This month’s wallpaper is for all you coffee lovers out there. A nice close up of some Sumatran arabica coffee beans being roasted over an open fire. The smoke of the dark roast rising to through the beans. I hope you enjoy it and that the caffeine doesn’t keep you up at night. This month I am taking a suggestion from a knowledge management buddy and not over producing. So you get a one size fits all wallpaper, plus one iPhone/iTouch theme that gives you a Lock Screen and a Home Screen wallpaper. You can download the computer desktop wallpaper HERE, the iPhone screen lock paper HERE and the iPhone home screen paper HERE. Enjoy and tell all your coffee buddies to drop by for a drink.

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After a few minutes, I took a quick look at Nates LCD on the back of his 7D. His shots were rich, golden and really were capturing the feel of the coffee plantation we were shooting. I was jealous. I knew in my brain what I was seeing was only a preview. Just an embedded JPEG and I knew that I was able to get the same richness once I imported the images I shot that day into Lightroom. But something happened when I looked at his LCD. Just like all good photographs do, his images evoked emotion in me. I looked at the images on my LCD, but that same warmth and emotion was lacking. Same place, some of the same images – but my LCD was lacking the emotion that I was feeling when I looked around the coffee plantation. Now, maybe a better photographer than I could ignore this and continue on shooting. The thing is, I’m a visual person and what happened there had a rather immediate effect on me. I asked Nate what white balance he was shooting at and he told me 6300 Kelvin. I change my white balance from AWB to the same Kelvin number and started shooting. It did something to my creative juices, a Muse arrived that had been missing and she started whispering in my ear. It was a small thing really. But changing the white balance to show a warmer preview gave me inspiration. Some of the best images I shot on the trip came from this day.

Maybe you didn’t know that your camera’s white balance has no effect on your RAW image? Well, it doesn’t. But it does effect your raw emotions. Certainly, I can go back and change any images that I shot throughout this assignment to 6300 Kelvin or to any other temperature. The point isn’t what the photograph looks like later in Lightroom. The point is at that moment, on the back of the LCD screen I found inspiration. I was excited to see something closer to what I imagined. It’s a small thing and many of you already do. I realize now that I had let knowledge trump inspiration. I had banished the Muse with AWB.

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Hanging out a 2nd story window to get the shot.

Over the past week I have been up to my chest in tea plants and knee deep in coffee beans. I have slid muddy slopes on my butt down too many times to count and dug dirt out of my camera more than I care to think about. But I gotta say, it has been a great time. I have been able to get plenty of creative images for my client and I feel I have stretched my creativity and that is always a good thing.

Most of the trip has gone as planned. All but yesterday, when 10 minutes turned into the scariest part of the trip, on our way back to Palembang. We were only a few hours into our 10 hour trip back to the big city when we came around a bend in the road and found four large bamboo trees placed across the highway. Having lived in some pretty rough areas for most of my adult life, the first thing I thought was: bandits! Our driver gets out of the car just as I was telling him to continue to drive on over the trees, but he didn’t hear me and jumped out and started moving them off the road. About the same time a small van pulls up close behind us and four men jump out. They walk up to the bamboo and then look around. At first I thought they were just like us, travelers stopped by the road block. But then I see one of them has a pistol stuck in his pants behind his back. I suppose he might have been a plain clothed security officer of some sort. But the chances of a security officer appearing just at that moment is about like winning the lottery. About this time our driver finishes moving the large bamboo poles and and the man with the gun seems to show no interest in us. My heart is pounding as we drive off. Apparently, we were either not who they was looking for, or we were too much of a risk for them. Anyway I look at it I thank the Lord for watching over us.

The multimedia slide show below is on the Lintang Coffee Millers of Sumatra. The coffee millers hull the cherry, thus leaving the familiar much loved coffee bean. These millers spend all day hauling 220 lbs (100 kg) sacks of dried coffee cherries from trucks into their shop, up a ramp, dump them into a hopper, where they get sucked down through the hulling machine that removes the skin and fruit, and leaves the raw bean. This is just one step in the process of how we end up with rich dark Sumatran coffee. I hope you enjoy this peak at the Lintang Coffee Millers of Sumatra.

Some folks have asked if they can embed my slide shows. So I thought I would give you the option to embed this show using the embed code below. I hope this works for you. All I ask is, if you use it, please give me a link to the website and let me know. Have fun.

