everyone's lost but me...

Calotypes and The Dawn of The Paper Processes

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 11:23:00 +0000

This is the third article in a series on the history of the photographic process for The PonF Project. The original can be viewed here.

In 1839, Louis Daguerre was pronounced ‘The Inventor of Photography’. This did not sit well with many others, Nicéphore Niépce’s son, Isidore, for one. He was furious that his father’s work wasn’t even mentioned by Daguerre and spent the rest of his life telling anyone who would listen that it was, in fact, his father, who really invented photography.

There were several other people working simultaneously and independently of each other to perfect a fixed photographic image.

Sir John Herschel by Julia Margaret Cameron, April 1867

In 1819, the Polymath Scientist, Sir John Herschel discovered that hyposulfite of soda (now known as sodium thiosulfate, or “hypo”, common photographic fixer) dissolved silver salts.

Herschel discovered what would become the platinum printing process in 1832, based on his research of the light sensitivity of platinum salts. Around this same time, he also invented other lesser-known photographic processes such as The Chrysotype using colloidal gold as a means of creating an image and the Anthotype (also known as Phytotype) process that used photosensitive material from plants.

In 1839, he shared his sodium thiosulfate discovery with both Louis Daguerre and his friend William Henry Fox Talbot, giving a solution to the vexing problem of stabilizing photographic images to permanence.

Also in 1839, Herschel produced the first photograph on glass. This photo depicted his father’s telescope in Slough, near London. Herschel’s other contributions to photography include coining the term Photography and he was also the first person to apply the terms Positive and Negative to photography.

Herschel Telescope First Photograph on Glass, 3 September, 1839

In 1842, Herschel invented the Cyanotype process as a way to reproduce notes and diagrams. (This process was used well into the 20th century for engineering and architectural blueprints.). Cyanotypes have an interesting characteristic in that they will fade under prolonged exposure to sunlight but can often be regenerated by placing them in darkness for a while.

In 1843, Botanist and Photographer Anna Atkins used this technique to produce a book of Cyanotype photograms (objects placed directly onto sensitized paper and exposed leaving a negative impression) called, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.

Algae Cyanotype by Anna Atkins, 1843

In May 1839, three months before the big announcement of Daguerre’s invention, a clerk in the French Ministry of Finance, named Hippolyte Bayard, had shown French physicist (and director of the Paris Observatory), Dominique François Arago his own photographic images made with a positive paper process. He had sensitized paper with Silver chloride and inserted the wet paper into his camera for exposure; the paper was then developed out in potassium iodide to yield a positive image. This image was fixed with potassium bromide. Bayard was given a small pension to keep quiet about his process. His photograph, Self Portrait as a Drowned Man is widely considered the very first political protest photograph.

Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, Hippolyte Bayard, 1840, Courtesy of Societé Francais de la Photographie and the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY

Upon hearing the announcement of Daguerre’s invention, an Englishman named William Henry Fox Talbot rushed to The Royal Institution on January 29th to proclaim that he had been working on a photographic process he called Photogenic Drawing, since 1834, presenting several images he had made. Two weeks later he presented his process to The Royal Society.

William Henry Fox Talbot With Camera and lens, by John Moffat, 1864

Talbot’s process couldn’t have been more different, however.

Talbot’s Salted Paper or Photogenic Drawing process used fine-grained writing paper sensitized with a weak silver chloride solution, then brushed with a strong solution of silver nitrate. This created a coating of silver chloride, which darkened when exposed to light. The exposure times were often an hour or two for this process, producing a paper negative. This is referred to as a “Printing Out” process, meaning that the image is fully visible when the exposure is completed. (This is different from a “Developing Out” process where the latent exposed image is invisible until it is developed. Daguerreotypes are a developing out process.)

WHF Talbot, The Open Door, April, 1844

What was so revolutionary about Talbot’s process was that photographs were now easily reproducible. To copy a Daguerreotype, you had to re-photograph it. By contrast, with a paper negative, the process was fairly simple. First, you would wax the paper negative to make it translucent. Second, you would place the waxed paper negative on top of a piece of sensitized paper and place that into a contact frame. This frame was placed out in sunlight to expose. Once the image was developed to satisfaction, it was processed as normal.

In 1841, Talbot perfected his Calotype process (sometimes referred to as Talbottype). The term Calotype comes from the Greek καλός (kalos), "beautiful", and τύπος (tupos), "impression".

This was a developing out process using silver iodide. The Calotype Process brought exposure times down from hours to a few minutes in bright sun. The process starts with brushing a high quality writing paper with silver nitrate and allowed to dry. The paper is then soaked in potassium iodide (This formed silver iodide on the paper) and allowed to dry again. When the paper was needed, the silver iodide paper was brushed with “gallo-nitrate of silver” (silver nitrate, acetic acid and gallic acid) and placed in a dark slide to be exposed. The latent image was developed by washing the negative in gallo-nitrate of silver and then stabilized by either a rinse of potassium bromide or fixed in a hot solution of sodium thiosulfate.

Contemporary Calotypists are using several different methods to make their images. Each method has its followers and my research has shown that this process is not easy, but once mastered, produces beautiful pictures. Looking at the Flickr gallery of The Calotype Society you can see the potential of the process.

Edinburgh Calotype Club 1 53 Maitland, Montgomery, Tennent

The Calotype is a very different image from the Daguerreotype. The Calotype is a paper process, so the grain and texture of the paper become part of the image, lessening detail and giving the overall image a more painterly quality. This was seen as much more desirable for portraits and artistic landscapes. Because of this, Talbot is often seen as the first photographic artist. His monograph called The Pencil of Nature is regarded as the "first photographically illustrated book to be commercially published". It was published in instalments and contains his own account of the invention of the Calotype process; as well as several insights into the making of images and their use outside of being pieces of art. You can view and search Talbot’s vast collection of Calotype negatives and prints here.

The United Kingdom and Scotland, in particular, was a locus for Calotype photography. The Edinburgh Calotype Club, founded in 1842, was the world’s first photography society. They had many distinguished members and their body of work, Pencils of Light, is still available to view, in person, at The National Library of Scotland.

The Pencil of Nature cover

The Calotype studio of Hill and Adamson at Rock House in Edinburgh, produced some of the first social documentary photography with their images of the fisher folk of Newhaven. The work of Hill and Adamson can be seen at The National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.

Hill and Adamson, Fisherman and Boys, 1843

Many historians believe that the invention of the Calotype marks the real birth of Photography in the mainstream consciousness. It’s repeatability and relative ease to produce (when compared to Daguerreotypes) and the overall mass appeal of the images themselves really brought photography to the masses. There was, however, still a desire for the amazing detail of the Daguerreotype and that is where Fredrick Scott Archer came in…

Sources:

Talbot, William Henry Fox. Pencil of Nature Published by Longman, Green and Longmans, London 1844

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33447/33447-h/33447-h.html

William Henry Fox Talbot Collection http://foxtalbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/search

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33447/33447-h/33447-h.html

https://digital.nls.uk/pencilsoflight/history.htm

http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/1_edin/1_edinburgh_calotype_club_0.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Calotype_Club

http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/1_early/1_early_photography_-_equipment_catalogue_1856_chemicals_for_the_calotype_process.htm

http://www.foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/

http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/Feb2007.html

http://fourtoes.co.uk/iblog/strines-journal-calotype/

Hunt, Robert. A Manual of Photography Published by John Griffin & Co. Glasgow 1853

https://www.flickr.com/groups/1384661@N22/pool/

http://fourtoes.co.uk/iblog/strines-journal-calotype/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Atkins

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Herschel

James, Christopher. The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes. Cengage Learning, 2016.

Atkins, Anna (1985). Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms. With text by Larry J. Schaaf. New York: Aperture. ISBN 0-89381-203-X.

http://www.mikeware.co.uk/mikeware/New_Cyanotype_Process.html

https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/hippolyte-bayard-direct-positive-process.46274/

Daguerreotypes and the Popularization of Photography

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Sat, 16 Jun 2018 11:26:00 +0000

This is the second articles in a series I am writing for The PonF Camera Project. You can find the original post here.

Daguerreotypes and the Popularization of Photography

In our previous entry we looked at Nicéphore Niépce and his Heliograph, View from the Window at Le Gras. This entry focuses on his business partner Louis Daguerre.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was born on 18 November 1787 in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d’Oise, France. He was trained as an Architect, but was known for his skill at theatrical illusion and diorama painting. His fascination began when he used a camera obscura to aid in the painting of his large Diorama Paintings for his theater. When he partnered with Nicéphore Niépce, his mind was always on the money-making potential of the medium of photography.

In 1833 Nicéphore Niépce suddenly died, leaving all of his notes to Louis Daguerre. Daguerre would all but abandon the bitumen-based photographic process they had been working on in favour of a silver-based process that he had been experimenting with, separately from Niépce.

Above: Portrait of Louis Daguerre, 1844 by Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot, George Eastman House

Daguerre’s process was as follows:

A silver-plated copper sheet was polished to as perfect a mirror finish as possible. This first step was essential to making a good-looking photograph. Getting a perfect finish by hand, could take up to an hour. First, rottenstone, a fine polishing abrasive, is applied with a hide-covered buff, then jeweller’s rouge. Lampblack is then applied, usually with a velvet-covered buff. Applying nitric acid, to remove any remaining matter, finished the polishing process.

The polished plate is then sensitized in a darkroom using a fuming box

Right: Stephen Day Fuming Box, http://cdags.org/wiki/index.php?

Here is an in-depth look at a modern fuming box. The plate was placed into the fuming box carriage, and then slid over a dish containing iodine crystals. The plate is fumed until a yellow tinge appears. This produces a coating of silver iodide.

