Hasta La Gadget!

Ever wonder how war photographers survive out there? We’ve enlisted Teru Kuwayama—a photographer who has covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hotspots for Time, Newsweek and Outside—to explain the perils of working in a war zone.

Among military planners, there’s an aphorism that states: “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.”

The daily mechanics of photographing in a “war zone” don’t have much to do with photography—mostly it’s about getting from point A to point B without getting your head cut off, then finding a signal and an outlet.

I’m probably not the right person to be give advice on war photography, since I don’t even count myself as a war photographer—but for one reason or another, I’ve spent the better part of the last decade in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. I was a young photographer when these wars began—I’m not anymore, and from all indications, the “long war” is just getting started.

For what it’s worth, here’s some advice for first timers heading out to the badlands.

Wear Your Seat Belt
I get questions on a daily basis from journalists heading for Afghanistan—most of them are about body armor—but it’s the traffic that’s most likely to kill you. The stretch of Islamist insurgency that arcs from Southern Philippines to Somalia hasn’t produced exceptional snipers, but it’s home to some of the most lethal drivers on Earth. On my last trip to Pakistan, I flipped a car four times within 72 hours of arrival. My bulletproof vest is still wrapped in plastic somewhere in Islamabad.

Learn How To Say “Hello” and “Thank You” and To Count To Ten
Most tourists wouldn’t go to France or Italy without packing a phrasebook, but a surprising number of photographers set off to Iraq or Afghanistan without learning how to make the most basic conversation. I recently found myself explaining to an “experienced war photographer” that Afghans don’t speak Arabic.

Stop Looking For the “Front Line”—It’s a Mirage
The awkwardly named “global war on terror” might be the undeclared World War III of the 21st century, but it doesn’t play out like WWI and WWII, and counterinsurgency isn’t done in trenches. In modern military parlance, the “battlefield” has been replaced by the “battlespace,” an all-encompassing realm that includes not just the landscape, but also the “hearts and minds” of a “human terrain,” and the airwaves and webspace across which an “information war” is being waged.

Equip Yourself With the Right Gear
War zone propeller-heads can talk endlessly about their toys, so here, in bullet points, are a few tips:

• Avoid the faux-commando stuff – An entire paramilitary equipment industry has emerged, selling “special operator” products ranging from “tactical flashlights” to mercenary-chic cargo trousers. Private military contractors love this overpriced war-schwag, but since you are not a highly paid, heavily armed, former Navy SEAL, it’s probably best that you avoid dressing up like one. When you’re on the side of the road, getting shaken down for your money and/or your ID, you really don’t want to pull it out of a camouflage passport holder that says “Operation Iraqi Freedom” all over it. (It won’t make you especially popular in the airport in Paris or Dubai either).

• Bring plastic (not your credit cards) – In places like Iraq and Afghanistan, you will encounter an unimaginable variety of dirt, dust, sand and, in the rare event of rain, mud that falls from the sky. These abrasive, corrosive, gear-choking forces are probably more destructive than any known insurgent militia, and they will eat you and your expensive toys alive. Zipties, ziplock bags, crazy glue and plastic packing tape will help you patch it together. Skip the army-navy outfitter, and go to Home Depot and the 99-cent store.

• Pack your go bag – AKA, your grab bag, jump bag, snatch bag, bug-out bag, etc. Since you’re out there looking for trouble, be prepared to find it. Your go bag is the essential kit, packed in advance, that you head for the door with when things get hectic. Beyond your go bag, keep an ultra-light bare-bones survival pack—and keep it strapped to your body. When things go bang, you may be semi-conscious, crawling out of a destroyed building or a wrecked vehicle, and even your go bag may go sideways. Military bases and hotels with foreign guests are natural magnets for missiles and explosives, so expecting to be blown out of bed is not necessarily an irrational thought. Similarly, you are exceptionally vulnerable when traveling by road, and in the event of an accident or an ambush that you are lucky enough to survive, you won’t get a time-out to collect your stuff.

