Blue Planet Photography

This year at the fair was interesting.

On Aug 21, I held my bi-monthly PhotoCrawl at the fair, in the evening. Around 9:15pm a powerful microburst struck the fairgrounds with 70 mph winds, knocking over ticket booths, breaking tree branches, tearing up canvas tent awnings and vendor canopies. The fair was shut down at around 10:15pm and everyone was evacuated because there were still high winds blowing stuff around. Reports of 70 - 80 minor injuries (scrapes and bruises) and 4 people taken to the hospital (one person apparently the victim of a fallen branch). Around the area there were grass fires sparked by exploded transformers, massive power outages (40,000 people without power), a car fire, car accident, even a domestic shooting, all in the same relative area at the same time. It was a busy night for fire, rescue and police.

I shot some iPhone video that ended up on the local news and a request to upload to CNN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRS2JwWYdQc

I went back again on the following Tuesday to shoot some things I wasn’t able to get on Saturday, and came up with an idea. So, I went back again last Saturday to finish up. I created a slideshow (http://www.vimeo.com/14560155) using 534 photos from those 3 days (many are time-lapse style). This show is probably a first draft; the photos (except for one) are processed very minimally.

I judged the Youth Photo Entries this year and there were a lot of really good photos. The judging was made even more difficult because the bakery good judging was going on right behind me and I was constantly smelling ginger snaps, oatmeal cookies, snickerdoodles, and chocolate chip cookies.

I also picked up 2 2nd place and 1 3d place ribbon from my photo entries. As usual, I have some issues with the judging, but that’s the way it usually goes.

Artist Vik Muniz describes his creative progression using various “found” materials.

What does it mean to you to be successful? A hundred self-help books start with that short sentence and it has, in my opinion, become a cliche often treated superficially by authors and readers alike. But, it really is a fundamental question leading to actions and beliefs by you that influence your satisfaction with your life as an artist and, ultimately, with your life in general.

Determining for yourself the criteria of success as an artist is a complex process involving both internal and external factors and obstacles, starting with the creation of a way of being and expressing, of life and living, a structure that is your own. Do you want to be a full-time artist, a part-time artist, or improve your skill as a hobbyist? Do you want to have a solo exhibit in a well-known gallery? Do you want to be published? Do you want to establish an art school? Do you only want to be personally satisfied with your work and don’t care what others think?

Creating the structure of your own life provides greater freedom and opportunities for self-expression and happiness. If you do not have control over the structure of your life, you will have to accommodate the structure created by someone else and their vision of what you should be and do, which puts you in a position of powerlessness. The people who would love to create your structure for you (and do) are friends, teachers, family, lovers, mentors, colleagues, employers, strangers, students, even enemies and rivals. When you have control, you seize the initiative and move forward confidently and deliberately. An artist’s life is made from the inside out.

Many artists (if not all, even secretly) want one (or THE) measure of success to be financial security. As artists, one of the things we look for in our audience is approval. Approval is an external factor dependent upon others liking our work and showing their approval by positive comments and/or a purchase or two. We can become slaves to approval, however, and stray from our intended path if we only create art that is approved of (purchased) or suppress our talent or experimentation because we fear risking disapproval or because the “easier” or “safer” art sells better.

The best life would be doing what you love and getting paid well for it. But, financial security isn’t a true measure of success by itself. I know of several well-known artists who are (or have been) unhappy, although very financially secure, because they lost control over their work and life for the sake of financial gain. I think a successful artist is in control of their work and their life, whether it’s making a million dollars or a thousand dollars a year as an artist. Establishing that balance is a tricky proposition. Our ego and the desire to be somebody special helps turn us into slaves of approval, which diminishes the quality and impact of our work and our overall satisfaction.

A very close relation to approval, is fear. Where approval is external, fear is internal, wreaking all kinds of havoc with our dreams and intentions. Artists are great self-doubters and second-guessers, destroying many opportunities and limiting our potential. Here is a list of the possible fears artists endure and fall victim to:

Fear of
1. Failure
2. Rejection
3. Reality
4. Losing identity
5. Pain/Sacrifice
6. Commitment
7. Making the wrong choice(s)
8. Not being in control
9. That it will never work
10. Success
11. Inadequacy
12. Being misunderstood
13. Perfection
14. Annihilation
15. Expectations

Overcoming Fear allows you to become independent, to divorce the wishes and desires of others wanting to control or influence your work, and to do the work you were meant to do.