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Just a quick note and a few photos from the past two days. The note is to say I have disabled the geotag feature. Great for clients, not so hot for blogging.

Tonight I am in the middle of nowhere in Southern Sumatra. The people are still amazingly friendly and a pleasure to photograph. Here are a few shot from yesterday and today. Click on them to view them larger.

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Had a good first day of shooting. I am reminded how wonderfully friendly the Indonesian people are. The men and women are both so willing to have their photos taken. In fact, almost incessant at times. It has been raining every afternoon and thus the weather has given us some great opportunities for dramatic images. The local staff I am traveling with think I am a bit crazy, because I curse the sunny and praise the cloudy and raining. It’s just that there is so much more mood in rainy weather.

I shelled out the money and bought the Megellan Tough Case for the iPhone. My initial thought is it is not worth it and I might return it back to REI. The idea of the Tough Case is that it gives the user a lot of additional battery time and enhances the GPS signal. It seemed to work the first day, though it might also have been because I was sitting in the font seat of the car But it did give me an accurate reading and I was able to run the GPS in the background for a good 8 hours.

I blogged about a WordPress plugin that puts a geotagged map link on the photos I post.But I never really got it to play nice with my other plugins, so this may be the last post using it. I will turn off the plug in and just post large (900 px) images of the day’s shoot rather than the 550 px wide images here. Whaddya think? What to see where the image was taken or just the image?

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David Honl’s images have appeared in such publications as Newsweek, People Magazine, New York Times, Professional Photographer, and countless more. He has visited all the exciting places, you know, the places where flack jackets are the norm. In his other life, David is the originator & designer of the world-renowned line of HonlPhoto small flash accessories, and he continues to design and field test new products during his travels.

In this interview, David and I speak about his time in the field shooting as a journalist as well as his transition back to the US. We discusses how he came up with his lighting system, and how sites like PhotoShelter have helped him become more efficient with his clients.

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For most people the fun thing about geotagging, or adding the gps coordinates to a photo is simply because you can. But there are some practical uses. I have a client that hopes to create a database of their projects around the world. In this database they might store information and names of staff that are working on certain project, the area that the project centers around, they might even list the some of the ethnocultural groups in the projects area of influence. This type of application of geotagged photos is new (at least to me). Up till now the only real reason to geotag a photo was because we could, or to show friends and family where you had traveled on your last vaction. My client for this next trip want their images geotagged. So even though my client does not wish to have their name in my blog they have granted me the right to post a few select images and show where these images were taken. To do this I will be using my iphone 3gs, an iPhone app called Geotag Photos by Jindrich Sarson (not very creative, but descriptive) and then on my MacBook Pro some software called GPSPhotoLinker by Early Innovations as well as Lightroom and of course my Canon 5DMKII.

There are many Geologging apps for the iPhone, I chose Geotag Photos because of one important feature that I only found with this application. It is the ability to file share the GPX file. A GPX file is the file that all geo-logging software creates that contains the navigational coordinates and timestamps.

There are plenty of blogs that explain how-to geotag your photos. This is not new. So I will abbreviate my process for you. The in short it goes something like this:

You open up Geotag Photos on your iPhone, you sink your camera’s clock to the time in the application. Geo-tagged photo gives you options on how often it will takes coordinate readings. I set mine to every two minutes. It saves a little bit of battery life and I don’t think I’ll be moving around that much. Then I head out and start shooting. At the end of the day, I return and download my photos into Lightroom as I would normally do. While my photos are being downloaded and converted to DNG files, I open up iTunes and sync my iPhone. In iTunes I go to the image of my phone on the left sidebar and then click the “App” tab for the phone. In the App window, scroll down to the bottom and you will find a small window that allows file sharing for certain apps. Geotag Photos is one of those applications.  I then locate the GPX file that I’ve named in Geotag Photos and I simply drag it to the desktop. At this point I open up GPSPhotoLinker. This is the software that will merge the GPX data into the DNG files. I take the GPX file that I saved to the desktop and drag it into GPSPhotoLinker. Then I find the folder with my newly downloaded DNG files and drag those two GPSPhotoLinker as well. Then I hit the batch process button and all of the navigational data in the GPX file is now embedded into the DNG photos. At this point it’s just a matter of opening Lightroom and selecting all the photos that I just downloaded, right click, select “read metadata” of the photos and then Lightroom updates the the new metadata. The cool think about using GPSPhotoLinker is it not only adds the navigational coordinated, it also adds the city, state and country when the image was taken in to the IPTC fields.

