What’s the best way to start out an iPad advert about learning? Evidently, Apple’s decided that they just can’t go wrong by featuring the awesome TED app. This time around, I’m especially happy to see that Kevin Slavin’s talk from TEDGlobal 2011—one of my top five favorite talks from Edinburgh—gets a couple of seconds of time.

Mad props to all of my friends at TED as well as to freelance developer Matt Drance for having the application they built featured in yet another iPad advert. (via @thaniya, the awesome product development director at TED)

Last Thursday, I stopped for gas at the intersection of US-395 and CA-299. Alturas, California. While I looked at the map as fuel flowed into my car, I realized that I was 2 ½ hours away from Gerlach, Nevada. Normally, that wouldn’t mean much. Gerlach is a very small place with a couple of gas stations, a motel, and a scattering of houses on the edge of a dry lake. This is the time of year, however, when tens out thousands of people gather on the dry lake near there for Burning Man. If you’ve ever been, you’ll know the pull I was feeling towards that dot on the map. After a few minutes thinking about what-ifs and what-could-have-beens, however, I turned south. Away from the playa and many of my friends that are out there right now.

It’s been five years since I was last there. 2006 was my last burn. Every year since then, I’ve toyed with the idea of going again. Several months ago, I almost hit submit on a filled out payment form for this year’s burn, but didn’t pull the trigger. Not too long after, the event sold out cementing my decision.

Why the hesitation? Usually, I just explain it away to others—sometimes even myself—as not being able to get it together in time. That’s not really the reason why, however. While preparing for the burn takes time, it’s not that big a deal. No, here’s the real reason:

I’m a photographer. I don’t feel welcome at Burning Man anymore.

The primary reason I don’t feel welcome is found in the terms and conditions that come with the purchase of a ticket in a contract of adhesion. In short, if you want to show a photograph you’ve made at Burning Man in public, the contract stipulates that you have to get permission not only from people in the photograph, but from Black Rock City LLC. Furthermore, if your camera can capture video—and what camera these days doesn’t—you have to register it and have it tagged. Finally, in a rights grab that’s usually associated with the kind of clueless big companies that burners love to hate, Burning Man also grants itself rights to your photos.

For an organization and event dedicated to creativity and radical unregulated self-expression, it’s counter-intuitive. Hypocritical even. You’re welcomed with open arms if your a sculptor, painter, builder, performer, DJ, odd, eccentric, or most anything else. Gothic furry rainbow suits? Sure! Bicycle riders with flame throwers? Awesome! Trans-proto-humanoid post-sexual progressivist? Come on in, whatever the heck you are! Photographer? Oh, wait. Hrm. We don’t really… Go over there and sign some stuff and let’s make sure to get you tagged so that others can be extra careful around you. And, oh, if you do come up with something good, it’s ours to use.

I could go all hyperbolic and violate Godwin’s Law here by comparing this behavior to oppressive historical regimes, but I’ll restrain myself. Surely, you get my drift. Besides, despite my obvious feelings on the matter, I’m not really interested in tilting at this particular windmill much. After all, I’m quite aware that Burning Man’s decision to radically squash the creative potential of photographers is popular with some portion of its 50,000 participants.

I’ve actually considered going without a camera. Put my photographer-self into the closet, if you will. It’d be easier, really, on lots of fronts. I could just enjoy the moment without thinking about the dust creeping into my gear. I wouldn’t concern myself with trying to be creative while respecting anybody else’s rights or demands. I’d have to turn off part of myself to go without a camera, however. Among all the other things I do, I create images. My art is created in the moment and lasts far after the moment is gone. For the last five years, I simply haven’t been willing to check that part of me at the door.

Maybe next year. Maybe. Maybe not.

The moon follows the sun in the southern Cascade mountains.

Simple and spare compositions emphasizing the sky seem to have been the theme of my recent drive through the southern Cascade mountains. I didn’t have a photographic goal for this first leg of my current trip. Instead, I happily let serendipity and emergence have their way. There will be time for intentionality soon enough.

Fog rolls through the Golden Gate as seen from the Marin Headlands with San Francisco in the background.

Yesterday, I spent part of the day between appointments up in the Marin Headlands. It always takes my breath away to be up there on a gorgeous day when the marine layer is in. I wish I had more time to spend up there yesterday and if I weren’t on my way to New York today, I’d be back up there watching the fog machine do its magic.

