit organization based in the Netherlands, World Press Photo supports the development of photojournalism internationally, by holding this annual contest and exhibition, by organizing workshops and classes -- please visit the WPP website to see them all.

Above photo: A man and a boy, displaced by floods, walk through flood waters on August 22, 2010 in the village of Baseera near Muzaffargarh in Punjab, Pakistan. This photograph is part of a series that took the 1st Prize for People In The News Stories of the 2011 World Press Photo Contest.(Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

Macro Kingdom III by Clemento

2011-02-15T14:51:00.000-08:00

Perspective is what we see when we stand outside ourselves.

The Courage of Responsibilty

2011-02-14T16:01:00.000-08:00

Responsibility for one's actions is at the heart of courage. I was moved as much by the courage of the protester in Cairo cleaning up in Tahrir Square, as by the their non-violent protests the days before.

Volunteers repainted black and white striped street curbs around a monument by the Egyptian Museum, which had been on the front line in street battles between Mubarak's foes and supporters. Police were starting to move barricades and trying to restore vehicle traffic at Tahrir Square, where many protesters vowed to remain, CNN reported.
"We're taking care of the square, and then we'll clean up the whole country," Mohammed El Tayeb said while standing amid the volunteer cleaning crews sweeping up Tahrir Square. "This is a beautiful country. Now it's ours and we're going to take care of it."
Across the crowded square, young men walked with paper signs taped to their chests that read: "Sorry for the disturbance, we're building Egypt." After days of protests that had such names as the "Day of Rage" and "Day of Millions," today's gathering was called the "Day of Cleaning," AOL News said.

Congratulation Egypt!

2011-02-11T11:42:00.000-08:00

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

From a speech by Robert F. Kennedy, on June 6, 1966, in his Day of Affirmation Address at Cape Town University

To all my friends in Egypt, the Egyptian people, and all those that imagine another world, achieved through peace - stand up for an ideal, or act to improve the lot of others, or strike out against injustice - keep dreaming.

There are other forces at work in this world,

2011-02-10T10:48:00.000-08:00

Frodo: I wish none of this had happened.

Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to

decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides the will of evil.

.... And that is an encouraging thought.

Weather... or not

2011-01-14T06:39:00.000-08:00

I always dreamed of a place with a view of the sea.

"And next up, your Tropical Storm Watch."

"And now more on Hurricane..."

Over the past few weeks I have begun to wonder if the Weather Channel was invented by a bunch of TV weather folks from Louisiana who simply had too much boudin and crackl'n.

Like all weather reports every one on the street, or water, thinks these are hit and miss at best. "These people are never right." But everyone keeps listening.

The marine radio is endlessly broadcasting a stream of concerns, mariners take note, coastal residence pay focused attention, for god sakes their lives could be on the line. That got me thinking, what if we had a global radio or TV network that could do the same, ya know, broadcast climate concern. Like the CCBN - Climate Change Broadcast Network? But would it be profitable? Who would listen? Would there really be an audience?

In 2010 I think we the CCBN would have done well - demographically. Let's see who might have tuned in...

In January through April we could have counted on over 20 million Pakistanis to kick off the year.
In April we could have highlighted an oily distraction that would have lasted well into hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico - keeping a couple billion of the planet captivated.
In June and July the CCBN would have been flooded with broadcast opportunities as three-quarters of China's provinces were hit by flooding and 25 rivers saw record high water levels, causing the worst death toll in a decade, Liu Ning, general secretary of the government's flood prevention agency, told a news conference. Aside from the dead and missing, 645,000 houses were toppled and overall damage totalled 142.2bn yuan (£13.7bn). All the figures, Liu said, were the highest China had seen since 2000.
In the summer, one weather system caused oppressive heat in Russia, while farther south it caused flooding in Pakistan that inundated 62,000 square miles, about the size of Wisconsin. That single heat-and-storm system killed almost 17,000 people, more people than all the worldwide airplane crashes in the past 15 years combined. We could have counted on over 20 million Pakistanis tuning in.
September it started showering in SE Australia and by December was flooding most of the entire east coast of the continent - Australia had its wettest September-to-November spring on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. - a good portion of the population, say 20 million - they are still watching.
In early November I could have reported live from Costa Rica as flooding from the snapped off tail of Hurricane Thomas killed and destroyed - but good ratings, all 4.5 million Ticos tuned in.
December washed out the old year in Brazil by killing several hundred and drawing over 2 million local viewers

In other news we could have broadcast reruns the global Climate Conference in Copenhagen, where the world's nations gathered to get down to the serious business of addressing the potential possible impact of change in the climate if it actually happens... and is caused by human actions.

Of course, it will be a rerun, the show was previous cancelled due to lack of action. Nations, especially the USA, China and India were looking for a program with more monetary mystery and intrigue. They complained that they need programming that really bites into their economies before it's worth tuning in.

Well its a New Year, 2011, this year we may have something for them. A fresh new show from DownUnder called 'Flood the Market' The show follows the current ruin of a nation due to catastrophic flooding. Lots of action, chaos, death and destruction, AND the economic Apocalypse that should get their rapped attention. Here are a few of the episode recaps:

The rain may cut the quality of more than 40 percent of the country’s wheat crop, according to estimates by National Australia Bank Ltd. Rio Tinto Group, the world’s third-largest mining company, said today coal mines in central Queensland state had partially resumed operation after rains.
Macarthur Coal Ltd., Aquila Resources Ltd. and Vale SA said last week they had declared force majeure, while Xstrata Plc shut part of its rail system and said it would use stockpiles to supply customers. Force majeure is a legal clause invoked by companies when they can’t meet obligations because of circumstances beyond their control.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia cut its estimate of wheat exports to 14 million tons in 2010-2011, from an earlier 16 million tons. “Many in the industry suggest the disruptions to the harvest this year and the implications for grain quality are the worst in a lifetime,” Luke Mathews, a commodity strategist at the bank, said in a report yesterday.
Queensland Sugar Ltd., which ships more than 90 percent of the country’s sugar, also today cut its export forecast to 2.2 million tons because of weather, compared with an outlook earlier in the year of as much as 3 million tons.

As 2011 flows forward so do the storms and floods, for investors in the new network it looks like the CCBN would financially stay afloat.

TODAY From Brazil - The region has already seen the largest rainfall since 1967, according to the government’s Inmet meteorology agency. Teresopolis, the largest and hardest-hit city, where at least 228 people died, absorbed 259 millimeters (10.2 inches) of rain in the past 10 days, while the average rainfall for the month of January is 290 millimeters, according to Inmet.
The floods in Rio are the world’s fourth-worst disaster involving floods and landslides over the past 12 months by the number of deaths, according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, or CRED, a Brussels-based independent research institute that collaborates with the World Health Organization.
TODAY - More than a million people in Sri Lanka are suffering from massive flooding described by the government as the worst natural disaster since the 2004 tsunami.

Preliminary data show that 18 countries broke their records for the hottest day ever. The killer Russian heat wave — setting a national record of 111 degrees — would happen once every 100,000 years without global climate change. Super Typhoon Megi with winds of more than 200 mph devastated the Philippines and parts of China. Through Nov. 30, nearly 260,000 people died in natural disasters in 2010, according to W.H.O. A list of day-by-day disasters in 2010 compiled by the AP (news service) runs 64 printed pages long!

Weather or not climate change is real it would be nice to have some real scientific evidence to back up this climatic hyperbole.

Bit more cherie climate summary here.

Iceberg Cam - Cool - Polar Cool

2011-01-07T14:14:00.000-08:00

And the Envelope Please....

2010-12-21T10:46:00.000-08:00

WHAT! You've got to be kidding me!

TIME announces it has selected facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg for Person of the Year - move over Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., yes, even you Stalin, Hitler and Ayatollah Khomeini.

"But then again, perhaps Time's selection is a perfect fit for a nation of passive consumers in love with themselves and bored and addicted to mind-numbing entertainment. In a rich post-military and on-the-verge-of-collapsing-empire, who can blame most Americans for wanting to seek an impersonal, isolated and virtual outlet to get away from the realities and perplexities of their leaders domestic and foreign policies? After all, self-censorship and egotism is at a all time high, as are doses of self-love and madness that are lived through technological co-dependency which keeps one sane, or so it seems. Anything that will distract consumers and make them even more inattentive is good for business and a technocratic state. Technological diversion is the adhesive for a ruinous empire." wrote Dalles Darling.

Do I use facebook? No, I talk with people.

When I heard Zuckerberg had been named Time's Person of the Year I was stunned with numbness and the dumbness. I started to write, then read Dalles Darling's piece - it said it more eloquently.

TIME says in justifying their choice, "This year, Facebook — now minus the the — added its 550 millionth member. One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Last month the site accounted for 1 out of 4 American page views. Its membership is currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day."

700 billion minutes - that's almost 500 million DAYS! Imagine if those wasters volunteered to do something real on this planet?

POOF! Gone is hunger

POOF! Gone is homelessness

POOF! Gone is illiteracy

POOF! Gone is... hell just fill in the blank, the point is things would get done

Even being the lead sheep doesn't make you the sheep herder. I would like to nominate instead my mother who taught me, "if every one jumps off a bridge that doesn't mean you have to."

Inalienable Obligation

2010-12-06T14:34:00.000-08:00

Certain phrases have followed me around my life like a shadow - there beside me, stretching out from me, inseparably connected, married to me, even before they were there, as they were becoming know, as they are occasionally forgotten.

"Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one"

- Eleanor Roosevelt

An "obligation" to be an individual.

Wow. Could there be more powerful a concept.

We don't generally think of the obligation embedded within our right. Taking for granted the first too often seems to obliterate not obligate responsibility.

As I work on the Gulf Coast and each trip leads me on a journey continually further in pursuit of a truth that so much money, time and energy has been spent to conceal, I think a lot about my obligation. To myself as well as others.

I keep searching for a balance. A balance? Yes, in my own life and in my global life, I think. And then I remembered the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, "Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one."

Not just a right, but an inalienable obligation. As such maybe there is no balance - balance suggests two or more objects held in some level of equilibrium. If right and obligation meet at individual then all are one and the same. My own life and my global life are simply Life, as I live it.

Obligation of individual to me means putting self on hold.

Today I hear that at the global summit in Cancun, Mexico the parties have accepted that there can be no global agreement on global climate change, reduction of greenhouse emissions targets.

"The rising ocean raises questions, too: What happens if the 61,000 Marshallese must abandon their low-lying atolls? Would they still be a nation? With a U.N. seat? With control of their old fisheries and their undersea minerals? Where would they live, and how would they make a living? Who, precisely, would they and their children become?" - more on the disappearing Marshalls

At what point is that Life what I focus on first? At what risk of discomfort, inconvenience, nuisance, reduced fortune, maybe even frustration? When do the decisions I need to make I actually become the decisions I make? When do I realize I am that individual with an inalienable obligation?

More: UN chief warns climate talks are too slow

Pub, Pints and Petroleum Politics

2010-11-17T13:48:00.000-08:00

I don't know if I always had a journalist gene, or it's just something that intertwines itself within the double-helix for curiosity, but stories that don't walk a straight line fascinate me. Especially stories that don't just dip their toes, but wade waist deep into the confluence of environment, politics, conservation, money. Any one of those, combined with the erraticism of human nature, would be enough, but find that wedding of the waters and you better start looking at the local levies - something eventually will give. Maybe what intrigues me even more are the convolutions that the various channels take, and the moments of serendipity. Those moments I'm finding are often over a pint in a pub.

You can just call it drinking, but it's more. It's journalistic in perhaps the oldest sense of the craft. A filtering process refined in the great newspapers and radio days, and polished in the early years of television. Sorting on the fly what is and isn't helpful verses pure raconteur BS - which of course can always lend a bit of color. Out side the DC beltway, and unless you are overseas, there seems to be less hard stuff being drunk these days, but a couple craft beers, local brews, do just fine.

Some watering holes work better than others. Each locale has its flavor and approach. I'm not skilled at them all - yet. For example I'm not good with bad beer. In other words, fishing dock lounges are my Achilles heal. The kinda places where the lingering combination of grease and cigarette smoke veneer even the clean flatware, and the smell haunts you in your motel room even the next morning as you stare in disbelief at the paisley-plaid curtains (yes, somebody really did think combining those two was a good design idea.) Places where nothing on tap, or more often bottled, is darker going in that it is coming out. Beers often referred to by the person behind the bar as "beer product" and generally bear the label "lite". And all of the establishments start and end with someone's first name - women's names are the worst for me, they hold the promise of cleanliness going in, then dash your hope and smother your senses.

Yesterday afternoon I visited one of my favorite pubs here on New Orleans' Magazine Street - finally yielding to that little voice. The same little voice that over the years tells me, "talk to that guy or gal sitting next to you" and I finally relent to discover a valuable lead or relationship that far exceeds the cost of the local draft microbrew.

There were just two of us sitting outside at 4PM and serendipity killed the power on the outlet he was using. So laptop in one hand, pint in the other, here he came. Sharing an outlet bonds you in this digital age, the way a bad cab ride or train trip did a couple decades ago, or a five-day monsoonal rainstorm in the third-world still can.

