Weng Ji, a Bulang minority village on Jingmai Mountain in southwest Yunnan. Still pretty traditional – and just about to become a location for a Chinese movie.

We’re on for the next big Asian workshop! Mike Yamashita and I will be holding it in Manila for a week at the end of November, organised by the super-efficient and highly experienced Kris LeBoutillier of ƒ8 Workshops. Manila’s high-energy, funky, and full of amazing material for shooting – and we know the place well. Mike and I are looking forward to seeing those of you who want an intensive, rewarding and very entertaining week. Come and join us! Check the ƒ8 site HERE

In time for Facebook’s new page design launching today, here’s my re-vamped page…..

Someone just wrote recently asking if I could explain some mysterious carvings and shadows at Stonehenge. My first thought was, oh-oh, here we go again. Another inexplicable mystery uncovered by the camera. This has happened before, but before I recall that, here’s the picture in question, which was the opening spread for a Smithsonian magazine cover story on an archaeological dig at Britain’s most popular historical site: as it ran in the magazine here…. and a larger view here:-

My correspondent was asking if I could explain three mysterious images within the picture, and whether I had inserted them later or someone else had tampered with the image:
1. A swan carved in the stone on the far right.
2. The letter J (apparently sitting in a chalice or cauldron-shaped whitish area) carved into the stone immediately to the left of the above.
3. A “figural holographic object just right of center, that, when focused upon resembles a Jesus or a druid-looking figure”.

Now, I like to think I have nearly complete recall of everything I ever shot, and even if that’s not as true as I would like it to be, surely I’d have noticed any of the above? After all, I spent a couple of hours setting up the shot, not to mention an entire week hanging around the monument. So I looked again, and also at the raw files. The swan – yes, I can see that. The letter J I’m not at all sure about; a rabbit with long ears, maybe? Or come to think of it, was my assistant misbehaving and doing hand-shadows behind a stone?. And Jesus or a druid – absolutely not, hard as I looked. Still can’t make that out. My reply, as you would probably imagine, was that what caused these shapes was the extreme raking angle of multiple lights; this was a shot that we really went to town on with a set of battery-powered studio flash units concealed around the stones.

Privately I was thinking that this was the kind of thing that feeds flying saucer theories and gnomic millenial mysteries, ho-hum, but to each his own. What did intrigue me was that my correspondent went straight on to say that no, this wasn’t a case of pareidolia, because the images were so clear. I had no idea that there was indeed a word to describe seeing shapes where none exist, as in peeling paint, so at least I learned a new word. I do it myself often, and in fact, let me dig out one that I actually photographed – it’s somewhere in the files. This is so completely trivial that the only reason I took a snapshot of it was to see if it still looked as much like a man’s head wearing a flattish trilby in a photograph as it did when I stood in the bathroom:-

Ridiculous? Silly? Childish? Yes, all of those, but that’s what I saw when I looked at the tissue dispenser, and in what I do I’ve never underestimated the power of the mind to interpret images in different ways. Which brings me to a previous photograph of a stone in a monument that surprised me in quite a different way – and then surprised me even more when I heard of some other people’s interpretation. This goes back to when I was shooting Angkor in the very early ’90s. Exploring around one of the western gates of Ta Prohm (the temple monastery left in a manicured ‘wild’ state by the French archaeologists to give visitors a suitable romantic impression of the ruins), I came across this small carved roundel on a pillar:-

Now what do you make of that? I’m familiar with pretty well all of the carved bas-reliefs throughout Angkor, and the different styles and mythologies, but there’s something about this one which continues to puzzle me. It’s a mythical creature, and the stonemasons at Angkor did a good line in mythical creatures – head from this, body from that, legs from somewhere else. They were, after all, inspired by both Hindu and Buddhist iconographies, in the same way as, for example, the exquisite gilded statues of kinaree and so on in Bangkok’s Grand Palace. I thought, that’s a dead ringer for a stegosaurus. Look at those platelets or whatever they’re called on it’s back. Obviously impossible, but intriguing. I was writing and shooting a guidebook to Angkor at the time (the one all the kids sell and pester you with when you visit the temples, except that that’s a pirated version – mine but not mine, if you see what I mean). I was doing it under the supervision of Claude Jacques, the great French epigrapher, and I thought to lighten it up a bit by slipping this in with a tongue-in-cheek comment.

But then, years later, someone wrote to me asking of I knew more about this, as it was mentioned on a website: this one. Creationism? Proof that dinosaurs co-existed with humans? Will that teach me to keep my mouth shut?