Artists have many obstacles, external and internal, to overcome on the road to success. Creating a structure to your life around your art, overcoming fear, understanding and taming the desire for approval, and a host of other barriers, milestones, and rewards make up your criteria for success.

In the end, though, you are the only one that can determine whether you’ve reached your goal and met your measure of success.

Good Luck!

The Government of Tanzania has approved the building of a major commercial highway across the northern part of the Serengeti, home to the world’s last great migration and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The road will adversely affect the world-renown wildlife migrations in that region, tourism, and local economy. An alternate proposal is to build a road in the southern part of the Serengeti, an area less sensitive and where a road would be more beneficial to the local residents.

For more information, go to www.savetheserengeti.org/issues/stop-the-serengeti-highway/

Join me in Zanzibar, Tanzania, November 16 - 27, 2010 for a 12-day photography workshop covering Stone Town, Nungwi, Prison Island and Chumbe Island Coral Park. Details and registration at http://www.blueplanetphoto.com/zanzibar.htm. There is a limit of 6 on this workshop and 2 spots are already taken. Your early registration will ensure a spot.

Zanzibar and Chumbe Island Coral Park, Tanzania, Africa from Mike Shipman on Vimeo.

Here is a nicely done segment from a film about Zanzibar, featuring Omari, the head ranger at Chumbe Island Coral Park. Omari talks about the threats to coral reefs, not just in Zanzibar but world wide. Some beautiful film of the reef as well.

Last weekend I lead a workshop to Bruneau Dunes State Park in the Owyhee Desert of southwest Idaho. About 20 miles south of Mountain Home and 80 miles from Boise, it’s a location easily reached for a day or weekend getaway. Spring and fall are the best times for color (other than brown) and temperature (other than scorching hot), but really any time of year is good. The main dune is the tallest single dune in the U.S. at over 400 feet. Several smaller dunes and dune fields are found in this unusual catchment basin for sand. Two small lakes are adjacent to the dunes and an astronomical observatory provides exploration of the night sky spring to fall. Tent pads, RV and trailer spaces, and a couple small cabins await the weekend or weekday warrior. The wind blows almost constantly, sometimes very briskly, so protection of camera equipment is important since sand gets into everything.

Ducks, geese, jackrabbits, osprey, great horned owls, kangaroo rats, lizards, snakes, songbirds, coyotes, insects, wildflowers, clouds, sky, and people.

We had a fun time exploring and learning.

I mean, REALLY macro? Here’s a site that will blow you away, plus give you the tools to do it yourself: if you have the patience. Charles Krebs (not the Ecology textbook author, but still very much interested in the natural world) is an accomplished photomicrographer and multiple year winner of the Nikon Small Worlds and Olympus Bioscapes contests. Putting together essentially a DIY setup, he’s created many visually arresting images.

Visit his website and galleries, plus several articles explaining how you can do this too: http://www.krebsmicro.com/

Here’s an article showing his current set up and equipment: http://micropix.home.comcast.net/~micropix/microsetup/index.html

photos © Charles Krebs

Back in the “Old Days” of computers, the mantra “Save Frequently and Often” was a hedge against the common system hangs and crashes of the day. While operating systems and software are much more stable these days, the mantra is still worth hanging onto and practicing for two main reasons:

1. Technology is not infallible
2. Human beings are not infallible

Computer operating systems and programs will crash and hang. Hard drives will crash and fail. Humans will format hard drives and memory cards thinking they’ve downloaded or saved the information stored on those devices. Humans will drop things they shouldn’t be dropping and misplace things they should be paying better attention to. It’s natural. It happens. However, if you can avoid that knot in your stomach when you’ve lost 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, or even 2GB of image files due to a hardware crash or other mishap, that’s a lot of stress and woe energy you can redirect to restoring that data instead of looking for the nearest window to leap out of.

Your job, if you value your digital photographs, is to make a practice of Saving Frequently and Often. There’s much more to this than I can squeeze into this little space, but let me point out some options (there are many) that can relieve the pain if such a disaster strikes you.

