I've transferred my blog onto Blogspot as it can handle slideshows, unlike Wordpress.
I've been slack lately, I should have blogged about the portrait assignment we were set quite a while ago. My tutor John Easterby said that this assignment usually proves to be the most difficult of all, one which most students struggle with, and he sure was right. Portraits are something I do on a regular basis for the paper, but it's always a pretty straight forward shoot, we never want anything complicated for that. Portraits to run with interviews are usually shot during the interview itself, often with whatever available light there is. There is no direction of the subject on our part, we just shoot throughout the interview whenever it looks right.
This time round I had to be more careful. John specifically wanted us to direct the shoot, pose the subject and so on. I had a few ideas of who to shoot, but time constraints meant I had to make do with newspaper assignments, and just be more creative than we normally are.
The first assignment was to do portraits of retired tenor Paul Asciak at an exhibition of his career as an opera singer. In the image which worked, I posed him in front of a photo showing him much younger when he played the title role in Verdi's Otello. Other images of him next to costumes he'd worn on stage didn't work too well.
MAPJD Portraits EDIT- Paul Asciak - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
The second assignment was with choreographer and dancer Felix Busuttil, who'd just hung up his dancing shoes for the last time, though he was at pains to stress he would continue working as a choreographer and director. The interview took place in a dark cafe, so once it was over, I took him out onto the shaded terrace of St James Cavalier, and placed him against the old stonework of the fortifications. I did a variety of close ups and long shots. The shots with his hands against his chin didn't look right, looked too posey.
Once those were out of the way, we moved to another nearby location, the ruins of the bombed out Royal Opera House, as it featured prominently in the interview. There has been talk of using the site to build a new houses of parliament, while the arts community is dead set against that. Felix was quite categorical when he stated that the site belonged to artists, and it should be returned to artists. The photos there, however, appear a bit forced as an idea, and didn't work too well. The light wasn't right either. The images of Felix on the terrace were the most successful of the three shoots, according to John.
MAPJD Portraits EDIT- Felix Busuttil - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
The final assignment was with artist Eman Grima in a gallery hosting his latest exhibition. I had more time on my hands than is the norm for this, so I was able to get a variety of images, partly thanks to Eman's full and helpful cooperation. Some images worked better than others. For some shots, I went wide, using the depth of the gallery. I also went for tight face shots, the guy's got a very interesting face. Most were done with available light - the few when I used a bit of flash to help out didn't work well.
The results, according to John, were competent, more than good enough for any newspaper anywhere, but I need to go beyond that - I need to break out of my newspaper mode, which won't be easy, considering I've been in that mode for some 18 years.
MAPJD Portraits EDIT- Eman Grima - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
Saturday, May 16, 2009
LIFE ON RENAISSANCE BOULEVARD
Originally published April 23, 2009
The rocking horse is familiar – it’s identical to the one my 3 year old daughter loves playing on. She’s safe at home, but this rocking horse is outside a rain-swept tent in the Piazza d’Armi tent city in L’Aquila. Something about it makes me pause, think, chokes me up. It all feels too close to home.
Yet, whereas walking around the city centre of L’Aquila left me with a foreboding sense of death, loss and despair, the ‘tentopoli’, tent cities which have mushroomed all over the earthquake-affected region, served as a welcome reminder that life goes on, that the human spirit is indomitable and cannot be crushed. People’s initial feelings of hopelessness has changed to a growing sense of community and solidarity – strangers have become friends, neighbours who’d studiously avoided each other for years have now become best buddies. The inhabitants have slowly begun to resign themselves to their fate and realise they will not return to their homes for the foreseeable future.
Some 7000 tents have been mounted throughout the area, the vast majority by the Rapid Response Aid Centres and Logistics Directorate of the Home Office Public Rescue. Working out of the enormous logistics base purposely set up in Avezzano, a town some 50 kilometres away from L’Aquila, the directorate has shipped supplies to places much further afield than initially expected.
I joined one unit of the Home Office Rapid Response Aid Centres and Logistics Directorate on a long trip to the remote mountain village of Collepietro, a drive of some 80 kilometres. The picturesque village appeared quiet, all doors were closed, the few shops shuttered. The whole population had moved to the rapidly set-up tent complex on the far edge of the village. The residents are afraid to return to their homes, even though damage in the village was negligible. So they’re all housed in tents, and now they were getting a large tent that can be used for social gatherings, town meetings, as a dining hall, school, church and so on. It’s a scenario repeated throughout the Abruzzo region. People are nervous and scared, and in places such as Collepietro, they’ll stay under canvas until mobile homes are brought in by autumn, or till they tire of living in tents and decide to return to their houses as long as the buildings are safe.