An hour later, and half a pint (second round) remaining, we shut laptops and commented on the weather - snow up north in home towns. My home town, Portland, was his envy. After this was over he would like to head there. This, turned out to be the BP mess. Serendipity. Much of the next several minutes was peppered with him saying, "off the record", but, in their turn comments, facts and anecdotal debris floated down several of the above mentioned channels, pushing me closer to the confluence of this oil mess. Information like, there are places people just aren't looking, "there's $5 billion in charter fishing in the Gulf", why isn't anyone talking to these guys. Yes, follow the money.

I'm headed for Grand Isle this weekend based on that last half pint. My Nawlins "Deep Throat" connected me to other activities, separate, out of Grand Isle. A coastal confluence. All channels seem to be flowing south to Grand Isle - now if the island just had a good pub!

PS - I debated on where to post this, here or over on my general blog Perambulations - in the end both - it's as much a Louisiana/Gulf story as general journalists journey.

"...a little rain must fall,"

2010-11-11T08:06:00.000-08:00

"Behind the clouds the sun is shining,

Thy fate is the common fate of all,

Into each life a little rain must fall,

Some days must be dark and dreary."

- Longfellow

"Into each life a little rain must fall", hmmm? We live on a watery planet. We are bound by cycles of precipitation. So naturally a little rain must fall. It's that ambiguous "little" that changes the equation and turns daily life into chaos. Turns a tropical trip into a chance to reconnect to being an Earthling sailing together on a lifeboat through space.

As a photographer few things strip life to its barest necessity like chaos. Images seem to emerge from what hours or days before seemed, as my Costa Rican friend Rudy Zamora would say, "tranquillo". Chaos comes in all forms, some predicted, some thrust upon its victims - be it war, famine, natural disaster, or in this case a little too much rain.

The past couple weeks in Costa Rica were the great yin-yang of traveling that makes traveling the wonderful experience I crave. The first nine days were near perfect - well, from a photography and bird-watching point of view. The chronically rain drenched Tortuguero N.P. was clear and hot. The surf rolled onshore and lured hatching baby sea turtles to sea each night and dawn. Scores of migrant song birds decorated the trees. Basking basilisks. Quiet paddling in the backwaters of the "baby Amazon."

In La Selve the rain came only one afternoon. In classic form. The sky swelled in humid heat and loomed with steely-hued cumulus. The rainforest cicada ratcheted up their mechanical rhythm and then the firmament exploded with a blinding flash and a thunderous clap - seconds later the downpour was on. We escaped and took refuge in the open bar, and toasted the tropical deluge with cold indigenous libations. Afterwards watched Aracaris share tree-ripened papaya with stingless bees.

In the mountains along the Continental Divide from Arenal N.P. southwest to Monteverde Biological Reserve light showers drift in and out of each day, as expected, this is the tropics, this is rainforest.

Even at a young age a baby Guan knew this rain wasn't going to be fun

and stuck close to mom.

The last week it was time for the other reality. The one where "...a little rain must fall,"

Over the past coupe decades of travel I've discovered most chaos slips in subtly, silently. The few contradictions being bomb-blasts from rebel factions or political protests, but even then the place had been compromised long before, you knew in your heart it was a rising tide.

The road less traveled - from Quepos to Manuel Antonio

- at least the day after 16.3 inches of rain in 24 hours made it impassable.

The wonderful British travel writer Colin Thubron wrote, "You go because you... crave excitement, ... the need to understand something before it's too late. You go to see what will happen." I would add experience, not just see, what will happen. We always want to survive that place we go, but were or when we tip-toe that tightrope of survival we step into a new reality that never leaves us.

The tail of hurricane Thomas visits Costa Rica and out-stayed it welcome, turning the Pacific Coast into waterworld. A place where virtually nothing was high enough to escape the flooding waters.

Clarity, empathy, concern, global awareness, perspective, ownership, responsibility, Earthliness are all facets of the new reality. You finally emerge from the place where things happen and your days change. You check the news, surf the web, wonder why your chaos isn't news. Why where you know things happened it doesn't concern the rest of the world.

You learn sluggish sloths may die with full bellies, unable to digest in the soggy cold. You fear for friends, and all for the homeless you drive past, left sleeping on the road. You feel a refection of guilt because your wealth secures a life boat - this time. Your world has shrunk in all the rain. It has also become more lush. Rising waters have pushed up your experiential fecundity. You do it enough and soon the whole world is your street, your town, your neighbors. Your parochial blinders washed off - you see the world with your heart and soul.

My thanks to Rudy Zamora for making the past couple weeks a brilliant experience.

Only One Hummingbird Still Makes A Magical View

2010-11-09T10:01:00.000-08:00

The rain began falling this morning early, just at dawn. Cold and soaking. Northwest winter rain. The kind for which we have received a tarnished, if not rusty, reputation. Truth is we don't like it much either. As much as it chills me to the bone I always imagine the toll on creature without the luxury of a space heater and cuppa tea. Over a dozen species of birds, little feathered souls, have flocked to the backyard feeders to fuel against the chilly downpour. My past couple weeks away in Costa Rica seems to have caused them a bit of concern - especially the diminutive dragons - Anna's hummingbirds.

With the hummingbird feeders full the Anna's, feisty three-inch hummers, have filled their bellies with sugar water and have returned to squabbling over the remainder - more of the sweet liquid than any one of them could possibly slurp up on their on. If birds did indeed evolve from dinosaurs then I fear what a 10 foot high version of these little bullies must have been like.

Peering out the kitchen window at one little male, his head swiveling side-to-side, alternately flashing the most brilliant ruby-violet color imaginable, I flashed back on one week ago, standing in the edge of the montane cloud rainforest of Monteverde Biological Reserve in Costa Rica. There, squadrons of these aerial acrobats squabbled and jousted over the sweet liquid in a half dozen feeders at the park's Hummingbird Gallery - one of the most enchanting experiences on the face of the Earth. A dozen different species vie for the feeders - oblivious to all other creatures, including humans. Their wings flashed by my head so close that wing-beat wakes would rush over my cheeks, a whoosh of air making me flinch. One diminutive hummer even entered the lens hood on my telephoto lens to challenge the reflected foe. This morning, clutching my hot cuppa Earl Grey tea and watching my single hummingbird species, I had but one regret, to paraphrase my Costa Rican friend Rudy Zamora, "I live in a place that has only one hummingbird." His regret was a planet with only one moon.

Then I thought a bit longer - if my world was only this vision, through this kitchen window, and I never knew such a place as the Hummingbird Gallery existed, I would rejoice in the one winged-jewel I have. Still, a couple more moons would still be cool.

Costa Rican hummers from top to bottom:

Male Purple-throated Mountain-gem (Lampornis calolaemus)

Male Violet Saberwing (Campylopterus hemileucurus)

Female Purple-throated Mountain-gem (Lampornis calolaemus)

Male Green Violet-ear (Colibri thalassinus)

TED Prize Goes to Mr Anonymity

2010-10-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

I smiled this morning when I read the latest TED Prize was awarded to an "anonymous photographer." The man (since everyone refers to him) is like his work, composed of light, but takes shape in the shadows. He is anonymous, or semi-anoymous, the Parisian is referred to only as "JR." I smiled because I have always felt the work should be the celebrity, not the artist.

TED's Director of the Prize Amy Novogratz said, "The winner of the 2011 TED Prize is JR, a provocative and enigmatic artist who puts a human face on some of the most critical social issues of our day and redefines how we view, make and display art."

Mr Anonymonity's projects vary, but have one underlying cause which resonates the TED mantra, "Wishes big enough to change the world". JR's self-described photograffure indeed provokes change by fostering community. "Portrait Of A Generation" showed giant photos of suburban "thugs" outside of Paris. "Face 2 Face," which, as the Ted site explains, "some consider the biggest illegal photo exhibition ever," explored Israeli-Palestinian tensions. "Women Are Heroes" was an effort to empower women by showing their faces.

One of JR's more incredible project, is in the huge slum of Kibera, on the edge of Nairobi, Kenya. (Kibera is one of the largest slums not only in Africa, but in the world.) Perhaps more meaningful to me because I did my Wild Orphans elephant project in the orphanage just beyond Kibera and would pass the slum many mornings for two years.

JR installed his huge suffocatingly tight black and white portraits on the rooftops of the slum (photo above). His, the slum's, images stare skyward, depicting women who's lives are trapped there. Proving art can be functional as well as provocative, the giant photograffures, printed on tarp, also safe guard the frail falling-apart huts from rain. Poetically the images can best be seen by the wealthy tourists and politicians flying in and out of neighboring Wilson airfield. They are even large enough to be viewed on Google Earth. He also installed the top portions of the portraits on the sides of the train that passes twice daily through the slum. As the portrait clad cars chug through the metal and cardboard huts that press right up against the tracks, they momentarily align with the bottom portions installed on the hillside to complete the image. (Now that was a brilliant idea!)

From JR's website:

"As he remains anonymous and doesn't explain his huge full frame portraits of people making faces, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passer-by/interpreter."

Photo above copyright JR from project: Women are Heroes. You can learn more about JR on the TED site or on JR's own site.

I've posted here before about the TED, but if you missed that, you should check out the deep archive of TED speakers - there are some truly wonderful and thought-provoking video clips worth discovering.

Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year

2010-10-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

The annual celebration of images from nature, the Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year, has released its 2010's top selection (the word winner suggests the others are losers - don't like it) a wonderful dance of ants by Hungarian photographer Bence Máté. My favorite ants - tropical leaf cutters. He said, 'I love the contrast between the simplicity of the shot itself and the complexity of the behaviour.' From the posting on the gallery site it says Máté's Costa Rican photo had its trials, "Lying on the ground to take the shot, he also discovered the behaviour of chiggers (skin-digesting mite larvae), which covered him in bites."

This annual event draws submissions from around the world making it truly one of the best and most prestigious competitions of its kind. As a former participant I know having one of my images selected was a great reward and considering the range and quality of the other entries.

For a look at more wonderful images from this year's entries visit the (British) Museum of Natural History's site.

the Color of Joy

2010-10-10T10:38:00.000-07:00

Sharing is perhaps the greatest virtue of the web - ideas, images, challenges, perspectives, personal stories. I'm evolving my thoughts to see blogs as one of the most valuable and dynamic venues for web sharing. As a consequence I feel more and more passionate about this blog becoming both a sharing of my ideas, etc. but a platform for sharing all the niches I discover. Today, the niche is the joy of color - via some exceptional creativity = photography + experimentation.

Jenn's brother works for Pixar, the animation studio. Pixar I have learned is both a job and a journey of exploration - I wish there were more companies like it. Craig, her brother, sent the below video and links.

Color is Joy

Enjoy!

Canon Pixma: Bringing colour to life from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

iPadding the Future

2010-09-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

(Gerry - since posting this Paul Melcher on his blog Thoughts of a Bohemian has posted Oct. 20th, "Beyond Metadata" worth a a read)

I have been accused of having shiny-object-syndrome. If I were 10 it would be simply AD of the HD. If you were ten 40 or 50 years ago they simply call it curiosity. Maybe that's why if you look around you see 40, 50, 60 year olds creating a pretty curious world full of things like the internet, cellular global communication, and stuff like touch-screen iPads.

But back to my focus issues for a moment. Focusing, I have always struggled with it. Having a laptop in front of me with Google open is the same as walking around in a tropical rainforest - I get excted about every thing that flutters past, flits by, crawls through my perception. I can barely read through a paragraph without highlighting and clicking a search for that word or idea and there I go - I'm off in a new wondrous direction. Unfortunately I have no light filtering through the canopy enabling me to "check in" once every so often and remember where I am, where I've been, and, oh ya, where I was going.

So I look at the iPad with trepidation - but I also know that somewhere in there lies my future. Not maybe the iPad itself, but the rainforest it will give birth to in a few short generations. As the iPad was nearing reality a photographer friend Michael and I had a pint and "it" came up and consumed much of the conversation. It was both the iPad and the rainforest. Ya see we are trying to figure out the future of our creative work, in turn a living from it, in turn our financial ability to continue the creative process. We came to a collection of conclusions, one was that quality would eventually be critical. But many conclusions rested on the creative inspiration of others - primarily the new publishing world; and I use the word publishing with considerable reservation. This snippet from media writer Colby Hall touches on the foundation of it, and slides forward in the direction we need to focus:

The question that publishers should be asking themselves regarding the iPad, and other tablet platforms, is not “how do we put our magazine on this device?” It should be “how can we best replicate the brand experience of our title, using the full suite of technological advances afforded by this new platform?” Follow up questions would include notions that would have previously been considered bizarre, like “What does our magazine sound like?” and “How many video advertisements is too much next this block of type?” (Because video stimulation hits the lizard part of the brain much quicker than the most well crafted and moving essay ever will.) It’s sad, but true.

Most of the web is frustratingly pathetic. On one level I understand and accept that because of the boxed minds that developed it. These were not audio visual people. That's why the web has been a hopeless place for kids. Kids are curious, the web is not designed in a curiously thinking way, although, as I said, a rainforest may be a short evolution away. If it is the iPad is a nice little muddy path leading in there.