• A look at my general kit:
notebooks
passports x2
sim cards -af, pak, india, thuraya,usa
2 x mini waterproof case – credit cards, cigarettes, etc
ziplock bag – currency – af, pak, indian, euro, pounds sterling,
dollars canadian, USD, UAE dirhams
IDs – press cards, military embed badges, etc
med pack + personal hygiene
batteries – AAA, AA, 123
power strip/surge protector – universal/multi port for regional power plugs
steel cable/TSA locks X5
AC/DC car power transformer – cig port to US power socket.
box o’ electronic shit – chargers, adaptors, usb cables, etc
zip ties, ziplock bags, packing tape, contractor grade heavy duty garbage bags
protective cases with camera memory cards
laptop
mini-pelican case with 3x 500GB external harddrives
2x headlamps w/red gel

• I keep my shooting gear in a big Pelicase:
2x Holga
2x Widelux
2x Leica (M6, M8.2)
1x Canon G10
3x batteries for G10 and M8.2
2x charging units for G10 and M8.2
light meter
audio recorder
gps navigator
folding stereo headphones
mini screwdriver set
knife
2x multi-tool (large with wire cutters, small w/scissors)
2x mobile phone (US + overseas)
film + memory cards + video tapes

• Plus I carry…
body armor (level 4 stand-alone rifle plates, carrier harness + kevlar helmet)
boots, trainers, local sandals
ultra light sleeping bag + bivy sack + all purpose dhoti/sheet
waterproof river-rafting bag
survival blanket/camping tarp
compression straps, rope/cable
clothing – western + local

Embedding Has Both Perks and Consequences
For better, and for worse, the military has provided training wheels for rookies. On the upside, embedding takes care of the serious logistical challenges of transportation, shelter, security and food and water. There’s not a lot of bed-and-breakfasts to be found in Fallujah or Kandahar, so that’s not a small consideration. On the downside, embedded reporters operate on a very short leash with ever-increasing restrictions from their military handlers. Independent reporting is critical for getting an accurate view from these places, but it’s dangerous, difficult, expensive, and it’s being done less and less by the international press. Embedding provides a particular but extremely limited view of the battlespace. You can spend an entire deployment embedded with the US Marines in Diyala or Helmand, but don’t fool yourself that you know anything about Iraq or Afghanistan—what you’ve seen is the inside of an armored bubble.

Get In Shape Before Deploying
If you’re going to hang out with the war jocks, get in shape. No one expects you qualify for Special Forces school, but if you’re an overweight chain-smoker, you’re not going to inspire a lot of confidence in the infantry unit you want to tag along with, and you’re likely to get left back at base (for your own good, and theirs). I’m 5’6″, 140 lbs, and 38 years old, which means I should probably be behind a desk somewhere, but somehow ended up living in mountains and deserts with soldiers and marines who are literally twice my size, and half my age—while I’m hauling a backpack that’s more than 50% of my body weight. Those are unsympathetic mathematics that destroy knees, spines and ankles. Do whatever you can to rebuild your most basic equipment—running, lifting, swimming, wall-climbing, yoga, whatever—just do it, and don’t wait till the week before you ship out.

Fixers: The Tour Guides of War Reporting
Sometimes they’re local journalists, sometimes they’re taxi drivers or doctors who speak English and know how to get things done. If they were American or European, they’d have more glamorous titles like “field producers” or “media consultants.” But in Iraq and Afghanistan, they do journalism’s heavy lifting for a $100 a day, and they’re left back in the shit when their clients are telling war stories back at home. Respect them, their knowledge, and the risk they face to make your work possible—but don’t trust them blindly. Some of them are shady, and all of them are winging it, just like you are. I avoid fixers because so many of the ones I’ve worked with are dead now.

Don’t Follow the Pack
For most of the last eight years, Afghanistan was the “Forgotten War”, and Iraq was the “Central Front”. The US government has now reversed gears, and the US media is now falling over itself to relocate all the balls it dropped. As mainstream journalists are beginning to grapple with the complexity of Afghanistan-plus-Pakistan, special operations are quietly moving on to the Horn of Africa. Try to think outside the extremely cramped box—by the time it’s “news,” it’s pretty old.

Read. Think. Ask questions – and triple check before you start believing.
Some suggested reading:

Descent into Chaos – Ahmed Rashid
The Gamble – Tom Ricks
29 Articles – David Kilcullen
War and Anti-War – Alvin and Heidi Toffler
The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell – John Crawford

Visit Lightstalkers.org
Five years ago, while I was working in Iraq, I teamed up with my brother, a web developer, to launch a web-based data-sharing network of people who do inadvisable things in sketchy places. When you have a bizarre question that no travel agent can answer, try our site, lightstalkers.org. Someone out there will have advice for you—heed it at your own peril.