Closer to the epicentre, things are different. Even once they tire of living under canvas, thousands have no home to return to. Buildings which remained standing after the earthquake are unstable – an as-yet unknown but large quantity of them will have to be demolished.
The ‘tentopoli’ have taken on an air of permanency. Well-equipped field kitchens provide a steady stream of hot meals, gravel paths with rubber matting have been laid down in order for it not to get muddy. Tents are numbered, it’s only a matter of time before street names start appearing. One man has hung a sign outside his tent reading “Boulevard de la renaissance o deju recominciu” which roughly translates as “Renaissance Boulevard… Or we have to start again”
A remarkable infrastructure is falling into place – apart from the tents which house six people in each, one finds veterinary services, mobile post offices, information centres, internet service, dental clinics, medical centres providing psychological support, refuse collection, and even a tent where one can get a massage. Doctors dressed as clowns roam the camps, providing essential psychological support and cheer to children and adults alike. The large social tents, which serve as dining halls, are packed for daily mass. People who in some cases hadn’t stepped into a church for years are now flooding back.
People queue in an orderly fashion for anything from clothes to soap and toothpaste, relying on a remarkable influx of charity.
There’s a growing sense of resurrection. In Onna, the small hamlet where not a single building remained standing and 40 of its 300 inhabitants were killed, the church of stones has fallen, but the church of people remains alive, albeit wounded. The church bells were retrieved by fire-fighters, and a hastily improvised new belfry, built with steel poles and wood, with those same bells, now dominates the camp outside the hamlet. Last Sunday, the church bells of Onna rang out once again.
Outside nearby Paganica, children released balloons with messages, their thoughts and feelings written on them. They watched them catch the airflows and climb higher and higher towards the towering mountains that surround the region.
Some 35,000 people are living in the tent cities – that number is set to grow, as around 20,000 people who were evacuated to hotels along the Adriatic coast will now have to make way for the thousands of tourists who will soon flood into the holiday resorts there.
It’s probably just the thing to put you off camping holidays for life.
This trip was made possible through the initiative of Koperattiva Kulturali Universitarja (KKU) and will be followed by a photographic exhibition which will take place during Evenings on Campus 2009.
Life on Renaissance Boulevard - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
THE END OF THE WORLD IN TWENTY SECONDS
Originally published April 20, 2009
There’s a rumbling in the ground, a couple of seconds of shaking. It gives me one hell of a fright, but then I notice that the hotel receptionist doesn’t even bother to look up from behind his desk. He’s evidently grown used to the tremors which continue to strike L’Aquila in the region of Abruzzo in central Italy several times a day.
“Around 3 on the Richter scale,” he tells me afterwards, a far cry from the 6.3 magnitude earthquake which struck the region on April 6 with devastating ferocity. I relax again, and before long, I’m hardly taking any notice of the tremors myself, or that’s what I try to tell myself. Yet that night I sleep with my hard hat next to my bed, my boots ready to be jumped into instantly and more clothing than I’d normally wear in the bed, and not because the room is cold.
My hotel is right outside the old city walls, only a couple of hundred metres away from scenes of indescribable devastation. However, if it weren’t for the countless fire engines, police vehicles, army trucks going around all the time, and the tent cities which have sprouted up in every available large open space, you’d never know the region has just been struck by one of Italy’s worst natural disasters in years.
Most of the destruction in L’Aquila itself is concentrated in the historic centre of the town, a place of narrow cobbled streets and sweeping piazzas, beautiful churches rich in art and history. Other parts of the town also suffered damage, but it’s not so evident at first glance because it’s spaced out.
The city centre is off limits to everyone apart from the emergency services, and a steady trickle of residents who are allowed in, in small numbers and under escort, to retrieve personal belongings such as documents, jewellery and money, as well as journalists, also under civil protection escort. The fire-fighters who drive the residents to their homes do not allow them into the houses. The residents have to tell them where their important possessions are, and the fire-fighters go and find them. The residents have to apply to go to their homes, and often have to wait several days till their name is called. The gathering points on the peripheries of the centre are full of people with empty suitcases, holdalls or boxes, patiently waiting their turn.