What Michael and I discussed was exactly what Colby eludes to, that is, "best replicate the brand experience", although we think not in replication (which still implies backwards thinking to me), but in more creative (forward thinking) terms like, 'how cam we make the image come alive for the viewer', or 'transport the viewer/listener on our journey', or 'challenge the visitor to think anew'.

Those are the challenges we photographers, audioists, animators, film-makers and writers face. After a decade sort of away from my craft I'm incredibly excited to be back creating, it is filled with newness: I shoot digitally in both still and HD video from the same camera, upload into software like Lightroom, geotag my creative movement around the globe and listen for audio opportunities. iPad, Galaxy, even now Galapagos are, like the latter name suggests, new niches of evolutionary opportunity, creatively we can't think in replicating terms, those creatures die out, but in wholly new species.

I think we went through an odd transitional phase, past couple decades, and we aren't completely through it, as publishers will attest, where quality was down-graded and volume became king. If you walk the perimeter of a rainforest you see a pretty messy place - tattered bits of the original forest, invasive species, strangler weeds, garbage, it can all look rather depressing. Seen a few decades in the future and the order is returning, the forest re-assumes control, or more likely, a new order is established. I think we are there, in that messy place of chaos, where it is extremely difficult to see, hear, think. But I can also see some sense of order, new order with elements of old, taking root, sprouting forth. There will be devices and delivery methods that need brilliantly created content, designed to be probed and explored, and the world will pay for it, in a way that enables creativity to thrive not just survive.

The Unseen Sea

2010-09-17T18:32:00.000-07:00

It's been rather quiet over here since I started work in the Gulf - literally and figuratively I have been swamped. I fly back to Portland next week and will catch up with several posts in the works for here and my Gulf specific blog. In the meantime Jenn sent me this very cool site with a time lapse piece on the fog and cloud formations in and around San Francisco which I wanted to share called The Unseen Sea by Simon Christen - enjoy!

Gulf Oil Spill Project

2010-08-18T06:55:00.000-07:00

Over the past week I have been racing forth and back across the Gulf Coast between Louisiana and the Florida panhandle searching out the impacts of the latest human disaster created from our short-sightedness in exploring alternatives to a petroleum based existence. The past week has been interesting - on multiple levels - travel and photography are just two.

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster caught the world's attention for the past couple months and then with the capping of the well greatest human cause environmental disaster began to slip from the media's attention and the worlds - here on the Gulf, especially in Louisiana it is still very much front and center - and as I saw Monday (Aug 16th), out on places like Grand Isle (photo above) it will be for years to come . We need to know who we are, what we have done, why we let it happen, and what is the long-term impact. That's why I came - I hope to help tell that story.

Over the coming weeks as I continue to understand what this disaster means to the Gulf Coast, human lives here, the food chain, and long-term impact on and to our cultural, political and social relationship to the environment I will be blogging about it specifically in a different site you can find here at the Gulf Oil Spill Project.

Partnering with me on the project is the National Audubon Society and photographic support is being provided by Pro Photo Supply (my blog about the photojournalism can be found here) - for each of those I will also be blogging and doing other presentations. As soon as those are up and running I'll post links to them here.

Finally this blog will continue to comment on my travels and observations on the planet - perhaps more, perhaps less, depending on the craziness of the schedule. It will take a new look soon as I will be migrating it to some new blogging tools which should provide you with more imagery, video, sound all to better experience the world I'm perambulating in and through.

Thanks to everyone who is along for the journey - Gerry

Gross Negligence - by whom?

2010-08-03T09:33:00.000-07:00

You don't need to sit down for this, in fact most Americans won't even pay attention to the news, but here it comes...

The BP oil spill is the new world record holder for human inflicted environmental disasters. The spill has released just under five million barrels - an estimated 210 million gallons - of oil. That's 20 times more oil than was released during the Exxon Valdez spill--which previously held the record for the worst oil spill on U.S. territory. On top of that we have no estimate on the volume of methane gas poisoning the waters in and around the wellhead.

That figure "blows out of the water" the 3.3 million barrels released during the world's previous worst spill, the Ixtoc spill in the Bay of Campeche off the eastern coast of Mexico in 1979.

Writers Campbell Robertson and Clifford Krauss for the New York Times reported, the official estimate of the amount of oil spill means that BP faces fines of anywhere between $5.4 billion and $21 billion, depending on the degree to which federal investigators decide that gross negligence sparked the spill.

"Gross negligence", hmmmm?

Most Americans would say that's pretty obvious, isn't gross negligence spelled B P?

Negligence, yes, "gross", well I'm undecided. Certainly BP pushed the limits of safety, corporate ethics, destructive capitalism, and we will find out over time a whole host of other practices were compromised or simply toss overboard. But the blame for gross negligence maybe rests more broadly.

For true gross negligence I think we could start with elected officials over the past four to five decades who have failed to implement a comprehensive energy management plan for a nation (and in turn a world - we have been the leaders like it or not.) And then to the lobbying companies like auto makers who have slaved to profit margins, and insured those elected officials played along. But ultimately we have to look in our own rear-view mirrors at the people behind the wheel. WE. We elected official and didn't hold them accountable. We bought cars that ran on oil. We scream everytime gas smells $3/gal. - make it cheaper at "any" cost. We insured the system didn't change because it might be uncomfortable.

WE, you and me, are the ones responsible for the gross negligence.

Real gross negligence is being done by the media and the public indifference to a living planet that, from a human perspective, is being pushed to the limits of survivability. Just this past week the media has begun down playing the "great disaster" they so jumped on a couple months ago: "Where is all the oil?" an AFP headline asked. Time magazine ran a piece suggesting that the environmental impact of the spill has been "exaggerated." The New York Times ran a story that said the "Gulf oil spill is vanishing fast." Yahoo news ran a story suggesting that oil-starved microbes are gobbling up the oil. Anderson Cooper's CNN show ac360 is one of the few that has continued daily reporting from the Gulf Coast - and he too will likely pack up the mobile unit this week as BP looks to finally shut the well.

As for the longer-term, no one really knows what tomorrow's tide will wash up, that will take some drilling into, long into the future. The scientists are already taking sides, some optimistically portend that Mother Nature will mitigate the oils impact - but let's face it, you don't need and environmental PhD to grasp 5 billion of anything spilled into the environment unnaturally does damage, and to some creatures off our homo-centric radars, the damage could be terminal.

Brett Michael Dykes, who writes the Upshot for Yahoo News, reported that Doug Radar, the chief ocean scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, told the Times Picayune that millions of gallons of oil remain unaccounted for.

"If you go back and look at the sheer amount of oil dumped - 60,000 barrels a day for 87 days - you get about 220 million gallons," Radar said. "Of that, 11 million gallons were burned and 30-some million were collected, meaning about 50 million gallons were eliminated. That leaves you about 175 million gallons of oil-based pollution loose in the Gulf. And when it degrades from the thick stuff you can see, that doesn't mean it's all gone. There's still an untold amount of toxins from that oil in the marine environment."

And what about that web-of-life we learned so much about in elementary school? That's the great mystery. Long-term it becomes broken links and chain-reactions, many beyond our best guesstimates. Researchers have already recorded that the Gulf's traditional summer dead zone - the annual dip in oxygen levels along the Gulf shoreline (due to Mississippi River runoff carrying agricultural fertilizer waste) - is twice as large as it was last year, representing an area the size of Massachusetts - stretching 7,722 square miles across Louisiana's coast well into Texan waters, scientists with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium announced yesterday (Monday).

So gross negligence? BP? My gut says the real criminals will never appear in court. The real crime is being perpetrated everyday by roughly 300 million Americans who won't accept a new energy-use paradigm. 300 million Americans who greedily refuse to become participants (better leads) in a global solution to living sustainably on this planet. The real gross negligence -- the courage-less creature at the wheel of the vehicle that creeps along in our rear-view mirror everyday, around the world, at 8AM and 5PM.

PS - and what about that "other" giant nation consuming oil. China has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases and biggest energy consumer, but they are searching for solution to the unsustainable -China Plans Huge Buses That Can DRIVE OVER Cars

Being American - None of US are Islands Alone

2010-08-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

I saw a movie last night that struck several cords from joy to frustration to anger. All about people. Not one kind of people, them over there, they, but all people. And in that sense about Americans. Being American. What that means. What ever that means?

It's odd to have an island named after you that represented a door, a passage way, a gate to all those people, regardless of origin, color, perspectives, experiences. A word that dangled in the desire of faraway sleepless nights and unfulfilled dreams. Ellis Island. To so many it launched a freedom granted to you at birth, for no price, and you have never in all your global wanderings stepped foot there. Yes there, on that small, originally 5 acres, of terra firma that somehow meant more than all others; between 1892 to 1954 millions of people, a planet's worth, created the most remarkable crucible of human diversity our world has ever known: mixed with the poets and the thinkers, the scientists and the musicians, and farmers and shopkeepers, there were also bigots and hate mongers and those who would have you believe that theirs is the only American blood that flowed out of that remarkable crucible - that's the price of diversity - there are mosquitoes in the diverse beauty of the rainforest, and some of them carry malaria.

The Visitor is about the potential of continuing to give life to that remarkable crucible. The Visitor is a movie every American, illegal, legal, or by the luckiest miracle on Earth - of which you had no say in - you were born here. You paid no price for your luck - you can only pay it forward. And do so like The Visitor "with impressive grace and understatement, resist potential triteness and phony uplift." Qualities you wish were the gifts of being born American.

I agreed with one reviewer who wrote, "The most remarkable part of The Visitor is the way it organically shows the way life can change un-expectantly, unfairly and without warning and does it with real, raw emotion. Just when you think you've figured out what the movie is about, you [are] slapped with a new reality. It is frightening, timely and angering. Even the ending, which is not the typical movie ending, is emotive in a subtle and realistic way. I was not overwhelmed or underwhelmed by the movie, I was perfectly whelmed; a task indeed."

Like living as an American.

The Visitor was released in 2007, that year roughly 1 million immigrants entered America, none of them look like you and me, all of them look like US. That same year 283,000 were detained - 85% of them did not have access to a lawyer - their crime was dreaming of the crucible. That year there were 10,350 immigrant children placed in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The goal of all this? To protect US from terrorism, the them, the there. The price? The crucible crumbles and diversity dies.

*****

A footnote of comparison: On September 11th, 2001 the them destroyed 2,973 lights of imagination and hope and joy in the crucible of diversity. By comparison that same year the them (drunk drivers) destroyed 17,448 lights of imagination and hope and joy in the crucible of diversity. The latter terrorism has continued every year since, and still.

BP Announces New Summer Movie Release: Silence of the Scientists

2010-07-23T10:05:00.001-07:00

I really don't know where to begin this, so like a good writer, when stuck, just start writing and then eventually ya hit a grove. Of course, like a good writer, the alternative is to walk down to the pub, grab a pint or two and contemplate my ideas, hydrate my inspiration, then write. I'm opting for the first, since its 10 AM - not that that ever bothered Hemingway.

Here goes... I'll start with a question.

Is there a time when something is so off, its principals so clearly skewed as apparent by its actions (all that we know) in which we as a society need to stop and question its value in existing? Is it something we really need in our lives, in our world?

My background, my experiences are in nature, observing it, studying it, contemplating it, soliciting other perspectives on it. In nature the above question would be rhetorical at best, ultimately moot. The old saying goes "Nature abhors a void" but nature equally abhors anything mindlessly destructive to the system, all other life. The global petroleum company BP is treading down that path and perhaps it's time we as a society pause and consider its value in our lives, in our world.

In the past couple months the following information about BP activities has come to public light, and it's clear much more remains receding in the dim recesses.

BP abandoned almost all prudent safety procedures in deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
BP paid or insured few if any regulations governing their drilling activities in the Gulf of Mexico were know or under the scrutiny of the licensor (us hence the US).
BP continually has under reported the extent of the spill scope.
BP has, in coercion with local and government officials gagged the flow of information about the extent of damage along the Gulf Coast, including using coerced/paid local law enforcement to challenge, threaten and exclude journalists.
BP has pressured government in the UK for release of a know terrorist who's actions killed
BP is, still, working with the Lybian government on who's side it was pressuring the UK government to open the flow of oil leases.
BP is current trying to buy the silence of scientists regarding their research into the Gulf spill damage.

Yes, this last one hits home. I have always had a soft spot for scientists. I think they try more than most, to do something of value for humankind. So it's with complete outrage that I read BP officials have been quietly moving through the science community trying to buy the silence of the scientists faced with understanding and analyzing the impact of this spill nightmare.

BP said it had hired more than a dozen scientists "with expertise in the resources of the Gulf of Mexico," according to a statement given to the BBC. That's great, get real scientists at work on this mess. But that isn't their objective apparently. According to a BBC report:

Bob Shipp, the head of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama, said BP's lawyers had approached him and wanted his whole department.

"They contacted me and said we would like to have your department interact to develop the best restoration plan possible after this oil spill," he said.

"We laid the ground rules - that any research we did, we would have to take total control of the data, transparency and the freedom to make those data available to other scientists and subject to peer review.

"They left and we never heard back from them."

Nelson warned BP's actions could be "hugely destructive".

"Our ability to evaluate the disaster and write public policy and make decisions about it as a country can be impacted by the silence of the research scientists who are looking at conditions," he said.

