Tag: photography
Exploring Yosemite’s Wintry, Arty Wild Side, Camera In Hand

Exploring Yosemite’s Wintry, Arty Wild Side, Camera In Hand

By Karen D’Souza, San Jose Mercury News (TNS)

A lone coyote darts through a snowy meadow, disappearing into the mist enshrouding a grove of cedars. Icicles sparkle from the mossy trunks of massive pine trees. Snow drifts and waterfalls tumble down the faces of majestic granite monoliths.

No matter how many times you have been to the jewel of the National Park System that is Yosemite, you haven’t really seen it until you’ve glimpsed it over freshly fallen snow. Amid the solitude of winter, when snow blankets Half Dome, skaters zip around the ice rink at Curry Village and a hush of beauty and calm beckons, it’s the perfect time for the artsy among us to descend on Yosemite. It’s now, when the madding — and maddening — throngs of summer are a distant memory, that the majesty of the place, from the roar of Yosemite Falls to the elegant white peaks of Glacier Point, sparkles more brightly than ever before.

That’s true even when those dainty ivory snowflakes suddenly turn into a bone-chilling rain, as you’re tromping through Yosemite Village behind one of the guides from the Ansel Adams Gallery, which offers free camera walks several mornings a week. Shooting in snow can be magical, the radiant light revealing the glamour of the natural world and making it easy to see why Adams looked through his camera lens and saw art, where others only spied rivers, rocks and trees. These camera walks are the perfect start for an art lover’s whirl through Yosemite in winter.

Wielding your iPhone in a torrential downpour is another matter entirely (let’s just say a bag of rice comes in handy), but getting to see the valley floor through the eyes of the photographers who walk in Adams’ footsteps is priceless. The gallery’s photographers all know the history of the park as well as the science of photography. So the camera walk is a chance to look beyond the surface of things.

“When you first get here, it can be overwhelming,” says Evan Russel, curator of the gallery. “It’s hard to focus the shot, because everywhere you look, there is a photograph waiting to be taken. That’s Yosemite.”

Certainly my guide, Christine Loberg, moves fast, stashing her camera inside her parka and nimbly scampering over sheets of ice like a deer as we students scurry in her wake. She’s been capturing Yosemite on film for 30 years, but she still jumps with joy when she discovers a particularly fluorescent patch of lichen creeping up the side of the tree.

“The trees are like ballerinas today,” she says. “They’re dancing in the fog.”

Like Adams, she sees the sublime in the natural, the wonder in the way the mountains seem to vanish in the fog, the whimsy of pine cones winding through the icy waters near the site of John Muir’s cabin. She advises iPhone shooters to concentrate on contrasts, the play of light and texture in an image.

So entrancing is the craft that you might not notice the frost nipping at your fingers and the slush trickling into your hiking boots. Sometimes getting the perfect shot demands a sacrifice. It’s a small price to pay for a morning of feeling like you have a private audience with nature.

“No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite,” Muir once wrote. “Every rock in its wall seems to glow with life.”

For the record, the gallery’s shutterbugs are a hardy lot, eagerly leading tours in rain and wind and snow, willing to hold their ground in the face of a snarling winter storm. Come bundled up — and be prepared to take your time to find the perfect tableau.

“If you want to get that amazing storm shot, you have to be out in the storm waiting for it. That’s how Ansel got those shots,” Russel says. “You have to be there in the moment. If you are inside somewhere waiting, you will miss it.”

Built in 1927 as a retreat luxurious enough for the robber barons of the day, the stately Ahwahnee manages an impossible balance of opulence and simplicity. Gilbert Stanley Underwood’s design glories in the intricacy and richness of its appointments, from the Native American-inspired stencils on its walls and its gorgeous kilim rugs to its grand dining room, but it also fits perfectly within its landscape nestled at the foot of the imposing Glacier Point. It’s a photo op all by itself.

As if the views weren’t spectacular enough, the hotel is also bejeweled with exquisite details: Steinway pianos and stunning stained glass windows in the Great Lounge, the fanciful images of the Mural Room, the brightness and warmth of the Solarium and the charm of tea service in the afternoons. The palpable sense of grandeur in the famed dining room, an august temple to food that makes everyone feel straight out of “Downton Abbey,” is as decadent as the eggs Benedict.

There’s an air of graciousness here that makes you feel as if you have stepped back in time to the days when the hotel opened to much fanfare. Celebs and titans were, of course, invited to mark the launch, but alas, so many of the creme de la creme tried to make off with the hotel’s antiques that the managers decided to cut their losses and scale back on some of the extravagances for the public opening.

Hammill can regale you with many a story about Lucille Ball and Judy Garland kicking up a ruckus, or Queen Elizabeth II having a bidet installed — or how the front of the hotel is actually the original back. The architect had planned for carriages instead of cars, so the whole thing had to be flipped around.

You could happily listen all day — until you look out the window and remember the vast snowy terrain still beckoning for exploration. There’s still time to frame one last shot of Half Dome in the waning light.

