View from my balcony and the power of understanding how to use your camera
A word about my image creation and writing process. As a photojournalist for many years I had to balance quality and speed. A long time ago the photo editor at National Geographic had a sign on his desk that read "At National Geographic we print photos, not excuses." In the world of photojournalism and back in the days of fixed print and broadcast time deadlines were your life and death. If the deadline was 8pm then it was 8pm. Not 8:01pm. If you were late you didn't go to your editor and give an excuse. You grabbed a box and packed up your things because you knew you'd be fired. On the few times I had to fill in as the news director on a local nightly newscast I had one night that a much beloved anchor came to me and said her report wouldn't be ready by the deadline but only by a few minutes. I gave her a stern look, turned around, grabbed an empty paper box by my desk, tossed it in front of her and said "pack up your fucking things." Native Bostonians have a natural tendency towards foul language but I digress. Needless to say she delivered on time and all was right with the universe. While harsh by today's standards editors would catch hell and most likely lose their job for a dozen or so column inches of blank space in the next morning's newspaper or a minute of dead air on that night's newscast. Those were the rules we lived and died by so anyplace we could simplify our workflow we could.
When I was a news videographer and had to shoot a piece that would be a maximum length of 90 seconds, an eternity back in the day, I shot no more than four or five minutes of video. If you shot 20 minutes of video that's 20 minutes of video you had to review. You knew the shots that were needed, took them and buggered off to your next assignment. A workflow so efficient that one holiday weekend I was given the seemingly impossible task of 21 assignments, where normally I'd have at most a half a dozen, that had to be shot and edited with the appropriate copy written as everyone else would be away. While it was a very long weekend that Tuesday morning my news editor found a two foot high stack of U-Matic video cassettes on his desk ready for broadcast. Failure wasn't an option even if it was a pretty crappy job, which it was.
Fast forward to today. I don't get called on assignments because I'm some great travel photojournalist because I'm not. There are better writers and better photographers than me. If you're looking for that guy or gal to capture some mystical "je ne sais quoi" that will win you an award I'm not your man. I'm the one you call because you need 800 to 1400 words that follow the AP Style Guide, convey a simple story to the reader who's most likely consuming said content while driving or on the toilet, requires little to no editing, can be quickly culled as space or as the ego of the editor requires and three solid photos: establishing, context and close-up, within 72 hours without fail or excuse. Not 72 hours and one minute: 72 hours.
I can achieve this by working on my photography and writing every day which allows me to optimize my creative process without sacrificing quality. For photography it means shooting the best image I can in raw format, adjusting the JPEG export in camera and cropping on my Chromebook using an Android photo editing app. The bonus is that Fujifilm cameras produce some of the best JPEGs right out of the camera, better than most others except possibly the much vaulted Leica. From there I'll write the article in Google Docs, add the full sized photos and share.
Why don't I use a Macbook? While I have a Mac Mini that has toiled away for years without failure the same can't be said of my Macbooks in which two died on me in the field. One from the all too common butterfly keyboard failure and another from a bad resistor that regulated power. These early deaths weren't caused by mistreatment but by poor design. Fool me once Apple, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. Chromebooks on the other hand rarely break down, cost less than half that of a Macbook and since everything is backed up in Google Drive I can have a complete system failure and be back up that day with a new machine and at most lose a few hours work unlike the Macbook where I've lost months. The day I can get Photoshop on the Chromebook will be a great day.
Which leads me to the photo at the top of this screed. It had been a long day of writing and holding forth with other writers and I hadn't shot a thing. Okay, maybe less writing and more holding forth with coffee during the day and beer at night. As tradition goes in Vietnam when the head of house locks the front door it stays locked 'til the next morning and I wasn't the head of house. So I headed out to my balcony to see if I could capture something, anything. Maybe "dragging the shutter" on a passing motorbike or the back of a couple holding hands and walking under a street lamp but everyone else had also retired for the evening. All that was in front of me was my empty street bathed in a rather ugly orange-yellow glow from the everpresent high pressure sodium street lights.
Bob Krist, photographer for National Geographic, has a great saying: "You can't say you didn't get the photo because the light wasn't right. You make the light." I had to turn the orange-yellow glowing mess in front of me into something that would look different so I started with the most obvious: the light, in particular the color. Instead of depending on the automatic white balance I cooled the image way, way down until those terminally ugly, orange-yellow street lights became a bright and clean white which added a beautiful and dreamy blue cast over the off white and light green buildings around my home. A quick export to JPEG and I was done. What started as what most would see as a futile task ended up producing a Vietnamese city dreamscape in under ten minutes which allowed me a chance to enjoy one last bia Larue for the night before retiring.
Almost anyone can take a great photo once in a while, maybe one out of fifty, but with the power of understanding how to use your camera and practicing with it every day you can greatly increase those odds and like me turn a simple and boring view from your balcony into something special.
Image: View from my balcony, Đà Nẵng, Việt Nam in Velvia. Fujifilm X-T1 SOOC (straight out of the camera). image: ©Brian Beeler
