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Storytelling

On April 3rd, photographer Chris Linder and science writer Helen Fields joined a team of 38 scientists for a 40-day expedition to study the impact of climate change on the Bering Sea ecosystem. While crisscrossing the Bering Sea with the science team, Chris and Helen will post photo essays, sounds, and videos to the Polar Discovery website every day, as part of the Live from the Poles project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Richard King Mellon Foundation. This week Chris relays his “Inspector Clouseau” trick to getting candid shots from an interesting angle. Sign up for Chris’s webinar on May 5, and check out his past posts on writing the grants for such science-based photo expeditions and preparing for a sub-zero photo shoot.

Chris's photo of Marty observing sea birds, taken by hanging his camera over the edge of the observatory deck roof. Photo by Chris Linder, WHOI

After 22 days photographing daily stories aboard a 420-foot ship, I can tell you that I’ve used up all of the obvious vantage points. I’ve climbed to the aloft conn, the highest point on the ship, for night shots of the ship moving through ice and low-crawled around the main deck to shoot instruments being hoisted into the air. There are very few places I haven’t poked my camera.

For one story we covered the seabird and marine mammal observers. They work in one of the most difficult places to shoot: the bridge. This is where the crew drives the ship. It is high up and lined with giant square windows from end to end, which let in a lot of light. Since this is the only light source, you’re faced with a monster contrast problem. Add to this the fact that these observers are, well, observing. That means that they are pressed up against the windows with binoculars stuck to their eyes. This leaves you with a rather predictable side shot or a very unflattering back-of-the-head shot, both with a washed out sky background.

As I was pondering this dilemma, I watched a bird fly by and I thought –- that’s it! I’ll shoot them from a bird’s perspective—outside the windows looking in. Well, it turns out that there is no way to look in those windows from outside unless you’ve got wings. Plus it’s a good 50 foot drop to the deck. However, there is easy access to the roof, which is also called the flying bridge. So I thought, what if I lowered a camera from above?

I decided to use a monopod to lower my camera to window level. I attached my Nikon D700, with a 14-24mm lens set to 14mm, to a Gitzo monopod using a Really Right Stuff monopod head. Then came the tricky part. We were steaming at about 10 knots when I took the shot, into a 20 knot headwind. That makes 30 knots of wind in my face (which is roughly 35 miles per hour). The air temperature was about 22 Fahrenheit, so the wind chill was in the flesh-numbing range. Yes, I could have done this in calm weather and better light, but I had just thought of it and that day’s story was due in a few hours. So I had to make it work.

I tied a line from the camera to a railing so that if anything went wrong I wouldn’t be dropping thousands of dollars worth of gear onto a very unforgiving deck. I prefocused the lens and set the exposure manually so that ambient light coming through the viewfinder wouldn’t bias the exposure. I set the interval timer to click off a shot per second. Laying on the deck, I gradually lowered the camera four feet down, until it was level with the windows below. I bracketed the composition by slightly turning the monopod as the camera clicked off the shots. The first attempt was a failure because Liz, one of the observers, couldn’t stop laughing when she saw the camera (which in all honesty, had the very unsubtle look of an Inspector Clouseau spy camera). On the next round I tried Marty, and he was so intent on his work he didn’t even notice the camera. Those were my best frames — they create a completely candid portrait of a bird observer at work.

Be Part of the RESOLUTION: It’s always a challenge to find a new perspective or to work with a challenging lighting situation. Do you have a story about how you overcame such obstacles on a shoot?

