Photojournalism and respect

By ABC | Published: December 22, 2009

At the Lansdowne SkyTrain station in Richmond, B.C.

Sometimes I think that one of the main reasons I feel I am not particularly skilled as a photo journalist is that I’m just not enough of an a-hole for the job. On a recent trip to the largely ethnically Chinese city of Richmond, B.C., I realized that more strongly than ever before.

I had gathered only a few photographs that day, mostly of SkyTrain and of a few of the signs around the Richmond area, whose total lack of English turned the mundane into a visual feast, in the same way that listening to an opera sung in a language I can’t understand — say Italian — is far more moving to me than most songs sung in English.

Walking past a grocer’s doors, I peered inside to see dozens of families sorting through piles of fruit, looking for the best orange or persimmon. I had been just about to raise the camera to take the photo when I stopped. What was I doing? Why was I taking this picture? Oh, look, whole crowds of slant-eyed people!

Although their ethnicity served to make my actions more immediately felt, this wasn’t really an issue of race at all. It was more an issue of respect. I was a guest in these people’s community, and in my mind I had turned them into zoo animals to make picture postcards of. It was a sin I was sure, in that moment, I had committed numerous times.

I tucked my camera back into a pocket of my vast coat.

As a writer, I think you can say and do far worse things — slander is so much easier with the written word — but somehow, at the time, the invasive act so central to photojournalism seemed worse.

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The Future of Beaverton?

By ABC | Published: December 21, 2009

The Future of Beaverton?, originally uploaded by route99west.

I’ve rather provocatively titled this image “the future of Beaverton” with my tongue only partly in cheek. There are many ways that the pairing of Richmond/Vancouver does not hold as an analogy to Beaverton/Portland. Vancouver, for one, is a true international city, thanks to being the only major metropolis of its country’s (Canada) west coast, while Portland is more of a domestic city in the middle ranks of the United States.

That said, Beaverton — like Richmond — is a significant suburb of a larger city that is rapidly diversifying ethnically. Over the last decade, Beaverton has become the home to more and more small businesses catering to Japanese, Korean, and other Asian and Latin ethnic communities, a trend that shows no sign of slowing.

Beaverton, also, has ambitions, as evidenced by projects such as The Round, the recent proposals for mid and high rise towers on the old Westgate Theater property, and an attempt to secure a stadium for the soon homeless Portland Beavers AAA baseball team.

Rapid transit, high rise towers, acres of parking, strip malls of ethnic small businesses. This is the vision of Richmond, B.C. today. Might it also be the vision of Beaverton, Oregon in the next decade?

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Bridge within a bridge

By ABC | Published: December 21, 2009

Bridge within a bridge, originally uploaded by route99west.

Fall and Winter can be a dual-edged sword for photographers.

On the down side, colors often become muted, and days are shorter thus cutting down how long you can remain outside shooting without the complication of tripods and time exposures or the use of high ISO settings / films.

On the other hand, the light is often quite low, providing striking side lighting on objects normally far less illuminated during Summer. And those same muted colors can be an asset, reducing the palette and emphasizing form and composition over richness.

These cooler months and shorter days can also provide interesting atmospheric conditions, like the slight mist seen here veiling Portland’s Steel Bridge on a cold December day.

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Review: Vis Major: Railroad Men, an Act of God: White Death at Wellington

By ABC | Published: November 16, 2009


Vis Major: Railroad Men, an Act of God: White Death at Wellington
By Martin Burwash. iUniverse, 1663 Liberty Drive, Bloomington, IN 47403; http://www.iuniverse.com/; 9 x 6 x 1.1 in; trade paperback; 480 pages, 15 maps; $29.95

In the late Winter of 1910, the largest avalanche disaster in the history of North America struck the tiny railroad town of Wellington, Washington, perched in the Cascade Range. One hundred people died, and the tragedy remains unsurpassed to this day. The cause, according to an inquest held later that year, was determined to be “vis major”, an act of God. Afterwards, the Great Northern Railway abolished the station name of Wellington from its timetable, hoping to eliminate the memory of the disaster from the minds of passengers on the line. The story, however, lived on, becoming a source of legend about the power and danger of the high Cascades. Photographer Martin Burwash is not the first person to write about these events of 1910 — guidebooks to the region often contain thumbnail accounts of the tragedy, while more recently Gary Krist dedicated an entire volume to it — but he may be the author who comes closest to bringing a reader to understand the experience. To do this, Burwash worked within the tradition of Jeff Shaara and Patrick O’Brien, and delivered to the world his life’s work, the historical novel Vis Major.