There are plenty of options for geo-logging applications and desktop apps that will sync your GPX files back to your photographs. But the process remains pretty much the same. Until Canon comes up with a GPS embedded in their DSL are this cumbersome process will remain the same.

You will notice the photos that I shot today have a small Google type pin icon in the lower right-hand corner. This is from a very clever plug-in by Dave Stivens.  If you click on the icon a Google map appears in a lightbox style window. I love the effect and how unobtrusive it is. The problem is this plug-in conflicts with my other plug-in that I use to get the same effect with most of my photos posted in my blog. So after a few days, I will disable Stiven’s plug-in. Unless someone can figure out what the conflict is and we’re able to fix it.

I’ll be posting my itinerary on Friday. I hope to be able to post photos now and again and reflect on my trip while I’m gone, but I’m not sure what kind of Internet access will have available.

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A photo essay by John Stanmeyer about Tom Little and NOOR.

(Click the photo to go to the story at VII)

This post is a little out of the ordinary for me. But I think my readers will still be interested in the photos and the plea associated with it is important. By now, you’ve heard of the killings in northern Afghanistan. The Taliban executed 10 Christian aid workers for no apparent reason other than the fact they were Christians that might be sharing their faith. The leader of the 10 was an eye surgeon named Tom Little, who had given 30 years of service to the people of Afghanistan. This is a real shame. It’s an insult to Islam and goes a long way at damaging any relationships that are being built between the two faiths. This hits home because I know several employees with this NGO. I did not have the privileged to meet Tom Little, but I wish I had. Yes, it was no secret, they were Christians. The fact is, it was their faith that motivated them to spend years helping the blind see in Afghanistan.

All these doctors and workers were associated with the National Organization of Ophthalmic Rehabilitation (NOOR) Eye Care, a program of IAM. NOOR does nothing but good for the people of Afghanistan in northern Pakistan. Their doctors and workers preform cataract surgeries, make glasses and help people see. According to Wikipedia:

In 2009, NOOR treated 179 000 patients and performed 11,000 surgeries. In addition, Ministry of Public Health eye hospitals supported by NOOR saw 157 000 patients and performed nearly 7,000 surgeries. It dispensed over 17,000 pairs of glasses, and 359,000 bottles of eyedrops. NOOR has a particular emphasis on training and it runs a three-year ophthalmology residency programme. Almost all ophthalmologists and all ophthalmic technicians in Afghanistan have been trained by NOOR.

There are reports that people who had been blind from birth and in their 50s given their site back by these doctors. Yet, the Taliban for some reason fear them enough to kill them.

This is exactly the reason why I am a part of the International Guild of Visual Peacemakers. Our goal is to draws photographers from all cultures, ethnicity and beliefs and to help breakdown religious hate and cultural stereotypes and biases that divide us. We want to see the type of hate that killed these 10 people and so many others every day, destroyed and replaced with compassion and appreciation. Maybe this is too big a job and can never be done. Probably so. But it shouldn’t stop us from trying and at least making a positive mark on the world. I am thrilled that John Stanmeyer of VII was able to document Tom Little’s work before he was murdered. It needed to be told.

If you agree with me and feel this madness has to stop, please join me and support IGVP. If you are a photographer, consider joining and being apart of this important community. IGVP is days away from going live. Simply click this link HERE and sign up to be notified when the site is online and then you can be apart of something very important.

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By now you will have noticed I have not been posting on this blog over this past week or so. I am on the road and will be spending much of August in Indonesia on assignment and in meetings with several organizations. Last week I taught a workshop on how to compose and shoot better images with the camera you have. Fun stuff, I have not taught complete novices’ in a long time and it was rewarding.

Indonesia is green to say the least. Lush vegetation of every plant imaginable. Yet, as is so often the case, one of my favorite images was taken in the most common of places – next to the wall of a hotel. This photo of bamboo communicates relaxation and peace to me and so I hope it will work well on your desktop. This month I continued the idea I started with last month in providing you with a theme for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Keep checking back for post, or better still subscribe and you will be notified when something goes live. Until then, so take some pictures!


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iPhone_Aug_10.wallpaper.jpg                                            iPhone_Aug_10 home

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