Jambo fellow travelers!
Bwana Brucie is back at the rancho at last…
I trust all of you traveled safely and are now sparklingly-clean and well rested. I wasn’t terribly
jet-lagged after the trek back to
Arizona
and am already back in the swing of things.
I shipped the mighty 800mm back to Canon and have begun to edit both
stills and video. I’ll be creating a
video montage that will segue into a tutorial on image finishing and digital
painting. The rough cut begins today and
then it’s into the studio for me. I plan
to document the painting process with two cameras and screen capture software
so it should be a nice finished piece.
All video footage will have to be sourced from my Sony EX-1
as it turns out. I did a fair amount of
capture with the small-but-mighty Canon HV-30 but unfortunately none of that
footage is available. Somewhere between
Arusha and
Phoenix
a scoundrel got into my checked bag and stole my HV-30 and all of my exposed
tapes. Major bummer. Therein lays the problem of tape-based
capture. If I had chosen one of the new HF-100 SD card-based HD Camcorders I
would have made an on-site back-up to my Western Digital Passport Elite-based
RAID array. And all would be well. Except for the loss of the camera, that is.
Thankfully, all of my Sony EX-1 footage was in my carry-on so I’ve averted
total disaster on the video front.
Mendel, from the first group, also reported the loss of two
iPods from his luggage. Did anyone else have a similar experience with sticky-fingered
baggage handlers?
My time in
Tanzania
added up to a solid month and I enjoyed every minute. Well, the strong winds and driven sand
experienced at the Maasai village on Trip Two did tax my patience more than a
bit but other than that I had a terrific time.
It was great to travel with such an interesting bunch of folks and many
wonderful images were captured. I’ll soon
be assembling a gallery of images provided by my two troupes and we’ll all get
a chance to share. In the meantime, anecdotes
and reminiscences are welcome!
As some of you know, I had an opportunity to stick around for a third session with my new pal Erica Thomson.
Erica received a grant to do some photographic studies and create a
gallery of images for a school dedicated to a sadly-departed family friend. We stayed an extra day in
Tarangire
National Park
chasing elephants and then retreated to the lush slopes of the escarpment to
spend our remaining days at the fascinating Gibbs Farm, a working coffee
plantation that is also a fine cottage-based lodge. We worked on creating environmental
portraiture using several handsome Maasai models enlisted from the farm’s
extensive staff. We also visited a local village marketplace where our driver, Kileo, greased the
wheels to allow a bit of photojournalism. Working from a fixed location allowed more
time to review the results of our cultural captures and revisit those
situations that we felt we could improve.
Since these images are all ones that none of you have experienced for
yourselves, I’ll offer a few for review….
Erica proved to be a quick study and generated many
first-rate images of her own.
We did a lot of available light portraiture around Gibbs
Farm and there were cool locations galore.
We considered the visual value of locations that offered “portico style”
lighting, indirect window light, and open shade “edge lighting”. I initially selected locations, backgrounds,
and demonstrated how I work with the subjects’ staging and posing. After we captured some images and made our
subjects comfortable with the process I turned the reins over to Erica. She demonstrated a good eye for the capture
and post processes and began to sharply hone her observational skills as
well. Fun stuff!
Here are a few more of mine. Horizontals this time. All images in this collection were captured using Canon's new 200mm f2 IS lens on a 1Ds MkIII 22 megapixel body. Special thanks to Chris Kittredge for the nice sunset portrait of Yours Truly....