The exposure time was several minutes. This made the first portraits quite an ordeal, with the sitter clamped into all manner of metal braces to prevent movement. It was later found that an additional fuming over bromine fumes, followed by a second shorter exposure to iodine fumes greatly increased sensitivity, reducing exposure times to as little as 30 seconds in full sun.

Once exposed, the still invisible latent image was developed in the darkroom, over fumes of heated mercury. Even though the toxic nature of mercury exposure was well known, precautions were rarely taken. Modern practitioners of this process use fume hoods and other laboratory-grade safety equipment.

The much safer modern Becquerel process of Daguerreotype development involves sensitising the plate only to iodine fumes. Then, after exposure, the plate is developed in sunlight using a red filter to cover the plate. This red-filtered “sun bath” intensifies the latent image to visibility, as if the image were exposed for several hours.

Back in the darkroom, the fixing of the image was originally done with a hot saturated salt solution, but this was almost immediately replaced with a bath of sodium thiosulfate, the common fixer we still use in film development today.

After drying, the image on the plate was basically a coating of fine dust and very, very delicate. A gold chloride solution was pooled onto the surface of the plate, which was heated from underneath then drained, rinsed and dried. This gilding gave the image a warmer, more pleasing tone and made the coating a little more resilient. Still, the image was subject to tarnishing from exposure to the air, so great care had to be exercised to maintain the image’s integrity.

The finished Daguerreotype plate had to be encased in an airtight container. A matt was placed over the plate and covered with a pane of glass, bound together and sealed with strips of paper coated with Gum Arabic. This was then fixed into a protective case.

Daguerreotypes were a one-off process, meaning that the plate that was produced was a one-of-a-kind with no negative. They could only be copied by re-photographing them. This was a service that many studios offered but it was costly.

With the help of French physicist (and director of the Paris Observatory), Dominique François Arago, Daguerre would present an overview of his process to the French Academy of Sciences on January 7, 1839. The details were kept secret, with viewings of his plates only at his studio and under strict supervision. The French government agreed to buy the rights to his process in exchange for a lifetime pension for himself and Niépce’s son, Isidore, as per a previous agreement between Daguerre and Niépce.

On August 19, 1839 the French government presented the Daguerreotype process to the world for free, as a gift. (Despite this a patent agent, acting on Daguerre’s behalf, applied for a patent in England and Scotland just five days previous, entitled “A New and Improved Method of Obtaining the Spontaneous Reproduction of all the Images Received in the Focus of the Camera Obscura”. Photographers in England and Scotland would now have to pay a license fee to use the Daguerreotype process. For this reason the process wasn’t widely adopted in the UK.) Louis Daguerre would also retain the patents on the camera and other equipment used to make Daguerreotype images.

Daguerreotype studios quickly opened in every major city across the globe.

For the next 15-20 years Daguerreotypes would be the most popular and ubiquitous method for image capture. Nearly 5 million plates were created in this time.

Daguerre himself created what is believed to be the first photograph of a person. In his image, Boulevard du Temple, in the lower left corner you can see a man getting his shoes shined. The exposure time is thought to be somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes, long enough for the camera to capture the unknown men and render the moving traffic in the street invisible.

Boulevard_du_Temple, 1838 by Louis Daguerre

This image is thought to be the oldest daguerreotype portrait, taken by John William Draper, of his sister Dorothy Catherine Draper.

Portrait of Dorothy Catherine Draper, 1839 by John William Draper

The first self-portrait was taken by Philadelphia photographer Robert Cornelius in October or November of 1839. He wrote on the back “The first light picture ever taken”.

Self Portrait, 1839 by Robert Cornelius

It’s difficult for us to understand the impact that Daguerre’s photographs had on the public. For the first time in history, people could see places they could never visit and images of someone long dead. These were not sketches, or paintings, but actual moments, frozen in time and made immortal. This is perhaps why the Victorians were so taken by photography. The chance to make their own or someone else's visage immortal.

The best way to experience a Daguerreotype is to hold it. Alison Nordström, a photographic curator, called Daguerreotypes “Mirrors With a Memory”. This is very apt. The image is both a negative and a positive at the same time, depending on the angle at which it is viewed. The image appears to lift off the plate, with the viewer often reflected in it.

A properly exposed and focused Daguerreotype has nearly infinite detail, exceeding even modern digital methods. One can get lost in the image examining every tiny detail and staring into the eyes of someone from the past.

Daguerre had introduced photography to the populace and photographs were being made all over the world, for those that could afford them. The process was complicated, cumbersome and somewhat dangerous but photography was gaining popularity.

Next: The Calotype and other paper processes make the photograph repeatable and easier.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Daguerre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photography

James, Christopher. The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes. Cengage Learning, 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d932Q6jYRg8

http://www.alternativephotography.com/becquerel-daguerreotype/

https://goo.gl/cfqRiV

http://www.cdags.org/wp-content/uploads/HowImadeDaguerreotypes1972.pdf

https://agno3solution.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/daguerreotype-fuming-box-ver-3-3-march-2015/

http://www.daguerreotypes.co.uk/Equipment.htm

http://www.alistairscott.com/daguerre/

http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/1_early/1_early_photography_-_processes_-_daguerreotype.htm

http://cdags.org/

https://goo.gl/Cnjudu

http://www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk/dagprocess.htm

https://www.filmsnotdead.com/joyeux-anniversaire-daguerreotype/

The First Photograph...

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 09:10:00 +0000

This is the first in a series of articles I've written for The PonF Camera Project on the history of the photographic process. You can find the original post here.

The First Photograph

View from the Window at Le Gras

Nicéphore Niépce, 1826

This is the oldest surviving photograph made by a camera. It is called is a Heliograph and it was produced in 1826 by Nicéphore Niépce. This image is the manually enhanced version made by historian Helmut Gernsheim in 1952. The actual plate looks like this (The dimples were caused by damage sometime after 1952):

Niépce’s other pioneering work included the invention of the Heliogravure, a process used to copy drawings and engravings. He worked with Louis Daguerre perfecting many photographic processes like the Physautotype. Niépce and his brother Claude invented the Pyréolophore, the world’s first internal combustion engine.

View from the Window at le Gras was created by dissolving Bitumen of Judea in Lavender oil and brushing it onto a pewter plate. The sensitised plate was then loaded into the back of a camera obscura similar to this one:

The exposure took anywhere from 8 hours to several days (modern experiments lean toward several days). Notice how the sun strikes both sides of the buildings?

After the plate was exposed, it was washed with lavender oil and white petroleum. The bitumen in the areas of the image that received more light would harden and remain and the areas that received less light would wash away. The Heliographic process doesn’t yield a terribly detailed photograph, but considering this is one of the very first times that a permanent image was made with a camera, it’s pretty incredible. This process, as well as Niépce’s Physautotype process, are still practiced today.

View from the Window at le Gras is on display at The Henry RansomCenter, in Austin Texas. You can also visit Niépce’s home and workshop, TheMaison Nicéphore Niépce in Paris.

With the birth of photography, the process of making a permanent photograph was neither easy nor convenient. It was the domain of scientists, inventors and craftsmen. It would be some time before everyone would be able to be a photographer.

Up next: The Daguerreotype

Links:

http://www.photo-museum.org/niepce-invention-photography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicéphore_Niépce

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/firstphotograph/

http://www.photo-museum.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliography

http://www.photo-museum.org/niepce-nicephore-daguerre-physautotype/

Why I am involved with PonF

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Sun, 25 Feb 2018 12:10:00 +0000

Over the last 15-20 years there have been many attempts to merge traditional film photography with digital. The one that I remember most clearly was a company called EFilm. The idea was to have a digital sensor attached to a memory capture device that would fit into a film camera. It looked like 35mm film canister, with the sensor sitting over the image plane.There were other ideas out there like this, some turned out to be hoaxes, but the idea that we could have both digital and film in one unit really stuck with me.

I have making photographs for 30 or so years. My work has been a mix of both analogue and digital. I’ve shot nearly every film format from sub-miniature Minox, to 10x12 Glass plate negative. Over the last 3 ½ years I have been working nearly exclusively with the Wetplate Collodion process. What this has taught me is that image making is less about the process and more about the image itself.

Several months ago I contacted Rafaello Palandri on Instagram. He was creating a new camera that could combine both traditional film and digital capture into one unit. It would be a camera body that would have a 35mm back and a digital back. He also planned to make a 120 medium format back as well as a 4x5 back. Finally, this idea would become a reality.

The first time I met Rafaello, in person, we had a long conversation about what we both loved about film photography and what we both loved about camera design. The outcome of this conversation was that I was asked to be a part of his PonF project.

What I love about this project is that it embraces Photography. This isn’t a film vs. digital thing anymore, it’s about the medium of photography. It’s about the freedom of image making.

In addition to beta testing the camera, I’m writing a series of articles about the history of photographic processes and will be producing several videos about the PonF camera as well as videos about film processing.

I believe in this project. I believe that we don’t have to choose between film and digital. I believe that we can have 2 (or 3, or even 4) camera systems in our camera bags at one time.

I believe that we can have all of this.

If you also have this belief and would like to find out more, please check out the website for the PonF project.

Between Dreams and Wakefulness...

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 20:48:00 +0000

There is a small window of time between dreaming and wakefulness when anything can happen. The day before you is pure, untainted and full of possibilities. The worries of the previous days have not yet fallen upon you.

It is a state of bliss.

When I was young I believed that during this magical time, I could wish myself to wake anywhere.