The book starts with a brief author’s note, discussing the actual event and noting that this novel is the author’s attempt to tell the story of the men who lived through or died in the snow slide. After this short note, the novel begins. The book is organized into a series of chapters, each following one character for the duration of the chapter. Overall it is an effective device, allowing the reader to gain an understanding of the events from multiple perspectives without sacrificing the human point-of-view. The subject matter — an obscure event in the insular context of a railroad from the often forgotten past — is in great danger of being difficult to access. Burwash largely succeeds in avoiding this problem, restraining from overuse of insider technical terms as well as staying away from lengthy esoteric descriptions. Instead, the author strikes a good balance of minimal terminology and the use of context to orient the reader.

The book has a lengthy narrative pace, and this seems to be a deliberate choice made by the author. Although we get only a few key days in the Fall of 1909, once the fateful storm of 1910 strikes the mountains, we follow nearly every move made by the men, day by day, step by step. Burwash has made many public comments about his dedication to doing justice to the men who endured and in some cases lost their lives in this tragic event, and it is no doubt this historian side of the author that is manifested in this narrative choice. Much of the events of the story were pieced together through research and the records of the inquest that took place in 1910. Although the dialogue in the novel is imagined, the movement and actions of the characters are as accurate as the author was able to piece together from the records, as stated in the author’s note at the book’s beginning. The result is generally positive. While the book feels too long both figuratively and literally — it weighs over a pound and a half! — the pace of the narrative is a bit like a horse galloping, and is difficult to resist.

Although Burwash’s first novel, Vis Major shows little signs of it. The biggest weakness of the novel is likely it’s length, as mentioned above. This said, the reader never feels their time is wasted, and the overall effect is to become accustomed to the characters. There are, perhaps, a few too many instances of Burwash trying to put us in the thoughts of the characters, (invariably indicated by italics,) thus using exposition when description might have proven more effective. This said, by placing us on the shoulders of the men (and women) of Wellington, the reader gets a highly sensory ride. We get to know the isolated community of Wellington, the passengers of two stranded passenger trains, and the workers of the Great Northern Railway. Most of all, we get to experience as if firsthand the valiant, frustrating, and ultimately futile battle of the rotary snowplows and their crews as they attempt to keep Wellington connected to the outside world. When the reader finally reaches the penultimate tragedy, the hairs will very nearly stand on the back of their neck.

Following the novel, Burwash provides an epilogue discussing what became of the main survivors, and then includes a list of the GN’s men who were caught in it, noting who lived, who were injured, and who died. Given that the novel is based around a true story, the book would have benefited from a slightly longer epilogue with a bit more detail. Finally, a brief statement of acknowledgements closes out the book.

The fit and finish of Vis Major is very professional. The book is quite hefty but it feels good to hold when reading. Cover stock and paper quality feel standard for a trade paperback, and the typesetting and layout is professional. Considering that iUniverse is a print-on-demand publisher, this is far more than I would expect to see. The biggest question might be, is it worth the price? Even for such a hefty book, thirty dollars seems a bit steep. In the end, however, what you pay a premium for is not the physicality of the book, but the content. (Would Vis Major have seen print through traditional publishing houses? In these days of increasingly thin margins on published material, it is an unknown.) For me, the question was simple: it was worth an extra $5 or so to have a book with rare and interesting content and production values that felt professional. [Note: a hardbound version is also available. The paperback version was used for this review.]

