Picture Stories by Stephen Alvarez

Don Beni: Peru

It took 2 weeks of walking to find this man. In one of the stranger assignments I’ve ever had a magazine asked me to spend a month in Peru looking for the mythical Don Beni. As a young man Don Beni had ventured into the jungle, exploring Inca ruins, fighting jaguars founding towns and eventually disappearing deep into the rainforest with his oldest daughter.

Before leaving for Peru I knew 2 things.

1) I wanted the portrait to have some production. It didn’t make sense to go all that way and shoot natural light. It would have to be lit.

2) I'd have to carry everything on my back through the rainforest for weeks so the lighting kit was going to have to be lightweight.

In the end I carried 2 hot shoe flashes with manual controls and a medium softbox. The flashes put out just enough light to overpower the sunlight in the clouds behind Don Beni.

The story both of Don Beni and of the expedition to find him is very twisted. It definately falls under the category or “dark tales from the underbelly of journalism.” Maybe one day I will start posting those (any interest?).

-Stephen Alvarez

Lighting: New Britian

I’ve spent 15 years shooting underground exploration, the “Earth from Below.” What is hard for people to understand about the pictures is that the caves are completely dark. There is no light at all inside them. So everything that you see in my pictures has to be lit.

In the years I’ve been pursuing this sort of exploration, my lighting technique has gotten pretty refined. It can be summed up as “less is more.” These two different views of Myo falls are good examples of why I think that way.

The room that contains the falls is enormous and remote. Conventional strobes would not begin to light the room and studio lights that MIGHT be powerful enough are far to heavy and cumbersome to use underground (not to mention the problems of high voltage and water). What I use for lighting big underground spaces is old technology.

In the 1930s and 40s pictures were lit by flashbulbs- think Weegee-. These wonders look like a regular household bulb but contain a magnesium filament that burns only once but produces a huge amount of light. They also have the added advantage of a “slow peak.” The filament takes a long time to burn (1/5 second) so moving water blurs.

In the upper picture David “Moose” Nixon is lit with an electronic strobe in a softbox and the background is lit with a flashbulb. The bulb has to be synched with a special slave and held by an assistant hanging on rope next to the waterfall.

The bottom picture shows another view of Myo falls from across the lake. My assistant Robbie Shone and I are perched on a rock 1/2 out of the water and we can’t even see the falls through all the swirling mist. The camera opens, the bulbs fire... When I first saw the picture come up on the Canon 5d’s screen I thought “wow, that is so cool but no one will ever believe it is underground.”

Golondrinas: Mexico

Philip Rywalder descends 330 meters into Sotano de Los Golondrinas. It is an increadible place Golondrinas. The pit is named after the millions of cave swifts that nest in the pit. In the morning the swifts leave their nests en mass and fly, swirling around the pit in a great tornado of birds who emerge from the cave’s entrance in one quick cloud.
2 of my assistants decided to spend the night at the bottom of the pit. The next morning after they had made to long climb out I noticed that Matt looked a little more tired than normal. When I asked how they slept he replied “Terrible, it was an all night bird Orgy.” Apparently the swifts spent all night flying around the cave and at one point even bombarded their tent.
The Banff Mountain Center had given me a grant to make pictures in a few deep pits in Mexico to continue work on a cave book I’ll publish next fall.

Slow Boat: New Britain

One of the best nights of sleep I ever had was on this boat. I had spent a year and a half planning, training for, securing funding and generally sweating worrying and fretting about a big caving expedition to the island of New Britain. After all that time all expedition members and our tons of gear were on board as we cast off from Rabaul bound for the south coast of New Britain, PNG. Finally, at last, there was nothing more I could do. No phone calls I could make, no spread sheets to update, no email I could send, no last minute things to pick up. If it wasn't on the ship, it wasn't going with us.

That night on the deck of the freighter setting off into warm water of the Solomon Sea I drifted into the deepest sleep. When I woke up just before dawn that morning I found this scene.

As it turned out we all needed our rest. The expedition was a long difficult trip, but very very successful.

-Stephen Alvarez

Canon EOS 1ds mark II 24mm lens

Think Fixed Tech: Quick Tips

I know we have gone over backups and some nice apps to help any photographer plan and produce. I have received some requests to go over some more immediate and practical aspects of photo workflow and advantages of OS X Leopard. Leopard has been out now for over half a year and still there are many people that have not upgraded. While it has some nice performance upgrades, there are three things that are quite amazing, especially for a photographer in the field. Lets assume you do not have immediate access to your primary desktop and the goal is to ensure you make it home with all your images. Consider, if you have not already:
1) Time Machine. Simple to use and simpler to set up. Travel with two or more mini hard drives (I cannot say enough good things about these. The drives and bridges are second to none.). Plug one in, the window pops up and off you go. Hourly backups.
2) Spotlight. Leopard's spotlight has some big improvements over Tiger and can greatly increase the speed and efficacy of searches, especially for any metadata you might have input.
3) Back to My Mac and Screen Sharing. In the event you do have an internet connection, you can remotely control your main machine at home and get whatever info from it you need. A poor man's cloud computing for sure but very effective.

Anyone interested in learning about setting up remote services to upload or access files from anywhere?

Geof Bowie
www.thinkfixed.com