I often wished to wake up in the small bedroom of my Grandmother’s house, the Burnt Umber curtains casting a warm glow in the morning light, giving me the hope that all could be right with the world.

Every once in a great while, I’d open my eyes and actually be there in my Grandmother’s house. The sense of relief and accomplishment was immeasurable. I would smile the biggest smile I could and close my eyes, hoping I could wake up there all over again.

Sometimes it was a dream, but sometimes it was reality.

As I got older, this magical ability seemed to move to the area just outside my vision and perception, fading into a haze of impossibility.

That magical span of time between the dreaming and the wakefulness has grown ever shorter. The worries of the previous days fall upon me quicker now, but every once in a great while, I have a brief moment of possibility that I might wake to find those curtains hanging above me, casting that glow of hope and for a brief moment I think that all might be right with the world.

Fireworks: The Process of Making a Music Video Part 12 The Big Finish

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:28:00 +0000

The last of the footage is now ingested and rendered. The synch is working a little better, but the issue is the image itself. Some of the sequences are drifting in and out of focus.

At first, I thought it might have been the scans from LomoLab, but, upon close inspection, the individual grains of the film were sharp, so it must have been the seating of the film in the camera. It could have had something to do with the speed of the hand cranking not allowing the film to seat itself properly. I was cranking pretty fast this whole project, though and this issue didn’t present itself until shortly after I switched camera backs. It’s an intermittent problem, so I may be wrong.

I’m relieved to have enough usable footage to finish the video, so its not a huge problem and the main vocal section with the affected footage is in the middle of the video, so I can cut around it and the fluttering focus becomes another part of the Lo-Fi aesthetic. After talking with Kyle about it, he was in favour of the “warts and all” approach to the footage. The aesthetic of the piece as a whole is fun and pleasingly “retro”. It definitely stands out, which is what Kyle needs.

The vocal piece at the lighthouse is synching up fairly well, with the footage being sped up, on average, 125%. This is a bit baffling to me because the calculations I made, based on the song being slowed down by 300%, then shot at (what I assume to be roughly) 6-8fps, transferred at roughly 10fps and having that footage sped up 300%. Somewhere in that fuzzy film math something happened. It worked in the end, so I’m not complaining, but still…

The vistas and other B-Roll shots are being sped up between 200% and 400% to create a time-lapse effect, which I think works quite well.

Completing the full rough cut took 4 long days in the edit suite in Edinburgh. The bed next to the computer became very handy after 12 hours of cutting footage. I emerged from the edit-cave with a very tight edit for Kyle.

There weren’t very many changes from the rough to the fine cut. The cuts were refined (with the help of a click track) and the final mix of the song slotted in perfectly.

With the edition of Kyle’s title cards (and a bit of “old film” filter on top of them), the video was pretty much finished. The “coming soon” end card can be removed after the album is released, so Kyle will have the option of including it on the CD, or even broadcast.

I’m really excited to see the general reaction to it. Lomomography is very interested to see it as well. They want to post it on their LomoKino micro site and publicise the “professional” uses of their little camera.

Jack Quick at LomoLab London was Brilliant! His hard work and willingness to go above and beyond is what made this project possible. I could not have completed this project without him!

Overall, I’m very happy with Fireworks. It was one of the most technically challenging films I’ve worked on. Of course there are things I’d do a bit differently, but hindsight is always 20/20…

Here it is, Fireworks

Fireworks by Echo Bloom from Big baby Productions Ltd on Vimeo.

Here is a link to the Echo Bloom Micro Site

Fireworks: The Process of Making a Music Video... Part 11

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 07:37:00 +0000

Let the edit begin!

This is proving more challenging than I first thought.

After Jack Quick at LomoLab worked out a few issues, the footage from Day 1 is looking really great. In order to get rid of the choppy, jumpy nature of the first pass, we came up with the idea of disregarding the half-frames, losing 1 of every four frames in the end. The new workflow is working and the footage is much smoother now, so Big Thanks to Jack.

There was a roll of 160VC that was a couple of stops underexposed. The semi-automated process at LomoLab just couldn’t find the frames. I ended up re-rendering the MP4 from the film scans myself, using (of all things) Canon’s DPP RAW converter software. It has a trimming function that made this tedious process a bit more streamlined. There were a few other rolls that I re-rendered to get rid of jumps when the camera would skip a frame or two.

The first attempt with this was a couple of macro shots of the costume. I had taped a +10 diptor to the LomoKino lens and hoped for the best. The focus was surprisingly sharp. The underexposure, however, rendered the footage unusable, even after the re-render and colour correction in Final Cut. Bummer, but great proof of concept for later.

Another experiment that has proved to be really interesting was a sequence where I had Kyle walk backwards down a set of stone steps. We did 2 takes of this. I reversed the footage, superimposed the shots over each other and synched up the motion. The result is a trippy little shot that will be great in the final edit.

The Portra 400 has (so far) really held up well. The first day’s footage looks great. The film handles over exposure very well. I’m able to dial back the couple of shots that were 2-3 stops over and they still look good.

Day 1 started with the end of the song. No vocals here, just Kyle playing the guitar in a Chapel ruin. The plan of the ever-widening shot is looking great, but the issue is (as I thought it would be) the synch.

The first thought was synching the footage as it came back with the slowed down audio tracks that we shot with. The speed is, unsurprisingly, off. I got the slowed down tracks sped back up to normal speed and onto the timeline. The LomoKino films are rendered at 4fps and around 19 seconds long. I’ve been experimenting with speeding up the films to match the real time audio. 300% proved to be way too fast. I worked my way down to 200% at 25% increments. 200% seems to work, but since there aren’t any vocals to synch to and the instrumentation in the tracks makes the individual guitar strums difficult to discern, it has been a challenge.

The next batch of footage will contain vocal tracks. Then we’ll solve the speed issue.

I still contend that this can work. (Although I’m reminded of a line from The Ghost and The Darkness where Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer are talking about a lion trap… “Did it work?” “No, in point of fact, it did not. But I’m convinced the theory is sound…”)

Fireworks: The Process of Making a Music Video... Part 10

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Sun, 13 May 2012 11:59:00 +0000

Day 5:

41 Rolls shot today.

On our last day we ventured out to The Lighthouse. The walk was great. The location was amazing. It was a great way to end the shoot.

The sky was bright blue and nearly cloudless. The remaining rolls of Portra 400 would more than likely have been overwhelmed with a 3-stop overexposure if not for the Polarizer filter that I taped on the front of the LomoKino. 1 2/3 stop worth of light that I didn’t have to worry about.

I grabbed a couple of wide shots while Kyle and Lesley-Anne got ready. The barnacle covered volcanic rock is going to look amazing on film. The small patches of grass and little purple flowers that carved out an existence in the little hollows of the rock added some unexpected color to the scene.

The Sun gave us a nearly perfect side light. Kyle sat on a set of concrete steps in front of the lighthouse. The names of several kids who’d made the journey before us littered the wall behind him. Brilliant.

We opted for a nonlinear shot sequence instead of the ordered moves that we had done previously. Starting on a medium wide, moving to a medium close, back to a medium wide, to a close up, then a close up of the guitar, and so on.

The vocal sequence went very well. The sun remained, but the temperature dropped dramatically and a bracing wind came in from nowhere. All of us were chilled to the bone. We finished the vocal sequence and Kyle quickly changed into warmer clothes.

We grabbed a couple shots of the patches of flowers before we began the walk back.

For our last bits of B-Roll, we opted for some pieces of rocky shoreline and close-ups of the bits of the costume. We laid the main neckpiece of the costume along the edge of a bit of exposed rock and shot the length of it. It fluttered in the breeze and will look great. This was a great project that I'm happy to say was shot on film.

The film will be shipped to LomoLab in London for procession and scanning. we'll get it back in about 6 weeks. Then the mind-bending edit will begin...

So.

That’s a wrap! 5 days, a dozen locations, 2 LomoKino cameras, 168 rolls of Kodak Portra film, a LOT of work and a great collaborative experience!

Fireworks: The Process of Making a Music Video... Part 9

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Sat, 12 May 2012 08:59:00 +0000

Day 4:

Shot 30 rolls of Portra 160. Today.

A bit cold, a bit windy and a bit awesome! We began the day at a rocky outcrop overlooking Scalpsie Bay. This particular vocal piece was the crest of the song. The shot started low and progressed up the hill, past Kyle to the wide vista behind him.

Lesley-Anne set up her "office" with the computer, speakers and camera log a short ways down the hill. She's been great, pulling triple-duty as Production Coordinator, 2nd Assistant Camera and Chauffeur. She's been indispensable. This shoot wouldn't have been possible without her.

Kyle was a trooper, barefoot for the first 2/3 of the morning, freezing and covered in fluttering feathers. He pulled it off brilliantly.

As he and Lesley-Anne packed up our kit, I cranked out a few more wide shots for the open.

We warmed back up in the car on the way to The Musiker Café’. By the end of lunch Kyle was able to feel his toes again.

After lunch we went back to Scalpsie. The seldom seen strange burning orb in the sky had decided come out. It was getting warmer and it looked like a completely different location. I'm constantly amazed by the ever changing weather here. We can have all four seasons in one day. It makes shooting a bit of a challenge, but at least it's never boring.

We went to the gully nearby to where we had shot in the morning. Kyle was in costume and walking through a cut in the hillside. I shot the first bit through a knurled tree, cranking very slowly as he also walked very slowly. Next shot was the same setup, cranking much faster. (I’ll blend the two together in post.) I also caught a lower angle of the same as Kyle passed the camera. Next up was an extreme low angle of his walking bare feet.