Overall, Vis Major is an effective vehicle for telling the story of the Wellington disaster. Burwash’s passion for the human aspects of this story ring through in the text, in some cases making the novel feel more like creative nonfiction in the tradition of Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe. The book will prove of interest to readers of historical fiction, as well as those interested in the Great Northern Railway, the history of the North Cascades, or the futility of attempting to fight nature.

Vis Major: Railroad Men, an Act of God: White Death at Wellington is available from Amazon. [The hardbound version is available here.]

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Liquidated

By ABC | Published: June 17, 2009


Liquidated, 2009; watercolor on paper, approximately 16 x 25 inches.

Well that took a bit longer than expected.

Liquidated is the second in my 99W Series of paintings. This is a planned sequence of images using the thread of old Pacific Highway West through Western Oregon as a common theme. The road forms a cross section of the western portion of the state, stretching from urban Portland through to the rural prairies of the Willamette Valley. This latest painting follows the earlier Morning Rush, Portland….

…Earlier by two years.

It is really amusing because Morning Rush, Portland I completed in January 2007, and immediately afterwards began Liquidated. My academic activities, however, quickly took over my time and attention. For the longest time, the painting sat clipped to an oversized Masonite clipboard, 2/3rds done. Every time I looked at it, I felt guilt, as if it were an abandoned child. There was never enough time. There was never enough motivation. Always my calendar had something else to do, some other thing that needed my attention. If the painting had been a garden it would have been growing dandelions.

Now that the 2008-2009 academic year has wound down, I’ve been playing catch up. There’s been lots of cleaning, straightening, book sorting — scarily enough there are over forty books I have collected over the year that have yet to be read — and all manner of other reprioritization that is now possible with the additional time on my hands. One of the activities that immediately rose to the top of the to-do list: complete Liquidated.

Monday saw me heading downtown on WES to supplement my disintegrating brush collection. Tuesday morning saw me cleaning out the paintbox, the old dried up palettes, the caked and dead tubes of paint. Tuesday night saw me marathoning until 1:30 in the morning, the smell of wet cotton paper in the air and my fingers stained with viridian green and Prussian blue.

Creating — be it writing, photography, or watercolors — is a vital part of me, but somewhere along the way of the last four years, I lost that. I came, somehow, to the conclusion that I had to set that part of me aside to get more important things done. The reality is, however, that that act of creating was what was important all along. The ground is familiar now, and it feels good.

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G9: One Year Later

By ABC | Published: May 25, 2009

(If you hear Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson reading this to you in your head, don’t be surprised.)

Nearly one year ago, I, a dedicated film photographer, did something unthinkable: I bought a digital camera. No, I hadn’t eaten one too many happy pills. No, I hadn’t drank my fixer one too many times. (Mmm, fixer!) No, rather, I had come to the conclusion that I needed to stop burning film on snapshots and marginal images, and a digital camera would help me fix that.

For the last decade, the Canon G series have been amongst the best performing digital cameras in the world. These little machines have been the backbone of advanced amateur photographers, especially photographers shooting candid images — you know, street photographers, wannabe pornographers, and stalkers. Over the years, though, the G series has wandered. As Canon introduced more and cheaper and better digital SLR cameras, the company began intentionally crippling the G series, to reduce in-house competition. Things came to a head when, with the introduction of the G7, RAW file format capabilities went the way of the 110 instamatic.

So it is with some trepidation that the news of the G7’s replacement was greeted in 2007. What would be gone next? No manual controls? No viewfinder? No hotshoe?

But no. The bitch, as Sir Elton would say, is back. Meet the Canon Powershot G9.


The Canon Powershot G9, courtesy khedra @ flickr

Like all its G series forebearers, the G9 is a handsome machine. It has the classic lines of a mid-20th century rangefinder. The body is sleek and matte black. And unlike many of the competing cameras in the G9’s market segment, it isn’t made of the same material as Jacko’s nose; the G9 is metal bodied with only a small plastic piece closing in the top of the camera. The result is a body that feels solid and rugged. It also makes the camera heavy; unlike, say, a Fuji Finepix S100, if you swung this thing on it’s neck strap you could probably kill someone with it. This handy trait should make the G9 quite popular in, say, Detroit, or South Central Los Angeles.