One of the conversations I keep having with my photographer friends lately revolves around editing. It doesn’t matter what city I am in or what kind of shooting the photographer I’m talking to specializes in, it’s the same conversation. We’re not editing enough.

A quick clarification: I don’t mean that we’re not spending enough time moving pixels around in Photoshop or tweaking sliders in Aperture or Lightroom. Not at all. No, what I mean by editing is the process of looking at a collection of photographs, finding the good ones and then—and this is the part that we’re not doing—eliminating the ones that don’t make the grade from our active catalog. Maybe even throwing them away entirely.

In a conversation about editing yesterday over coffee, Lou Lesko mentioned that he used to be able to go through a shoot’s worth of chromes on a light table, pull out the keepers and then casually sweep the rest into a trash can without a second thought. Digital files, on the other hand, keep stacking up in his library and it’s somehow hard to delete them, even though he knows he should. I remember doing the same thing.

The irony, of course, is that it cost real money to expose and develop each and every one of those chromes that ended up the trash. On the other hand, the marginal cost of creating each digital file is zero. It’s only on the backside where they pile up to the point where they can’t fit on our boot drive. Then it starts costing money, time, and finally sanity to manage the storage for all those images. Everything bogs down and we can’t ever seem to keep ahead of the volume of fresh images that we make.

In essence, we’ve become digital hoarders. Despite the hassle of managing the drives to hold all the bits and the bloat in our catalogs, it’s hard to hit that delete key. Maybe, just maybe, those unrated images will be useful for something at some point down the road.

As we talked, Lou brought up his parents’ strategy (and mine and probably yours for that matter). They’d pick up finished prints from the lab, flip through ’em, and put pull some of them aside to put into a photo album. Other prints—the worst of the batch—might find themselves tossed into the trash. The rest would go into a shoebox and go under the bed or into a closet. Those albums were gold. They were what we’d look at during the holidays. They would be the first thing to be grabbed in a fire. That shoebox? On the nice to rescue list, but definitely a lower priority.

To be sure, the shoebox is not a new metaphor for thinking about all of this. I think that Steve Jobs introduced iPhoto by calling it the “shoebox for our digital photos”. Conflating the idea of albums containing our best work with the shoebox that holds the remaindered bits, however, might not be the best way to go about it for those of us who are avid photographers and blow past the point of managing our data on a single drive.

More thinking and more conversations to come, I’m sure…

A view of San Francisco Bay from over San Bruno Mountain after taking off from SFO.

The first rule of making photographs from a commercial airplane is to pick your window seat carefully based on the expected flight path and time of day. Yesterday for my flight to Los Angeles from San Francisco, I was a bit sloppy and sat on the left side—as I do on all of my flights north to Portland. Usually that gives a front row view of the SF skyline on departure. With our destination to the south, however, we made a left-hand U-turn after take-off which cut off the view of the city that I wanted. Oops.

Instead, what I got was a view to the south of the San Francisco Bay from over San Bruno Mountain with the airport in the foreground. It’s not what I was expecting, but I’ll take it.

Hollywood and the Hollywood hills as seen on approach to LAX.

The Hollywood hills are right in the middle of this photograph taken while on approach to LAX. In the foreground is Hollywood and West Hollywood. Wilshire Boulevard is at the bottom edge of the frame. Behind the Hollywood hills is Burbank and the San Fernando valley along with the Verdugo Mountains and Angeles National Forest.

The Empire State Building and New York City as seen from the south.

I’m in New York this weekend to work on a personal project. The weather yesterday was fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. It’s supposed to be a bit unsettled through the weekend, but I’ve got hopes that it will be perfect when I need it to be.

Tonight, I met an old man in Battery Park who moved to New York in 1969. Just in time to watch the twin towers rise. He lived in New York the entire time they stood. He watched them fall. I talked with a photographer from Germany shooting the Tribute in Light with black and white medium format film. I heard how my friend Thaniya spent that day in New York ten years ago and felt like crying as she described some of her experiences to me.

I walked up to the fence around Ground Zero while remembering a walk I took around the twin towers one night eleven or so years ago. I recalled laying on the plaza between the towers looking up at the sky. I thought about the people who jumped to their death before the towers fell and the passengers and crew that were aboard the hijacked planes. I couldn’t quite resolve all those events happening in the same space that I was standing at. It’s so very confusing.