"It's hugely destructive. I mean at some level, this is really BP versus the people of the United States."

So where does it stop? I return to my original question,

Is there a time when something is so off, its principals so clearly skewed as apparent by its actions (all that we know) in which we as a society need to stop and question its value in existing? Is it something we really need in our lives, in our world?

Sounds ludicrous you think. We would just remove a company from our planet. Why not? BP now equates to BioPoison - life threatening. It's not infected every last worker, but clearly it has become what all corporations run the risk of, slipping off the tightrope, losing balance. BioPoison infects the inner ear, one no long hear the voice of reason and right, one loses balance. Their record is illustrating they have been tiptoeing that thin tightrope corporations balance on so precariously, only maintaining balance based on the collective conscious of a few men and women to listen to the inner ear, and realize their decisions do destroy with equal severity as they do value.

BP has lost balance, they're falling and like any one who does they desperately flail about, grasping at anything and everyone for hope of stability. The result is they take us down with them. Despite our hardwired human urge to save - this time we need, hold back our hand, look away, to let them go.

BP Lies vs Mistakes: The PhotoShop Cunundrum

2010-07-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

Sometimes something smells so foul that it needs to be aired (out) on as many blog laundry lines as possible. Below is such a case. The original text and images (below intact) first appeared on a Yahoo blog by Brett Michael Dykes - and congratulations to John Aravosis of AMERICAblog for astutely catching Bad People doing yet more Bad Pr and first posting this. I won't rant on these PhotoShop "mistakes" here - I've said my fill before.

BP caught using altered image of command center

Is a picture worth more or less than a thousand words if it's Photoshopped?

John Aravosis of AMERICAblog made an interesting find Monday night: A high-resolution image on BP's website of the troubled company's Houston-based Deepwater Horizon response command center had been altered.

The altered image was later removed by BP and replaced with what they say is the original (the altered image is above and the original is below). You'll notice that three underwater images were inserted onto screens to the right on a wall of video feeds in the altered image, where blank images exist on the screens in the original.

The photo flap inspired the usually staid Washington Post to quip, "Apparently BP is no more adept at doctoring photos than it is at plugging deep-sea oil leaks."

BP spokesman Scott Dean told the Post's Steven Mufson that there was no diabolical plot to photographically beef up the company's command center. Rather, he said, a BP photographer with completely benign intentions just slipped the images in.

[Animals most threatened by Gulf Coast spill]

"Normally we only use Photoshop for the typical purposes of color correction and cropping," Dean told the paper. "In this case they copied and pasted three ROV screen images in the original photo over three screens that were not running video feeds at the time."

He added, "We've instructed our post-production team to refrain from doing this in the future."

(Pictures courtesy of AMERICAblog)

More than a little Spat

2010-07-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

I haven't quite been able to figure out exactly why this BP oil spill mess keeps gnawing at me? I mean beyond the fact that you would have to be working with half a brain not to outraged at the reason, historic and current, blind energy greed, that have us in this position. But more than that I think its my childhood love for the sea. I grew up thinking and planning to be a marine biologist. I shuffled off to university with wet feet and a salty freshening breeze blowing on shore. I learned to scuba dive before I could drive, and the first place I drove, literally, was to the beach with the back of my little Datsun pickup (mini by today's standards) stuffed with diving gear. The first photo job I applied for was on the Calypso with Jacques Cousteau (okay, I was really naive.) So as the Jimmy Buffet song goes, "the sea's in my veins," and there it remains.

As I read reports and news releases, call folks on the Gulf to set up interviews, and work through the last details with National Audubon Society and prepare to start documenting in the Gulf with their interests (Important Bird Areas) in mind, its all those years of walking beaches and face-mask pointed into the sea that makes this assignment hit closer to soul's home.

Marine biologists will admit that not a great deal is known about the effects of oil on organisms in deep water.

"We know almost nothing about the ecology in the deep ocean," says Professor Ed Overton, an environmental scientist at Louisiana State University from a recent interview with BBC.

That comment comes as the Obama Administration once again filed a stop order on deepwater drilling in the Gulf. At the same time oyster fishermen (harvesters really) are coming to grips with the reality of their crops life cycle; oil and the toxic soup associated with it are not only polluting the beaches and mangroves, but plunging a dipstick deep into the future of all marine life in the wake of this disaster. In their case they have more than a little spat with BP and other oil companies that are responsible for this disaster. In fact, spat is at the very core of their future. Spat are baby oysters, and now is the time along the Gulf coast when they head off to become the encrusting bivalves nature intended. And nature's job for them - filter the sea.

The April 10th BP/Deepwater Horizon spill has carried on just long enough to spell spat doom. Late June the waters warm and trigger oyster spawning, about a 100 million eggs per female. After mid-water fertilization the infant bivalve wannabees attach to something hard, like another oyster, and start their quiet sedentary lives of inner contemplation - they are called spat, about the size of a big pinhead. Spat kindergarten through high school takes about three years, so if you are in the oyster harvesting business your crop is always three to four years in the making.

I wouldn't know so much, or care, about oysters other than they were a part of my summers and winters as a teenager growing up near Puget Sound, Washington. A friend's family owned oyster beds and forever needed a hand, and I needed the money. Lowtide, razor sharp oyster shells and the rich alive smell of the estuarine flats was better than flipp'n burgers.

And there's a culture to work drawn from the sea. Everything around it has a culture. A taste of that culture can be felt on trawlers, and shrimpboats, and village around the world. It extends into all the lives connected to the sea. Along the Gulf coast that means oysters as much as anything. A recent article in the Nola.com from New Orleans reflects the downstream impact of the oyster loss -

Gulf oil spill puts oyster shuckers, traditions on ice

Working those beaches taught me a valuable lesson, later reinforced formally at university, if you are an oyster you can not run, you can not hide, you are on the inside, what you take from the outside. In the Gulf that outside is a toxic world beyond what the past 200 million years has prepared the oyster for, and it is becoming clear it will be that way for years to come.

Photo courtesy: Mary Campbell/GLOBIO

"I will come with my full mind and soul"

2010-07-14T11:16:00.000-07:00

The following are the words of a dear friend and photographer from India Shyamal Datta. He is returning soon to India after living in the States for a quarter century. In many ways Shyamal has something most of us never experience, two homes. Homes in the cultural sense, the sense of place. He has taken the opportunity to travel and explore this home most of those born here never feel inspired to roam. In many ways he is the American we wish all of us would be, proud of the place, both of its passion and its faults, and in love with the grand wildness our landscape still hold.

When in Kolkata recently for his wedding I reminded him of visual magic that lives and breaths on the streets he left all those years ago to do as millions do in America, discover a new home. The above image was one I discovered on those streets of his other home. Sharing it inspired this reply:

"I know. I understand where you are coming from.

I know you vouched this subject before in Kolkata. But I didn't respond to you. That's because when I am there I am so engrossed with family matters, friends, logistics and the shortage of time that I deliberately detach myself from photoshooting. Except of course when I have planned a side trip somewhere with the sole purpose of shooting.

There are millions of stories and plots and projects in my mind for when I am there. Its like when I am there I see a story and I tell myself - I will come back to you (the subject) later and I will come back to listen to your story and to capture your pixels and save them and keep them. So please forgive me for now. Because when I come to you I will come with my full mind and soul and my paintbrush or my pencil because to come to you now will trivialize you.

I have a story for ten or twelve year old kids working in shanty chai shops on the footwalks of the city - from dawn to dusk these kids work with no choice but to work. In the early mornings in the footwalks in the midst of smoke from their chai shops you can see their soiled faces serving chai to drive by truckers or taxi drivers. Something Cartier Bresson would love I guess

Just an example. So yes I see them but I try not "see" them for now. But I will"

We often see what lies before us, the challenge is to not let our eyes and ears and senses rest until we etch it indelibly with in us, then it adds texture and balance to the fabric of who we shall become, otherwise we're just so much flotsam, here and gone with the tides.

76 more years win insanity for life

2010-07-09T12:05:00.000-07:00

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague..."
- the Matrix

Did you catch that? "...until every natural resource is consumed"

I have always admired wisdom - real wisdom. Not the kind we cavalierly toss about in the media, label political leaders with in election years, bestow on military leaders, aggrandize money-makers with, rather the wisdom born from careful thought, holistic thinking, kind application, careful reflection and consideration of future. I've also always have a soft spot for fore-thought and inspired thinking. I have always appreciated simplicity as well - a building block of wisdom really - like the kind many folks without the financial luxury of waste apply to their daily lives. In my travels around this planet I have never assumed myself to be the wisest human, I not only make mistakes, more consequentially I don't always use all that confetti of wisdom scattered about my feet. I have sought the wise, tried to learn from their experience of knowledge, and understand how to figure things out ahead of the mistake, the inevitable, the painful.

I was pedaling home from the market a few days ago and spotted a new billboard (an aesthetically abominable idea to start with) ad in my neighborhood (above.) I pulled from the bike path in amazement. As millions of barrels of oil and millions of cubic feet of methane gas spew from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico creating death zones and dead zones, I tried to fathom the stupidity of the advertising looming over me. Did centenarian petroleum company 76 (now owned by ConocoPhillips) really draw on a spec of its 120 years of experience before suggesting that we would, or should, still be running on gasoline that far into the future?

I also found the graphic subtly interesting with its hose draining from the future and its nozzle satiating the current. But then that was the ultimate virus talking - corporation marketing department - selling, exploiting, mindless and virally greedy. (Remember - Viruses are not plants, animals, or bacteria, but they are the quintessential parasites of the living kingdoms.)

I'm not anti-corporate, I've contracted to many, I'm typing this blog on one, I photographed the above picture with one, I accessed the internet to share these thoughts with one, and before the day is over I'll ride, eat, crap into, and sleep on, several more. They are us. One of my issues with the anti-BPness going on is the irresponsible We. We refuse anything but cheap gas, and they are doing their cheapest to provide it. They are us. If you don't drive a car, buy shipped products, and don't have any plastic in your world, then you are not they, and you have a reason to be uncontrollably upset.

If they are us and us are they, then we have at least 40 years selfish procrastination to stare in the mirror at.

John Stewart's The Daily Show staff assembled one of the most painfully poignant, satirical sad video montages of historical procrastination I have ever seen. It ran, I watched, I wanted to cry. Instead I laughed that kind of pained laugh one does when the truth is so excruciating, insane, and depressing, that laughter is the only survival tool despite how wrong it feels.

P-a-u-s-e
(watch the clip first)

Maybe we aren't good at wisdom anymore? Seeing it, absorbing it, understanding it, and most importantly using it. If I can draw anything from all those travels and quiet perambulations with the thoughts and actions of wiser folks than me, it might be that we no longer think, no, not think, rather believe, that wisdom is a survival requirement. Or maybe we have decided wisdom must fit into our lives to be believed, be more media relevant, app'd to our iPhones... hmmm? Maybe just cheaper? Like our gas, maybe we want cheaper wisdom. The price of the old wisdom is just too high - patience, tolerance, kindness, listening, thinking, and reflection.

"I'm starting with the man in the mirror
I'm asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make that change"

- MJ

UN-embedded Journalism

2010-06-17T07:30:00.000-07:00

Excellent piece of UN-embedded journalism by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone - worth the read!

The Spill, The Scandal and the President

The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder

From the article:

Even worse, the "moratorium" on drilling announced by the president does little to prevent future disasters. The ban halts exploratory drilling at only 33 deepwater operations, shutting down less than one percent of the total wells in the Gulf. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the Cabinet-level official appointed by Obama to rein in the oil industry, boasts that "the moratorium is not a moratorium that will affect production" – which continues at 5,106 wells in the Gulf, including 591 in deep water.

Most troubling of all, the government has allowed BP to continue deep-sea production at its Atlantis rig – one of the world's largest oil platforms. Capable of drawing 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor, Atlantis is located only 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana, in waters nearly 2,000 feet deeper than BP drilled at Deepwater Horizon. According to congressional documents, the platform lacks required engineering certification for as much as 90 percent of its subsea components – a flaw that internal BP documents reveal could lead to "catastrophic" errors. In a May 19th letter to Salazar, 26 congressmen called for the rig to be shut down immediately. "We are very concerned," they wrote, "that the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon could foreshadow an accident at BP Atlantis."

Photo courtesy of al.com

Embedded... in oil... and much more

2010-06-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
- the Beatles

Over the past few weeks I have embedded far more information about the Gulf ecosystem and the mismanagement of natural resources into my brain than I really care to know. "Embedded" is a word that has been troubling me for about 10 years, since it was first applied to the other Gulf war, that other oil mess, and the feeling continues to churn in my gut, like one of the parasites I once picked up in the Congo. This one just won't go away. My saying then was "better living through chemistry", this time that joke's punch line has a petrochemical stench to it.

"Embedded" was initially used in the media coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The US military reacted to pressure from news media who were growing frustrated by the level of access granted by the Bush (Sr.) Administration during the 1991 Gulf War and in the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (Bush Jr). Lt. Col. Rick Long, the former head of media relations for the U.S. Marine Corps, managed the media boot camp in Quantico, Virginia, which prepared journalists for their war assignments. "Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment." Embedding journalists honorably served that end, said Long. BP, and in a complicit act, the US Coast Guard, are now going to attempt to dominate the information environment". Only the environment keeps growing (see map below).