Actually, just now, right now, I did a search to see if I could find that original creationist website, and to my horror found that the story has become contagious. Oh dear, there are hundreds of listings about this on Google. And some of the commentators have gone to a lot of trouble, like this one. I even get to be an expert….here, where it says, “In short, it would be extremely difficult to find two men [Claude and I] more qualified to speak on the Stegosaurus carving at Ta Prohm. Of major significance is the fact that the authors view the carving as authentic.”. Well, that’s very kind and thank you, but I’m totally unqualified. Er, that was a joke. Well, maybe not that funny, but a throwaway. A stegosaurus in the 14th century? Are you kidding? Or even carved from a view of a fossil skeleton? Ask a paleontologist what’s involved in reconstructing the skeletons you can see in the Natural History Museum.

You can buy the book here on Amazon, by the way (might as well get a plug in).

A long Colombian trip coming to an end, with the overnight Air France flight this evening from Bogota. And we ended it in style, staying for the weekend with Fabio and Elena. One of the mares gave birth last week, and at four days the foal is running! (aided, unfortunately, by George the dog)…

Sunday lunch for two dozen friends, the weather was perfect, and President Santos flew in…

With Luigi practicing rejoneo (bullfighting on horseback). Amazing sideways moves…

All seems a long way from Focus on Imaging, where I’ll be on Wednesday 7th.

I’ve become absorbed this last few weeks with time-lapse shooting. It began with a practical need. We’re working on a series of half-hour photography teaching videos, and I’m keen not to rely absolutely on straightforward video for the motion parts of these. They are, after all, about still photography. One of the five-minute segments will be about why the ‘golden hour’ has always been such a popular time for outdoor shooting. What better way of showing how the light changes (and for many photographers ‘improves’) than to show a speeded-up sequence through the late afternoon to dusk? In other words, time-lapse.

And what better and more reliable place to shoot a ‘golden hour’ time-lapse sequence than Cartagena de indias, where I’ve been for more than a month? At this time of year the weather is perfect, and almost every day is crystal clear. Time-lapse sequences have to be planned, so a reliable weather forecast comes into it. Not much point trying this in England most days.

This was by no means my first experience with time-lapse. I had probably the best apprenticeship in the world, though a short one, when I worked on the movie Baraka in Cambodia in 1992. See the YouTube trailer here. I learned a lot from director Ron Fricke. This was the most serious and complex time-lapse shooting ever: 70mm, 12-hour sequences, programmed with camera moves throughout as the camera tracked on rails under the full moon at Angkor Wat. Incredible. In fact, in the first issue of Photographer’s i Magazine, which you can see here, the cover story is about the sequel to Baraka, and includes some shots of the set-ups at Angkor and other places. Time-lapse is integral to Ron’s vision.

I learned that there are many ways of using time-lapse, and that no shoot is ever predictable. One of the classic ways is to show the changing play of light during the day (or night), and for this it’s important to find and frame a scene where there is maximum movement. All of this merits a book in itself, but shadows are a good place to start. I’ll come back to the ‘golden hour’ sequence another time, but for now I’d like to show you a longish sequence that aimed for maximum change throughout the sequence. I spent a few days on the nearby island of Baru, and it was ideal for experiment. I decided to do midday-to-dusk, just over six hours, and time the frames a minute apart, remembering that setting from Ron’s Angkor all-night sequences.

I scouted around the beach for a suitable location. Changing light and colour temperature were a given, but I wanted shadow movement. The ingredients for this are: a bright surface to carry the shadows (the white sand beach(, graphic shapes to cast the shadows (I found a small stand of mangroves), a very wide angle of view and very close to the sand. This last was key, because the shadows would move more exaggeratedly across the frame – so I imagined. This was the set-up at noon:-

Yes, we’re on the beach here, and I’m about to leave my Nikon D3 next to the waves under a tropical sun for six hours. That calls for some precautions, the first of which is a good tripod, here my carbon-fibre Gitzo. The second is a bright reflective anorak, with the lens, a 14-24mm at full 14mm, poking through the elasticated sleeve. Waves have a funny habit of being irregular, so there’s always the chance that one will come straight through here. Make sure the legs are secured on some rocks – not ideal, but should avoid shifting, which would of course ruin the entire sequence. And here I am making last minute checks. As I wrote recently for a Popular Photography article, when it comes to travel photography, after equipment comes the right clothing! In this case, swimming trunks, beach shoes and a panama were de rigeur

I said that no time-lapse shot is completely predictable, and that’s one of the technique’s admirable qualities. You can measure this and that, and work out the sun’s path (though actually I was guessing here about where the sun would come down), and so on, but the way it all moves is always a surprise. In this case, I wasn’t a hundred percent on the location, and as a still it looks so-so, but I knew that I was actually framing for something I could only imagine and hope for. I love this uncertainty, really. Reminds me of shooting film. Except, perhaps, for the mechanical and electronic uncertainties – I wasn’t at all keen on any disturbances to the camera, or faults in the intervalometer operation. So I returned, carefully, at intervals. Here I’m listening for the click of the shutter after four hours. The note says “Por favor, no tocar!” to dissuade the curious, and there’s also a little twig barricade, Boy Scout style, to reinforce the message.

