The Freeman View

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10/06/09

One of the things I love about photography is the sheer variety, and the freedom to explore all kinds of ways, and reasons, for shooting. I’m constantly surprised, and delighted, at fresh ways of seeing, and fresh definitions of what is worth seeing. There was a time when photography was more-or-less neatly compartmentalised into different fields, such as fashion, still-life, reportage, wildlife, news, and so on. Even then it was  fascinating to see how other people put the same camera that I was holding to completely different uses.

This neatness of classification has started to break down, not least because the old, established ways of using photographs are changing. Newspapers and magazines, once the media that defined most photography, are going through very difficult times, and the illness may be terminal. This is bad news for professionals across a broad spectrum, or rather it’s a call to re-energise and diversify. Here this month, Brian Harris, one of the UK’s consummate professionals in photojournalism, gives us an insider’s view of this world. And this brings me to one of the aims of this site, which is to open a window on the working lives and methods of many different professional photographers. We’ll be ranging widely across subject material, countries, purpose, visual language, and the media used.

We can all learn from what others do. Well, I certainly can. And it’s salutary to look at all the possibilities that the camera offers, and has offered, to people with different interests and skills. That’s why I’ll have a guest photographer each month, and that’s also why I’ll be talking about what I’m doing. This is not simply because I like writing and talking (though I do), but so that you can look over my shoulder and see what I have to do to keep my photography on track. I do it in my own way, which is if course different from other photographers’, and it has its successes and failures. I can’t promise to be completely honest about the latter, though I’ll try. There’ll be a mixture of creative concerns and practicalities.

Well, this is June and issue number one, and the reason the launch of the site is running a little late is that I was away on a six-week trip, and frankly my mind was on other things, namely the assignment. Which was … a book that I’m shooting on the longest trade route in the ancient world, called the Tea-Horse Route, which ran from the far southwest of China up to Tibet, and then down to India, with a few side-routes thrown in.

One or two shots from the road, then….

I should explain first how my work schedule goes, because it’s not completely normal. As eighty to ninety percent of my work is editorial, on long projects with, usually, a large book as the end-result, I spend an average of seven months of each year on the road, these days mainly in Asia. A typical and ideal trip runs to around five or six weeks, sometimes rather more, sometimes a little less. For me that’s ideal because it gives me enough time to settle in to where I’m going, with leeway to change plans depending on what opportunities come up. Longer than that and fatigue and homesickness tend to set in. Shorter than that would demand much more precise planning, and in the subjects I choose there’s a fair amount of uncertainty and exploration; in addition, more frequent long-haul air travel would eat into the budget significantly.

So, I’m either away for a duration or back in London for a similar amount of time. Quite a regime contrast. Editing and processing take up much of the home-time, even though, compared with some people I know, I don’t shoot major gigage. The last trip, most of it in Yunnan, produced 4,000 images and aroud 100GB. I do some immediate edits on the road, throwing away any technical errors and in some situations shots from early in a series that have clearly been bettered by those at the end, although there’s a risk in doing this without time to reflect. Security and back-ups are a constant obsession, which is more to do with my nature than anything else. My on-the-road procedure goes like this…

At the end of every day, images are downloaded from the cards to the laptop, and given numbers.

Ideally every day, but at least every two days, the images on the laptop are copied onto two external hard drives - mirror copies.

As soon as possible, I caption the images on the laptop, which is my primary archive for the trip. This makes sure that I get the right information, and also saves a huge amount of work back home. It’s a duty, but pays off in the end. Captioning means entering title, place and date, a short caption and long (extended) caption, and keywords. If I manage to do this at the end of the day of shooting, then the captioned images are copied tot he external hard drives. Otherwise the captioned images have to be re-copied to the hard drives later, which is a bit of a waste of time.

On this trip, I filled up the laptop’s drive before the end, which I hadn’t expected, and so I bought two more external drives in Kunming to carry the backup overflow. Travelling, particularly by air, means splitting the laptop and the drives among different cases, for safety. There’s little point having a backup if you carry it in the same place as the primary.

That captioning makes life easier right now, and is one less job to do. I can concentrate on making a more considered selection than I did on the road, and on processing the selects. So, this month breaks down as follows:

One week in Singapore, filming a promotional video for Sony. This time I’m in front of the camera, and the script calls for me photographing a Chinese opera backstage and on-stage, using the A900. In fact, I’ve been using this camera in China during April-May, and am very impressed. Very solid, professional, no-nonsense, as well as beginning to turn me into a pixel addict.

Planning and preparing for the next trips in August and in November. The research and logistics on a large book project like this take up a great deal of time and energy, and this includes a pile of books ordered on-line. My reading list includes The True History of Tea, newly out from my UK publishers Thames & Hudson; Journey to a War by Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden about their reporting in 1937 of the Japanese invasion of China; Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China; et al.

preparing two photography-teaching videos, one of them with footage that I shot in China in May. Writing the scripts, preparing the still material and filming in the studio and office is a longer job than I expected.

Researching and beginning to write the sequel to The Photographer’s Eye.

In other words, very little photography, which is not a good thing, but unavoidable. That will all change on the next five-week trip, starting in August, when there’ll be little else but.

Tags: asia, backups, China, monk, monks, photojournalism, Singapore, Sony A900, Tea-Horse Route, Tibet, travel