We also captured another shot looking up through trees to open sky. I used the +10 diopter this time to really mess with the focus. The sun poked through and would occasionally blow out the scene completely. I can’t wait to see how much of that the film can take.

We walked down to the beach to grab a wide shot of the amazing panorama there. The textured sand and calmly lapping waves, combined with the blue sky and the amazing snowcapped mountains in the distance made for a great addition to the opening sequence. I also grabbed a shot of Kyle walking through this scene both forward and backwards. (I’ll reverse the backward shot in post and blend the two together.)

Since I had 1 more roll of Portra 160 in my pouch, we did a shot of Kyle’s feet in the sand with the water lapping over them. The sun shimmered on the water at 3, maybe 4 stops over key. It’s going to be beautiful.

We declared victory on the day and went home early.

Film count feels comfortable heading into the end of the shoot. 46 rolls of Portra 400 and 5 rolls of Portra 160 remain.

Tomorrow is the trek to The Lighthouse.

Fireworks: The Process of Making a Music Video... Part 8

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:30:00 +0000

Day 3.

Cut short by rain.

We started the day with a B-Roll shot of this huge amazing tree in the middle of this empty field. (I say empty, but for the herd of grazing cattle who were kindly keeping completely out of the shot) The tree is surrounded by a stone circle and an old wooden fence. The grey clouds and misty rain made for an amazing shot. The wind was moving the bare branches of the tree slightly, so I cranked the LomoKino as slowly as I could and then varied the speed to slow down the movement of the branches slightly.

Onto The Lighthouse?

The trek to the Lighthouse is no mean feat on the best of days. It's about an hour along the coastal cliffside trail. The wind and spitting rain would make the walk (let alone the shooting of an important vocal piece) difficult, if not dangerous. We decided that we would go back to the house to see if this weather would pass and make a decision later.

On the way back to the house, we stopped at Kerrycroy to grab a shot of the storm surge moving onto the beach. The camera was as low as it could go on the tripod and the stone pier was coming into the right of frame. The waves will look frenetic and angry as the cloud in the background sail through the top of the frame.

The weather didn't pass like we'd hoped. We shot 2 rolls today. The rocky hill overlooking Scalpsie Bay is scheduled for tomorrow and The Lighthouse has been pushed back to Saturday.

Fireworks: The Process of Making a Music Video... Part 7

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Thu, 10 May 2012 08:48:00 +0000

Day 2 was a real treat.

We shot the first vocal synch segment and several B-Roll shots.

We started at the Cement House. While Kyle was getting ready, I took some wide vistas and establishing shots. The 2-Perf Super 35mm format really makes these wide shots much more stunning.

The first shot in the vocal sequence had Kyle, sitting on a rocky outcrop on the extreme right, the Cement House in the background and a huge rusty old winch in the foreground on the extreme left. As the shots progressed I moved Kyle across the frame, ending up on the extreme right. The results will be very dreamy as each shot dissolves into the next.

I’ve been asking a lot of the Portra 400. It’s latitude for underexposure is legendary, but I’m asking it for 2 stops over exposure in some instances. Negative Filmic emulsions have always handled highlights better than any digital format ever could. I’ve always put a tremendous amount of faith in Kodak films and have only seldom been disappointed. That and the esthetic of the sun coming in and out of clouds will add to the look of the film. I can also cut around it with B-Roll if the results are too egregious.

My ear is slowly tuning itself to the slowed down version of the song. I can hear the lyrics and the slowed down guitar strumming. I think when it comes time to listen to the regular version in the edit I may not recognize it.

Also, I discovered that the lifespan of a LomoKino camera is 82 rolls. The crank has a tiny plastic tooth that engages the spindle. this tooth slowly gets chewed up as the crank turns and occasionally skips frames. Kyle brought his LomoKino as a back-up. I used the front of our Kino and the back of Kyle's.
So. Just so you you know... 82 rolls.

The B-Roll shots were next. Lesley-Anne stayed at the Cement House with the gear while Kyle and I trekked up the rocky coastline, past several very confused sheep and lambs, up the hill to the cliff side. The view was epic. Kyle stood at the edge of the cliff with the feathery bits of the costume blowing in the slight breeze. Arran was in the background; it’s peaks barely visible through the clouds. I cranked the LomoKino slowly to make the most of the movement of the clouds and the feathers while Kyle stood stock-still and barefoot.

There was a nice close-up of Kyle, followed by a great shot of just one of the feathery bits of costume on the edge of the cliff, fluttering in the breeze.

We trundled back down the cliff and had lunch at The Musiker, a vegetarian café in Rothesay.

We scouted some possible B-Roll shots in Ascog with little joy. I suggested we take the coastal trail from Kerrycroy to Mount Stewart. There were some locations that might be of interest. There’s an old concrete boathouse and a very old stone barn that has been taken over by a huge tree.

It was a great walk. We shot a stand of prehistoric looking ferns. The other shot of potential interest to me was looking up through some tree cover into the open sky. At f11 it was going to be difficult to get the shot sufficiently out of focus to make it interesting, so I placed the +4 diopter over the lens. I think the result will be a nice element to cut around or to use between dissolves.

On the way back, we shot some coastline and a great ECU of a tiny waterfall, varying the crank speed to make the water movement change in shot.

It was a great day. Tomorrow will be the big Lighthouse Trek.

Fireworks: The Process of Making a Music Video... Part 6

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Wed, 09 May 2012 06:55:00 +0000

A couple of days before Kyle arrived; we had been talking over Skype about changing the song for the video. He felt that “Fireworks” was more representative of the album as a whole. This really wasn’t a problem, since the video had no narrative element. His costume had been created by a local costume designer and ready to be picked up the next day.

---

Monday Shoot T Minus 1:

My prep has been done. Lists were made and gear gathered.

Kyle got into Glasgow today with no problems. He showed us the costume. It looks amazing, consisting of several pieces of fabric, feathers, tassels and dangly bits. It’s brilliantly coloured and will look amazing on film.

We talked a bit about the scheduling. We think that 2 locations per day will be a nice easy pace. Kyle has broken the song down into 113 pieces. It’s a few more tracks than the previous song, but about half the song is instrumental, so we don’t have to worry about syncing as many vocals and therefore won’t have to use as much film. That being said, the amount of B-Roll that will be needed will take care of any film that would have been used otherwise.

There are 3 vocal pieces and 3 instrumentals.

The final instrumental piece that ends the song is 33 segments long. We’ve decided to get that out of the way first. This is by far the biggest bit of the song. If we can get this done earlier, then I won’t have to worry about having enough film for it later.

The shot starts on a medium close up (MCU) of Kyle in full costume. With each segment, the camera moves back, ending in an extreme wide shot (EWS) that reveals him standing the ruin of a 12^th century chapel.

After lunch, we’ll move on to the Cement house to do a B-Roll shot and one of the vocal pieces.

The other major locations have been decided as well. The 2 locations at Scalpsie Bay will be Wednesday. The Lighthouse location will be Thursday (it will be the only location on that day due to the 1 hour hike there and back). Friday and Saturday are scheduled as B-Roll for the montage sequence (yes, we ARE going to need a Montage!)

---

Shoot Day One:

The weather was spectacular. Not terribly sunny. The costume looked great. The contrast between the bright colours and the grey brickwork of the Chapel really worked. In between takes Kyle was writing a song about the video shoot. The slowed down song sounds very trippy. Kyle added a metronome click track to the song as well so that we can all keep the lethargic beat. (I'm amazed that he can keep this song straight in his head, broken up this way.)

As we were shooting, I realised that the way Kyle had sequenced the tracks (3 measures of the previous track, then the 3 measures of the current track, then I keep cranking for another 3 measures) I could dissolve the segments together in post for a dreamy, less jarring feel.

Leslie-Anne was doing playback, slating, and camera logs. The computer was set up with some USB powered speakers and the tracks were played through iTunes.

The slating was simple: Track number and Take number. We only did second takes of this sequence 3 or 4 times, when I felt that the camera wasn’t feeling right. There were instances where the camera started to skip frames, or the crank became hard to turn because of a feeding issue.

The Sequence ended up taking a bit longer than expected and with the B-Roll shots we did of the costume and the vistas surrounding the stunning location, we shot 47 rolls of film (including 3 rolls of Portra 400VC I had sitting around waiting for a chance to be useful). I knew it was going to be our biggest film use day.

Some of the B-Roll shots became interesting experiments. I pulled out my Lens Baby Diopters and taped them to the front of the LomoKino lens. I have no idea if it'll work, but why not, right? If nothing else, it'll be colourful out of focus stuff to dissolve in and out of. The +4 diopter worked around the neck of the guitar and the +10 did some extreme closeups of some of the feathers and what I hope to be a full frame shot of Kyle's eye half covered by feathers. Macro is such a tricky thing. If it works I'll be very pleased, if it doesn't, I won't be too fussed.

We did another shot of the neck and head of the decorated guitar in the foreground and the beautiful vista in the background. I wanted to see just how accurate the "close-up" button was. I shot it at infinity and with the close-up button engaged.

Kyle was great today. he stood barefoot on gravel for nearly 3 hours with no complaints. He's really committed to the process and is very excited to try anything we throw at him. He's a great collaborator. This is going to be an amazing film.

We wrapped the Chapel location at 3PM and went to lunch. After lunch, we decided that the Cement house location should be pushed back, since Lesley-Anne would have to leave us and we didn’t want to try to do vocals with only me working camera, slating and audio. Instead, Kyle and I went on a tech scout to the Cement House and also found a cliff top location for one of the B-Roll shots.