  • In the latest update on Iranian-American photojournalist Roxana Saberi, after being charged with espionage two weeks ago, she was subsequently convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. Her parents, Reza and Akiko Saberi, who are staying in Tehran to press for her release and Roxana has announced a hunger strike in protest. In the meantime, students at Northwestern University, where Roxana received her graduate degree in journalism, are rallying in her support. According to ABC News, Roxana’s parents have hired new lawyers for her appeal, which could be decided within a week.
  • Congratulations to Damon Winter of the New York Times and Patrick Farrell of the Miami Herald, the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes for photography. Damon’s coverage of the Obama presidential campaign garnered the award in the Feature Photography category, and Patrick’s photo story of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike in Haiti earned him the award in the Breaking New category.
  • Showing that they aren’t resting on their Pulitzer laurels, the New York Times posted a nice multimedia slide show featuring Tyler Hicks’ photographs of American soldiers in Afghanistan.
  • Photojojo alerted us to World Pinhole Camera Day on Sunday (April 26) and also to the extravagant pinhole cameras for free download from Corbis. They come as a pdf that you cut out and assemble yourself — warning, these are the most complicated instructions we’ve seen in a while, but they look cool! All the designs are created by Fwis, a small design firm based in New York.

On April 3rd, photographer Chris Linder and science writer Helen Fields joined a team of 38 scientists for a 40-day expedition to study the impact of climate change on the Bering Sea ecosystem. While crisscrossing the Bering Sea with the science team, Chris and Helen will post photo essays, sounds, and videos to the Polar Discovery website every day, as part of the Live from the Poles project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Richard King Mellon Foundation. This week Chris explains the importance of simultaneously making images for short-term and long-term photo essays. Sign up for Chris’s webinar on May 5, and check out his past posts on writing the grants for such science-based photo expeditions and preparing for a sub-zero photo shoot.
Photo caption: An example of give and take. While I loved the composition of this shot, which shows Dr. Katrin Iken taking an ice core on a small ice floe near the ship, we used an image that also showed the ship for the daily dispatch. Photo by Chris Linder, WHOI

Chris says he loves the composition of this shot, which shows Dr. Katrin Iken taking an ice core on a small ice floe near the ship, but he ended up using an image that also showed the ship for the daily dispatch. Photo by Chris Linder, WHOI

After two weeks on an icebreaker in the Bering Sea, science writer Helen Fields and I have settled into a comfortable groove, cranking out photo essays every night for the Polar Discovery website. This is our process for turning out daily news with an ice-bound, two-person team.

The goal of the Live from the Poles project is to tell stories about how scientists study the polar regions. Our stories fall into two broad categories. If something unique happened during the day, the photo essay will be a “Wow, this amazing thing happened today” narrative. To keep the website fresh and interesting for 40 days, we also sprinkle in stories that draw photos from different days, like the one we’re working on today about the different types and shapes of sea ice. So while I may be shooting for a “daily news” story, I will also have about a dozen other future stories rattling around in my head.

For example, I may be photographing a graduate student analyzing the contents of a mud sample from the seafloor. I’ll shoot not only the storytelling shots showing her doing the work in the lab, surrounded by mud and equipment, but also a few tightly cropped portraits for a possible future story featuring graduate students, plus some close-ups of her mud-covered gloves for a story about working hands. As I walk from the lab back to my stateroom, I notice a textbook example of newly formed sea ice glinting in the light of the setting sun, and I snap that for today’s post about ice.

Throughout the day Helen and I compare notes on our theme and the list of potential photographs that will illustrate that story. I typically take between 500 and 1,000 12-megapixel RAW photos during the course of the day. After dinner I download the images to an external hard drive and edit, deleting the junk and moving keepers into appropriately named collections using Adobe’s Lightroom software. This takes roughly two hours.

Once I have a collection of 20-30 photos, the haggling begins. Helen and I sit down and discuss what shots best tell the day’s story and the order in which they should appear. This means that some of my pet shots don’t make the cut because they don’t fit the story. Conversely, sometimes Helen has to do extra reporting so we can include a really outstanding image.

While Helen is writing, I do some basic tone and color corrections, size the images for the web, and email the photos to the editor and web designer back at our home base, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The entire process is usually finished by 10pm. Then I format the compactflash cards and head back out on deck to catch the last hour of light and some nighttime science operations. It always pays to work ahead because there are no days off until we get back to the pier on May 12.