As I have struggled with the "go" vs "not go" to the Gulf issue these past couple weeks, one of the issues that weighed significant in the "not go" column has been "embedded" media. It feels a bit like my friend who was unceremoniously ushered off the Nike corporate campus because he was inadvertently wearing another companies footwear, shoes that better fit his feet and wallet. If you are at Nike you better have your feet embedded in their shoes. It's hard to imagine anyone embedded in the BP media caravan and not wearing BP sneakers.

It is possible to sneak around in other shoes, sometimes, some places, but in my own country?

Amr Al-Mounaiery, Abu Dhabi TV correspondent: "After this war [Gulf 2003], I realized that we in the media are the soldiers of politics. Not the military soldiers. I am proud that Abu Dhabi TV showed all sides, everything. You can see CNN showed only part of the war – their favorite part. They didn't show any of the anti-American rallies or the civilian casualties. They just showed crowds welcoming American soldiers and clapping hands. It is selective journalism – like Saddam did ... This was the Arabic way. Now we are switching roads and we wonder: Where is America? Where is the American dream? Freedom of expression, where is that?"
– Excerpt from "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq – an oral history" by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson

"Embedded" should never be linked to journalism, journalists, media or integrity of reporting. I have a great deal of respect for many correspondents who have worked the front lines of the painful and ugly stories, both wars of politics and environment, but I am also disheartened by our lack of Murrow-ism. Our lack of courage to demand more of the words and images we create.

"For birds, the timing could not be worse; they are breeding, nesting and especially vulnerable in many of the places where the oil could come ashore," warns Melanie Driscoll, a Louisiana-based bird conservation director with the National Audubon Society. Embedded means limiting, controlling the look and distribution of images that painfully picture pollution-soaked pelicans and other life - images that are powerful emotional arguments for getting off our oil addiction. Yes, it's still possible for a picture to say a thousand words (above), unless it's embedded, controlled and marketed, then it's only 500 words at best.

Speaking of numbers, here are a few, embedded in this environmental disaster. I'm not a numbers guy, but these are numbers basic to primary school math.

Since the initial inky plume began spreading up and under the Gulf of Mexico, the price of oil per barrel has risen by $2.5 U.S. dollars a barrel. BP generated $4 million a day before the crisis, that figure has now risen to $10 million per day.
When the accident first occurred the BP estimate was 1,000 gallons flow, then upped to 5,000 (which the US government trumpeted), then 10,000 was finally settled on after 5 weeks. Post several botched attempts to stop the spewing crude, a capture siphon was reported by BP to be collecting 11,000 gallons/day... okay, my math is starting to fail me here, but isn't that 110% ? hey why not, coaches ask that of their athletes, BP of their employees, why not their well heads? (That actually make good math, if a company can get 110% of the oil out by spilling it, that's more efficient and more profitable.) But let's continue... the cutting of the pipe was, BP reported, going to expand the output by 20%, and then they (BP) announced some success as they are capturing up to 50% of the escaping oil. So, does that mean 11,000 = 50% so there is 22,000 being released, which would be 20% increase over the original which would need to be about 18,000? Hang on, I'm almost done with this story problem.

Now, as of June 16, nearly 2 months after this started the Government scientists today increased the estimate of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico to be upwards of 60,000 barrels per day. That translates into 2.5 million gallons per day; an amount equal to the Exxon Valdez spill could be gushing from the well about every four days.
Okay, so is the BP capture 50% = 11,000 or is it 50% = 60,000/2 = 30,000? which = 50% of 600% more than they said? At what point do the numbers, or men behind them, lie?
A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration video, shot as officials coordinated response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, shows that federal officials almost immediately worried that the oil well could leak up to 110,000 barrels per day, or 4.6 million gallons.
$20 billion vs $27.7 billion cash - the first is amount the US Gov. pressed BP to set in escrow for partial clean up ($1 billion spent currently) - the second BP's cash generation in 2009.

A couple more bullet points -
New polling suggests 76 percent of Americans support some government limitations on greenhouse-gas emissions - yet, 53% believe off-shore drilling should go forward. (The Senate recently rejected a backward-looking resolution to discredit the EPA from Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski. “It shows that senators are now scared of being tied to fossil-fuel interests,” says Michael Levi, a climate expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. No numbers yet on percentage of those senators currently vs previously embedded in the pockets of major oil companies.)
2 cents - A tripling of the federal government’s expenditures on energy technology R.D. & D. could be financed with a increase of about 2 cents per gallon in the federal tax on gasoline. (more on this)

I'm a picture person - I've embedded a little map to bring this ugly mess closer to home - your home - just click on the tabs at the top of the map and move it to your home - or any other place you love.

James Carville, a Clinton campaign veteran who has criticized the administration's response to the spill, said, “We don’t need legislation, we need to utterly reject the philosophy that companies and markets are able to regulate themselves,” continuing, “Until you have that you’re going to have banking crises and environmental catastrophes.” Along with that I would also "utterly reject" the philosophy that as long as journalists (photogs included) are embedded in their subjects we will never hear and see what is and isn't being regulated and by whom.

So, "embedded", what has it come to mean? It feels a lot like a lie, or worse yet a partial truth. The kind that confuses our confidence and erodes our integrity. We have now for a decade embedded those few among us charged and challenged with reporting the facts, unbiasedly, in war and disaster - at the same time we have now been engaged in the longest war in American history and the country's largest environmental disaster. Something, maybe that "feeling continues to churn in my gut" sensation, tells me the two are embedded in one another.

other thoughts: Pros and Cons of Embedded Journalism

Photo above: A laughing gull mired in oil from the Deepwater Horizon on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

A Moment of Silence Please...

2010-05-26T13:30:00.001-07:00

Oil Spills, Korean crisis, Jamaican death toll rises, Blast near NATO base in Kandahar, more after this pause to catch your breath.

And in other news.... The BBC reported today that, "The Alaotra grebe is extinct" ...going on to say, "The last known sighting of the bird was in 1985 and experts have now confirmed its demise, killed off by a combination of poaching and predatory fish."

You probably didn't know the lovely little bird, lived just around the corner, quiet fellow, so nice to the local kids, never really bothered anyone. Gosh, kinda wish we had gotten to know him before he died.

Painting of the Alaotra grebe by Chris Rose via the BBConline

Thinking about the cost of oil

2010-05-25T10:18:00.000-07:00

"Today we know the price of everything, the value of nothing."
- Oscar Wilde

"better than anything I have ever seen. It will haunt you. trust me."

2010-05-18T13:37:00.000-07:00

Everybody creates a world - shopping, working, eating, love, friends, experiences, passions, etc - it is something that we expose, like an image in a darkroom, over the passage of time, occasionally moments, brief and puctuating, more more often over months and years and seasons. Sometimes we are active participants in that creation and more often than not we are passengers, it just happens. I hate when it just happens. I have always want some say in the deal. Maybe that's the creative bit in me. The bit I keep chasing--like I just said to a friend in an email--like a firefly, on-off, on-off, it goes. And I keep chasing, sometimes where it's been, sometimes where I think it's going, and even sometimes where I hope it will go.

These past months I have spent increasingly engaged in creating my own new world; it has become a very active persuit, mentally, spiritually and physically. Part of that creative perambulation has been trying to experience the world not just through my own eyes, ears, and touch, but as well, the thoughts and writings and expressions of others. Today I was catching up on "others" and read Paul Melcher's "Thoughts of a Bohemian" blog, which is linked in the upper right of this blog. He has posted his thoughts and links to war photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson's NYTimes Magazine piece The Shrine Down the Hall - here are Melcher's words about the images:

"These images by Ashley Gilbertson are the most powerful images of war I have ever seen. They are dramatic by what they do not show: The fallen boys. Instead we see the remains of Life brutally interrupted, the trophies, posters, gadgets that once made them happy and proud. Suddenly, their absence within these personal space become unbearable. And death, the death of a US soldier takes a new dimension. It is no longer a soldier from within many, an anonymous face under a helmet, but a person, an individual, a life that is missing."

Even more powerful perhaps are a photographer's words in this amazing interview with VII The Magazine: The Consequences of War. Set your world aside for a few minutes and watch this. War is one of the most hideous acts we humans do, there is no reason for it, only excuses. I couldn't agree with Melcher more, this is, "better than anything I have ever seen. It will haunt you. trust me." Ashley you have my greatest respect for what you have created and are saying in words, pictures and actions.

Never there until you get there

2010-05-15T11:43:00.000-07:00

Back from Europe and managed to scoot through a window. Planes, trains, security alerts, volcanic ash, mix with two quarts Perrier and you have it, a royal travel mess. Ah, international travel, how I've missed you so.

I started reflecting (while serpentining my way in a [in]security line) how things have changed since I started my traveling career. In the beginning it was simple, buy a ticket, get on a plane, land somewhere, travel around taking pictures and scribbling your impressions of the place, come back and do a story. Now it's wake up, pop the computer on, check seismic reports, read financial forecasts, survey the upper atmospheric wind patterns, check latest State Dept terrorist reports, load the iPhone with key destination apps, gather the dozen different chargers to keep my digital existence powered up, THEN, think about hitting the road and going to work.

But then I started thinking, hasn't that's always been the challenge for gypsies, staying fleet-a-foot and one step ahead of the obstacles. Just after the first of the year the word proprioception entered my weekly vocabulary. Up until now it was uttered as I gasped for air and dripped with sweat between sets of one exercise or another dished out by my fitness coach Phil. That proprioception directly connected to my spine and lower back, and their general inability to communicate with the rest of me. Proprioception popped up today as I juggled BBC volcanic ash reports, flight schedules and substituting TGV reservations for a hire car; in this case my brain communicating with the flexibility of my travel intentions.

'Travel proprioception' is something I got very good at long ago, but it came in other names and descriptions: A cameraman friend from LA use to describe it like this - our ability to eat most anything and not get sick, get toss around in a helicopter and not turn green and sleep not just anywhere, but everywhere. Another person put it "leaving your baggage behind." For the most part that's baggage filled with preconceived notions of what a people, place or thing should be - even what traveling there should be like. And as a wise, and oh so salty woman once said to me, "Want to be a good writer in this place [Africa], follow your nose, but keep your nose pointed down, out of the way."

Phil, loves to say, "sometimes ya gotta go slow to go fast" - I think it applies to travel proprioception as well. I have a bit of the Energizer bunny hopping about inside me - and it's taken 50 years to learn how to slow the little hopper down - and I still can't always catch the little hare. I once arrived in the mountains of Papua New Guinea and was still flying around in some artificially sped up world of my own; my metronome pulsing to beat of a world consumed by devices--computers, cell phones, deadlines, downloads, 24-hour news--and an elder I was suppose to meet with was not available; I was going nut. Two days later he said we could meet now, when I found him in his garden, leaning on his handmade hoe, mande tene wig slightly askew, but happily adorned with bright saffron-colored everlasting daisies, he said, "you are finally in time." I had no idea I wasn't until that moment. From that trip onwards I always took two days off before coming to the village - that's about what it took to reset my clock.

I use to have a saying when travel was my only way of life, "You're never there until you get there." People would ask me are you excited about going to this place or that, my reply, "after I get there, then I'll think about getting excited." Because the flip side of excited is total downer. It becomes a yo-yo ride that can spin out of control. On the other hand, if you are truly a journey-person not a destination-person then "there" may turn out to be a whole different place, and the place you really were destined to be. Not always an easy reality to wrap your mind, body and soul collectively around.

The one thing I have gotten smarter at is creating fertile fields for the "there" of which I had no reckoning. Heading for Belgium and France I was excited, mainly because my travel proprioception feels totally turned on, lit from within. When I first began traveling I intentionally cast my plans away from Europe, towards lands untamed, maps that still claimed "Here be dragons", places that struggled to be pronounced (like Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano - I mean, c'mon, that's a scrabble goldmine!). Europe is now a journey - I'm am excited - because I have no idea where it will eventually lead.

Writing - it will come

2010-04-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

Look at that mess. Supposedly there is a book there, about the Lanterne Rouges of the Tour de France, yet unwritten, blank pages wanting for words, experiences waiting to bloom, questions unanswered, friendships renewed, some to begin.

I'm entering into that fun/chaotic/question-my-sanity phase of writing a book, and this one doesn't have a photo outline to guide the vision - only historical confetti... after the parade... I'm knee deep in it. I feel like a street sweeper, pushing a broom about the last 108 years of French cycling history trying to clean up this mess. Scary part, it's only about to begin, I know it. Somewhere in my dimly lit memory I did this sort of thing before. Maybe it's that, that memory, and know I must be alive to have it, that makes this possible. Almost a weird creative mantra; "yes, I wrote a book before. I found the words. I survived the editors. I met the deadlines. I am alive to tell about it."

The odd part - part deux - after assembling over 120 pages of writing on this book - I'm now about to start. It feels like 120 page Prologue - luckily I wasn't up against Fabian Cancellara (see my bike blog for what that means).

