The Voter Outreach
After my day and a half in Allensworth, I was partnered with another News21 fellow, Nick McClellan, working the photographic angle on his story about Latino political engagement in Fresno County, CA. Here are a few shots from the morning we spent with a group called SOL that registers and organizes Latino voters.
Lingering on the porch; before you can change the world, someone needs to unlock the front door.
This photo appears courtesy of Joe’s old 20mm, currently on loan from Drew Anthony Smith.
Same with this one.
Evelia from Fresno, signing up for the effort.
More photos from California as I work through them for the project. For the moment, however, my effort will be focused on Allensworth, and creating a story from the 35 or so gigabytes of content I shot and/or recorded there.
What's in Allensworth?
A couple of things have shifted since my last post. For one, I’m now at News21, the Carnegie-Knight Initiative for the Future of Journalism. That lasts through August. So now I’m technically based out Maryland, but I’m currently on assignment in California. Yeah, I know. It happens.
Anyway, here are five photos from something I’m working on. If any of my News21 fellows see this — or, God help me, my editors — please trust me when I say it’s more than just this. I only got a day and a half in Allensworth, and most of my time was spent on getting the really great interviews that tell this hundred-year story. Still, these stills are a sort of a background view, a sense of the ambience of the place that I hope will set the tone for the piece.
Five from Allensworth, California:
Also from Commencement: my sister, standing as her degree is certified, 23 May 2009.
In the spirit of less than ideal gear, we took off in such a rush that I left my D90 in San Antonio. So I shot some photos with my dad’s Digital Rebel XT, using a kit lens that only opened to ƒ/5.6.
I like this one.
Raw Sound: “Home on the Range,” performed at the University of Texas 2009 Commencement, 23 May 2009. Also, as a warning, this post talks about gear.
I’m pretty sure I’m not violating an NDA by saying this: the iPhone 3.0 software update due out next month includes a handy voice recorder application. I have the new software now (legally, owing to a development I’ll post more about later), and at my sister’s graduation, I found occasion to use it. There was a choir singing the iconic song, Home on the Range, in a way I didn’t expect; so I whipped out the phone, hit record and held it in the air.
Most of y’all know I’m a fan of Marantz when it comes to audio. My PMD620 lives in my camera bag and has served me well. But I hafta say, this iPhone thing is revolutionary. While it lacks the quality of the 620, it’s no worse than the M-Audio recorder I had to buy at the end of my Brownsville trip. And then there’s this:
Built-in editing and posting. From my seat in the audience at commencement, I was able to trim off the handling noise at the beginning, cut out at the end of the applause, then upload to drop.io and post the audio on my Twitter feed.
Maybe that’s kind of silly and frivolous, when it’s just found sound you grabbed at a family function. But imagine the possibilities for insanely mobile awesome reporting. Even if it’s not immediate, imagine you’re out shooting something and you don’t want to carry a sound recorder. If you have a phone with this kind of technology, there’s no longer an excuse for not having audio.
I’m not huge on gear; I say, use what works and focus on the other thing. But the day before yesterday, when I heard something, recorded it, edited it, uploaded it and shared it from my damn cellphone, it occurred to me: this works.
Department of Getting Things Done
A while back, I went to the Texas-Mexico border with Drew to work on a story. I did the sound; Drew did the pictures. That story hadn’t been published; but now it has.
There are some things that, looking back, I would have done differently. But then, we learn and grow, and anything done with the skills you learned yesterday could be done perhaps better with the skills you’ll learn tomorrow. In that gap, you have to keep doing things, finishing what you started and starting new things to finish.
What’s next?
View the slideshow of Aquí y Allá on its page at Pterodáctilo.
Of squash blossoms, aphids, life, death and purpose.
News from the Garden: Squash Blossoms, 8 May 2009.
The first two leaves that pricked up from the surface spent the last couple of weeks in the shade; they’ve since shriveled and died, their purpose fulfilled. So now we have these big, yellow flowers, unfurling their floppy petals. In a few weeks’ time, these too will shrivel and fall; every thing that lives, likewise dies.
Also, the flower in that photograph happens to have what I’m fairly certain are aphids on it. It seems fitting; you can’t have a story about agriculture without a fairly substantial subplot about pests.