In 2001, world-renowned photojournalist Reza Deghati (known simply as Reza by most), founded Aina, an international non-profit organization based in Afghanistan that cultivates a well-trained independent media in order to promote democracy and to help heal post-conflict societies. In this and upcoming posts he talks about his experiences as a photojournalist in war-torn countries, how the idea for Aina came to him, the successes of the organization, and where it still struggles.

©Reza, courtesy Aina

When I started photographing 30 years ago, all the photojournalists in the world, we all had almost the same tools: one Nikon camera. When you went to cover African or Asian countries, they had the same camera. The writers and journalists had only a pen and a notebook. Everyone had the same things. But in the last 30 years, we went through an information revolution. We in the west are the first ones who have access to these new tools. We are the ones getting the best laptops, cameras, and video cameras. In the meantime, considering how expensive it is not only to buy this equipment but to be trained on it, we are leaving the whole other part of the world — non-western countries — behind.

Their journalists and artists and poets don’t even have money to buy a pen and a notebook while we have access to the top technological materials. So how can they connect to us, or their own nation, if they don’t have tools? So I thought, each country needs just a few hundred people to be trained and to get those tools. If we can help them, train them, and give them access to tools, we have connected the whole humanity of the world together again.

My other observation was that one of our main tasks is to say that democracy is the best way of having a government. We are trying to spread democracy. The only way to achieve that is to let the people themselves make democracy. You cannot force people to be democratic. And the best tool for democracy is freedom of speech, which needs free media. If there is no free media, there is no democracy.

With those three observations in my head, and running from one conflict to another, I started thinking, “What will be the 21st century’s new organization that could bring all these elements together and effectively help solve those problems?”

I had started training local photographers when I was going on assignments, in ’86 in the Philippines, and then the former Soviet Union. Then I went to Bangladesh to help Shahidul [Alam] start his own school, and I was the first teacher in that school. Afterwards I went to Beijing for three years to teach in the university and train professional photographers. This was how I began to realize the answer to my question: Create an independent media and culture center in each country, where a couple hundred local journalists and talented young people would be trained to have access to new technology. We would train local people, not as a school, but as a job training center. The idea was to start media projects immediately, like independent magazines, children’s magazines, women’s magazines, a radio station for women. Then in the meantime you have people who are trained launching their projects.

When I wrote all those ideas down, I was looking for one country that would be the pilot country, which I would use as a laboratory for the whole thing. It was 2000 and the obvious place for me was Afghanistan. First, because it was the darkest place of humanity: the Taliban were there, Russians had been there, there was civil war, and Al Qaeda fighting them. Plus, the world had totally forgotten them for 10 years. So I thought Afghanistan would be best place for a pilot project. And this was the whole start of AINA.

The official launch was in July 2001 in the north part of Afghanistan, in a rebel region, when the whole country was under Taliban. Then suddenly 9/11 happened. Everything changed. The Taliban fled and we entered Kabul and started a center there immediately. We were the first NGO that started a project there after the fall of the Taliban.

In Afghanistan during the pilot project, I realized that the people who would have an especially big impact would be the women journalist. During the conflict, my hatred of the war made me think that if women could take more control of the media and government, we could grow toward a more peaceful world in a century or two. So this was how we started saying, let’s start having much more women in the training, especially in Afghanistan.

That’s how we launched Voice of Afghan Women, which is a radio station. By doing this, I realized how important this tool is, and how it reaches millions of Afghan women in their remote homes. They cannot read. They cannot even go out. They cannot have access to magazines or books, but radio can be brought to them in their homes. So we launched this women’s station and started distributing small transistor radios to remote places, 5,000 of them. Now from just one radio, information is going to the whole village.

Be Part of the RESOLUTION: Have you observed the growing gap between the technology Western photojournalists use compared with the rest of the world? Do you think there is potential in this model of helping local journalists to cover their own country?

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