The current schedule stands as such:

Wednesday: Cement House and Cliff Top B-Roll and other B-roll Locations

Thursday: Lighthouse

Friday: Scalpsie Bay Locations

Saturday: B-Roll Several Locations

I feel that today went very well, considering it was the first day. We got a great deal accomplished. I’m looking forward to tomorrow and the rest of the week.

Seeds: The process of making a music video Part 5...

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 15:41:00 +0000

Returning from a weeklong time-lapse shoot in Edinburgh to find the film shipment had arrived. Excellent.

I was wondering how that might turn out. Morco didn’t have as much stock as they thought they would. I thought I might have to scrounge the whole of the UK to come up with 150 rolls, but as it happens, Silverprint in London (my new best friends) had a ridiculous amount of Kodak stock to sell. I grabbed 100 rolls of Portra 400 and 50 rolls of Portra 160. (The unpredictable nature of the weather here had made me reconsider the idea of shooting all 400. There is a chance of being in full, raging sun with a couple of our locations, so I opted to be safe and cover myself with a bit of 160.) As long as I stick to a single stock per location, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Jack Quick from LomoLab, UK, has been most helpful in determining the post options that are best for the project. It turns out that their semi-automated process will produce a bigger, beefier file size and is also a bit less expensive. We’ll be getting DVD’s of the quicktime movies to edit with. I’m hoping to juice up my Macbook Pro before then, so I can handle the off-line edit myself. We may move the on-line edit to a post house in Glasgow for finishing and tweaks.

Kyle is currently working on the costume he’ll use for the film and getting the song ready. The slowed down broken up version will be on CD and played from a bog-standard portable CD player. Each take will be slated with the track number and take. Once in the edit, the tracks will be cut together with the slowed down version of the song, then the whole thing will be “brought up to speed” and further tweaked. (This is how it works in the perfect little fantasy world inside my brain, anyway…)

I’m working on trimming down the number of locations, as well as scheduling. We’ll shoot 2-3 locations per day (weather permitting), starting each day on the east side of the island and moving to the west side after lunch, to maximize our daylight.

We’re still considering several locations. The lighthouse is definitely going to be a prime location, as well as the St. Blanes Chapel ruin. There are a couple of locations above Scalpsie Bay that will be amazing as well.

We’ll be asking a favour of a boat owning friend of ours to shuttle us to the remote lighthouse location. That’ll save an hour-long cliffside hike. (Although, I’ve been considering certain points along the ciff-hike for locations, so maybe the boat takes us to the Lighthouse and we “shoot” our way back along the cliff…)

This is going to be exciting…

Seeds: The process of making a music video Part 4...

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 10:52:00 +0000

“Buy the ticket, take the ride.” – Hunter S. Thompson

This new performance based video is much more technically challenging.

How do I have a synch sound performance piece from a camera whose frame rate is far from constant?
Kyle and I decided that synch would be less of an issue as long as it was mostly there. With the dreamy look of the camera as the film’s centrepiece we could forgive “perfect” synch for the overall look.

I’m getting excited about the challenge.

The next decision is about Film stock. The overall look of the film has to be natural looking and in colour. Kodak films have always seemed to me to be warmer toned and people friendly, whereas Fuji tend to be more on the cool end of the spectrum and a bit more contrasty.

Because of the varying exposure from frame to frame and the 100% outdoor locations, I need a stock that has wide latitude and a certain amount of forgiveness in regards to over and underexposure. That would be Kodak’s Portra 400.

How much film? 1 roll per scene makes 95 rolls of film. Assuming a shooting ratio of around 2:1 makes 190 rolls of film… When Kyle and I decided that playback could be 18fps,That meant that the song only had to be slowed down 3x, so Kyle would be burning the song, slowed down 300%, bringing the total length would be 8:25, then breaking that down into 7-second chunks preceded by 2 or 3 beeps, which brings us, in the end to 73 individual 7-second scenes. With our 2:1 shooting ratio, that’s 146 rolls of film.

I now have the challenge of coming up with 150 rolls of film. Since Kodak’s bid for Chapter 11, their film has become tougher to find. I called every major supplier in the UK and they all told me the same thing.

“We don’t have that much and it would be a problem to get it for you.”
“So you can’t do it?”
“It would be a bit of a problem, sir.”
“So you can do it, but won’t?”
“Finding that much of the Kodak film would be a problem, but we could get you Fuji film instead.”

This was the response from all but one supplier. The guy at Morco Photographic was very positive about being able to get the film, so we’ll see if he was shining me on, or if he has the juice to make it happen.

I received a comp of the song today. It’s a minute longer than the rough cut I heard a couple of weeks ago, but the performance bit is still 2 minutes and 45 seconds

I’ve been thinking of ways to use the limitation of the 2-2.5 second takes to enhance the look of the film. I’ve decided that each performance bit could be set up to be shot as a series of shots to emulate a crane or dolly move. This will show off the dramatic scenery as well as the performance.

The location scouting is going well. I found another way to a high cliff overlooking the Lighthouse on the southern end of the island. It’s a real hike to get there though. It’s about an hour up and down rocky, muddy hills and valleys. To get to the lighthouse itself, is an hour hike along a cliff face. It’ll be really sweet. There might be an easier trail to the lighthouse, but I’ve yet to find it.

__

There are now several locations to choose from and we’ll be making those decisions soon. I had another conversation with Jack Quick at LomoLab, UK. It turns out that using the slightly cheaper semi-automated process for the Kino film will produce a bigger file size than with the Deluxe process. I’ve been a bit worried about the files sizes of the little movies. I don’t want to do all of this work, and then have a project that can’t be adequately displayed full screen.

I’ll be completing the “synch” test film this week, hopefully. (I’m in Edinburgh working on a weeklong time-lapse project for a client, so I’m hoping that I can get the rolls completed and sent to Jack during the downtime.)

Seeds: The process of making a music video Part 3...

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 12:14:00 +0000

Testing the LomoKino was a fun little excersize to figure out what the camera was capable of. The first roll was a bit of a disaster in post. The colour was way off and each frame had to be corrected by hand. The shakiness of the movie was due my own inability to perfectly select the individual frames. The camera test was basically a success. It revealed a hitch in the process though. Around 150 frames per roll meant that I would have to individually scan each one. The colour could be taken care of in the scanner menu under "Color Restoration". This worked for the other rolls.

Wet-scanning on the Epson Perfection V750 Pro has always been a time consuming process, but this was a bit more than I bargained for. By the end of the 4-roll test, I’d become a bit better at selecting the frames, but there’s still a bit of a shudder in the final films. This could be taken care of in post, however, by motion tracking stable objects in the frame. This would also be ridiculously time consuming, not to mention expensive, since it wouldn't likely be me doing it.

By the end of my camera test I was able to get 2 rolls a day finished. Realizing that the Seeds video may have as many as 200 rolls to process, the pre-edit post was becoming a bit daunting. Around 30,000 frames that need to be individually scanned adjusted and cleaned up, would make my job a bit more than I had bargained for.

--

My discussions with Kyle have been centering around a performance of the song. The 6fps of the frame rate of the LomoKino would prove to be inadequate for a good performance. I’m considering a way to get a 24fps output by speeding up the footage by a factor of 4. This could work if the song was slowed down by the same factor of 4. Kyle could mime the slow version of the song at 6 fps in 7 second increments. The downside of this being that the final sped up shots would be 2 seconds long. That’s a lot of cuts for a relatively slow song.

Also, the 2:45 minute song becomes 11:00 minutes (15,840 frames) 106 rolls of 35mm film to shoot the song ONCE. For a 2:1 ratio that becomes 212 rolls of film, or 31,680 frames. If I got fast enough to scan 3 rolls a day, that’s 71 days of scanning before I can eve edit anything. YIKES!

I need to test this “synch” idea. It works in my head, but that rarely translates well into reality.

I emailed Mike Raso of The Film Photography Podcast about his LomoKino workflow. He’s been scanning strips of film and selecting the frames in photoshop. His films are a bit steadier with this workflow, many not as time consuming as my process. I have another test roll left to scan and might be trying this workflow instead.

--

Great news from LomoLab UK. Jack Quick, the LomoLab UK Manager said that he was really interested in working with me on this project. They also process and scan! The crux of the conversation centered around the size of the quicktime files. If the files are too small, the quality of the final film won’t be a high enough quality. The price of the service was a bit of a shock at £12.00 per roll (£2,544.00 for 212 rolls), it skyrockets the budget. There’s also the time factor, 5-6 weeks for the number of rolls I need processed. I figure it's either me or the LomoLab that's going to spend a month and a half with this, so it’s worth considering.

Seeds: The process of making a music video Part 2...

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 10:53:00 +0000

I really enjoyed working with Kyle on his last album. The Echo Bloom project, Jamboree was one of the most fulfilling creative endeavours I’ve ever undertaken. Kyle is a great collaborator and at the same time willing to let me make creative leaps in my art to create amazing images. I’m excited to be able to shoot the first music video from his new album BLUE. The song is called Seeds. It’s about a couples’ longing to be together after death. It’s haunting and beautiful.

The original idea was using marionettes to act out the story of a man asking his wife to fill his pockets with seeds on the event of his death and bury him in the forest so that he would become one with the tree that will grow from him. He tells his wife to do the same, when her life comes to an end.

I planned to have Kyle come to the Isle of Bute to shoot the film. The stunning natural and dramatic settings would create the perfect backdrop.

Using a local puppeteer to make and use the marionettes was a natural fit. (This idea still fascinates me and I’ve come up with another Marionette Video for the single Cedar Beach.)