Supplemental View: unfurling flower, 6 May 2008. Same plant, different flower.
Things Grow
[large version here; or just click the fullscreen button above]
I threw this together in an hour just now because I have work all week and I’m not gonna have a chance to post a more put together version for a while. I feel as though it’s a recurring theme on this blog, “I’ll post something better later,” “a more substantive post will have to wait.” Well, yeah, sorry. Here’s another thing I’ve been working on, in what is again, a work-in-progress form.
News from the Garden: Yellow Squash, 13 April 2009.
Hopefully this gives a little more shape to the thing I’m doing with the garden. A recent calamitous hard drive crash means I no longer have Photoshop, or most of the photos I’ve shot between November 1 and today. But whenever I get access to Photoshop (read: come to Austin and use the lab) I’ll post some stills from this mini-project in my own backyard.
Poetry break
in reply to Bruno, and in the spirit of remixing William Carlos Williams, a poem for Rod Blagojevich via Politico:
This is just to hold a press conference to announce
I have filled
the Senate seat
that it was in
my power to fill
and which you were probably
saving
for Quinn
Forgive me
it was a $(*)ing valuable thing
so sweet
and so *(^)ing golden
News from the Garden: Yellow squash sprouts, 3 April 2009.
Plant after plant has sprouted over the last nine months; yet something about new life in the soil never ceases to amaze me. We’ve become so accustomed to food coming from a store that it’s tempting to imagine the yellow squash coming from a sanitized clean room somewhere off in a lab. But that’s not how food works.
For our part we had three loads of landscaping soil, which we fortified with manure. Situated near an oak tree, the pollen and leaves fell day by day, creating a natural layer of compost — potential energy, made manifest by the drop of one thin seed.
I read, a few years back, that squirrels take the acorns they find, and bury them to store for the winter. Their brains are sufficiently small that they inevitably forget some of the acorns they bury; in this way, we get oak trees. Years later I later read that rats, consummate omnivores that they are, are intelligent enough to nibble on a new food, like a mushroom, and connect a stomachache hours later to the mushroom from hours before. The memory it forms at that point is lifelong; this is, incidentally, why rats are so hard to poison.
How incredible, then, to think of that first practitioner of agriculture, who buried this thin seed in the ground, this seed that would hardly sate his hunger. To think that burying this speck he returned to that point, months later; that he connected the dropped flake to the harvest of years to come. How miraculous must this green shoot have seemed?
The Things We Can Do
The surgery went well. Better than I could have imagined. I laid down unable to see shapes; then stood up ten minutes later, able to read the time on the clock across the room.
We have this phrase that we throw around, “the miracle of modern medicine.” It’s a true enough thing, and yet until you experience it, it’s just a platitude. For my part, my vision now looks something like this:
It’s about 20/50 in one eye and 20/70 in the other; and over the next few weeks I’m told it will improve. I’m not trying to sell anyone on anything, but I post this by way of saying that it’s just incredible, the things we can do.
burning of the eyes with lasers
I’m nearsighted. My vision corrects to 20/20 with glasses, but without them I’m a mess. Up close I can see fine; but put anything further than six inches from my face and I’m blind. I have trouble explaining how bad my vision is, so a couple weeks ago, at the Greenbelt, I did an experiment. I took a picture, deliberately out of focus, then took off my glasses and compared. After some trial and error, I can say that my uncorrected vision looks something like this:
(but with slightly uglier bokeh, probably owing to my astigmatism.)
Anyway, tomorrow (Tuesday) at 11:30 AM I’m undergoing PRK surgery, also known as the burning of the eyes with lasers, to try and fix my vision. In advance of the thing I’ve been prescribed both narcotic and non-narcotic pain relievers, including 2,400 mg of Ibuprofen daily — the over-the-counter dose is 200 mg — so I’m assuming it’ll be at least marginally painful. But seeing as we’re living in such uncertain times, and I have the money saved up, I figure it’s wise to get it over with now.
I probably won’t be shooting much in the next couple of weeks, and recovery could take a full month or more, although I’m certainly hoping to hit the lower end of that window. In the meantime, I’m going to try to document my recovery on my Twitter feed, and from time to time I may bring the camera to my face; take a picture, out of focus; and compare.