Next week I leave for Paris and Liege (why Liege? more about that in a minute) and I feel like the photo above will not change - it will look like that for 10 hours on the flight to Charles De Gaul (sans food stains I hope - the wine will be another issue), on the TGV heading to Belgium, in my hotel rooms in Liege and Paris, and probably, out of having a brain ready to burst with facts, anecdotes and trivia, look like that on the flight back to Portland.

Am I prepared - god no.

My French lessons have fallen into a crevasse somewhere between a lung infection and procrastination. I know some of it has permeated my memory, but beyond pleasantries and a few basic directional aids the vocabulary is pretty pathetic - I'll need my agent Joel to shadow me through every interview and negotiation for access. Ya know, it was easier working in the Congo.

Jenn came home from work the other evening and said my blog entry over on Gerry's Daily Ride totally lost her. After trying to read it for the third time she raised the white flag and pedaled home. Ya, my brain had too many facts, it was doing a defrag looking for more hard-drive space.

Writing a book is like that, different than a magazine piece. Every once in a while I think, I do anyway, need to download all that stuff I have been storing. For example, I now have read and re-read how le Tour de France got started to the point I'm beginning to feel like I AM founder Henri Desgrange (I wish I could at least speak and write French as well). My first book we hired a writer skilled at the abbreviated format of a magazine, it and he never crossed over. One chapter and several months later we went searching for another author.

So why Liege? Liege is the kinda sidetrack that writing books take you on. Required rambling. On your first book or two you don't trust it, it costs money and you favor your wallet not your intuition. Now I go only knowing partially why and over time realize, with patience and outstretched antennae, that it will come, it will come. In Liege I'm trying to lock down an interview with a few cyclists, done deal, and the two icons of cycling broadcasting Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin, not done. It hasn't happen yet, but the race Liège-Bastogne-Liège is there, they will be broadcasting, and I'm buying the beers, it will come.

And finally, look at that mess again - notice anything? No camera. Ya, I plan to take them, actually plan to use them, as a diversion - never thought of them, photography, that way, but I think a daily walk with Jenn on the streets of Paris with camera in hand may help write this book. It will come.

Places of the Mind

2010-03-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

Geography - endlessly flat, dwarfing, towering beyond sight, wave washed, beautiful from a distance--blistering from a footstep, emerald, terracotta, alabaster, sage, azure, granite;

Senses - ebbed and flowed, the push of soft air leading the deluge of monsoon, scent of grass basket fields, sting of spice markets, icy wind from the bow, sweet humid humus, the look in a whale's eye;

and Light - warm in it, awash in it, coloured by it, persuaded and seduced by it.

...why I travel.

Travel, like travel writing, is a self-indulgent-immersion. I have four books that have companioned my indulgent perambulations over the years, in some cases inspiring others: Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen, Arctic Dreams, by Barry Lopez, Song of the Dodo, by David Quammen, Crystal Desert, by David Campbell. But one of the most eccentric of its practitioners, cum addicts was Robert Byron who set out in 1933 on a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Teheran to Oxiana - the country of the Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya which forms part of the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. His arrival at his destination, was the legendary tower of Qabus. He chronicled this indulgence in The Road to Oxiana. Travel writer Bruce Chatwin has described the book as "a sacred text, beyond criticism," and carried his copy "spineless and floodstained" on four journeys through Central Asia.

The map of this journey is from what is called the 'inter-war years' - those are words that describe much more than a reference of years, they define, they demarcate, they turn the page on a world that will never again be - and like all times there are better and worse. Places like Persia, Ottoman Empire, Indo-china, Oxiana and others, lingering vestiges of colony - India, East Africa, German-Belgian Congo. After WWII the dusty roads were hastily paved, there was fear in foreign, urgency without understanding, the world shrank as quickly as double-right clicking Google Earth.

My first map was a paper sheet, not a digitally disconnected earth, (amazingly wonderful as GE is), one I could have crawled beneath and slept, and did in my mind. Folded and unfolded beyond its intent, its creases and worn edges clung to dreams, adventures and escapes. I clung to it as if it were a guide to my imagiNation. Even then I was traveling into self-indulgent-immersion.

In the mid 1990's I had just returned from what would be my last trip to Rwanda photographing mountain gorillas, a genocide had just been released on the people like a plague beyond our imagination and what Christiane Amanpour could report. For me Rwanda was multiple visits, it had become a place of my mind, not a mille colline landscape squeezed within the inky squiggles determined by the Belgians/UN in 1960, it was, as Byron penned, a place that "henceforth it exists on the map of our [my] intelligence as well as our atlases." It was the Rukashaza family teaching me about local pili pili, dark chocolate bars melting in equatorial sun, eucalyptus wood fires cooking rice, one cent avocados, four hour journeys into the Virungas, sweaty day-long gorilla treks, and night-time gauntlet runs to the buffalo guarded outhouse. Geogrpahy, senses, light, places of my mind. In the wake of our evening's conversation Barb shared with me Byron's words from First Russia, Then Tibet.

"Tibet, for us now, is no longer the land of mystery; a piece of dark brown on physical maps, gripped by an unholy hierarchy, and possessing no amenities of life beyond devil-dances and butter statues; but a physical, aesthetic and human definition as implied by the words France or Germany. Henceforth it exists on the map of our intelligence as well as of our atlases. If, say the newspapers, this or that is happening in Tibet, this or that means something. In Tierra del Fuego it does not. This or that moreover is invested with a particular romance. We see again the parched distances, the damson hills and gilded rocks, the encroaching snows, the yaks plowing the pale dusty earth of valleys, the threshers singing on the outskirts of the four square farmhouses, the laugh of the passer-by, the burning turquoise sky, and the pop-eyed clouds. We have a part in the country. We wish it well."

Yes, Henceforth it exists on the map of our intelligence as well as of our atlases. In my journals and field notebooks I make maps, places small and large, flower markets and labyrinth waterways, like personal address note taking, with contour lines of pondering, persuading future steps to the left or to the right. I might add those atlases Byron speaks of are not digital, but paper, rich with creases and tattered corners, faded from stare. They are ragged-eared reminders, sticky-notes to self-indulgence-immersion.

I've written that my recent travels in India were the first, after four initial encounters. It took a while, I don't know why; the mind wasn't full of places. India has now become a place of the mind. Daily it lives in people, thoughts, news, emails, food, book titles, cricket scores, writings, reviewed photographs. It connects to other places of the mind, an elaborate mental metro where journeys come and go. Two Kashmerie brothers met on floor in a Guwahati apartment have become a journey, my Tibet to know.

I envy Edward Abbey, Thoreau, Bryson for finding travel within their own domain. I have searched and the roads deadend. Even when I lived oversea perpetually for a many years the fascination remained in the foreign, only for a fleeting few days in the latter half of October did I glance skyward and wish to see Vs and voices passing southward, a reminder of home other than the road under foot.

I ran away when I was six, not because, but because. There was a road, it led, to a journey, some imagiNation, so I took off, in much the way I have traveled since, with curiosity and senses tilted forward - much to my mother's horror, although all journeys since have been to her horror as well - to this day I recall vividly those Places of the Mind collected up that sunny Saturday morning.

Photo above - a place for the senses: Kolkata flower market

R-e-s-p-e-c-t... all life, that's what you mean to me

2010-03-22T13:16:00.000-07:00

(this is the same posting as currently appears on my Wild Orphans blog)

One would think 'sense and reason' should be the rule by which we travel through our lives, across the Earth, but sadly it's not always the route we humans choose, rather the road less traveled.

Today the folks representing how we treat all things but ourselves met in Doha to play god for another few years - elephants lucked out. Although not everyone was tickled pink, "We do not think our sovereignty has been respected," the Zambia's Tourism Minister Catherine Namugala said. "Respected", interesting word Ms Namugala, apparently that sovereignty doesn't extend to all life? No comment yet from the elephants who's sovereignty (and tusks) may have been spared.

Finally, perhaps, we have looked down that respect road, strewn with life other than our own, and decided they too have a place on earth. If that's the case it is somewhat ironic timing since this weekend in several countries the new BBC/Discovery Channel series LIFE took to the airwaves. Elephants, maybe more specifically African elephants have been given a short reprieve by a group with the highly ironic title the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species - yes, I know you are scratching your head and saying, how can one "Trade" something that is labeled as "Endangered", if by the very meaning Endangered you are saying this thing is near disappearing, poof, gone! - doesn't that seem counter-intuitive? Oh well, I did say there were two roads and most of the time...

From a web article on BBC online:

"The UN's wildlife trade organisation has turned down Tanzania's and Zambia's requests to sell ivory, amid concern about elephant poaching.

The countries asked the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting to permit one-off sales from government stockpiles."

An overview article on the CITES vote and who's involved can be found in BBC Enviro corespondent Richard Black's article:

Ivory bids fall on poaching fears

And from the Washington Post: Elephant trade ban reaffirmed for Tanzania, Zambia

Tiger Trap

2010-03-09T14:57:00.001-08:00

To answer several of you at once (thanks for asking) - the project in India I was working on is called Tiger Trap; so I've titled it for the moment. It is my first major overseas endeavor since returning to photography and writing full-time; it is a self-assignment. Like most of the projects I have worked on previously, it relies heavily on contacts I have developed over the years, and subjects or species, that I have a keen interest in seeing explored from a perspective I think has been neglected.

Tiger Trap follows project leader Dr. M Firoz Ahmed and his team of researchers in Kaziranga National Park, in Assam, India. The team is with the conservation organization Aaranyak, based in Guwahati.

View Larger Map

As is painfully the case in many of the endangered species stories I have researched and photographed, the cost and state of affairs become sad reminders of our planet and the life on it. Just over a century ago there were an estimated 45,000 tigers living wild in India's forests. By the time hunting was banned in 1972, their numbers were down to 2,000. Over the past century, the world's population of tigers has been reduced by 95% as a result of hunting and poaching for their body parts, which are used in traditional Asian medicine. As we celebrate The Year of the Tiger there are only around 3,200 tigers left on the planet.

A bit more about the project and updates will be posted on my website at http://gerryellis.net/tigertrap.html

Tiger Trap Photo: ARNYK_KNP_Female20 (courtesy Aaranyak - not to be reproduced without permission)

Reacquainting with the road

2010-03-05T14:21:00.000-08:00

Thirty plus hours each way, two weeks on the ground, fish market on bicycles, Kashmiris brothers selling shawls, one successful assignment, fifteen minutes with one of the rarest cats on earth and close with a TV talk show – it’s been a very long time since my life looked like that. I’ll admit, it took me no time to be mainlining it again. I'm a travel junkie. It was a fix long in coming. It was good to get reacquainted with the road.

Still just settling back into Portland so this is short – many more details and images to come over the following weeks – I missed something this past decade that I had become very skilled in hiding away. This unexpected, hastily planned trip to India, for friend Shyamal’s wedding, and a collection of wanderings before and after the wedding vividly shined a light on the magic that only travel is. It threw me back into photography, filming and writing and thinking about the three in a way I couldn’t have imagined, and in reality could not have eased into as I had planned. A bit over a month ago a bought all new gear, forced my brain, eyes and fingers to reacquaint themselves in this dance of creativity that seemed so intimate not so many years ago. But the reality is the "reacquaintance" could only take place on the road, where I have always been most at home.

I’ve only walked in the door and am hungry return to the road; wash a load of clothes, review 1,500 odd images, a couple hours of film, sort through my field notes and then get back out there. I’m completely set to again live at tiger speed. What I am completely convinced of is I never ever again want to live at Blackberry speed. While passing through SFO airport earlier on the return, I happily stood far right on the moving sidewalk and let everyone stream by – most staring at some digital device. I don’t want it, don’t need it.

When I began this journey over a quarter century ago I did so with the hunger to have each day be a clear punctuation mark in a long time line of living fully, for the past decade days have merged and gotten lost in seamless monotony. The road reminded me everyday had a value, a memory retained, experience worth living. This is the most alive I have been in years.

Now, off to plow through a sea of bits and bytes that now assemble my perception of the world via the 7D’s shutter button.

Photo (c) J. Loren

Picturing Pat Metheny

2010-03-04T13:26:00.000-08:00

Pat Metheny is a rare and unique creator. His creations are through music. The initial response is to call him a guitarist - but that has always missed the mark - he is a musician in the fullest sense of the concept. He says, "the result is absolutely nothing like I ever would have imagined" - YES! That is why we create! His latest creation is "Orchestrion" - best described by Metheny in this video clip. I post it here because a) I think he is one of the finest creators ever and I want to share that, and b) because he does what I strive to do as a creator, particularly focused in Orchestrion, and that is create, push the seams, stretch beyond where I and others have gone. Simply - to imagine! Enjoy Orchestrion -

More About Orchestrion Here

UNCONDITIONAL JOY: A HUMAN ANGEL IN THE METRO

2010-03-01T09:22:00.000-08:00

NATURE | Behind the Scenes of "Hummingbirds" | PBS

2010-02-25T17:35:00.000-08:00

Filmmaker Ann Prum describes the breakthrough science and latest technologies that allowed her and the crew to reveal incredible new insights about these aerial athletes.
Very cool photography/film stuff - check it out!

A fake wolf in any other clothing is...

2010-01-20T11:55:00.000-08:00

... still, apparently, a fake wolf, at least according to the judges of the 2009 BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards.