Teru Kuwayama has made more than 15 trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir, traveling both independently, and as an embedded reporter with US and NATO military forces, as well as Afghan, Pakistani, and Indian armed forces. In 2009 he received the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor award for his work in Pakistan, and a fellowship from the South Asian Journalists Association.

He is a 2009-2010 Knight Fellow at Stanford University, a contributor to Time, Newsweek and Outside magazines, and a contract photographer for Central Asia Institute, a non-profit organization that builds schools for children in remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He is also the co-founder of Lightstalkers.org, a web-based network of media, military, and aid and development personnel, and the curator of Battlespaceonline.org, a traveling exhibition of photographs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A special thanks goes out to Teru. Immediately after sending Gizmodo this piece, Teru returned to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

See that guy about to get creamed by that huge wave? That’s Clark Little, master of wave photography. He gets wetter than other shooters capturing ocean motion, so we asked him for his trade secrets. The biggie: “Hold your breath.”

You’re a surfer who has gained fame as a photographer—what exactly is your background?

I’ve been on Oahu’s North Shore for over thirty years—so I’m kind of raised here on the shore and in the Waimea Bay shorebreak. I’ve surfed the shorebreak off and on for years, and the love and joy for the oceans has always been with me. So, a couple years ago—maybe two and a half years ago—I decided to bring a camera. My wife wanted a picture for the house and I went and did it. What I do when I go out is use my surfing experience with the camera.

There’s a photo of you inside this overhead barrel (above) and you’re kind of just standing there, with camera in a hard casing with a dome for the lens and a handle on the bottom. Why do people use that setup in the water?

I preset everything before I go out in the water. When you’re out there and the big waves are coming in you don’t have time to look through a hole and be fiddling with things. You just point and shoot—once you have that sweet spot on all the settings it’s pretty much keeping the drops from the dome. It’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time. That’s where the knowledge comes in, so you can get into the most gnarliest impact zone as possible but you don’t get hammered.

For the most part, I try to stake out the back. I get doughnuts and get beat-up sometimes for sure, but at the same time I love to be in there and feel the thunder and the bass and the turbulence. It’s pretty cool. Mother nature has a lot of beautiful things to offer. It can get scary also—don’t get me wrong—but the ocean is my comfort zone fortunately, and I want to be out there. It’s not like I have to be out there, but I want to be out in the ocean, you know?

When you’ve got a camera in your hand and a big wave is coming, explain what your body does. What do you do with your body to make sure that you don’t lose your camera and you don’t get hurt?

First of all you get a good breath. It’s just anticipating. If I’m standing knee deep and a ten-foot wave is coming in, I’m actually going towards the beach because it’s sucking me out. You want to get in towards shore because you don’t want to miss the wave. If you get sucked out, sometimes it’s past the wave. You want to be in the impact zone, so you’re going the other way, knowing kind of where it’s going to break for the most part—you’re anticipating the sweet spot. And so you’re going the other way, and right when it breaks, you’re going to pull the trigger and try to get as many frames of that gnarliest barrel shot as possible. Of course after it breaks, for the most part, you try to sneak out the back of the wave.

You’re wearing fins?

Yeah you’re wearing fins for sure. That’s my life vest to be honest. I wouldn’t go anywhere without swim fins.

Is that because you have to carry a camera in your hands, so you can’t be paddling?

Yeah, the camera definitely is not light. It’s a chunk. When the waves are big, you forget about it, believe it or not. When you’re rocking and the waves are huge and you’re excited, you don’t even know. It’s like instinct, the hand goes up and click click click, and down and back and behind the wave, it turns in to an instinctive kind of thing.

Sometimes I run up and down the shore to get into position to get those weird ones that break right on the sand. For those I don’t wear fins because I gotta be fast—move in, move out. You get toasted every time you get the ones that are on the dry sand because there’s no way out, you can’t really get out the back of them. You just have to roll with it up the beach 30 feet or 40 feet.

Without giving away your secrets, can you tell us about your camera and your settings?

I use a Nikon D3 with a 16mm fisheye lens, and then I also use a D200 and D300 with a 10.5mm lens. I preset the focus—there’s like a sweet spot on that. Depth of field is insane with that setup, so, pretty much everyone else can figure out the rest of it.