People appear calm, resigned to their fate. It was a very different story on the night of April 6. Tremors had been shaking the city since December, but few people thought to leave. A few who did mere days before the big one were lucky. Most of the population however was asleep in their beds on that soon-to-be catastrophic night. When the shaking started at 3.32am, accompanied by a terrifying rumble from deep in the earth, buildings shook not from side to side, as one normally expects during an earthquake, but up and down. In those fateful twenty seconds, the lives of the people of L’Aquila, and several other towns and villages through Abruzzo and further afield, were changed forever. For several others, 295 at the last count, their lives stopped there.
People in the city centre rushed in their bed clothes to the Piazza Duomo, screaming and wailing, hugging whoever was closest to them, friend or stranger made no difference. “It’s the end of the world,” they screeched. All around them, they could see the city crumbling, the magnificent dome of their beloved Duomo di San Massimo collapsing.
Not far from the Duomo, a students dormitory collapsed in on itself in seconds, resulting in the largest single loss of life in the whole region. Now, close to a fortnight later, it’s a mound of rubble in a gaping hole among the rest of the buildings on the ill-fated XX Settembre Street, a street where in all likelihood, practically all the surviving buildings will have to be demolished. Flowers and soft toys lie on the ground next to the remains of the dormitory, placed there by students who were allowed to visit the site to pay their respects to their dead friends, to try reliving some of the memories so savagely torn to shreds that night. Two students hold onto each other across the road, gazing tearfully at the rubble. They have happy memories of their time living there, but also the horrifying recollection of being trapped in the remnants of the building of twisted beams and smashed concrete till finally being rescued through heroic efforts by the Civil Protection. One of the girls wants to go closer, to touch the stones that were her home until a few days before. I lend her my helmet, and a fire-fighter takes her up to the edge of the rubble.
Moving through the streets, taking care to always try to stick to the middle of the road when on foot because of the ever-present danger of falling debris, given the regular aftershocks, I pass the orphanage where a nun died while saving five children by covering them with her veil so they wouldn’t suffocate. Cars lie buried in rubble, people’s possessions lie abandoned in the streets. Their lives have been exposed for all to see – their private bedrooms opened to prying eyes after the walls fell out, even if the buildings remained standing. It is a ghost town, the eerie silence broken only by the movement of civil protection vehicles driving slowly, fire-fighters clearing debris away, trying to make safe places where masonry is hanging by a thread.
Nothing can prepare you for this kind of sight – seeing it in photographs or television doesn’t even come close to seeing it for real. Though the damage is not as widespread as in other major earthquakes that have taken place, such as in China last year, even hardened experienced journalists who thought they’d seen all the horrors that the world could throw their way, feel that this is one of the places that has most affected them – maybe because it’s closer to home. I’m in a place of death, of hell - I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like for the people who lived through it.
Their lives will never be the same. A part of each of them died alongside those who would never see the light of day again.
This trip was the initiative of Koperattiva Kulturali Universitarja(KKU) and will be followed by a photographic exhibition which will take place during Evenings on Campus 2009.
“Around 3 on the Richter scale,” he tells me afterwards, a far cry from the 6.3 magnitude earthquake which struck the region on April 6 with devastating ferocity. I relax again, and before long, I’m hardly taking any notice of the tremors myself, or that’s what I try to tell myself. Yet that night I sleep with my hard hat next to my bed, my boots ready to be jumped into instantly and more clothing than I’d normally wear in the bed, and not because the room is cold.
My hotel is right outside the old city walls, only a couple of hundred metres away from scenes of indescribable devastation. However, if it weren’t for the countless fire engines, police vehicles, army trucks going around all the time, and the tent cities which have sprouted up in every available large open space, you’d never know the region has just been struck by one of Italy’s worst natural disasters in years.
Most of the destruction in L’Aquila itself is concentrated in the historic centre of the town, a place of narrow cobbled streets and sweeping piazzas, beautiful churches rich in art and history. Other parts of the town also suffered damage, but it’s not so evident at first glance because it’s spaced out.