In an article published on the BBC website Wildlife photographer stripped of award photographer Jose Luis Rodriguez was the recently crowned winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award has been disqualified after judges ruled that the featured wolf was probably a "model".

Despite the panel's decision Rodriguez strongly denied that the wolf was a trained animal, according to a statement from the competition organizers. His photograph was selected as grand prize from more than 43,000 entries in October 2009.

The panel stripped Rodriguez and decided this year will be the first in 43 that no grand prize winner will be awarded.

I'm deeply saddened by this "problematic photo". Since the photographer denies the wolf is fake and the panel has ruled otherwise it resurfaces the question of what I refer to as the "covenant with the image". There has long been fakery in photography - since virtually its inception. In fact the miracle of photography is its ability to capture many things our eyes can not, and in so doing reveal worlds, emotions, perspectives that can awe, amaze, motivate and inspire. The one thing that we have had is a long standing agreement, that is photography, inclusive of the creator, when the image being shared is from realms of wildlife, nature, and journalism, respects a covenant with the image. That covenant allows all viewers to engage, rely, depend,... simply put, to trust, and in turn make valued decisions about our world based on that trust. Tear the covenant and you tear the trust.

Whether that trust is broken by a would-be contest winner or a trusted publication as in the mysterious moving pyramids in National Geographic (No one might have noticed had Gordon Gahan [the photographer], not voiced a complaint) the fallout becomes a source of controversy and erodes if not murders our trust. Some say all photographs are a lie, since they freeze a moment, but that's a comment of sheer stupidity. Is Henri Cartier-Bresson's leaping man frozen moment a lie? Is Eddie Adams' Vietnam execution of Nguyen Van Lem photo a lie? Is a memory a lie because it's frozen in our minds? In each we trust the source.

I have no idea if Rodriguez is pulling the wolf over our eyes. The leaping wolf photo is a wonderfully executed image, and if his covenant with us is indeed intact, I am saddened for him, if not then bravo the panel, regardless, the covenant with the image has been tarnished.

remembering that life is fun

2010-01-11T11:55:00.000-08:00

Why is it we forget that - after the age 12?
What's amazing is, when we are having fun, like a kid, all the horrible things disappear.

No one laughing ever invented a war
No one playing with finger puppets ever committed a murder
No one practicing hula-hoop ever engaged in bigotry
and
No one playing stair piano does it with hate in their heart.

More Fun @ the Fun Theory dot com

A year in review worth watching

2010-01-06T17:09:00.001-08:00

By years end I'm certain everyone was sick-n-tired of yet another top ten this, and best of that, so it begs the question - was there anything worth seeing, hearing or thinking about one more time before the New Year and New Decade race away with us in such frenetic craziness that what was wasn't?

One man did find a way, a simple way, a lovely way, to consider the essence of what has past. His name is Eirik Solheim

Eirik is very generous and open to sharing what he did and how he did it - more here on his website/blog @

eirikso.com

"The end is where we start from." - T.S. Eliot

2010-01-04T14:50:00.000-08:00

When we least expect it life begins living and we are washed ashore in the joy.

I love cycling up hills on my bike, this past year I have begun enjoying the downhills equally (almost) and that has as much to do with becoming as skilled at descending as I am ascending. Confidence.

As the year/decade has concluded and another opened I'm starting to get the hang of it again, my photography and my writing. It's beginning to feel right, the "feeling" is returning. I'm exploring more photography and writing of others and much further afield than I did a decade ago when I boxed up one life and opened up another. I now see those new clothes were only partially mine, the rest I was trying desperately to make fit.

Most of the past half year I have been trying to unpack that old box, retry thoughts, notions, ideas, and see what still fits. It's taken a while, but surprisingly I discovered that I gained no weight, yet grew; didn't shrink, yet have a smaller footprint; and most importantly, never lost my curiosity appetite for the world explored through words and images and sounds.

Growing up we are told there are no short-cuts to success, and on some level I've paid my dues to that credo, but this past year the decade has come more sharply into focus and I've concluded living a life is about learning short-cuts, and more importantly they exist and every well lived life has them.

I'm discovering a strange new attraction to the web and ironically it has increased my enjoyment of reading and writing - both things all its critics rioted against it for destroying. Blogs in particular are becoming ever increasingly a part of my daily/weekly reading agenda. I'll try and share more of them here, and those of consistent interest I'll also post to the new blog section I have started in the right column.

The following I found on a blog by photographer Sean Gallagher that I have enjoyed for what he connects me to as much as what he says. The following quote he posted, found via the NY Times photography, video and journalism blog LENS - well worth checking out regularly. It hit me in a particularly wonderful way today, as I just purchased a range of new cameras and lenses to launch 2010, both new year and new decade, rededicated to images and words.

“What kind of typewriter did Hemingway use?” Jim Estrin, photographer at the New York Times for the last 20 years, asked his news photography class by way of an introduction this morning.

Nobody knew.

“That’s because it doesn’t matter,” said Estrin.

Short-cuts keep surprising me, but come more anticipated by the day.

A Decade In Search Of Truth

2009-12-31T09:23:00.000-08:00

In 1999 I began one last project, one that I thought would define my career as a photographer, and nudge forward perhaps my career as a writer. It started off to be my journey, a last journey with cameras in hand. A few years later I was, I thought, embarking down Frost's road less traveled.

Now, a decade later, I found myself looking back to the future. Wild Orphans once again is surfacing as my photographic savior, my sanity check, I need it. As NY Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich, "A decade that began with the “reality” television craze exemplified by “American Idol” and “Survivor” — both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth." As the last hours of 2009 flicker out, I realize I need 2010 to be a flight back to truth.

Appropriately, the decade's last December epitomized our collective disengagement from the truth - Tiger Woods, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and the US sending 30,000 more troops to "win" a game that has no finish line, buzzer or top-of-the-ninth - or maybe our decade of delinquent decision-making was exclusively due to “bad intelligence,” (to coin a phrase by Bush administration alumni), that pushed us into these fiascoes. Unfortunately the tigers of truth, print journalists, are as rare as their Asian counterparts, and as the decade comes to a close, we are watch their habitat disappear as well. In Washington DC they opened the Newseum — "a 250,000-square-foot museum of news — offers visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits." As the director is quoted on the Newseum's own website, "Visitors will come away with a better understanding of news and the important role it plays in all of our lives,". Frighteningly we don't build museums to the living and vibrant, but to the vanishing and disappeared - is news habitat gone?

Much of 2010 I will be back on the road, exploring this planet, personal and public perambulations. In search of truth I already have some sense of where to look, but know many new roads will appear--filled with excitement and that tingling trepidation when perambulating on a precipice. But the search for truth will be alive, and that's what I crave and that's why so much of life is "blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth." it's not alive. It's as if we have become our own avatars. Gleefully cocooning ourselves into our make-believe reality. And most frightening of all... as the climate conference in Copenhagen insanely pointed out - inside that reality we don't need to care.

I care. I have but this solitary existence. I have no guarantee of second chances, no do-overs,no redemption after missing the warning, or as the chorus rings out:

This is it
Make no mistake where you are
your back's to the corner
This is it
Don't be a fool anymore
This is it
the waiting is over

No room to run
No way to hide
No time for wondering why
It's here, the moment is now

So about Frost's road less traveled. I only know roads are man-made, and that any new road is not so much littered with leaves unworn by human footfalls, rather shiny tchotchkes of world blinded by it's own make-believe reality. "Follow them, use them and forget them.... Don't park. [roads] will get you there, but I tell you, don't ever try to arrive. Arrival is the death of inspiration." (Ernst Hass) Truth lives in inspiration.

A poster ad featuring Tiger Woods forebodingly chimes, "tougher than ever to be a Tiger." Paradoxically over the past decade the world has discovered that too, hiding from one lie, while not questioning the other. The caption on another Accenture Woods poster reads "It’s what you do next that counts." True enough for Tiger in 2010, but not just Tiger. Inside the cocoon I think it's easy for life to imitate art because you can never stand back far enough to get a proper perspective.

Nike’s chairman, Phil Knight, told The Sports Business Journal, in perhaps the most prophetic quote of the decade's closing month, that when Woods’s career "is over, you’ll look back on these indiscretions as a minor blip." Decades hence I think we will look back on this first ten year span of the new Millennium and realize there were too many "blips", I hope not too many for us too survive. Those blips, like the make-believe reality TV shows that launched the decade, held no truth.

Tomorrow morning is just another morning, but it begins a departure. I have reconstructed a camera bag - filled with all new Canon gear, three decades Nikon left behind; I have the love of my life that will see me through my days on this Earth; I travel first to India for a friend's wedding, a global wedding in a sense; then to Europe to understand why we are willing to suffering to know the truth about ourselves; and to East Africa in search of where all new roads began.

2009-12-08T10:12:00.000-08:00

It's no secret I love animation and the mind of the animators that, "boldly go where no man has gone before", or what ever Capt. Kirk uttered. Well here is another one my friend Jenn's brother Craig just sent over (Craig has the enviable joy of seeing this stuff a lot in his job at Pixar). This one is from the mind and scribbling of animator Alan Becker - a battle of digitally galactic proportions - click on the image above to see the action.

Anna's not convinced of global warming - but definitely climate change

2009-12-08T08:31:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'll admit, this is a rant of sorts - but it's keeping me warm, my fingers moving and the blood boiling.

As I sit here doing research for another project, one a world away in terms of importance to the eventual legacy of humankind, I'm shuttling forth and back to the kitchen every half hour to switch out the magic elixir, the sugar water of life for a trio of flying lilliputian. Three Anna's hummingbirds, along with a host of other avians have decided, or perhaps by my maintaining their food supply, been coaxed into staying the winter. This week they may be seriously reconsidering their decision. In a bone-chillingly rare bash of icy windy weather the temps have plummeted into the teens at night and disparately grasp for the 30 degree mark by day - this is far from the norm for Portland. Or am I dillusionary and this is the new norm and I clinging to an old norm out of denial?

This morning on NPR's Morning Edition was a story with climatologist, some would say evangelist, James Hansen:

Scientist: Urgency Needed On Climate Change Action

Just as I was finishing his op-ed in the NY Times, the NPR story began I was clicking on the BBC online news to a story on the same topic:

This decade 'warmest on record'

According to the World Meteorological Organization the first decade of this century is "by far" the warmest since instrumental records began some 160 years ago.

Well, the tiny Anna's hummingbirds sitting at the warm sugar water feeders outside my window would adamantly dispute that fact. They would surely ask - "Where's the heat? Bring it on!"

And that's the issue. I have been saying for years that until people wake up in the morning, put their hand on the door and get burned because it's too hot out (or alternately freeze) then can't leave their homes for days on end, they are never - NEVER - going to get it, climate change.

In reaction to Hansen are other, not all conservatives as you think - like Paul Krugman, in his own piece

Unhelpful Hansen

What is clear to anyone who has traveled this planet for the past quarter century of more - and I'm not just talking about to one frigg'n conference after another - really traveled the back roads, back alleys and forgotten corners - is that we are in deep climate change shit! And the only way to even hope of shifting the course is stop the bullshit conversation about "what ifs" and get on with changing the way we function with our planet. Millions of people, poor people, die everyday on this planet because of the changes we have brought about in the last century, and Mr. Krugman they don't give a damn your thoughts on cap and trade - "What the basic economic analysis says...", or what your magical chart shows - to them it's all "crap and trade offs".

And that is the crux part one - it's climate change - not just warming. A year ago I was in India and farmers were complaining about drought in one part of the country and too much rain in another - in each case the experience was not the norm. This is no longer about economic survival - it is about survival.

Part two - we don't really give a shit. If we really did there would be no doubt where to spend the $700 billion the Obama Administration just got back from the bank bail out - DEVELOPMENT OF NON-CARBON RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES. It's, as Hansen says, about too much carbon being pumped into the atmosphere. And the average person in the developed countries (read - over consuming) and developing countries (read - trying to consume more) has no clue WTF is going on - or cares frankly. This week is the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, another summit where rich nations will promise to do a little and promise to give just enough to keep poor nations from complaining too much. And the pontificated proclamations on changes regarding the climate? At least Copenhagen will benefit from all the week of hot air - it's just above freezing there this week.

Which brings me back to that possible case of - clinging to an old norm out of denial? Denial: "a state in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence."

Krugman closes his blog post with:

"Things like this often happen when economists deal with physical scientists; the hard-science guys tend to assume that we’re witch doctors with nothing to tell them, so they can’t be bothered to listen at all to what the economists have to say, and the result is that they end up reinventing old errors in the belief that they’re deep insights. Most of the time not much harm is done. But this time is different.

For here’s the way it is: we have a real chance of getting a serious cap and trade program in place within a year or two. We have no chance of getting a carbon tax for the foreseeable future. It’s just destructive to denounce the program we can actually get — a program that won’t be perfect, won’t be enough, but can be made increasingly effective over time — in favor of something that can’t possibly happen in time to avoid disaster."