A second mantra is the 3-2-1 Rule:

3. You should keep 3 copies (at least) of any important files - a primary and 2 backups
2. Your backup files should be on 2 different media types (i.e. hard drive and optical media - DVD/Blu-Ray) to protect against different types of hazard
1. 1 backup copy (at least) should be stored offsite

The 3-2-1 Rule is really a guideline (like most “rules” in photography) and should be understood to be a minimum recommendation. You can never have too many backups (versus having no backup).

There are many more backup options now than just a few years ago and they range in price from around $5 to several thousand, depending on your needs. Let’s run through a general list:

1. DVD and Blu-Ray. The least expensive but probably the most time-consuming backup tool. DVD capacity is 4.7GB and Blu-Ray is 25GB (50GB for dual layer). The cost per GB is nearly the same for each with DVD at an average of $0.299/GB ($0.60 - $0.90 each) and Blu-Ray at $0.213/GB (about $5.00 each). The $300 cost of a Blu-Ray drive might offset any small cost-savings for now, until prices come down.

2. External Hard Drive Dock. These devices are relatively new, dispensing with the difficult-to-access enclosure for a simple “drop slot” for the bare drive. The BlacX SATA dock by Thermaltake connects using Firewire or USB and can read 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives and costs between $35 - $55 depending on the vendor. You do have to be careful handling the hard drive since it is bare, but the dock is a convenient way to quickly backup or transfer information.

3. External Hard Drive units. Large drive enclosures like the Seagate FreeAgent Pro or Western Digital MyBook are more for ‘permanent’ use as backup space or storage. Connecting via USB or Firewire, they range in price from $90 for 500GB to $200 for 2TB.

4. External Hard Drive enclosures. Sometimes called JBODs (Just a Bunch Of Disks), these enclosures are simply extensions of the disk capacity of your main computer, with from 2 to 6 or 8 or more hard drive bays. Some enclosures have removable hard drive carriers for “easy” replacement while others require the hard drives to be attached in the bay (like in your computer). Connecting via Firewire or USB, they can also be set up in a RAID, individual volumes, or as a large volume. Other enclosures are used for single drives and can be purchased with a drive or empty.

5. RAID and BeyondRAID. RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks and allows for the division and replication of data among multiple drives. Some cons for RAID is it’s difficult for the unitiated to set up and maintain (I think) and the volume is set by the smallest capacity. So, if you have a 250GB drive and a 500GB drive, the capacity is driven by the 250GB and you “waste” the 250GB from the 500GB drive. Also, if you upgrade capacity, you have to backup and reload all your data. Systems such as the Buffalo Terastation (2TB $730 - $900 empty, 4TB $1150 - $1400 empty) use RAID. A system called BeyondRAID, used by Data Robotics in their Drobo line, allows the use of multiple capacity drives and easy upgrading of capacity without the need to reload data. Drobo products range from the 4-bay Drobo (up to 8TB capacity, starts at $310 empty) to the 8-bay DroboPro and DroboElite (up to 16TB capacity, starts at $1250 empty).

6. Solid State Drives. This technology is very promising but still expensive. These drives have no moving parts and are very durable, like your Compact Flash memory cards. They use less power than conventional hard drives, run cooler, are smaller, and are faster. The downside is the price. A 64GB solid state drive is $200 and a 256GB solid state drive is $700. As with all new technology, the price will come down as the devices enter the mainstream.

7. Personal (or Portable) Storage Devices. These palm-sized devices are primarily for backing up memory cards. Epson, Hyperdrive, JoBo, Wolverine, are some of the brands that manufacture PSDs. They come in various configurations and capacities. Epson PSDs tend to be the most expensive, but feature rich. However, upgrading capacity requires the purchase of a new device and battery life is low. Hyperdrive makes a PSD with smaller color screen, but faster upload and longer battery life for about 1/3 the cost of the Epson. These devices are great in the field for backing up memory cards. They connect to your desktop or laptop via USB just like an external hard drive.

In addition to the backup devices, a regular program and procedure to backup your data is needed. Whether you backup every day, once a week, or once a month, doing so on a regular basis will save you a ton of grief if you ever have a crash.