The city centre is off limits to everyone apart from the emergency services, and a steady trickle of residents who are allowed in, in small numbers and under escort, to retrieve personal belongings such as documents, jewellery and money, as well as journalists, also under civil protection escort. The fire-fighters who drive the residents to their homes do not allow them into the houses. The residents have to tell them where their important possessions are, and the fire-fighters go and find them. The residents have to apply to go to their homes, and often have to wait several days till their name is called. The gathering points on the peripheries of the centre are full of people with empty suitcases, holdalls or boxes, patiently waiting their turn.
People appear calm, resigned to their fate. It was a very different story on the night of April 6. Tremors had been shaking the city since December, but few people thought to leave. A few who did mere days before the big one were lucky. Most of the population however was asleep in their beds on that soon-to-be catastrophic night. When the shaking started at 3.32am, accompanied by a terrifying rumble from deep in the earth, buildings shook not from side to side, as one normally expects during an earthquake, but up and down. In those fateful twenty seconds, the lives of the people of L’Aquila, and several other towns and villages through Abruzzo and further afield, were changed forever. For several others, 295 at the last count, their lives stopped there.
People in the city centre rushed in their bed clothes to the Piazza Duomo, screaming and wailing, hugging whoever was closest to them, friend or stranger made no difference. “It’s the end of the world,” they screeched. All around them, they could see the city crumbling, the magnificent dome of their beloved Duomo di San Massimo collapsing.
Not far from the Duomo, a students dormitory collapsed in on itself in seconds, resulting in the largest single loss of life in the whole region. Now, close to a fortnight later, it’s a mound of rubble in a gaping hole among the rest of the buildings on the ill-fated XX Settembre Street, a street where in all likelihood, practically all the surviving buildings will have to be demolished. Flowers and soft toys lie on the ground next to the remains of the dormitory, placed there by students who were allowed to visit the site to pay their respects to their dead friends, to try reliving some of the memories so savagely torn to shreds that night. Two students hold onto each other across the road, gazing tearfully at the rubble. They have happy memories of their time living there, but also the horrifying recollection of being trapped in the remnants of the building of twisted beams and smashed concrete till finally being rescued through heroic efforts by the Civil Protection. One of the girls wants to go closer, to touch the stones that were her home until a few days before. I lend her my helmet, and a fire-fighter takes her up to the edge of the rubble.
Moving through the streets, taking care to always try to stick to the middle of the road when on foot because of the ever-present danger of falling debris, given the regular aftershocks, I pass the orphanage where a nun died while saving five children by covering them with her veil so they wouldn’t suffocate. Cars lie buried in rubble, people’s possessions lie abandoned in the streets. Their lives have been exposed for all to see – their private bedrooms opened to prying eyes after the walls fell out, even if the buildings remained standing. It is a ghost town, the eerie silence broken only by the movement of civil protection vehicles driving slowly, fire-fighters clearing debris away, trying to make safe places where masonry is hanging by a thread.
Nothing can prepare you for this kind of sight – seeing it in photographs or television doesn’t even come close to seeing it for real. Though the damage is not as widespread as in other major earthquakes that have taken place, such as in China last year, even hardened experienced journalists who thought they’d seen all the horrors that the world could throw their way, feel that this is one of the places that has most affected them – maybe because it’s closer to home. I’m in a place of death, of hell - I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like for the people who lived through it.
Their lives will never be the same. A part of each of them died alongside those who would never see the light of day again.
This trip was the initiative of Koperattiva Kulturali Universitarja(KKU) and will be followed by a photographic exhibition which will take place during Evenings on Campus 2009.
The End of the World in Twenty Seconds - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
TRAVELLING AGAIN
Originally published April 16, 2009
I haven’t been particularly prolific with this blog in recent weeks. I’m still going through the long process of editing my Uganda photos and writing up a series of features on the place, so won’t be posting any of the pix here till then. Things have been very busy at the Times too, which hasn’t left much time for anything else.
As far the MA is concerned, we’ve been on a long Easter break, which has upset the rhythm we’d built up somewhat, but I’m sure we’ll quickly get back into it once we resume sessions next week. One blog that’s still missing from here concerns the portrait assignments I had to do, so I’ll try sort those out next week.
Right now I’m in Rome, and going over to the earthquake zone in Abruzzo first thing tomorrow morning… a bit late in the day story-wise, admittedly, but it’s only over the past couple of days that the opportunity came up. I certainly wasn’t actively seeking it out, having just returned from Uganda and still not settled back down.
Besides, I do believe that just because the media circus is over, it doesn’t mean the story is… perhaps this way I won’t have to worry about other members of the press straying into my frame!