In this case I agree with you - sorta. "...this time is different." Neither of you should be professionally in this discussion - it's not about economics or physical science - it's about biology! You should be only in it as living human beings. The only discussion we should be having is about things living and dying. Other wise the dieing will eventually be very tormented and excruciating because we run out of drinkable water, clean air, arable soil, livable space. So, "a program that won’t be perfect, won’t be enough," - sorry, this time is different, we need perfect and we need enough.

And what about real change on the climate - the only real change will be too uncomfortable regardless if we accept it or reject it - hotter hots, wetter wets, drier drys and tomorrow it will be clear and friggi'n cold again here and the Anna's better evolve in a hurry - I'm running out of warm sugar water.

"Quick, quick, quick, like a cat"

2009-12-04T14:50:00.000-08:00

(similar post over on my bike blog)
Last night was the Awards for the 2009 Bicycling Northwest.com Bike Photo Contest presented by Pro Photo Supply. Despite a civil war football game distraction we had a nice group of the winners and friends gather at the Lucky Lab NW for a bite, a pint (or two) and a look at all the entries as well as those that carried home the winning swag.

Taking top honors was a great shot by photographer John Rudolff - the crash of cyclist Joe Dengel in last summer's Portland Twilight Criterium. The photo epitomizes the old adage, " luck is opportunity meeting preparedness". Photographically many elements come together quite beautifully in this shot - three in particular that make it work for me. Most critically in my mind, and many of the judges, is the expression on the young girl's face in the upper left corner. Without that this photo doesn't have the same voice. With it, it has what Henri Cartier-Bresson use to refer to as the moment you must go click, "quick, quick, quick, like a cat".

In that sense cycling photography is like wildlife photography and unlike so many other types of sports photography. Planning is crucial, preparadness mandatory, understanding your subjects behavior essential, and then realizing you are at the mercy of the universe to bring all the elements together before your lens... that last bit is the hardest part to be patient and accept. If you have never tried photographing cycling - criteriums are the best starting point. Unlike most other cycling events, they are contained within a set "small" manageable playing field - usually a half dozen blocks of city street. You can move freely around the perimeter of the race and take advantage of multiple photo opportunities.

If you are a wildlife photographer and looking for another challenge - even just to keep your eye and index finger sharp - give crit cycle racing a go.

Congratulations to everyone that entered and all the winners!

We will be putting up all the winning images on Bicycling Northwest.com over the coming week - as well, they will be displayed in large print format at Pro Photo Supply later in spring 2010 when we announce the opening of the next contest (I'll post a note here on the blog).

Thanks to Canon cameras for sponsorship of the prizes.

PS - Joe Dengel, the cyclist, is fine and cycling again - the crash did ring his bell a bit.

Perspectives

2009-12-01T19:36:00.000-08:00

Here is another wonderful animation to share. Very different from the Kudan animation I posted a couple months ago. The below work is a captivating perspective on the idea of a book, and words, and an interpretation of moving through a space. The light throughout is wonderfully created - worth watching multiple times.

Discovering this piece comes on the heels of a couple hours scrutinizing the quality of light and reflective surfaces in the latest Pixar film UP. They have become masters down in Emeryville at bring life to two-dimensions through reflective surfaces and indirect lighting. If I were currently teaching photography and/or film-making I would spend half the class immersing students in great animation, both variety and depth.

Predators, Prey and When Nature Turns the Tables

2009-11-19T15:24:00.000-08:00

One of my great joys in being in nature, with wild animals, is having the tables turned - everything I thought I knew, tossed on its ear, and I was forced to rethink who I am and what I'm doing on this planet. The following by underwater photographer Paul Nicklen describes his most amazing experience as a National Geographic photographer - coming face-to-face with one of Antarctica's most vicious predators and things not going at all the way he imagined.

PS - just a note, film crew for David Attenborough's Life in the Freezer series on Antarctica had a very similar experience - perhaps we've unjustly named this selective, and sometimes sensitive predator?

"I didn't want a cruel image."

2009-11-17T08:01:00.000-08:00

October was the month of extraordinary images if your passion is wildlife and nature photography. This year's winner of the prestigious Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009 award was by Jose Luis Rodriguez (photo captured the imaginations of the judges with a picture that he had planned for years, and even sketched out on a piece of paper. "I wanted to capture a photo in which you would see a wolf in an act of hunting - or predation - but without blood," he told BBC News. "I didn't want a cruel image."

A photo I wish I had created

2009-11-14T07:46:00.000-08:00

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it"

- Hannah Arendt

Last Wednesday evening I a bit of good fortune fell down on me, along with the rain, while strolling about Georgetown (DC). I stumble upon this image by photographer, Monica Szczupider - which has become cyber-viral in the last couple weeks after appearing in the current, November, issue of National Geographic. Fortune measured about 24x36 inches. The print was part of the photo festival DC Foto Week going on across Washington DC this week. To see this image first large was unbelievable serendipity. While the pages of NG would have been fine, seeing it large on a wall in a gallery was perfect - the mind and eyes were in full exercise mode, ready for exposure to new, delighted to be surprised and forced to reconsider. Large - the image gives you space to contemplate it - those faces behind the fence become personal, they etch their expressions deep into your planetary perspective of what it means to be a species. You find yourself stepping slowly face to face, expression to expression.

In my career I have come across few images, maybe two or three, that I wish I had created - this is one. Beautifully done Monica.

More creation of the photo

Clash of the titans filmed at last - and we owe one man

2009-11-06T16:36:00.000-08:00

Long before I took my first flight overseas, created that first truly memorable image, saw my first extraordinarily rare creature, or live with some forgotten culture, I watched an amazing exuberant British chap with child-like zeal and curiosity climb breathlessly over mountain tops to reveal fossils, dangle from treetops in the Amazon, and lie nose-to-nose with army ants on the march. That Brit was David Attenborough (not yet a Knighted) and he gave me hope - hope that I too could remain connected to my child-like curiosity and love for the things that go bump in the night, wriggle through a swamp, and soar beyond the clouds. He continues to do so - and I am deeply indebted to him for that gift.

The BBC wildlife film crews have long been know for pushing the envelope to discover, record and share the most amazing events in nature. Much of that must be credited to Sir David Attenborough. While to many he is now just the voice of these great visual works, the fact of the matter is they would quite possibly never found there way to the little screen - or web - had he not years ago doggedly persevered to bring this work to the masses in such groundbreaking works the 1979 TV series Life on Earth: A Natural History by David Attenborough and followed five years later by The Living Planet.

In each of the series then and now teams have fanned out around the planet, often craft methods, tools and techniques never before tried. The results have been breath-taking at the least, and simply jaw-dropping at other times. This sequence of clashing titans from the newest series Life is one such example - as described in the BBC web article (linked via the title below):

"During the first complete sequence of this behaviour ever captured, the male humpbacks swim at high speed behind the female, violently jostling for access.

The collisions between the males can be violent enough to kill.

The footage was recorded for the BBC natural history series Life."

Epic humpback whale battle filmed and scroll down the article for another clip on how they filmed it.

Wild Orphans specific website and blog

2009-10-26T15:48:00.001-07:00

A few months ago I started this blog with a posting about my original Wild Orphans baby African elephant project. In that and subsequent blog postings I mentioned that I was exploring a return to Kenya and renew the Wild Orphans journey. The first steps in that journey are now a reality with the launch of a Wild Orphans specific website and a Wild Orphans specific blog. From this point on I will be posting most of the details, plans, thoughts and travels, along with photos and video relating to the Wild Orphans on those sites - please follow me there as well.

WildPhotos - A chance to see beyond your borders

2009-10-08T12:05:00.000-07:00

If the UK is on your travel schedule in the coming weeks or you are simply wealthy and free enough to drop what you are doing, tell the world to take a hike and go (assuming you don't live there), then something well worth considering is the WildPhoto 2-day seminar/program in London. Great opportunity to see some inspiring imagery and connected with a international collection of photographers that are focused on seeing the world a bit differently.

From their site: "WildPhotos 2009 offers a wealth of award-winning photographers, including a keynote presentation from Michael ‘Nick’ Nichols, [see my post 'When a Picture becomes a Project'] the world-renowned National Geographic photographer."

When a Picture becomes a Project

2009-10-05T09:55:00.000-07:00

This NPR story (Biggest, Tallest Tree Photo Ever) caught my ear for a couple reasons, first, it connects directly to a post I have been working on for this blog called Pictures vs Projects, and second, it sends a wonderful message out there to young photographers (of any age) that the world is still full of things to create great projects around; and if so inclined, involve all kinds of whiz-bang gadgetry and software.

So the deal is longtime Nat Geo photog Nick Nichols (pictured above) set out to take a photograph of a full redwood tree as part of a full story on Pacific Coast redwoods. Here’s the catch, these redwoods are over 300 feet tall and unless one is standing in the middle of a recent clear-cut chances are it's going to be damn difficult to see the whole thing much less back up far enough to photograph it. So the challenge - how to create a "single image" from close enough range to capture the detail of these extraordinary leafy leviathans? Nick's solution: Build a custom gyro-stabilized camera rig to take multiple shots and stitch them together for a composite photo. (See Redwood Photo - At least 1,500 years old, a 300-foot titan in California's Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park has the most complex crown scientists have mapped. This photo, taken by Michael Nichols, is a mosaic composed of 84 images.)

Nichols, with the NG staff, created a system to holding a trio of Canon cameras focused to the left, middle, and right of the tree. The frame includes a gyroscope to keep the cameras steady. By lowering the cameras from the top to the bottom of the redwood they were able to capture 84 pictures to assemble the final shot. The result is featured in the October edition of National Geographic magazine. I’ve included the final picture (via link above) and embedded a video of the rig in action (below).

I'll go into it further in the Picture vs Project post soon, but the bottom line is interesting and unique visions of our world and interactions are all over the place; even more so with new technologies and software like the stitching option employed on the Redwood photos. (More on stitching check out All Things Photography and Luminous Landscape)

100 Photographs for Press Freedom

2009-09-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I received a copy of the latest edition of the Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres), or RSF, annual fund-raising publication, Nature: 100 Photographs for Press Freedom. Based in France the non-profit RSF creates a publication each year to help generate revenues to support is global journalistic efforts; this year the focus was nature photojournalism. It's a project that I am extremely proud to have my photographs contribute to supporting.

This is one of those rare publications and projects that speaks to the heart of why I became a photographer. Not about the money (none of us received a dime for our contribution), and not always pretty images, it reflects the passion and commitment behind the lens. I am extremely proud to share this space with fellow photojournalists like Mitsuaki Iwago, Jim Brandenburg, Mark Moffet, and others.

Through my photo agency, Minden Pictures, my photographs contributed 8% of the 100 images that speak to the diversity and struggle of life on our planet, and support the environmental journalists, photographers and film-makers that often times risk personal safety to sound the alarm regarding the ever changing fate of our environment. From Nature, "They go to places few have ever heard of, where even fewer would like to go. Some never come back: nature photojournalists share with war reporters the highest rate of casualties of their profession. Fueled by a singular vision, they return time and time again with glimpses of our planet that challenge and shape our perspective of a fast changing world."

With the approaching 2010 designated by the UN as the International Year of Biodiversity the booklet, Nature: 100 Photographs for Press Freedom may provide a small additional glimpse at the course we are on and the need for rethinking our impact.

My great appreciation to Larry Minden and the staff of Minden Pictures for inclusion of my work in this project. Also a huge thanks to our partner agent in France Joel Halioua for his role in bring my work to RSF and sharing it on these pages with the world.

Below is a slide show of the eight images that support the 2009 edition Nature: 100 Photographs for Press Freedom.

Stepping out of the monocular rut

2009-09-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

The Ernst Haas quote I posted a few days ago, "I am not interested in shooting new things - I am interested to see things new.", popped up again today when a friend sent a link to this short film "Kudan". It's a nine minute animated voyage through a different world. Voyages should be like that - journeys, perambulations in lands unfamiliar. I guess that's why I have always been passionate about exploring nature - a different world full of surprise that always awaits. Nature inevitably forces me to step out of my monocular rut. Other artists and art forms can do that as well, and I'm always delighted when I find an artist or work, in any medium, that pricks my perspective.

A quote I use in the early moments of a live presentation I do called, Wanderings on a Wild Planet, reads, "Life is not measured by the breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." I am unapologetically selfishness about those take my breath away moments every day - I'm addicted. Yes, a life on Earth junkie. I can't imagine a more amazing place than this, Earth. Every several hours light spills upon it, magically, miraculously turning everything about me into something new and full of discovery - how frigg'n cool is that! Then, so our eyes don't become dulled, impassive to the magic, the light fades and goes out; left are but the faintest fireflies twinkling in the dimensionless firmament, reminders that the light will return.

Photography is very tricky - it's about seeing, with two eyes, a richly influenced multi-dimensional world, framing it, refining it through a single viewfinder and lens (using just one eye), then creating an image to be viewed once again in multi-dimensions. When done exceptionally well, truly an heroic feat! Mostly we are awash with thoughtless, poorly executed, mountains of mediocrity - which does dull our eyes and makes us impassive to the magic. So it vital to voyage through a different world, to prick our perspective.

The film below, Kudan, is wonderful because it is not what I would have imagined - until now there were no people-headed cows or word tubes in my world. There are fractal clouds, but not imagined in the same way. So, today, Kudan, became part of a Friday afternoon's wonderful voyage.