I made a lot of photographs. The image above is one of the first I’ve pulled off the memory cards and looked at. The rest will have to wait. It’s late. Life goes on tomorrow.

Portrait of Laura Galloway in New York City.

This week’s trip to New York came with several things on the agenda, one of which was creating some new portraits of my friend Laura Galloway. We took advantage of one of the best roof locations I know of in Manhattan—the same location I photographed the midtown skyline from a few days ago—and the weather cooperated perfectly.

Tech details for the camera geeks: I used a single remote Speedlight on a lightweight stand with a shoot through umbrella as my primary light source. The setting sun was my secondary light. I did experience a short moment of panic when I realized I didn’t have enough weight to keep the light from sailing off the roof in the moderate breeze, but worked around it by keeping my foot on the stand as I shot. Not exactly elegant, but it got the job done.

A few months ago, a thought entered my head. An idea for a personal project. I couldn’t quite shake it off, even after a few weeks. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I knew I had to do it. So, I booked flights and made plans with friends to be in New York the weekend of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Here’s the result:

This short film contains footage created over a twelve hour period last Sunday starting a bit before sunset. I shot from Brooklyn and multiple locations in Manhattan, both public and private. My friend Thaniya drove me and my gear around town for the first part of the night so that I could cover ground quickly for the long shots. I then spent midnight to almost 6AM walking around downtown on my own to get the close up shots.

It was an intensely emotional night for me once I was on my own in downtown, especially after my iPhone’s battery died and took away my connection to the world at large. I don’t really have words to put to the thoughts I was thinking in the wee hours of the night as I walked, set up shots, and clicked away. That feeling stayed with me for the next week as I assembled still frames into video clips and then edited them together into this film. I may not have the words, but I think this short film expresses everything I want to say.

For those curious about the making of my Tribute in Light short film, here are a few production notes, loosely structured. It’s as close to a behind-the-scenes as I can do for this project.

Exposure: All the takes were shot as stills on my Nikon D3S using a Nikkor 24-70 f/2.8 G lens. The built in intervalometer in the Nikon bodies is super handy and it’s a shame more cameras don’t have this feature. I used intervals ranging between two and four seconds, depending on the amount of motion in the scene. Typically, the long-distance shots were on a four second interval and the closer shots were on either two or three second intervals.

The exposure time for each frame was usually half of the interval time. In other words, for a four second interval, I usually used a two second exposure. This is equivalent to the 180º shutters used in traditional motion-film cameras. It lets the motion in each frame blur nicely into the next. For a few of the shots, I used a slightly greater exposure ratio—three seconds on a four second interval—to further smooth things out.

Everything was shot wide open at f/2.8 to keep the monster of aperture flicker at bay. The lens I was using usually isn’t too bad about introducing flicker, but I didn’t want to have to spend time in post fixing anything that appeared so I played it safe. One of these days, I’m going to find a lens or two that I can fix the aperture on instead of having it cycle on each exposure.

Locations: To determine where I wanted to shoot from, I did a lot of research looking at where great photographs of the lights were made in years past and then reversed engineered roughly where they were taken from. There’s more about how I did this in the interview I did with Lou Lesko on Photocine News.

The Edit: I assembled the still frames into 4K resolution video clips using After Effects. I then edited the clips into a finished product using Final Cut Pro X on my 13" MacBook Air. Without a discreet GPU and a limited color gamut screen, it wasn’t an ideal machine to use for this purpose, especially with the 4K resolution files. By using proxy media for playback, however, it worked out decently enough as long as I exercised patience. I also borrowed an external display at a few points during the edit to see the colors more accurately. There were many moments when I wished I had a new Sandy Bridge 15" MacBook Pro in New York with me.

As to the structure of the edit itself, I had a story arc in mind during my pre-production research. The sequencing of shots from far away to close up and then to the new building was part of the concept from very early in my thinking about this project. I’m really happy that all the footage that I created enabled that vision to be realized in the final edit. Speaking of which…

Music: The soundtrack is a 83-second edit of Simplicity by Emmett Cooke that I licensed via his commercial website. I was sold on it as soon as I heard the break at the 30 second mark which lined up perfectly with the close-up shots on the story arc. In fact, once I settled on this piece of music, the edit you see came together in just a couple of hours as I returned to the west coast from New York. It’s almost as if the composition were made just for this project.