Anyhow, I’ve no idea how this will go – got a few ideas, some good plans, so am just hoping those plans work out fine and I come out of the zone in one piece and with some good pix and stories.
THE MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS
Originally published April 2, 2009
I’m currently on my way back to Malta after spending a couple of weeks on assignment in Uganda, working on a series of photo essays and features dealing with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by 189 nations at the UN Millenniun Summit in 2000.
Eradication of extreme poverty and hunger
Achieve universal primary education
Promote gender equality and empower women
Reduce child mortality
Improve maternal health
Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
Ensure environmental sustainability
Develop and global partnership for development
I’ll be showing plenty of pictures here of course, but not before the features appear in The Times over the coming days (not sure when the series will start yet) – suffice to say I’m really excited by the images I’ve got.
I joined up with an SOS Malta led mission, called MEDIP, to the country, meant to sensitise the media, and hence the general public, to the MDGs. So my thanks are due to them for allowing me to essentially gatecrash the whole thing and make the trip too, even though it was only meant for TV stations from the new EU member states.
RELATIONSHIPS - AUTISM
Originally published March 9, 2009
For the second part of my relationships assignment, I set up a visit to the Eden and Razzett Foundation , aiming to document the close relationship between the therapists and the clients. I did it over two sessions, the initial one having been cut short by some breaking news coverage. The Foundation’s CEO Nathan Farrugia put me in touch with the head of the STEP unit, Doreen Mercieca, who cleared the way through the minefield that is data protection in this country. On both visits, I had to be careful who I had in the picture, as some children could not be photographed – keeping track of who could and who couldn’t took some getting used to.
The Foundation’s website describes STEP (Structured Training and Education Programme) as a specialised programme for children and adolescents within the autistic spectrum. The STEP programme is offered through a team made up of tutors who are supported by the speech and language pathologists, occupational therapists and the programme’s psychologist. Parents are considered to be key members of the team and work alongside tutors and the other professionals. Their commitment and cooperation is considered to play a major part in the child’s progress. Parents are an integral part of their child’s assessment and teaching, constantly providing information about their child’s needs, behaviour, interests and dislikes, and also voicing their own concerns and priorities for their child.
The unit provides intensive specialised training, education and support allowing the development of the child’s full potential and level of independence appropriate for his or her age, as well as provides assistance and support to ensure full inclusion at school and within the community.
I found autism particularly interesting within the scope of the relationships brief as autistic children are normally considered to be incapable of forming normal social relationships.
However, whilst doing some internet research before the shoot, I came across a fascinating piece called Six Principle of Autistic Interaction, written by James Williams (http://www.jamesmw.com/), a high-functioning autistic person, proved very revealing.
Williams writes
“ Autistic individuals typically have problems interacting in normal social environments. This leads some parents and professionals to think that they are naturally antisocial. However, autistic individuals, if allowed to interact with other autistic individuals, develop complex friendships that are based on social rules that are unique to autistic relationships. These social rules are not necessarily the social rules of neurotypical individuals.”
I resolved to see if I could capture that.
As on earlier assignments, I was still restricted to one camera, one lens and manual everything. However, we were now allowed to uprate the ISO to 1600 and shoot colour if we preferred. I stuck to black and white, feeling it would work better for this kind of thing. I used a 16- 35mm f/2.8 lens on my 5DMkII, taking care not to operate the zoom at all but just leaving it on the 35mm end. Being all indoor work, being able to use an ISO of 1600 was a welcome addition. I was looking for moments of interaction among the children and tutors, as well as amongst the children themselves. I wanted eye contact, eye lines, expressive body language, physical touch. There were also the moments of interaction between the children and the world around them that needed to be captured.
At first, some of the children took a keen interest in me and the camera, but they soon got bored of me and started ignoring my presence, which is exactly what I wanted. Towards the end of the second session, when all the children were playing in the same space and all but two couldn’t be photographed, I had to use slow shutter speeds and pan with my main subject so as to blur everyone else. It’s a bit of a hit and miss technique, but I think it worked in a few instances. I wanted to show them playing together, and at times not playing together, and this seemed the only way to go about it given the restrictions of who could be shown in a photograph. I did find myself deleting several images, something I don’t normally do unless the image is technically a total washout, because the wrong person could be seen in the background, or the person remained recognisable despite the blurring technique. Some good images are lost because of that, but one has to accept that without too much bother. The fact that some parents did give consent to having their children documented was a blessing for which I’m very grateful, so why push my luck?