Kyle was initially behind the idea. We were set to create an eerie, moody puppet movie with minimal movement by the puppets. Using mainly emotive reactions (to avoid the piece looking like Team America), we could take advantage the LomoKino's 6fps-ish frame rate.

After a week of going back and forth about the story, logistics and cost of a puppet shoot, we changed the idea to a more abstract performance based idea.

Seeds: The process of making a music video Part 1...

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 10:20:00 +0000

The inspiration for this project came to me as I was falling asleep, wondering what I could do for Echo Bloom's upcoming music video. Making these projects different and interesting is always a challenge. I decided to approach this (as is typical for me) from a technical angle first. How could I shoot this to make it different?

Film, would, of course, be my first choice. Super-8 is always fun, and after some research, I found some resources in the UK to make this possible.

DSLR would be a non-starter for me simply because of the over abundance of material already out there. I thought that video in general wouldn’t work for the creation of an interesting look that I would want to create “out of the camera”, versus baking in a filtered “film-look” in post.

Super-8, initially, seemed like a great fit. It would be cost effective and easy to manage. The film, processing, and transfer could all be from The Widescreen Center in London. The Super-8 version of the music video would cost just over £1100.00 (including the camera). With Kyle’s plane ticket, that would be within our budget.

That’s when it occurred to me…

The idea for the using the LomoKino for this project, at first seemed utterly daft. The footage I was seeing on the web was shaky and awful. The film was colour shifted and looked as if it had been stored on the dashboard of a '81 Dodge Charger in Arizona.

What I liked about the camera was the widescreen aspect ratio, the grainy, ubiquitious film look and it’s simple overall process. I wondered what I could do to smooth out the rough edges of this little camera’s output.

The technical challenges are presented by the LomoKino are:

The frame rate of the camera varies from 5-8 fps.

The exposure can vary by as much as a stop to a stop and a half from one frame to the next.

The frame itself isn’t terribly stable and the handheld shaky look is jarring and not pleasing. (This could be taken care of by motion tracking stationary objects within the frame in post to make the picture more stable.)

So, I came up with a list of ideas:

First, using better film.
Second, using a tripod.
Third, using a different frame rate tricks to smooth out the motion.

How hard could it possibly be?

How much could it possibly cost?

How long could it possibly take?

Oh God, was I about to find out...

Hidden Away...

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:50:00 +0000

Hidden Away...

vanishing places o...

By gregg b. mc neill

Book Preview

This is a book of photographs i just published. you can purchase it through Blurb, or email me and i'll get you one.

loneliest bench...

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:27:00 +0000

He often boasted of his advantages.

He had been given the perfect amount of shade, and the luxury of the perfect location along the trail, near the halfway water fountain.

While he slept, someone thought it would be funny to sneak in the sign behind his back.

Now all of a sudden, no one would sit there and he had no idea why. He felt abandoned and forgotten. He grew to hate the snickering behind his back and despised everyone he thought responsible.

As his depression deepened, the joke went stale...

We thought we were teaching him a lesson. We're not so sure anymore...

mirror

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:44:00 +0000

She came here for the peace and isolation that frightened the rest of us, able to face herself, even after all that she had done.

For that, I envied her.

For that, we all resented her.

waiting...

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:22:00 +0000

His train was supposed to be here.

No one else was on the platform, leading him to believe that his mischievious timepiece had betrayed him once more...

It had been quite a while before he could trust the old pocket watch again, left in the drawer for all those years to ponder it's betrayal, with all the other forgotten things .

It was Belgium all over again...

low-rez transmission

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:18:00 +0000

Tracing the path of the broadcast was nearly impossible, since the analog transmission of data was no longer understood, like trepanation, leeching and supply-side economics. Not a single byte of meta-data, no sound, just a garbled hazy image flickering in and out.

Puzzling.

The transmission medium itself was ancient. In fact, we nearly missed it. The random sweep we used to calibrate our instruments is what caught it. That particular wavelength hadn’t been used, or even monitored, in decades. The retrotech needed to move data in this fashion would have to be built from scratch. Why? It would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention, very difficult, extremely cumbersome and frustratingly slow. The 'why' seriously intrigued me. It was like building a dugout canoe to ford an ankle-deep river.

Many of my colleagues had theories on where the transmission originated, but only one of them asked the truly relevant question, 'When?', since there hadn’t been that much open land here for nearly a century.

Holiday On Ice

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:33:00 +0000

Since Christmas could no longer be trusted to behave itself, it was confined to cell #17 in the A block of the Guy Fawkes Holiday Correctional Facility.

After Christmas tried to expand it’s area of influence to include all of November through January, Thanksgiving and New Years filed an injunction.

During the exhaustive investigation that followed, it was discovered that Christmas had set up 2 dummy corporations called “Black Friday” and “Christmas in July” to launder money received through the bribery and intimidation of other holidays.

At the trial, Thanksgiving hadn't been shy about it’s objections to the turkey and pilgrim decorations being entirely neglected in favor of the earlier and earlier Christmas sale trimmings. Halloween and Valentine's Day had actually been impressed with Christmas' initiative, but also recognized the danger in expanding any one holiday to 90 days.

In the end, even the Claus' pleas for leniency were ignored. Christmas was charged with Racketeering, Intimidation, Money Laundering and Tax Evasion.

Hannukah remained neutral throughout the affair. Their profits are expected to triple by next December.

christmas runaway...

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:58:00 +0000

I found it collapsed and unconscious in an alley behind a bar, most of its decorations removed or stolen. My first thought was relief. It had been missing since the 23 of December, but it was now January 6 and Christmas had long since past.

The kids' emotional wounds had nearly healed. The realization that their tree had abandoned them turned our holiday into a horror show. Feelings of anger rose up from within as I recalled the night it left in an angry, drunken stupor, trampling nearly all of the presents under it’s care. (this was not much of a problem for Charlotte's new teddy bear, but the crystal vase and the life sized origami hedgehog...).

The kids had picked out the little tree themselves. I had seen the potential for trouble but was assured that its “habit” would never affect its work. We decorated it with heirloom ornaments from my Grandmother and Great Grandmother. I now imagined all of them strewn about in back alleys all over town as a result of weeks of unknown debauchery...

I resolved not to mention anything to the family, as I tried to help it up, but it shrugged me off, collapsing back into the puddle, muttering to itself.

A country of proud people...

noreply@blogger.com (Mozo) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:06:00 +0000

What follows are excerpts from a journal. The Images were taken for, and property of, Scar Tissue Filmworks

Terminal 2, Dubai Airport

This terminal houses the flights to places like Iraq, Mogadishu, Somalia, and Afghanistan. The people in this terminal are all very serious. The few conversations going on were in hushed tones.

Every Caucasian here were either a contractors or military. It wasn’t hard to notice the vast number of military haircuts, Oakley shades and cargo pants. I could catch knowing looks from across the terminal between men that had seen each other in places I had probably never heard of. An odd chain-smoking journalist in a photographer’s vest was sitting in the corner furiously scrawling in a notebook.

Our contact, wore a tan suit and a black turtleneck. He used to be a journalist for Al Jezera and now owns a media production company in Kabul.

Driving though Kabul was an amazing experience. The entire landscape is grey and dusty. Few of the roads are paved and nothing is clean. Cars, bikes and carts clog the streets. The trucks are brightly painted with happy messages and blessings. Chains along the front bumper give the trucks their name; Jingle Trucks.

Our contact asked us if we had a specific time we needed to be at Bagram Air Base and if we were hungry. The Director said that we were expected, but not at any particular time.

“I’d love to have some Afghan tea, maybe some Kabob…” I said with a smile.

Our contact gave some directions to the driver and we turned a corner off the main road.

“Is this a good idea?” The Director asked nervously…

Our car pulled over in front of a building made of corrugated metal. A crude sign above the entrance had a picture of a chicken and the word Kabobs.

I knew that we would never be able to get into Kabul once we were on base, so this was our one opportunity to get into a place like this.

The inside reminded me of the Tibetan bar in Raiders of the Lost Ark. A potbelly wood stove heated the water for tea, and a young servant boy was tasked with it’s stoking. At one point a young girl in filthy rags came in to fill a teapot from the rusty spigot. She was pushed away by 3 older men, she argued, seeming to say that someone else had given her permission. She tried again with the same results.

We were asked what we would like. I wanted to try some Kabob. He ordered us some chicken soup and beef Kabob. Our tea arrived first. Our contact poured a little into one of the clear glass teacups and swished it around, poured it into the next cup and repeated the process for all of the cups. The green tea was really delicious. The soup wasn’t great, but the Kabobs were spectacular, served on the 18-inch metal spears on which they were cooked (at a foot and a half long, I can no longer call them skewers…). The meat was perfectly seasoned on the spear; each piece nestled between a bit of gristle for extra flavor and to keep the meat moist.

I asked if it would be ok to take pictures here, and was told that it wouldn’t be a good idea at this particular place and time.

Damn. At least I got to try some good Kabob.

The road to Bagram Air Base is pock marked and surrounded by mountains. The few buildings are in terrible disrepair or mostly destroyed. Our contact told us a few stories about people he knows that have fought the Taliban and the Russians before them.
It was a jarring 1-hour ride, swerving in and out of opposing traffic to avoid monstrous holes in the road.

Snipers often sit in the mountains and take shots at military vehicles. Few people walk this road. The military only travel this road in armored convoys.

We get to Bagram, and wait for our ride into the base. Our bags are inspected and loaded into a truck.

