Good things come to those who wait.

I feel like the last three (four?) months have been spent in a kind of static hibernation, waiting for something to shift. Waiting for the universe to just give me a sign.

Big news today. I received a big ol’ grant from the OAC to finish up (start?) the Guyana project. Ecstatic doesn’t begin to describe how I’m feeling.

Today I can finally call myself a filmmaker. Win!

Usually I like days in the field. It gets me out of the basement. Today was cold. Too cold. And wet.

I’ve been struggling with the idea of scientific visual storytelling. How do you make a story ‘pop’ when it’s really just the facts? Perhaps this is the challenge of all science communication. Make it interesting, make it factual, capture imagination.

This is what I came up with. I kept it short. Fish Surgery.

It felt good to have my DSLR in my hands again. This fall has been filled with writing applications for projects I might do one day. It’s nice to just do. I’m heading to Guyana in ten days, for a month full of doing. It will be just what the doctor ordered.

A field technician wades in to retrieve the net.

The bounty. Researches must sort through nets to find Grass Pickerel, a species at risk and the subject of the study.

The tools.

Fish Surgery. Grass Pickerel are outfitted with radio tags for year round monitoring and evaluation.

Storm front over Churchill, Manitoba

I watched this terrific storm roll in over what remains of NASA’s rocket centre. I thought to myself, this is like an aurora. If they were still here, maybe they would launch a rocket into it. Maybe.

It’s been a long week, and a tough shoot. We are without a bear guide. I have a gun license. This means in addition to two camera, a tripod, lights and mics, I am now carrying a winchester 12 gauge shot gun. I am the last line of defence against 1,200 pounds of giant white predator. It’s more than I bargained for.

Sometimes, while I am walking along this great moon landscape, gun in one hand, mk11 in the other, I think to myself, this is my life.

How did I get here?

Former rocket launchers, Churchill, Manitoba.

It’s been raining for days. Raining too hard to traverse marshy bogland in search of biting flies (pity.) In the distance I can see tin-can structures, pointed skyward. This is all that remains of the Canadian military’s lengthy operations in the region.

I want to go and explore them, but I’m told it’s too dangerous. I can’t be sure if this is because the buildings are old and weathered, or because there are polar bears lurking just beyond the next willow.

Communities of migrant workers, known as bateyes, spring up within the cane fields. They are far from the rest of civilization, and become home for those who venture across the border. Most will never return to Haiti.

stacked cane

cane cutter

long days in the field

25 years in the bateyes.

Jonny

We are squatting in what remains of a mostly abandoned building in Port au Prince.

English is the language of business,

Spanish is the language of love,

And Creole, Creole is how I speak with God.

shoes

]]> http://www.earthfeed.com/vote-for-my-photo/ /feed 0 http://www.earthfeed.com/three-step-guide-to-photography/ http://www.earthfeed.com/three-step-guide-to-photography/ #comments Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:30:38 +0000 Earth Feed http://www.earthfeed.com/?p=485 Three step guide to photography:

01: be interesting.
02: find interesting people.
03: find interesting places.

Nothing about cameras.

via Clayton Cubitt. HT Aaron Leaf

I’ve just finished reading Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. It’s got me thinking about the nature of travel and tourism. I travel a lot (too much for someone who claims to have a green thumb.) These days it’s less as a tourist, and more for work. Still, I’m forced to admit a certain degree of voyeurism in the work that I do. There are tough ethical questions that need to be asked, and after Zambia, I can’t help but ask them every day. A Small Place is a good read, and made me reexamine some of my own assumptions on post-colonial landscapes.

From the book:

Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they would be less lonely and empty — a European disease. Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way. The people in Antigua now, the people who really think of themselves as Antiguans (and the people who would immediately come to your mind when you think about what Antiguans might be like; I mean, supposing you were to think about it), are the descendants of these noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your masters yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.