I’d like to see you with a Canon 5D Mark II and get some video to be honest.

There’s also the Nikon D300s. I could use my same waterproof housing and lenses and go out there and get some footage, I don’t know what 24fps would look like, but at least we could get an idea with this new camera.

All right so, just imagine you’ve got this buddy with no experience. How does someone with a point-and-shoot camera take pictures of waves?

For me with experience it’s different, but for the inexperienced, to start off I would just go with like a little SD Canon and a little underwater housing that costs around $150. [Ed. note: You can also buy one of the new waterproof point-and-shoots from Pentax, Canon, Panasonic or Olympus.] You definitely gotta know how to swim, and you gotta have swim fins. You obviously gotta know your limits.

Be familiar with the ocean. Watch the waves prior to going out for at least 20 to 30 minutes, because sometimes there will be lulls or periods when there are no sets and then out of the blue a big 6 to 8 foot wave can come in and clean house. So you have to respect the Mother Nature, that’s huge. Once you get out there, you just give it a whirl and try to take some images. You gotta keep the lens clear, the front of the case. You can use Rain-X or you can spit on it. There are different methods that people use to keep it clear.

How many hours a week do you shoot?

It all depends—when the waves are good I’ll go out for a five-hour session and pretty much be fried all day. Or I’ll even do two two-hour sessions. On average, I would say at least a couple hours a day. When it’s good, I’m out there five hours.

Are you hunting waves the way surfers hunt waves? Going to places looking for hidden breaks?

I have a couple spots that I’ll call secret. There are maybe one or two guys that have found them. In general, I’m lucky to get everything right here in my home, and when I’m home shooting big Waimea shorebreaks or Waikiki shorebreaks, for the most part I’m by myself, which is good. A lot of photographers don’t want to get into the big shorebreaks and shoot waves. So I’m lucky in that aspect and I can just feel the motion of the ocean and play.

It’s like a playground for me. I’m like a kid in candy store, just having fun getting these images and coming home and looking at them and then sharing them with the world. It’s hopefully a win-win situation and, besides my family, it’s my joy.

Some people are painters, and they paint—it’s cool and it’s amazing and their talents are awesome. But it’s kind of neat to add that extreme factor to the art, trying to capture the art of the wave.

If you enjoyed Clark’s story and his amazing wave photos, check out hundreds more at his site, where you can order prints or limited-edition posters. Also, check out his brand new coffee-table book of shorebreak art, with forewords by Jack Johnson and Kelly Slater.

Summermodo is a chance for Giz to get outside and test our gear where it belongs.

Never one to miss a chance to feature action-packed UAV footage on this space, here we have a behind-the-scenes look at the new Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band video for you. While it ain’t exactly Hearts of Darkness or Burden of Dreams, sometimes there are more important things than pathos, obsession, and heartbeak — in this case, up close and personal shots of AerialPan Imaging’s custom-built remote control camera rig, complete with mounted RED ONE HD video camera. Not too many technical details for you, but there is enough remote controlled helicopter excitement to make you wish you were on location at San Juan Island with one of these bad boys. Check it out for yourself after the break.

Update: As one of our colleagues (and a couple eagle-eyed readers) so graciously pointed out, the camera mounted to the helicopter has the tell-tale markings (peep the on-board mic) of a Panasonic HVX200. Thanks, kids!

[Via CNET]

Continue reading RED ONE mounted to UAV, flown around San Juan Island (Update: false alarm, it’s a Panasonic)

Filed under: Digital Cameras, Robots

RED ONE mounted to UAV, flown around San Juan Island (Update: false alarm, it’s a Panasonic) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re down with the latest freshness, like we know you are, you’ll already be aware of light writing and the radical imagery that can be created through the use of long camera exposures and stop motion animation. Well, get ready to do your thing with even more style, thanks to the Halo LED spraycan — a DIY project by Aissa Logerot — which not only looks like the primary tool of al fresco art, it even recharges itself when shaken. While not quite as sophisticated as the Light Lane, this definitely makes our list of light-based paraphernalia we’d like to see more of. You’ll find a few more shots after the break, plus a video of a well-known ad campaign featuring the light writing technique.

