If you're anything like me, you've had at least one of your many digital news streams inform you that today is World Water Day (WWD for the rest of this post). In fact, if you're even more like me, you have never heard of this yearly observance, and would usually content yourself with noting the fact in passing, or maybe mentioning it as an offhand comment during an awkward pause in conversation.
Instead, I decided to look into it a bit more, primarily because I wrapped up a water droplet shoot with a friend of mine just yesterday, and thought it would make an intriguing post.
From the World Water Day 2010 website:
The World Water Day 2010 and its campaign is envisaged to:
Raise awareness about sustaining healthy ecosystems and human well-being through addressing the increasing water quality challenges in water management and
Raise the profile of water quality by encouraging governments, organizations, communities, and individuals around the world to actively engage in proactively addressing water quality e.g. in pollution prevention, clean up and restoration.
Before I go too far, there are a number of good resources out there on the subject. I'll include those that I have found most helpful in understanding the intent behind the observance:
World Water Day 2010: The official site for WWD 2010, and a great place to start. While the events that are listed have finished, it would be worth looking into some of the photos that starting finding their ways back here from those events.
World Water Day - Wikipedia: The Wikipedia entry on the event, with info about past years' themes and links to even more useful resources.
UN-Water: The official website of UN Water, and "inter-agency mechanism" for collaboration on the subject of water for UN agencies, and the group responsible for WWD.
Before you start worrying about the content of this post, this isn't going to be just another sob story. In fact, quite a bit of progress has been made in the last ten years, such that, according to UN Water, 87% of the world's population has access to sanitary water. One can also be reassured by the progress of technology in the area of water sanitization, as there exist pretty cool and easy to deploy solutions for cleaning water without electricity. Considering the fact that the last I heard on the subject was that the next wars would be fought over water resources, this is good news overall.
Of course, the earlier statistic I mentioned also means that 13% of the world (approx. 884 million people) lack access to clean water, which isn't acceptable. What further complicates matters is that the lack of clean water disproportionately affects those living in rural areas over city dwellers. From the UN Water Joint Monitoring Programme Report:
Despite the world’s population being almost equally divided between urban and rural dwellers, the vast majority without access to water and sanitation live in rural areas. Seven out of ten people without basic sanitation are rural inhabitants and more than eight out of ten people without access to improved drinking-water sources live in rural areas.
Considering all of this info, I began to become more aware of the consequences of my own ease of access to clean water. Despite all of the issues undoubtedly plaguing LA tap water, it is entirely drinkable, and thereby significantly better than anything at least 13% of the human population has access to. I won't even feed my cat this water, and yet almost 900 million humans would have their lives fundamentally improved if they had it available. Clean, safe, fresh water is so readily available to us and so taken for granted that I don't think I could have found non-potable water to use for this shoot if I had even considered the idea.
Unfortunately, there must be significant barriers to transporting this apparently plentiful resource to those who need it, else I can only assume that there wouldn't be people in need of it. In my searching on the subject, the coolest solution to the problem that I could find is a water filtration system known as a Bio-sand Filter (Wikipedia). From the article:
BioSand Water Filters are a technological adaptation of the centuries old slow sand filtration process. While implementations exist in many different sizes and varieties, the most common design is intended for use in rural homes where naturally safe or treated water sources are not available.
BioSand Filters remove 95.0 to 99.0% of organic contaminants, including bacteria, viruses, protozoa, worms, and particles.Safe water produced by the filters is free of discoloration, odor, and unpleasant taste, and can be used for drinking, food preparation, personal hygiene, and sanitation. Most common home-based models can produce between 20 and 60 litres of water per hour.
While it's easy to feel guilty about wasting water for the sake of art, I found myself feeling that I could at least do something to offset my waste, much in the way people offset their carbon footprints. I didn't find any sites specifically for offsetting your water wasting habits, but I did happen upon Charity: Water. With a little browsing, I found my way to their Unshaken program, which specifically provides clean water resources to survivors of the quake in Haiti.
A quick $30 donation there didn't mean much in the greater scheme of my own finances, but it will mean a year's worth of clean water for someone displaced by the quake in Haiti. At the very least, I will feel a bit better the next time I end up using clean water for shots like this:
Look forward to more and more frequent photography related posts. Basically, a friend of mine has somewhat recently gotten into digital photography, I've been itching to go out and shoot more, and I need to mentor someone as part of my masters program. Three birds with one stone is a win in my book, especially because I wouldn't have any time for doing even two of those things independent of each other.
While we're focussing in on his goals for where our interactions will take his photography, I'm already noticing a few benefits to myself after a few of our sessions.
One unsurprising benefit is that I get to play around with and talk about photography more and more regularly, which has been missing in my life. What I didn't expect was the degree to which this whole experience would give me an opportunity to reflect of my own knowledge and experience as a photographer. To be honest, my formal training in photography amounts to one community college intro course on the subject, and the rest has been my own independent study and personal experience with it as a hobby. Granted, I have other areas of expertise to draw from, including working in graphic design and growing up in a family of artists and educators, but I didn't really realize until recently how well that has all prepared me for this challenge.
That said, I expect that this relationship will present difficulties in the future. In fact, I think that it would be a sign of my failure as a mentor if we somehow avoid all of the pitfalls that should lie ahead. In my opinion, learning and growth go hand in hand with conflicts of perspective on the world and personal identity.
Unfortunately, I'd like to refer back to some of the goals we've set at this point in my post, but I can't do that on my iPod Touch. I'll have to leave this as an intro and a teaser for future posts on the subject.