After checking in at the Media Operations Center, getting our badges (which we’re obligated to wear at all times), we were shown to our quarters. It reminded me of the living quarters I had when I worked at Cedar Point many, many years ago. A simple plywood building called a Bee Hut. There were 3 cots in the room. We were informed that we had a roommate, a cameraman from the BBC. He turned out to be a cool guy, doing a documentary about combat stress and it’s effects on the women of the military. He was with us for one night before he was moved down to quarters closer to the hospital where he would be doing the lion’s share of his shooting.

We were told that we would be picked up at 8am the next day and taken to PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team) Headquarters.

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Our first Mission took us to 2 schools that are being built by Afghan contractors and labor, but organized, contracted and overseen by the PRT.

The journey to get to these schools was no drive down the Parkway. The 3-hour bone-rattling ride through the Afghan backcountry was, at times, harrowing. Our convoy of 3 armored Humvees drove narrow roads along the sides of sheer cliffs, through rivers and riverbeds, up and down terrain that no other vehicle could possibly navigate. Our vehicle, designated Ram 10, was driven by a southern Ohioan named Adam, known as Highspeed.

“Bump, John.” He calls out to the turret gunner, who braces himself. The Humvee nosedives almost 30 degrees down into a gully and back up again. Highspeed assures us that this terrain is no problem, as he’s a rally driver and off-roader back home. “I do this for fun on the weekends… Bump, John.” We bounce several inches off the seats as the 10,000-pound vehicle heaves over a boulder.

There isn’t a road here. It’s a dry riverbed filled with glacier-sized rocks.

“We can only take this way part of the year. Once it starts raining this will be a raging river. Bump, John”, Highspeed continued to take Ram 10 into places that even the Hummer dealer would wince at. He’s truly a remarkable driver.

About half way to our first objective, we stopped in a small village, the highlight of which was a couple of abandoned soviet tanks sitting at the end of the main road. The local kids used them as playground equipment. The Director started to hand out candy and was quickly mobbed. This gave me ample opportunity to shoot photos and video of the tanks while the kids were occupied. I got some really great shots of a small child as he cautiously approached me around the front of one of the tanks.

The Director called me over to get footage as he tossed candy out into the crowd of children and it scattered onto the muddy ground. The children scrambled over each other to fetch it. The Director smiled.

“Mister, Mister, pen Baksheesh, pen!” they all shouted over each other. The Captain told me that kids wanted American pens and they always asked for them. “Baksheesh” basically means, “give me…”

As the kids started getting more riled up The Director started talking louder and slower, because that’s how Americans communicate with people who don’t speak English. “HERE’S SOME CANDY! EVERY ONE TURN TO FACE THE CAMERA! TURN-TOWARDS-THE-CAMERA!”

“We gotta go.”, said The Captain, as he saw the situation starting to get out of hand. The Director’s mob began to resemble a George Romero film. “C’mon we gotta go.” We climbed into the Humvees and continued on. I could have shot those tanks all day…

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Snow began to fall as we gained altitude. We reached the first of our objectives in fog and snow. It was a little surreal. Snow was softly falling, but there was no wind. It wasn’t even all that cold. Fog hung low as we approached the stone and concrete building that was soon to house almost 100 students. We climbed the steps and were met at the top by the schoolmaster. As we took the tour of the work so far, the Civilian Engineer assigned to the PRT, commented on how some of the work (namely the ceiling, and many of the load bearing beams) would need to be redone, as the concrete mix contained far too much gravel and even wood chips. “We see this a lot.” He said, “Contractors want to save money and will mix in this stuff to take up space. What they don’t realize is that this won’t be safe. We need to make these structures to survive earthquakes, which are common here.” The Captain added, “Contractors are paid in 25% installments. 25% up front, then we check progress, before the next installment is paid. This contractor won’t get paid until this work is redone to specs. And because of this we have to tell the School Master and the students that the school won’t be ready for them this spring. They may have to wait until next fall. Until then they’ll have to continue to hold classes outside as usual.”

I captured some amazing portraits of the students and School Master. The soft light that filtered by the fog and snow was amazing.

The PRT guys were discussing the work that had been done and the work that needed to be redone, and started taking a tour of the rest of the facility. As I went to follow them, The Director stopped me and said that he needed video and stills of him with the kids and the teacher.

As we were leaving, I wanted to get the tripod out of the Humvee and get an establishing shot of the building.

“We don’t have time for that now the guys are planning to go.” The Director said. I insisted that this part of the story needed an establishing shot. I ended up running for the tripod myself and got a quick shot. The Director saw the shot and then insisted that I get another establishing shot with him and the kids in front of the school.

Our second stop was another school that some renovations had been done on. The PRT needed to check on the progress of those renovations. The schoolmaster wasn’t around and the gate was locked. One of the men, followed by The Captain, found an Afghan ladder, two straight-ish poles with cross pieces haphazardly attached, some by rusty nails, and others, tied with twine. No person in their right minds would trust such a contraption. After climbing over, they proceeded with the inspection.

Highspeed was holding a security position outside our Humvee. He was keeping watch over the desolate snow covered farm fields. The clouds and fog obscured all but the bottoms of the far off mountains. “You can never see the peaks of those mountains, even on a clear day, you can’t ever see the peaks.”

The convoy continued it’s way back to base. On the way, we stopped to see one of the Provincial Sub-Governors. Since he wasn’t home and his place was next to a village bazaar, we took a break and did a foot patrol of the area.

Again, I got some amazing portraits from this little excursion.

The old man standing outside his shop wrapped in a brown blanket, had a proud look in his eye as I took his portrait. The dark haired man in the Afghan hat with the wry smile who let me photograph him. I nodded thanks with my hand over my heart, a sign of respect in this part of the world.

The most startling portrait of the day was of the three boys standing in front of a shop. When I saw it, I had to have it. I pointed the camera and started shooting, all the while knowing I had captured something special.

There was a shop that a guy turned into a sort of dinner theater. He had a burlap curtain covering the doorway and benches facing a TV. A Kung-Fu movie was playing that I didn’t recognize. His shop sells the afghan version of French fries. Served cold with a sweet spice sprinkled liberally over them, and wrapped in flat bread.

On the way back I thought about how hard life is here. What kind of desperation that must take hold when your only plan for the day is to survive.

Ahead of us, a Toyota Corolla packed with 8 or 10 Afghan nationals took a blind turn way too fast and plowed head on into the lead Humvee of our convoy.

None of the passengers in the car were wearing seatbelts; all were injured, including 2 toddlers. From the look of the windshield, at least three of the passengers hit it. The car was completely devastated.

A French Convoy we had passed earlier caught up with us and their medics took care of the wounded until an ambulance arrived.

The turret gunner of that lead Humvee broke two of his fingers in the incident. The Humvee was virtually undamaged.

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Our mission brief today said that we’re delivering 26 mattresses to the women’s dormitory of a university. This is actually a pretty big deal, since there aren’t many universities in this region and even fewer that admit women. This school is housed in a German built textile plant from the 40’s. Its’ architecture has that ominous German look to it.

The Director said it looked like Dachau…

Nice…

We have a huge 5-ton truck in our convoy today loaded with the mattresses. It parks outside the walls of the compound.

We go inside to meet with the headmaster of the university and the region’s Sub-Governor. We are served tea and snacks while they discuss what’s happening. The tea is an important part of any process in this area. Business is never discussed right away. The Captain participates in a little small talk about weather, families, and hunting. After tea and cakes, business is slowly brought up. This can aggravate some foreigners, particularly Americans, as we have a tendency to want to get right down to business, which is considered rude.

Once the destination for the mattresses is discussed, we move onto the task at hand.

Several hands appear to help as the mattresses, donated by Bagram Air Base, are one by one carried into the woman’s dormitory and stacked against a wall.

The Captain is proving himself to be a great on camera personality. He’s got a great, permanent smile, he’s articulate, and what’s more, he knows what he’s talking about. I have him giving on camera “Play by Play” type stuff after each part of our mission. This will be invaluable footage when The Director gets into the edit.

After the University, we stop at a PRT-built women’s shelter to deliver some stuffed animals. It’s a bit of a mob scene and I realize that there is no good way to shoot this kind of thing. Half way through, I decide to shoot photos and get a few great ones.

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There are no days off in a war zone. They are called “Low Battle Rhythm Days”. I caught up on some much-needed sleep, and processed some of the previous days photos.

I’m becoming a fixture at the coffee shop/Popeye’s/Pizza Hut.

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Salang Pass, Salang Province.

The second highest road tunnel in the world at just over 11,000 feet above sea level (Bagram is about 5,000 feet), over 2 1/2 kilometers long. 80% of the region’s fuel and goods come through this tunnel and down the mountain pass.

Our mission was to meet with the head of Public Works for the province to see if the road clearing equipment that was purchased for keeping this vital road clear of snow and debris was being used properly or indeed being used at all.

Our meeting with the head of public works (a General in the Afghan Army) went well. We were requested to stay for a fabulous lunch of lamb stew, chicken and kabobs.

Got a few great portraits

The road leading up to the tunnel is heavily traveled and we stopped a couple of time to see the purchased equipment in use.

Once at the foot of the mountain, you must traverse a crazy number of switchbacks and bits of covered roadway. The tunnel itself isn’t ventilated and it was very icy. There’s something very unsettling about watching a 10,000 pound vehicle in front of you slide all over the road, dangerously close to oncoming traffic. What’s even more unsettling is when your vehicle does the same…

At the top of the mountain, we stop to inspect some other equipment, get some footage, and we go back through the tunnel and down the mountain.

This wasn’t without its difficulties. One of the Humvees had some problems. The brakes nearly caught fire. The driver had been riding the brakes downhill, instead of downshifting. We had one of the other Humvees tow it home.