[Via Cool Hunting]

Continue reading Halo LED spraycan lets you make grafitti the cheap, legal way

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Halo LED spraycan lets you make grafitti the cheap, legal way originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When a brain tumor caused professional photographer Alex Dejong to lose his eyesight three years ago, he turned to gadgets to continue making his art.

Carrying around a Nokia N82 cellphone, Dejong used assistive software to translate sounds into visuals in his mind. After stitching together a mental image of his surroundings, he snapped photos with his Canon and Leica digital cameras.

But Dejong’s blindness is acute: He can only perceive light and dark. Because Dejong could not see his own photographs, he hired an assistant for editing. Until recently, editing was a part of the creative workflow that he thought he’d lost forever. And then to his surprise, Apple’s iPhone 3GS, which launched late June, gave him back the ability to edit photos.

The new iPhone has a feature called VoiceOver, which reads back anything a user places his finger over on the screen: e-mail, web pages, system preferences and so on. Beyond that, photo-editing applications such as CameraBag and Tilt-Shift perform automated editing tasks that blind users like Dejong could not otherwise do on their own.

A photo of a cup shot with the iPhone 3GS. Photo: Alex Dejong

“With the iPhone and a lot of the photography apps that a lot of people are using, I have my entire workflow, and I can do it in five minutes,” Dejong said. “In this way, the iPhone is a remarkable gift. I’ve had it for three weeks now, and it has really opened up my world, apart from the photography.”

For years, technology companies and small software developers have created digital tools to aid the blind in everyday life. Microsoft Windows, Linux and the Mac operating system each carry tools such as audio screen readers and magnifiers to assist the visually impaired with computer use. And in the hardware arena, some gadgets, such as Dejong’s Nokia N82, specialize in helping the blind. The smartphone supports a vOICe app that analyzes the light detected by the handset’s camera and plays different sounds depending on the brightness, thereby helping the blind make pictures out of sounds.

Dejong said he still uses the Nokia N82 to help him “view” his surroundings, and he admits the iPhone 3GS is more of a “toy camera” compared to his professional DSLR. But he hails the smartphone as the first handset fully accessible to the blind.

“Even if I don’t see the output myself, I still want to have my hand in everything that I do as a photographer,” Dejong said.

Dejong is part of an online community called Blind Photographers, where similarly handicapped shutterbugs share their work and photography tips. Because blindness is variable from person to person, the shooters each develop a different methodology to suit their visual impairment, said Tim O’Brien, a member of the organization and a freelance newspaper photographer for Chapel Hill News.

“My eyesight is not blurry but more like low-resolution,” explained O’Brien, whose condition is called juvenile macular degeneration. “It’s like the difference between looking at an old television and a high-definition television.”

Because of his handicap, O’Brien can see much better from his periphery than his center. So when he takes a photo, he first familiarizes himself with his surrounding (walking up and down every aisle in a grocery store, for example) to gather and memorize a visual. He calls it building a map in his head.

After the necessary preparation, O’Brien snaps photos with his Nikon D40X DSLR and applies edits with the image application Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. His photography process, then, is not much different from a non-handicapped shooter. He just takes much longer than most digital shooters — about as long as a photographer using film, he says.

“I can’t tell if the camera is in focus, or any of the details,” O’Brien explained. “I’ll go home and find lots of interesting things that I didn’t know that I had. That’s not dissimilar to how photographers worked in the film days, when they didn’t know what their camera took until they developed film.”

Despite his visual impairment, Jason DeCamillis still primarily shoots with film. His condition is called retinitis pigmentosa: His central vision is good in the daytime, but his peripheral vision is poor, and come nighttime everything goes pitch black. Like O’Brien, DeCamillis spends most of his time preparing his photo shoots: He sweeps across the scene, and his mind tricks him into thinking he can see everything by forming a mental composite image.

DeCamillis’ camera of choice is the Holga 120WPC, a medium-format pinhole camera, because he feels it’s a fitting form of self-expression. His second favorite camera is the Diana 151, also a medium-format film camera.

“The cool part about that Holga is that because it’s a pinhole, it’s sort of similar to how I can tell people how I see,” DeCamillis said. “It looks very similar to what my composite image is in my head. It’s not a realistic view of how I think other people see the world.”

Photo credit: Alex Dejong shot the photos above and below on this page. Click through to the next pages to see photography by O’Brien and DeCamillis.

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