Yosemite Camera Walks

The Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite National Park offers free camera walks led by staff photographers several mornings a week. Find details at www.anseladams.com/camera-walk.

©2016 San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Sarah Selwood, left, and Ashley Wilson from Australia take a selfie at Tunnel View in Yosemite National Park, Calif., on December 30, 2015. (Laura A. Oda/Bay Area News Group/TNS)

 

How To Take Amazing Travel Photos? Slow Down

How To Take Amazing Travel Photos? Slow Down

By Josh Noel, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

I wasn’t so surprised at Dan Westergren’s reaction when I suggested that people tend to take too many photographs while traveling. He is a photographer, after all.

But when I argued that taking too many photos takes people away from actually experiencing the little moments of their travel, Westergren, who is the director of photography for National Geographic Traveler, said he was familiar with the sentiment and had even heard it from people close to him.

“For me, that’s complete baloney,” he said.

Taking photos helps center Westergren in his travel, he said. But he heard my point. And my point was this: Most of us take photos without much thought. I’ve observed it countless times and been guilty of it myself: Pull up to some iconic site or natural wonder, blink at it a couple of times, reach into the pocket for the camera and then turn to leave. As cameras have become more ubiquitous — smaller, lighter, cheaper, and easier to use — they have become our reflexive method of “experiencing” travel.

My advice: Slow down. Pause to savor the moment. Breathe deeply. Think about how things smells, what the air feels like on your skin, and look at what you’re seeing: the colors, the shapes, the shadows. Think about how it came to be. Share your observations with your travel companions. Listen to their observations. Look at what you’re seeing from a few different angles. And then take a photo — preferably one that you’ll be interested in actually looking at again.

Westergren’s advice also is to slow down, though in a different regard. He says to simply try to do, and photograph, less while traveling. Instead of scurrying through a laundry list of stops, have fewer but deeper experiences. While taking more time in those experiences, photograph them deliberately and creatively, in ways that center you in the moment.

“I don’t know that the issue is people take too many pictures — it’s that they have no purpose in the picture taking,” he said. “They’re snapping what everyone else does, and then moving on rather than trying to make it their own.”

Travel photography is a popular enough subject that Westergren just finished teaching a seminar on the subject to 42 people in Scottsdale, Arizona Many students, he said, hoped to be clued into a setting on their expensive cameras that would allow them to take expert photos.

“Everyone wants some really easy solution, and they think that buying a camera with a lot of knobs and buttons, that if they knew which button to push, the picture would turn out great,” he said. “It’s not the case.”

Westergren said the key is approach. And part of that approach is being a deliberate and creative photographer.

He cited as an example a recent work trip to San Francisco. He had an afternoon of down time before catching a flight home, and rather than run around to grab several iconic photos, he spent most of his free time at one place: observing the Golden Gate Bridge from the Marin Headlands, in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It offers one of the most iconic views of the bridge and gave Westergren a memorable experience and a quality photo.

“It’s about fewer situations,” Westergren said. “I gave up having a picture of a bunch of other things to get that one great picture. I didn’t have to visit 15 things to check off my list while seeing San Francisco. That’s a philosophy you can extend to any trip, and any traveling.”

And there, he and I agreed.
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IN HIS OWN WORDS: DAN WESTERGREN’S TIPS FOR BETTER PHOTOS

  • Be in the right place at the right time

You can’t get a good scenic picture in the middle of the day — you have to be out early in the morning or in the evening. The Grand Canyon is a profoundly different visual experience at those times, but most people are in bed or at the diner eating breakfast first thing in the morning. You have to reorder your schedule, and that’s regardless of whether you’re taking pictures with a cellphone or a really expensive camera.

  • Think outside the box

Maybe you don’t care to shoot the 100,000th photo of the Grand Canyon at sunrise, but you do want to show the experience your family had there. Think of a visual story line. Get a picture out the windshield of the car. Takes photos of the stop for lunch. Take pictures at the rim of your family but from different angles. Once you have the obvious pictures, take a less obvious one.

  • Don’t take a few pictures at a lot of places — take a lot of pictures at a few places

Be targeted about what picture you really want. Once you see an image you want, don’t take one or two and walk away; take dozens, and when back home at your computer, edit down to the one or two that really work. To me, editing photos is taking 10,000 photos and editing to the 30 really good ones. That’s where really good photography comes from.

  • Put people in your photos

I’m a really shy person without a camera. I would never just walk up to someone while traveling and start talking to them. But with a camera, I do it. It’s how I learn about the place that I am. I go up to the person, and say, “I’m Dan, I think you look great, and this is a great place, and do you mind if I take your picture?” Pictures are just better with people in them because they add local flavor. You can’t sneak pictures and you can’t steal them. Really good pictures are a short relationship between you and that person you’re photographing. The first picture will be posed, and if you’re patient maybe their attention gets distracted — that’s my favorite kind of picture: when you can get them back to doing what they were going to do before you showed up.