A Citabria ready to take to the sky over California

The Citabria—airbatic spelled backwards—is a two-seater plane that is rated for acrobatic maneuvers from +5g to -2g. I photographed this beautiful copy right before riding it into the skies over the golden hills of California on a gorgeous September day with a friend at the controls. Luckily, my stomach cooperated with the flight plan and didn’t embarrass me.

If you subscribe the the print edition of the British Journal of Photography, you might see my picture in the October 2011 issue alongside an article credited to me and a caption that gives my position as against Creative Commons. Appearances are rather deceiving. While I did say everything contained in that article, I didn’t exactly write an op-ed nor did I agree to actively represent an against position with my face and name.

How Did This Start?

The British Journal of Photography recently published an interview with a photographer who uses Creative Commons licenses. They wanted a counterpoint and, after having found a reference to the fact that I stopped using Creative Commons licenses a few years ago, contacted me and asked if I’d be willing to be interviewed.

I was happy to agree. The way we license photographs and how copyright can be either used or misused is an important discussion in professional photography right now. Furthermore, I’m right in the middle of thinking about Creative Commons licenses again. In other words, I’m on the fence. I figured it’d be an interesting place to provide some commentary.

The interview was last week. I spent a half hour or so talking with the Journal by phone. A few days after the interview, I received what appeared to me to be a rough transcript of my thoughts for review. It was essentially what I’d said without the interviewer’s questions. I made lots of comments and replied, figuring that what I was looking at would be used to pull quotes from.

What did I say in the Interview?

Roughly, I covered two primary points. The first is that I think the Creative Commons is a good idea, but I have been frustrated in the past with the confusion around the licenses. In one case, a Wikipedia editor asserted that they could reassign attribution. In other cases, there was confusion around the meaning of the non-commercial restriction—a point that the Creative Commons is aware of and is working to address. Finally, there is a perception that Creative Commons replaces copyright instead of working within it.

These factors all lead me to re-evaluate my use of Creative Commons licenses several years ago and I decided to step back even though handling licensing on a case-by-case basis isn’t a walk in the park either. At that point, I didn’t want to be on the bleeding edge of licensing. I also wasn’t fully comfortable with how Creative Commons licenses would interact with my new business as a professional photographer.

This led to my second point. The business of photographic licensing has changed immensely in the last ten years. Stock has effectively collapsed as a marketplace for most photographers. In fact, in my own business, residual income from licensing of already created images is fairly insignificant. It’s clear that a Creative Commons licensing strategy could be beneficial to a business model that did not rely on residual licensing.

Then What Happened?

On Tuesday of this week, I got an urgent email from the deputy editor clarifying that the Journal was going to use what I’d said as an article with an ‘against’ point of view piece versus one that was pro Creative Commons. She thought it was clear that the Journal wanted to use my comments this way from the start. When she realized I might not be on the same page, she reached out.

Unfortunately, I was offline Tuesday afternoon and evening and I didn’t get a chance to reply that I wasn’t OK with the usage. By the time I replied, it was too late. The issue had gone to press. The article appears in the issue written in the first person next to my photo and the word ‘AGAINST’ in bright red letters.

Sigh. This is awkward, to say the least. Doubly so if I were to move forward with any future use of Creative Commons licenses.

To be clear, I’ve seen the finished piece and nothing in the body of the article misrepresents my thoughts. The body of the text is consistent with the points I mention above. There’s a big difference, however, between having a few quotes appear in an article and to have my words appear in what appears to be an op-ed written by me. That’s the crux of the problem.

The deputy editor at the British Photography Journal has apologized to me for the misunderstanding and for the fact that it wasn’t caught until it was too late for the print edition. It won’t show up on the web. For the record, I am satisfied that this was an honest mistake in communication. In the future, however, you can bet that I’ll be much more on the ball and looking out for this kind of misunderstanding.

Stars and the Milky Way over the Bonneville Salt Flats looking towards Wendover, NV

I spent last night camping out with Bryan Jones right on the edge of the Bonneville Salt Flats. Our mission was simple: Enjoy and photograph the night sky while trading stories. I made this image as the sunset faded off in the west over Wendover, Nevada.

Standing in front of a hillside near Madison Junction covered with young trees, this tall lodgepole pine appears to be a survivor of a fire that consumed all of its peers. If I had to hazard a guess, the fire that burned this hill was probably one of the ones that ravaged the park in 1988.