Where the Stress Falls

In the Meme-Time

There's a Flickr meme that's been going around; I first saw it at Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind and thought I'd give it a try. Here are the rules:

1. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr search.
2. Using only the first page, pick an image.
3. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker.

For three of the images, I cheated a bit by ranking the search results by "Most Interesting". But I never went beyond the first page. In the image below, the corresponding photos read from left to right for each row.

1. What is your first name? Michael
2. What is your favorite food? Italian
3. What high school did you go to? Rowland High
4. What is your favorite color? Blue
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Liela Moss
6. Favorite drink? Coke
7. Dream vacation? Backpacking through Europe
8. Favorite dessert? Root-beer float
9. What do you want to be when you grow up? World traveler
10. What do you love most in life? A good night's sleep
11. One word to describe you: Nerd
12. Your Flickr nickname: I don't have one ... yet

See it large.

To give credit where it's due, here are links to the original photos:

1. Michael in the morning light, 2. Arriving at the Italian Riviera, 3. WEST END, 4. Berlin blues, 5. Liela Moss, 6. coke.jpg, 7. Cologne, Germany, 8. Float it, 9. Going nowhere, 10. Saluting Icy Days, 11. Spirit Warrior 3, 12. Only 4 More Days to Pass Your Way Every Day

I'll return soon with new posts. Have a good week, all.

A Moment Before the Meal

 

Imagination

As an amateur shutterbug (and let me stress "amateur"), I spend a significant amount of time reading about camera equipment, not only because the geek technician in me finds it interesting, but also because I've always been of the opinion that better, more extensively featured equipment leads to better results. But, then, I often discover the work of photographers who prove that the limitation is not in the equipment but only in the imagination. Alex Majoli, an award-winning photojournalist, uses, of all things, consumer-grade "point-and-shoot" cameras to produce some stunning work. He developed interesting techniques for working around the inherent limitations of his cameras:

Because Majoli is usually shooting magazine stories, his need for high frame rates and large image buffers is much less pronounced than it is for many newspaper and sports photographers. But while shooting in Iraq, where he needed to capture long bursts more often than he normally does, Majoli developed a method for overcoming problems with buffer stall.

He carried two [Olympus] C-5050 cameras on straps around his neck, with one strap cinched shorter than the other, so that the cameras hung at slightly different heights on his chest. The cameras were set for 3-shot burst mode. When a long sequence of shots was called for, Majoli fired a 3-shot burst with one camera, dropped it, grabbed the other and shot a burst with it. The first camera wrote its images to the card, thereby clearing its buffer, while Majoli shot with the second. He just kept rotating from one to the other for as long as the action in front of him continued.

"That was my way to shoot in Iraq," he says. "I'm talking about for news. In other situations, I don't need this." Majoli says he can't think of any shots he missed while trading cameras and points out that the overall system is faster than manually winding a Leica, his pre-digital practice.

For the entire article, as well as some of Majoli's photos, go here (the piece is a couple of years old, but it's interesting nevertheless).  The photo agency, Magnum, has Majoli's portfolio here, while this site has a brief video interview with the photographer.