In conjunction with this, the weather has been utterly uncooperative for photography. Every weekend, the wind dies and the volcanic gasses start piling up. At one point visibility dropped to less than a quarter mile. The view from my house, normally good incentive for me to get my camera and head out the door, was a uniform gray. On those rare days when the weather was clear, invariably something had already been planned, and photography wasn't part of it. Frustrating? You bet!
When the weather is bad, the only thing you can do is live with it. Read a book, surf the web, or look at other people's pictures to get new ideas of where to fly. I did a little of each. It didn't help.
I've known for some time there was a sameness to my pictures. But after surfing thousands of pictures of Hawai`i, I found there's a sameness to a lot of pictures taken here. It's because even with the variations from island to island, even with all the climates the Big Island has to offer, there are limits. You can only drive the same road so many times before it stops being something new. There are only so many times you can see the sun setting over the ocean before even a photographer says to himself, "Yep, seen that."
I need a change.
In a small way, at least, I do have a change coming up. Most of my KAP shots have been coastal, but there's a trip to map a heiau between Hualalai and Mauna Loa, and I've been invited to participate. Two of us will be flying KAP rigs over the heiau in order to gather the shots necessary for the photogrammetry software to do its thing and create the 3D model of the site. The altitude is of the site is almost a mile above sea level. Not enough to cause real problems, but enough to make wind requirements an issue.
I know I can fly my full RC KAP rig in ten knots of wind using my rokkaku. At 5000', that requirement goes up because of the thinner air. But the wind at the site rarely goes over 8 knots, so flying that rig is iffy at best. Since the shots required are all straight down, and since I need a lighter rig to fly, I made one specifically for the purpose.
It uses the same camera as my RC rig, a Canon A650 IS running CHDK. I've got an intervalometer script loaded on the camera, so it's a straightforward matter of dialing in the number of seconds between exposures, and sending the camera aloft. At just over 400g of mass in its ready-to-fly configuration, it's about half what my full RC rig weighs. And it packs small enough it will fit into a pocket of my KAP bag.
Planning the trip, building the rig, thinking through all the technical issues I'm likely to run into, it's all helped. But it's not really enough. I really need a more substantial change than that.
One thought I've been toying around with for the past six months is the idea of becoming a semi-professional photographer. I can't see myself making a living at it full-time, and I have no intention of quitting my day job, despite the heartache it's caused recently. But at the suggestion of a friend and fellow KAPer, I picked up a copy of Dan Heller's Profitable Photography in the Digital Age. It's a good book, and well worth the money. It also spelled out a lot of reasons why going semi-pro is probably not the right answer to the problems that have been dogging me. If anything, it would up my frustration level worse than it is now.
Today I was re-reading John Shaw's Business of Nature Photography, and came across one of his points about how to break into the nature photography business: publish articles that use your photography. I literally smacked my forehead! I know I'd read those same words years ago when I first bought his book, but for some reason I'd forgotten them.
A few years ago, I wrote some articles for Digital Machinist, one of the trade publications I take. I enjoy writing, and the articles were fun to do. I even published some pictures with them, though they weren't the greatest example of studio photography I've seen. I have some other articles lined up, but there's a big difference between doing machining and documenting machining as you do it. Photographing a machining process makes it take about ten times longer, and because you're constantly fiddling with the camera setup and the machining setup, it can be a frustrating way to get a job done. At some point I'll get back to those articles, but I'm not in a huge hurry.
Even after Digital Machinist had published my articles, it didn't occur to me that I'd done exactly what Shaw had recommended. Not until I re-read his book. The thought of applying this to my photography had simply never entered my mind.
But even I can put two and two together when they're put in front of me with a big neon sign. I live in a unique place. I do a fairly unique form of photography. And I know I can write since a publisher saw fit to print my work on more than one occasion. Hey, I can do this!
The next step, of course, is to come up with ideas for articles and to do market research into the publications likely to carry them. Travel magazines, airline in-flight magazines, photography magazines, and possibly even machining magazines are likely ones to try the ideas on. Travel destination articles, articles describing rig fabrication or camera fabrication, even educational how-to articles for teacher publications are all fair game.
The weather is a little better today, but I think it's the new hope for three hobbies I truly enjoy that's made for the change in outlook. Life is getting interesting again.
Tom
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