A study in contrasts

I don't "make" photographs, I take them, or at least that's how I think of it. I see the photo, I shoot it. The contrasts here tickled me, so I grabbed a camera and a flash and captured the moment. (Click photo to enlarge.)

I call it "Juanita (95), Catherine (14)." Seems subtler than calling it "Old Age and Youth."

This is a rare instance of a photo that I ran through Photoshop. In the original, the blank wall on the left takes up something closer to 60% of the width of the shot, in other words, there's more white space between the nonagenarian and the teenager. I simply removed a small amount of the blank white space in order to make the two halves of the photo more nearly balanced. Does this slight editing - removal of empty space - mean that the resulting photo has been "made" and not "taken"? There's a line somewhere, that separates corrective processing from creative editing. The small change I made here might be close to that line, but I don't think it crosses it.

Have you seen this kitten?

Our cats are indoor cats. The older cat, Mao, is smart enough to realize this is a good deal for her, but Kiki, the latest addition to our menagerie, has the typical adolescent's curiosity about things that aren't actually good for her, and two days ago, somehow she managed to slip out of the house, probably while I was going out to the deck where I was grilling salmon for dinner. We hunted for her that night inside and out but she ended up spending the night outdoors, and it was a cold night.

The next day, she didn't return in the morning, so I made a flyer to distribute in the neighborhood. I have a number of photos of her, but I picked a photo of her and Catherine. It's a satisfactory photo as a description of Kiki: You can see that she's a black kitten with white on her face and chest. But I chose this photo especially because it has Catherine in it. Most lost animal flyers show only the animal. I thought it would get people's attention to show them that this kitten is dearly loved and missed by a young girl.

I'm happy to report that, late in the second day - twenty-four hours exactly after her disappearance - Kiki responded to Catherine's calls from the back porch, crawled out from under our house where apparently she had spent the night, and let Catherine pick her up and bring her back in. She had no doubt heard me calling her over and over, but she ignored me and responded to Catherine. Well, I'm very relieved to have her back home.

The blog's new web address

I finally got around to tying this blog more closely to my domain. You can now get here using this address:

http://blog.william-porter.net

You might want to update your bookmark!

Body Double

When I shoot, even casually, I often carry more than one camera body. When I'm working, I always carry more than one body.

This is a pretty old practice, especially for news and sports photographers, going back at least to the early days of the single-lens reflex camera. If you can find old news or sports photos that include photographers in them, you'll see this. For example, in Hans-Michael Koetzle's terrific book, Photo Icons, volume 2, there's a photo by a great German news photographer Barbara Klemm, showing Leonid Brezhnev (Soviet Communist Party Chair at the time) meeting German Chancellor Willy Brandt in Bonn. The photo mainly shows the principals and their translators and advisors huddled together to negotiate. But in the near background, there's another photographer, shooting the back of Brezhnev's head. He's holding one Nikon with what appears to be a wide lens, and he has two other Nikons hanging around his neck, one of which has a telephoto lens.

I found Klemm's image on the Web. (Google Images never ceases to amaze.) Notice the photographer in the back on the left.



Anyway, carrying two or more bodies is still common, or at least not uncommon. I routinely carry two cameras with me, and sometimes three. This was true when I was working an event in the past, where I'd carry a wide, fast zoom on one camera and a tele, fast mid-range or longer-range zoom on the other. Now that I work mostly with primes, I carry more than one camera even more than I used to, because I would prefer not to change lenses. For example, I might carry the K10D with a Sigma 28 f/1.8 and the K20D with (perhaps) the Pentax 70 f/2.4. This gives me a choice of focal lengths, which is exactly what the old news photographers wanted when they carried more than one body.

Carrying more than one body also means that I'm less likely to be stopped cold by equipment failure. If one camera were to fail - and it has happened - I have the other camera right there, in my hand or at least around my neck, turned on and working. I can't apologize to the couple and the minister and ask them to pause the wedding ceremony for one minute while I get the backup out of my bag!

(This post is a revised version of a reply that originally appeared in the pentaxforums.com discussion site.)