Picture Stories by Stephen Alvarez

For Phone Friday: Mobile Photo Gallery

I feel like I am making some sort of confession here: Yes I am a professional photographer, yes I use hipstamatic on my iphone...

In the past I've talked the importance of a photographer having a visual diary, a place to record daily images that are just about what you are thinking and how you are feeling. That's what I've been using the camera phone / hipstamatic combination for the last couple of months and I have put some of the pictures up as a gallery on my archive (here). 

I've chosen hipstamatic because I like the set it and forget it aspect. In that it reminds me of shooting with a Dianna camera, one setting, what you get is what you get. Instagram (which I often use to upload) makes me look at the phone too much. With a visual diary I want to be looking at the world around me, not at the back of my phone.

Stephen Alvarez

Sewanee, TN

Keeping camera size down Canon 1Ds X

above, James Alker gets drenched under Ora waterfall, New Guinea

Canon's announcement of a new, big DSLR (here) got me thinking about camera size. 5 years ago I went on a 3 month expedition to New Britain. I packed a full sized Canon EOS 1ds MK II. At the time it was the absolute top of the line machine. 17 megapixels and absolutely reliable, fantastic camera. In the end, I hardly shot with it. The camera was just too big to carry around in the jungle and deep underground. It would not fit into my pelican 1300 case with a lens on, and having an unlensed camera in the situation above is just not an option. 

In the end I shot most of the story with the Canon 5D that I brought as a back up. True it had 5 million fewer pixels but I was able to get it into places that I never could have gotten the 1ds MK II.

So now we have the 1ds X which no doubt will be a much better camera than the 5D MK II that I'm now using but will it be worth the weight and size? Doubtful for the sort of adventure work I do. However, for a lot of journalism weight and size are not so much of an issue and for video work who cares about weight...

You have to be realistic about what the tools you choose will do. Sometimes a smaller, lower quality camera that you can actually carry is much better than something better.

Stephen Alvarez

Sewanee, TN

Wedding in Saint Petersburg

We had the most beautiful day in Saint Petersburg yesterday. Blue sky, sun even if the temperature was a bit cold. Lots of people were out for wedding photos on the Neva River. Today? 5°C clouds and rain. Time to head for Paris.

Stephen Alvarez

Saint Petersburg

No lava today

I've spent all day in the rain today trying to find a new panoramic perspective of Saint Petersburg. The lava and the steam reminds me of how hot the world can be sometimes. Northern Russia is distinctly cold today.

Stephen Alvarez

St. Petersburg

Photography and memory

Walking past Polka Gallery day before yesterday, Robert Clark's 9-11 image stopped me in my tracks. When I first saw the image 10 years ago -shortly after 9-11- two things flashed through my head. First was shear professional awe for a photographer who had gotten himself into the right place at the right time with a loaded, functioning camera. The second more powerful thought was "thank god that memory isn't mine." 

Photography and memory have always shared an intimate and uneasy relationship. We rely on pictures to reinforce experience. I find that if I have photos of something I often let them do memory's heavy lifting. It is not that I am particularly lazy, it is just that I tend to trust a recorded image more than my memory. There is a tendency to let images supplant memories. Look back on any vacation more than 3 years ago, do you remember the vacation or the pictures of the vacation? Looking back at those happy pictures edges the memory of the event out. Am I the only one who does this?

There will always be certain events no photo can replace. Maybe it is because I was not in New York that day that the pictures of 9-11 have not replaced my very clear memories. To this day I can remember the jet lag induced confusions (I had just returned to Tennessee from the middle east). The phone call telling me to turn on the radio, holding my 3 year old son, standing in my dining room and listening in horror as the first tower came down. 

People a couple of generations older than me talk about the Kennedy assassination and where they were, what they were doing when they heard the news. They never talk about the Zapruder film. I think it is like that for us with 9/11. It was an event so traumatic and wide spread that pictures of it will never replace the memory. Perhaps we store really life altering events in a different place in our brain than pleasent memories. Somewhere more reptilian, harder to replace. For those sorts of memories pictures can offer a key to them (as Robert's picture, unexpected, on a Paris street did for me) but photographs will never replace them.

 

Stephen Alvarez

Saint Petersburg, Russia

Rowing the Arno

A quick frame from Florence. I just spent a couple days there on a wonderful vacation (I know some of you think my life seems like one long vacation but the travel is really work). Now I am in the exquisitely dreary rain in France headed to Russia and back to work.

Stephen Alvarez

Paris 

Phone Friday: so what did I take?

So what did I end up carrying in the Grand Canyon? Well I sucked it up and carried both the Iphone and the 5D MK II with a 16-35mm lens (I left my long pants, and extra shirt behind to save on weight). But the what I carried probably isn't as important as the why I carried it. On this trip I wasn't working, I did not go to the Grand Canyon to make great photographs of it, I went to see the place and to spend time walking with my 74 year old father on his birthday. And while I shot a lot of pictures on the Iphone (they are here) I wanted to make sure that I had some images from the trip that were high quality, that I would be able to print large and look back on in 20 years and remember being there, with him. Yes the Iphone would have worked, but somehow I felt I should take something better than it. So the picture below, while not an important picture in the world of photography, will certainly stand the test of time for me. Glad I carried the extra weight, and happy birthday Dad.

Now for anyone who had to hike near me while I wore the same shirt 4 days in a row I apologise.

Stephen Alvarez

Sewanee, TN

Grand Canyon

Busy week. I'm headed to the Grand Canyon on Wednesday. Last time I was there we rappelled 100 feet down a 600 foot cliff and swung into to a cave to make the photo above. I have to tell you starting the drop over a 600 foot cliff knowing that you don't have enough rope to reach the bottom is pretty intimidating. This time it is a North Rim to South Rim hike. Not nearly as scary, but just as beautiful.

Stephen Alvarez

Sewanee, TN

Earth from Below: adding to big projects

Above an Earth from Below image from Easter Island

A big project like Earth from Below takes work all the time. It also means seizing the opprotunity when it comes. I had gone to Easter Island to make a very different picture but took a little down time to add to Earth from Below. 

Big projects take the ability to work on them all the time, with at least a little part of your brain. Sadly I am in Greece now and even though the country is full of limestone there is not a second to expore any of it.

Stephen Alvarez

Athens

Phone Friday: see how things change

Here's a thought for you. Cell phone cameras are completely changing publishing. It started in 2005 when the best pictures of the London metro bombings were from people's camera phones not from professional journalists. 6 years later things have moves even farther along. Professional journalists are now using their cell phones in addition to and in some cases instead of traditional cameras.

You can now shoot and publish straight from the phone. Always at the publishing forefront, DAH is instagraming the hurricane from the outer banks.


The ability to instantly publish is revolutionary. Maybe as revolutionary as the printing press. During the Iranian Green Revolution the government felt so threatened by cell phone publishing that they shut down the country's cell phones for weeks on end. That is how close the Iranian youth, armed with their phones, were to overthrowing their government.

Just a thought for Friday. Headed to Athens Monday...

Stephen Alvarez
Budapest