But forget how it looks. What really matters is how the G9 performs as a camera. The first thing you notice when you pick it up is… dials! The G9, like every proper camera ever made, has little round turnable dials! In this case, one controls ISO, while the other scrolls through shooting mode. While the camera does have special “idiot modes”, they are mercifully buried under a single dial entry labelled “SCN”. The rest of the dial cycles through video, a panorama mode, an all automatic mode, program, shutter priority, aperture priority, manual, and two customizable settings.

The back of the camera sports some buttons, along with a rotating selector, and a truly massive 3″ LCD screen. Although bright sunlight can still play havoc with the latter, the LCD is unusually bright and has a wide acceptable viewing angle. Unfortunately the screen is hard attached to the back — no fold out tilting screen like older G series cameras, meaning that its a bit harder to do those sneaky, creepy candid shots. Those buttons allow the user to customize the camera settings, including –mercifully! — the ability to turn off those dumb “look at me I’m taking a picture!” system sounds and that absolutely pointless fake shutter mirror sound.

Once you’ve shed the poser features of the camera, you discover all sorts of other customizable options, like how long the LCD will stay on after no activity is detected, or if you want digital zoom, or enabling advanced features like image stabilization and red eye reduction. And of course, you can also set it to remember whatever settings you are in now via one of those customizable dial entries up top. Be warned that it will not only remember your white balance, color mode, control method, and so on, but also your exact aperture and shutter settings. Be sure to set it when you’re in typical conditions for the mode you’re saving, or you might find yourself constantly resetting the shutter speed from 1/8th like I was. I didn’t bother playing with the idiot modes; they are, after all, for idiots.

Image quality is outstanding. The camera has a whopping 12.1 megapixels. To put that in perspective, when the Nikon D1 came out just about nine years ago and revolutionized newsrooms with digital photography, it had 4.3 megapixels. The G9 has nearly three times that. That’s more megapixels than the original digital Rebel, more megapixels than Nikon D80, more megapixels than the Moon. Images shot at ISO 400 came out crisp with only a marginal grain that is comparable to most 400 speed films, and ISO tops out at a stunning (albeit somewhat grainy) 3200!

Basic adjustments like white balance, color modes, and the like is easily accessed via a button on the back, and can be made rapidly on the fly. Intriguingly the camera includes a built-in neutral density filter, three different metering modes, and the ability to fine tune flash output. You can even select auto bracketing, and switching between resolutions, image sizes, and file formats can all be handled in seconds. It’s absolutely brilliant.

Of course, not all is perfect with the G9. The manual focusing is accomplished by hitting a button on the camera back and then using a rotating selector to fine tune the focus, which can be monitored on the LCD display. This is fine except that the LCD version of a focus screen is still relatively small and hard to judge by.

In addition, the G9 feels too small. In the typical “how small can we go” digital camera theory, the G9 is a lot smaller in person than in photos. The big screen on the back will within seconds of opening the box begin to collect thumbprints from your left hand. You get the impression that if Canon had stopped trying to make the camera smaller, there would have been room for a slightly more intuitive manual focusing system.

…Or perhaps to fix the viewfinder. Now on a camera in this price point, you’d expect the viewfinder to be sharp and poised. And… you’d be wrong. The image seen though it is on 80% of the visible scene, and what’s worse, it’s not centered, horizontally or vertically. It’s utter rubbish. You could always get used to cropping your images, but what’s the point of 12.1 megapixels if you can’t use them all? The least they could have done is properly centered the 80% you can see. Ironically, it is equipped with a manually adjustable diopter to accommodate for the user’s eyesight. To see what? 80% of a scene with no idea what portion that 80% is of? Totally useless!