We (myself, Caroline, and Natalia) took a trip up to Mulholland drive to try and see some of Tuesday morning's Leonids meteor shower. Have to say, I was particularly struck by the idea that the two streams of particles causing this year's shower were from a comet's passing in 1466 and 1533, and so I decided to bring my camera along and see if I could capture anything. So, without building up the suspense any more than is completely necessary, here is my most recent attempt at photographing a medieval event:
(Get it? "Photographing a medieval event"? 'Cause I usually take photos of medieval recreation events, and the comet passed during the... OK, it's lame =P)
It comes across pretty low-res here, so I highly recommend clicking through to the image itself, but that little streak above the horizon and just right of center is the only meteor I captured on film. Now, I don't mean to sound negative about this... I'm extremely happy and feel quite lucky to have captured anything, especially because we only saw about 10 meteors the entire four hours we were up there watching. Furthermore, this was the best one of the night, and I didn't even see it myself until I went through my photos!
When I say that this was the only meteor I captured, I actually mean that I got something other than meteor shots out of this. Yes, I learned more about astrophotography (I hope that's a real word =P) which will inform my future attempts and improve my photography skills. That's cool, but I'm always learning and improving when I go on a shoot. I also took the 400+ exposures that didn't include a streak of burning dust and put them together into two stop motion videos of the night sky changing as the earth rotates.
This first one includes the image above, and shows the hillside along Mulholland as seen facing almost due North-East:
The second is from another angle looking out over the greater Los Angeles area. Didn't capture any meteors as far as I know here... the bright streaks you do see are all planes going to or coming from LAX, spread out over the 15 second exposures:
Again, if it's difficult to see these very well, it might help to click through and view them on the YouTube site.
For reference, these shots were taken on my Sony Alpha 300 using the kit 18-70mm lens at an effective focal length of 27mm, ISO 400, with 15 second exposures at an f-stop of 3.0.
A song I composed for an assignment in the Online Master of Arts in Learning Technologies (Cadre 12) at Pepperdine University.
I chose to take the opportunity afforded by the composition assignment to play around with the use of motion and infrared sensors (via the Wii Remote) in revealing the music hidden in the uncaptured data of daily life. The results are admittedly absurd and not completely enjoyable, but I tried to document the process and present it in a fun way.
I learned two important facts that should be shared at the outset:
Matching a beat for more than a few measures takes practice.
"Flexi-time" in Sibelius means that the program attempts to compensate for the user's deviations from being on-beat by changing the song's tempo, thus destroying any hope of matching video and audio later.
A selection of shots I took at an independent hip hop out in Santa Monica. Enjoyed switching between my flash with a massive light-diffuser to make sure I didn't miss too many good images and making use of the ambient light for more dynamic pics.
On the subject of things I learned at this shoot:
Experiment, play, go with what works, but don't stop experimenting.
Flash-lit scenes can have significant potential too, but natural lighting is always fun.
Flash diffusers are awesome... especially when you make them yourself.
Some pretty nice fish photos here, if I do say myself. Took some time to finally dust off my camera again and enjoy a day out and about rather than inside studying. I've been to the Aquarium of the Pacific before, and I remember being particularly disappointed with the experience. This trip was far from disappointing, and I really appreciated the variety of sea life as well as the obvious effort that went into curating the individual exhibits.
I was especially glad to have my circular polarizer on hand for this trip. On top of filtering out the glare from the top of the water on my sting ray shots, it proved handy in reducing some of the reflection when I found myself shooting through glass. I actually had to throw out a few ray shots because the water just looked too clear and the resulting diffraction was distracting. There were times when I just didn't have the extra light to spare while shooting indoors and through glass, and my solution was to be particularly aware of any reflections and try to reposition myself to avoid them as much as possible. One helpful hint: I wore a white shirt to the aquarium... When shooting in situations where glare could be an issue, wear a black shirt to prevent a little more reflection.
I might have tried to use a flash to improve these shots by pulling off a little catch light in some of my subjects' eyes, but I was a bit annoyed with all the people who were blinding everyone else with their point-and-shoot camera flashes. A quick cost-benefit analysis led me to decide it wasn't worth being the source of further frustration. It was poetic justice to listen to one tourist complain about her camera being broken because she kept getting a big white spot in her pictures.
Finally, this was my first shoot using my Lowepro Slingshot 100AW as my new camera bag. I didn't have to do any quick lens changes or stash my camera away for too long, but it holds all of my traveling gear comfortably and safely, and sits surprisingly nicely for a sling bag. I don't really have enough experience with it to justify recommending it, but this was a good first experience.
It's been a while since I took the time to update, so I thought I'd finally upload this photo set. A small set of pics taken at and around Griffith Observatory in Griffith Park. These come from two trips with two separate cameras, my old Minolta Maxxum 5 (film) and my new Sony a300 (digital). You can probably tell the difference pretty easily both in the quality of the digital images and in the changes to (and I hope growth in) my style and technique.
Photography, daily life, interesting links, games, gadgets, world events... If it doesn't fit neatly into 140 characters or demand comments from my 300 closest friends, it should end up here.
Considering all of this info, I began to become more aware of the consequences of my own ease of access to clean water. Despite all of the issues undoubtedly plaguing LA tap water, it is entirely drinkable, and thereby significantly better than anything at least 13% of the human population has access to. I won't even feed my cat this water, and yet almost 900 million humans would have their lives fundamentally improved if they had it available. Clean, safe, fresh water is so readily available to us and so taken for granted that I don't think I could have found non-potable water to use for this shoot if I had even considered the idea.