--

Today’s mission was to inspect a clinic that had burned down. It was the best clinic in the area, originally built by a Bangladeshi NGO. The doctor still practices out of one of the fire damaged rooms. He had a calm, Zen-like appearance about him. His portrait is really great. Just after the PRT left, a man with a rash on his arms and chest came into the blackened office to be treated.

The PRT says it will be at least 3 months before they can begin the process of rebuilding the clinic, but in the meantime, they’re going to get the Doctor some tarps for his roof and other supplies to help him continue his work as best he can.

The next objective for the day was to look at a possible flood control project along the Panchere River. After disembarking from the Humvees, we are lead across farm fields and irrigation ditches to the area in question. “Cool. You’re first real foot patrol.”, comments The Captain. The walk takes about 15 minutes, but only 5 Afghani minutes.

The low-lying plain floods every year and the residents would like the PRT to build them a flood control barrier. The method used will be large wire mesh baskets called Gabions. You fill these huge baskets with rocks and boulders (if there’s one thing Afghanistan has aplenty, it’s rocks and boulders) and then stack the Gabions to make walls. This would divert the floodwaters away from the banks and save the mud-brick homes of the people that are forced to leave there for the months of the rainy season.

The reality of the situation is that the rainy season is less than a month away, and the project would entail 4-6000 Gabions. The PRT just can’t work that fast. It would take at least a month to get the paperwork ready for this kind of project. The PRT can eventually get them the Gabions, but the locals will need to supply the labor to fill them. One of the Afghans says, through the translator, that the Governor had promised them the use of excavating equipment. The Major said that he has no control over the Governor, but he will be talking to him with the next week and will remind him of the matter.

The Captain said that the PRT doesn’t want to just give the Afghan people things. The Coalition Forces won’t be here forever and he would like to see the people become self-sufficient. It’s the whole “teach a man to fish” thing.

A good example of this is the road clearing equipment for Salang Pass. The PRT donated the equipment, but the Public Works Department is responsible for maintaining and using it. The people of the region are used to asking for (and receiving) everything. “We are Afghanistan, we’re poor, give us what we want.” The Captain and the PRT are putting in place a bureaucracy where the people go to their provincial leaders to request a project, and then the provincial leaders go to the sub governors, who then go to the Governor, then The Governor goes to the PRT.

At ribbon-cuttings of new projects, like a recently opened Clinic, the PRT will take a backseat. They want the people to see and realize that it’s their local government that is responsible for the project. Whenever the Members of The PRT speak at these functions, they always bring it back to the Government official responsible. “We’re not going to be here forever.” The Captain said, “We’re basically trying to work ourselves out of a job here, so that the Afghan People can become self sufficient.”

When the PRT does a project, they hire Afghan contractors from the area where they will be working. The contractors then hire local labor to complete the project. The locals get the jobs and the clinic, road or school. Keeping this all local gives the Afghans a sense of pride and accomplishment, along with a job. These things are crucial to getting the country back on its feet.

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There are usually 2 or 3 PRT convoys that go out every day from Bagram. The other convoy that went out today came under fire from small arms and rockets propelled grenades (RPG’s).

I came to find out that a few days earlier, The Director tried to get us onto that mission, after finding out it was going to “a troubled area”. We were denied permission to tag along. I was reminded of a comment that the Master Seargent uttered to me in the hallway, outside his office that day; “You’re partner is trying to get you killed.” It didn’t make sense at the time, but after finding out how hard The Director had tried to get us out their with those guys, I got it. It would have been “good TV”, but having us in that convoy would have put everyone at risk, since we would have become a liability, if anything happened to us, or our vehicle.

In the end, no one in the convoy was hurt. The air cover that the convoy had the forethought to order (in the form of 2 Apache helicopter gunships), quickly dispatched at least one or two of the aggressors.

It really brought home for me how dangerous this job can be for the PRT. We’ve felt completely safe every time we’ve gone out. That’s because we follow their safety protocols. We ALWAYS wear our Kevlar vests, and we are never out of sight of the members of our convoy.

When we were at the Bazaar, I was walking around taking photos and shooting video, oblivious to the bigger picture around me. There was always an armed member of our patrol following me, keeping a lookout and watching my back. The PRT are responsible for our safety on these missions IN ADDITION to their regular duties. I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration, for these guys. They have a tough job to do. They do it well.

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The PRT helped to build a Women’s Shelter and Clinic. They are next to each other, on the same plot of land. The Shelter is for women and children and its run exclusively by women. This is a huge deal in this Islamic Republic. Today the women are looking for help with their International Woman’s Day event. The PRT will be able to provide donations of food, clothing and children’s toys. The women we meet with are not shy about asking for things that they need. Today they are asking The Captain for help transporting participants to their event. The PRT can’t provide vehicles to them. In the past they have gotten other NGO’s to donate funds to hire vehicles for them. The women are disappointed. “You can build roads, schools, and clinics, but you cannot get us a car?” One of them says through a translator.

Ending the meeting on a good note The Captain tells the women that the PRT has recently received approval for the construction of a 24-room school exclusively for girls on the grounds behind the women’s shelter. The current 12-room school, behind the Clinic is in terrible disrepair and will be fixed as well, in the end they will have the 36 rooms they need for their students.

On The way back, we stopped at a desolate cemetery at the foot of an imposing mountain face. There were only a few real tombstones. Most of the grave markers were just plain rocks partially buried in the ground. Makeshift flagpoles with green flags fluttered in the cool breeze, symbolizing those that died as martyrs. I got some great shots, but was hurried back to the convoy before I could get anything I was really satisfied with…

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Went to a provincial Government Meeting today with the Governor of the Panchere province and all 30 of the sub-governors. The meeting lasted over 2 hours.

Afterwards we distributed some clothing to an orphanage.

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Range day cancelled today, due to yesterday’s rain. Caught up on photo processing.

Went to a small bazaar on base. Dealt my way into a flintlock pistol for $30. It’ll be a cool souvenir for my wall.

With a week to go here, my thoughts turn to what’s next.

I’ve been thinking of coming back, actually, by myself, with just still gear. The portraits I’ve captured here are some of my best work ever. If I could return, I think I could get some even better shots. Doing a book based on the mission of the PRT and the people that benefit from its efforts might be a possibility.

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One of the Missions of the PRT is to assist in the training of the Afghan National Police. They have a bad reputation to deal with. They used to be underpaid public servants, prone to rampant corruption and bribery. The PRT helping to train them in law enforcement techniques, such as the proper way to apprehend a suspect and vehicle searches, as well as self-defense The ANP play a pivotal role in the recovery of Afghanistan. They have to be seen as a trustworthy authority so that the Coalition forces can focus on things other than law enforcement.

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More time at the coffee shop today, working on a library of photos for the soldiers of the PRT. They are very excited to see them. I’m apparently the only photographer they’ve worked with that’s been willing to share photos. The Director told me what ever they wanted was fine with him, so I’m trading over 300 photos for patch the members the PRT convoy wear. It says “Seven Club”; representing the less than 7% of the 20 thousand soldiers on base that ever go “outside the wire”.

I think it’s a good trade.

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Went to a training class today run by the Bagram Media people. It’s a training class for Afghan cameramen and reporters. They had many questions and were eager to learn all that they could. These people are yearning to tell their country’s story. They are somewhat misrepresented in the world media.

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The meeting we attended today was for Youth Generations. It’s a group that started out organizing intramural sports teams for the young people of the country, such as Soccer and Volleyball (which is HUGE here). The teams cross ethnic, cultural and religious lines allowing the kids to interact with kids from other regions and provinces. The group has grown considerably, now counting many adults among them and a new mission: to help the youth of their country to inherit an Afghanistan that they can be proud of. They meet monthly and this month there was a very special first time guest to the meeting. The local Sub-Governor heard about this group and what they are doing and wants to become involved.

The Captain hears about ideas for projects the group is interested in. One member says that they would like to plant trees. (Most of this region was almost completely deforested by the Russians and is in desperate need of trees). The Captain’s eyes brighten as he tells them about a recently received PRT contract to do that very thing.

The Youth Generations group will submit a bid for the project and they will be given donated trees AND be paid to plant them across their province.

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Getting out of Kabul International Airport.

After quickly and freely giving away all of his cash (some lucky baggage handler made a weeks salary, and so did some other guy in a uniform who opened a door for us), and frantically announcing that he needed 50 bucks from me to pay the airport tax (the only legal bribe in the airport…), I suddenly got over traveling with The Director.

You do NOT have to tip anybody here. The Director just nodded his head no…

“You’re wrong. They weren’t going to let us out of here. I HAD to pay them off. You’re just wrong.”

I told him that his frantic waving of money, opening his wallet, and general freaking out in a place like this only attracts the attention I would, personally, like to avoid. He makes himself a target and therefore, makes me a target.

We have valid passports and visas, not to mention, confirmed seats on the flight. They have to let us on, bribe or no. The Director again tells me I’m wrong and wonders if we are going to have a fistfight in the middle of the airport to settle the matter. I briefly consider it.

“All that bribes do is move you to the front of the line. We have plenty of time before our flight. There was no need for you to throw your money around like that.” The Director continues to shake his head no.

He stops when the guy who was helping us with our bags agrees with me. “He’s right actually.”

Now The Director starts muttering to himself that we narrowly escaped being incarcerated in an Afghan prison.

Narrowly escaped? Yes. But not from that.

He spent the entire flight two seats across from me angrily scribbling in his notebook. More than likely a tale of how he saved us with $350.00 in bribes to heathen brigands in the wilds of Kabul airport.

The flight back to the US was uneventful.

I’ve though intensely about going back to Afghanistan in the weeks since my return. It’s a beautiful country of proud people.