Photographic Originality.2: Day & Night Composites

I tried out the Triggertrap on a view of my backyard under the snow, taking photos at 15-minute intervals all night and into the morning. Then I selected two of them:

and then I combined these two, with a gradual transition between them:

This is for purposes of illustration only. My backyard is not that interesting. Imagine if the subject were a city with lights, such as Varanasi, India, or Lhasa, Tibet, or Antananarivo, Madagascar, or Madaba, Jordan. Or how about a series of photos of the dawn over the Nairobi Wildlife Park?

I tried this in Paris in 2007, with the following rather crude result:

Approaches to Photographic Originality

In this oversaturated world of images,  how can I bring back photographs with some originality, with my personal stamp? After all, the images of each destination on Google are pretty damned good. Any calendar maker would be proud to include them.
Here are some answers:
1. Super Wide Angle. I love this lens. It's especially provocative in small spaces, since it takes in more than a single glance can. It also adds edge distortion, which can be stimulating when used correctly. And it shines in asymmetrical uses—views from extreme angles, which present familiar subjects in new ways, or bring an immediate foreground into play with a sweeping background.

2. Panoramic camera. This is the film camera I'm bringing along. Its perspective is very different from that of the super wide angle, presenting a scene across a wide horizon with equal immediacy.

3. Timed series of exposures. I have a device called a TriggerTrap which connects an app on my smart phone to my camera and can trip the shutter at pre-determined intervals. Thus I can set it up to take photos throughout the night and into the dawn every 15 minutes, capturing whatever city I'm in as it wakes up. Then I can make composites of these for even more startling effects. (No samples yet.)

4. Provocative Juxtapositions. We street photographers are always looking for these. Alex Webb is a master at them. The super wide angle helps, but is not essential. I've had some successes here, and I'll be looking for more:

There will be more, such as long exposures on the street at night, so that people are blurs (or with flash, so they're fixed plus a blur), with a sharp background. In any case, my goal is always to come back with unfamiliar images, even images no one has seen before, even of familiar, overly photographed places. Stay tuned.

Traveling Light

There's a whole new way of packing out there, and a whole new wardrobe for plane travel. I'm fortunate that my neighbor across the street has done a great deal of "exotic" travel in the past few years and has many recommendations about clothing and luggage. The major revelation is that one only need bring two (2!) pairs of underwear! They must be the quick-dry kind (dries in 4 hours), and you wash them every night. The brand I bought is Ex Officio, and they're available on Amazon.com. I'm in the process of buying two insect-repellent long-sleeved shirts, two insect-repellent pairs of pants, a billed hat with a curtain down the back, a light-weight multi-use water repellent coat, whose lining comes out, some light weight hiking boots, and a rolling duffle that works as a backpack. Now what about socks and pyjamas?
I'm putting my camera equipment in a dedicated compartmentalized rolling carry-on bag from Thank Tank. All of it doesn't fit in there, so I'll be packing the soft stuff like pouches in the main bag, or carrying them on my belt. Instead of my usual gadget bag, I'll be bringing multiple belt-pouches and a vest that will hold lenses. This will distribute the weight better on long hikes. It's a system by Think Tank and seems to be the obvious solution to save one's back and shoulder. I still need to buy my image storage device, the Digital Foci Photo Safe 500 GB—two of them. But an official from the company advised me to wait for a new one coming out. I'll want my entire checked baggage to weigh less than 20 Kg, or 44 lbs, even though the trans-Atlantic limit is now 50 lbs. Some of the short-run flights have lower weight limits. I should have everything I'll need within about 3 weeks.
I'll take any advice from travelers.

Medical Precautions for Exotic Travel

One of the most important preparations for a trip to these areas is to get the proper immunizations. There's a company that specializes in this called Passport Health, with clinics all around the country, staffed with registered nurses. The closest one to me is at 81 Northfield Avenue in West Orange, NJ, where the staff person is Jamie Napolitano, RN. When you call to make the appointment she asks you your itinerary and has a spiral-bound printout when you arrive, indicating all the health dangers in each country you plan to visit. When you arrive she tells you your choices of type of vaccine, when you need to get them, etc. I need hepatitis A & B, tetanus, typhoid and malaria. The first two were injections she gave me on the spot, with a need to return for two more for hepatitis. The typhoid was an oral treatment, for capsules take on alternate days 1 hour before breakfast, and malaria was a prescription, amounting to ten more pills than days I'll be gone, which required that my doctor phone it in to the pharmacy.

It's not cheap: the initial visit plus shots was $439, and the two subsequent shots will cost $166 each. The malaria pills were $135 for 80  of them, but that's with Medicare. They are otherwise over $600. I mostly stay away from the healthcare system and maintain my health via diet and exercise, but I didn't want to take chances in countries where the climate is dramatically different than our own.

Jamie is friendly and supportive and very knowledgeable about the risks in the various countries.

Welcome to Marvels2014, my travel blog for our Round-the-World in 70 Days trip from March 31 to June 10, 2014. Author and professor Barbara Brodman and I have been planning it for almost a year now, and as we come down to less than two months before our departure, we're lining up the remaining hotel reservations, our balloon ride over Cappadocia, short flights not included in our overall flight package, etc.

Here's a link with more details: marvels2014—Round the World in 70 Days

We have several purposes for our journey. We're both travel addicts, and we'll be visiting places we've wanted to visit for most of our lives. Barbara will write about them, and I will photograph them and write about them. I have a long track record photographing geology, landscapes, archaeology, people in all kinds of situations, architecture, botanicals, and animals. I'll be photographing macro and panoramics (with a pano film camera). We want to show how anyone in good health can take a similar trip at our age (67 and 70), and that you can plan it yourself and be freer to wander and explore than you would be on an organized trip. Of course, you have to do more research, but there are now lots of ways to inform yourself so you don't miss major destinations in the countries you visit.

We'll also both be interviewing people we meet and videoing the interviews. My Canon 5D MarkIII is also a fine video camera, and I have a Rode microphone for good audio. I'll be asking anyone who'll talk to me in English or French a number of questions, including how things have changed in their country in their lifetime, the effects of globalization on their economy, on climate change on their weather, agriculture, water availability, and on the native flora and fauna, and what message they might want to send to the people of the US.

For a more vivid account of this travel project, please click here for my Indiegogo campaign video. I'm offering the disk of the interviews I collect as well as limited edition prints of various sizes (your choice from the 200 best) in exchange for modest financial help. These funds will go towards some of the expenses of the trip (by no means all), as well as the creation of a photo book on the project.

I welcome your comments. Feel free to spread the word to other travel addicts!

This is the composite image on my Indiegogo campaign page. Since I don't have my own photographs yet of the places we will visit, I put this together with analogous images. The woman is a friend I made in Jamaica last May. She was the spirit leader on an afternoon cruise. We developed a friendly connection, and I learned her life story. So she is the model of the kind of contacts I expect to make a lot of during this trip. The background photo that looks like a piece of exotic architecture is really the Palais idéal of Ferdinand Cheval, a French mail carrier, who spent 27 years constructing it in his back yard, finishing in 1912. It is considered a masterpiece of outsider architecture. The Book of Marvels cover is from a 1960 edition of this 1938 classic, which I read as a teenager, and which fueled my desire for travel. Please visit the Indiegogo page for more images and a complete summary of our itinerary: marvels2014—Round-the-World in 70 Days