Well, see what you think. The movie is here on the website under Home > Countries > Colombia, or just click on the frame below. Note to Nikon: Very lucky for me that your battery in the D3, freshly charged, lasted just six-and-a-half hours. I could have done with a bit longer. Will that be one of the improvements in the D4 that should be arriving in a week-and-a-half? I do hope so at that price. And before you start to say ‘second battery’, you can’t touch a thing during a time-lapse shoot.

If you’re attending Focus on Imaging at the NEC near Birmingham next week, I’ll be there on Wednesday 7th and looking forward to seeing everyone. I’ll be at the Ilex stand to sign books (means encouraging you to buy!) between 12:30 and 1:30, and then giving a talk and show on the Manfrotto stand from 2:00 to 3:00 – ‘Shooting the Tea Horse Road’. See you there.

The most interesting pairing of photographs in my latest book The Photographer’s Vision is what at first glance appear to be identical (well, nearly identical) versions of one of the Vietnam War’s iconic images, of a dead young Vietnamese girl lying in a flatbed truck, with her equally young brother howling in grief over her. It appeared in the book Vietnam Inc, Philip Jones Griffith’s personal condemnation of the American prosecution of the war, and is one of Griffiths’ most famous and powerful pictures.

But what’s that picture next to it? Almost the same, but from a little to the left and a few seconds distant in time. Possibly not quite as wide-angle, maybe 1 24mm instead of a 20mm (everyone used prime lenses in those days).

It’s by Tim Page, another well-known photographer from the Vietnam War, albeit for different reasons. Griffiths was known for his photographs, Page for his appearance in Michael Herr’s book Dispatches, his supposed characterisation by Dennis Hopper in the film Apocalypse Now, and general reputation. Their philosophies could hardly have been different. Griffiths was a committed photojournalist (committed and effective to the point of being declared persona non grata in Vietnam), while Page is on record as saying “Oh war is good for you, you can’t take the glamour out of that,” a statement that many might find offensive but which served Herr’s hip commentary on the war.

Peter Stuckings, a photographer friend, just posted a comment about this, with the double-page spread, on Facebook here and makes an interesting point. Many people in the business – photographers and picture editors – feel uncomfortable looking at this pair, because the comparison doesn’t compare with received wisdom, which Peter underlines.

To my knowledge, I’m the only person to have put them together on the same page/spread. This isn’t a boast, and it wasn’t the result of any deep research, but by chance. Many years ago, I was talking with my Paris agent, Anna Obolensky at ANA, and Griffiths’ picture came up in the conversation (I can’t remember why). Anna said, “but you know that Tim Page took the same picture.” No I didn’t, and was taken aback when she pulled it out from the archives and showed it to me. At the time, she was also Page’s agent.

The two photographers were standing right next to each other in a Saigon street in 1968. It’s a cautionary note on the generally held belief that every photographer has a unique eye, and that that eye is influenced, in reportage at least, by philosophy and point of view. I happen to subscribe to that myself, but conditionally. In his Facebook comment, Peter is nit the first person, incidentally, to say that Griffiths’ is the better shot because of detail in framing, position and moment. And detail, as we all know, can make or break.

Maybe I should have asked Griffiths and Page for comment, but I preferred the eloquence of imagery over words. I still do think that words might interfere with what you can see and think for yourself by looking at this pair. In any case, it’s too late to ask Philip, as he passed away recently.

One last point that intrigued me. Both pictures were shot on colour film, but for reasons I was unable to discover, the Griffiths photograph was available from Magnum only in black and white. So we had to present the Page version in black and white also, to avoid implying that there was an extra difference. Pity about that.

Over on my Open College of the Arts site I’m digging further into the detail of making slideshows – or as some newspapers call them, galleries. It’s impossible to avoid the software technicals, but as usual I’m really more interested in what goes on editorially and creatively. This is part II, which follows the process of developing a small story, and considering how the medium of the slideshow suggests new ways of handling the material from the traditional print way. It goes through three stages, from a basic click-through to a more evolved click-through and finally to a movie with soundtrack. Here’s the workplace for making it, but see how the final movie looks. Sequence, transitions, animation and sound add new dimensions to photographs — but whether this enhances the pictures or turns them into something else is something you’ll decide for yourself…

Please excuse the blatant promotion, but we just had a very good review on Adorama TV for the Photographer’s i magazine for the iPad. More on that on the blogroll at lower right. One of the things about publishing of any kind is that you really do put yourself up for comment, from anyone, anywhere. So it’s always a case of ‘phew’ when the first reviews come in and they’re good. Can’t ever take anything for granted, however. It’s a big world of opinion out there!

It’s available here