  • Don’t just let your images waste away — use them

It’s really important to do something with your pictures — like printing a book of them. That’s more practical these days than getting prints made: upload them to a website that will print a nice book. Make that book, and your grandkids will find it. In this day and age of pictures staying on people’s phones and in their computers, it’s important to make the effort of taking that next step and to make the photo album.

Photo: rickz via Flickr

‘It’s What I Do’ A War-Zone Photographer’s Harrowing Memoir

‘It’s What I Do’ A War-Zone Photographer’s Harrowing Memoir

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, by Lynsey Addario; Penguin Press (368 pages, $29.95)
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It would be easy for “normal” people to conclude that journalists chronicling war and disaster are anything but.

Why would anyone in his or her right mind leave the comfort of middle-class America or Europe to document the savagery inflicted by Islamic terrorists on any Western hostage they can get their hands on? Or to witness the sadistic mutilation of rival factions’ women in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo?

Only someone a little crazy does that, the uninitiated might conclude. Or bent on basking in the glory of capturing an iconic image with wanton disregard for one’s own mortality. But such assumptions are a superficial and unfair reading of a journalist’s motivation to bring the reality of suffering, instability and injustice to the consciousness of those who might be moved to try to right the world’s wrongs.

In Lynsey Addario’s memoir, It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, precociously undertaken before she turned 40, she endeavors to explain the “why?”

She takes the reader through a decade of violence in Afghanistan and Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001, then on to the Arab Spring. As if to set the record straight on the death-wish allegation, Addario opens her story with a harrowing account of being trapped between the rebels and Moammar Kadafi’s gunmen in the chaotic months before the Libyan leader was captured and executed.

“I hadn’t covered Tunisia and Egypt, because I was on assignment in Afghanistan, and it had pained me to miss such important moments in history. I wasn’t going to miss Libya,” Addario writes of one of the most powerful drivers that compel journalists to downgrade potential danger.

She and three other veteran conflict journalists were taken captive by Kadafi’s gunmen, who bound and blindfolded them for the hourslong ride in the back of a pickup during which the men were punched and rifle-butted and Addario was fondled. The Libyan experience conveys effectively the judgment lapses and regrets that consume journalists when they ignore the ever-present subconscious hazard detector.

Failure to heed those warnings is an occupational hazard, especially for female journalists traveling with male colleagues. Addario expresses throughout the memoir her aversion to being seen as “the girl,” more easily scared and inclined to leave the scene.

“The fact is that trauma and risk taking hadn’t become scarier over the years; it had become more normal,” she writes of her oscillating regret and resignation during the detention at a Kadafi prison and guesthouse.

Like Addario, I have a husband who is a journalist and understands the compulsion to cover the consequences of U.S. foreign-policy decisions. “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid,” my husband would say to me as I was leaving. And I’d try not to dwell too much on broken promises as I clung to a Haitian motorbike driver taking me on a slalom ride through burning tire barricades.

Addario seldom waxes remorseful in her richly illustrated memoir except when acknowledging the emotional trauma imposed on those who care about her. She recalls the year her mother fell into a coma after a car accident: “My family chose not to tell me, because I was far away and there was nothing I could do.”

Then there are the professional disappointments that inevitably afflict writers and photographers seeking to present a truthful image that military public affairs officers feel duty-bound to suppress. Addario’s devastating moment came after a grueling two-month embed with U.S. forces in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. A disturbing image she had taken of a young boy injured in a U.S. bombing raid was left out of the published photo essay for the New York Times Magazine because “the editor trusted the U.S. military public affairs officer — whose main responsibility was to polish the image of the U.S. military to the greater public — over us,” Addario recalls with a bitterness lingering seven years later.

She also recounts the deaths of colleagues that have saddened and shocked her, including the New York Times‘ Anthony Shadid, who had been among the trio with which she was taken hostage in Libya. He died in February 2012 from an acute asthma attack while making his way out of Syria.

Addario’s memoir is replete with the downsides of witnessing war and chronicling its myriad tragedies, all of which leaves the reader struggling with “why?”

Her answers are vague, as reflected in the memoir’s title. There is little historical context in the memoir, and Addario herself seems mystified by what she sees at times.

The book, though, doesn’t aspire to make sense of our violence-wracked world. It is narrowly focused on explaining photojournalism and the psychic rewards of influencing policymakers. She conveys well her unstated mission to stir the emotions of people like herself, born into relative security and prosperity, nudging them out of their comfort zones with visual evidence of horrors they might do something about. It is a diary of an empathetic young woman who makes understanding the wider world around her a professional calling.

By the end of her memoir, Addario slows ever so briefly to have a child with the man she marries after a minutely detailed decade of relationship misfires. Still, she returns to the scenes of chaos and violence, burdened anew with the fears that her young son will grow up motherless.

“As a war correspondent and a mother, I’ve learned to live in two different realities … but it’s my choice,” she concludes. “I choose to live in peace and witness war — to experience the worst in people but to remember the beauty.”

It’s what she does.
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Williams has been a foreign correspondent since 1984, covering the Eastern Europe revolutions as well as the violent rebellions and wars in the former Yugoslav republics, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine.

Photo: Harumi Ueda via Flickr