Still, the overall feel of holding the G9 in your hand is hard to beat. It feels like a quality product, and despite a totally useless viewfinder and a body size about 20% too small, it quickly becomes very intuitive to shoot with. Putting it through its paces on city streets, the G9 becomes a fast blast for quick images. And its size is also a plus point, as it can easily be tucked into a pocket or under a coat and not attract any attention at all.

There is one more downside, however. After a hard day of shooting, the next morning the G9 will not have your breakfast fixed. This is actually one of the camera’s redeeming features. Most camera makers offer machines these days that not only take photographs, but do your washing, balance your checkbook, call your mother, take the dog for a walk, and iron your shirts. And all this before tea time. But does the G9 have any of these extra features? No. The G9 is a photographer’s camera. Sure, it has some useless idiot modes, but with the turn of a sleek and very familiar feeling metal dial, the camera becomes a precision image making machine.

The Powershot G9 is simply brilliant. I can’t say enough good things about it. Weighing in at nearly $500, it’s not a cheap camera. But for the price of a crippled entry level dSLR made of recycled styrofoam coffee cups and cheese, you can have one of the best made, best performing digital point-and-shoot cameras ever. Canon just announced an improved version called the G10 with added megapixels, but really, a good closeout or used G9 is a much better bargain. It’s a more than worthy successor to the 35mm rangefinders of the last century.

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Biting the hand that “frills” you

By ABC | Published: April 2, 2009

Tomato Fest, Farmington Gardens
From my cold dead hands, Mr. Bingham.

Opening up today’s Oregonian is quite an education sometimes. In today’s paper, staff writer Larry Bingham outlines an in and out list, of “how life in the Northwest is shaking out in lean times.” The title is “The Frill is Gone.”

And the list? The list of outs include microbrews, Powell’s Books, New Seasons Market, boutique coffee, the Portland Opera, Oregon wine, and heirloom tomatoes from the local farmer’s market. In? Pabst, the library, Grocery Outlet, Folgers, radio broadcasts, California 2-buck-chuck, and home grown tomatoes.

When I first read it, I was shocked at the stupidity behind it. Let’s step backwards for a bit of perspective. Yesterday, Moody’s down-rated the status of Macy’s bonds to junk status. Macy’s just happens to be one of the biggest advertisers that the Big O has. Without them, the paper would be in serious revenue trouble.

Now journalism isn’t about advertisement, (or at least it shouldn’t be,) but I would hardly call a puff piece on trends from the “How We Live” section journalism anyway. Given that, is it smart to be, in essence, insulting potential and actual advertisers in this way? Last I checked, New Seasons inserts their weekly sales ads into the Big O, and in fact they are a partner in one of the paper’s promotions on the back side of the very page this story appeared on. Ah, irony.

But this is more than just a matter of keeping advertisers happy. The economy is, indeed, in a dark, dark place. People are being laid off, and markets are shrinking. In this time of all times, our brewers, booksellers, grocers, farmers, and artists do not need to be listed on an “out” list. They do not need the region’s largest newspaper advising people that spending money on these things is a poor choice. To suggest that spending on these things is “out” is a cruel blow, is kicking these sectors while they are down.

For all of these reasons, the Oregonian in general, and Larry Bingham in particular owe an apology to everyone on that “out” list, from Apple at the top of the chain (iTunes was ruled as an “out”) to the smallest farmer at the local farmer’s market.

But it is an even deeper mistake than all of this.

Microbrews, books, good coffee, local and organic produce; these aren’t “frills”. Bingham writes that “some would even say good riddance to our age of excess.” These things are not excess. They are our culture. What Bingham proposes would be akin to asking the French to give up bread and wine, the Carolinas to give up Cheerwine and Q, or Wisconsin to give up grilled bratwurst and beer. And for the sake of what? Saving money? Yes, money is tighter now than it was, but to suggest that we would give up our culture for the sake of our wallets is preposterous and insulting. Mr. Bingham, you will have to pry the heirloom tomato from my cold dead hand.

I, for one, know the perfect protest. I am going to Powell’s this afternoon to buy a book.

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