MAPJD Relationships 2 - Eden Foundation EDIT - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
MAPJD Relationships 2B - Eden Foundation EDIT - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
DANCING JELLIES - MY FIRST AUDIO SLIDESHOW
Originally published March 8, 2009
I find jellyfish hypnotic – I’ve been working on this audio slideshow on and off for months – the pictures were taken with it in mind 11 months ago when I was visiting California. I’ll probably keep tinkering with it for a while yet, but need an improved version of Soundslides Plus to do that (hopefully the features I need will be available in upcoming releases of the software). Image size is on the low size because of the sheer number of photos in it (over three hundred pix) – you’ll need a very fast broadband connection to view it properly. Music is by Kevin MacLeod from a royalty-free website I found on the net.
I’m just about starting to play around with gathering audio on location myself , having just bought a digital audio recorder, so in the near future I’ll start working on documentary audio slideshows.
RELATIONSHIPS - DANCE
Originally published March 4, 2009
The latest assignment I’ve had to do as part as my MA deals with relationships. Taking relationships in the wider sense of the word, it’s seems I’ve taken the approach of why keep things simple and straight forward when you can make them impossibly complicated? I’ve just completed my first shoot and am seriously considering a reshoot. I opted to try document the relationship between a contemporary dance teacher and her students, most aged around 15, during a dance class. I was also looking for what sort of relationship there is among the students themselves.
The thing with contemporary dance is that there’s little physical interaction during the lesson, it’s all done by voice and through the teacher doing the moves and students following her actions, most of the eye contact is done via the large mirrors at the front of the room. The relationship dynamics move via the mirror. It’s not close and intimate in the way a music teacher and a pupil would be; it’s not like in classical ballet where the teacher will go round the students one by one, adjusting the position of a hand, a foot and so on. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen in contemporary dance, but when it does, it’s usually over in half a second and tends to be on the far end from where you’ve placed yourself. So when you’re limited to using one lens (a 50mm in my case), you’ve got to almost fly across the room as though you’re a dancer yourself (and believe me I’m not!) in order to get the right angle, whilst taking care that another dance doesn’t back kick you as she goes through her paces.
Sandra Mifsud is one of the top contemporary dancers and choreographers on the island. I’ve followed her work for many years and she’s come up with some terrific and memorable pieces. The chance to photograph one of her classes at the Brigitte Gauci Borda School of Ballet was too good to pass up. But do the shots work? I’m not too sure… yes, there are some decent images but whether they fulfill the brief of capturing relationships is something I’m not sure of. One thing I’m certain of is that most of the pictures don’t really deal with the relationship at all but work as dance pictures in their own right.
Perhaps I should give it another go and cover a classical ballet lesson instead?
MAPJD Relationships 1 - Dance class EDIT - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
HITTING THE STREETS AGAIN
Originally published February 23, 2009
I’ve been back in action for a few days now, but haven’t had the chance to concentrate on shooting course assignments until this morning. It’s been a busy time, mostly covering Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping’s visit to the island and carnival activities for the paper. For one who dislikes the carnival here in Valletta, I’m quite surprised at how much I’ve shot. The one bit I really did enjoy was the masked Ball at the Manoel Theatre. There’s a small selection of photos from that here
This morning I had to cover yet another carnival parade for the paper, but decided to try shoot the continuation of my street photography assignment at the same time. Not easy, since the requirements for both are totally different. In the case of the college assignment, I had the usual restriction of one fixed lens, one camera, black and white, manual focus and exposure and 400ISO, whereas whilst shooting for the paper I normally use two cameras, one with a 16-35 and the other with a 70-200. So I had to do a bit of a juggling act.
I didn’t want to do the usual carnival pix. So I decided to concentrate on making pictures of people with cameras, engrossed in shooting the carnival themselves. I looked for combinations of facial expression, harsh light and shadows and juxtaposing the photographers with carnivalesque elements. I did get some weird looks when a couple of photographers caught on to the fact I was shooting them. Perhaps here shooting for the paper helped as well, as I’d simply lift the second camera with the long lens and shoot some detail in the parade.
Once done with the parade, I stopped outside an old church, wanting to get some interestingly composed photos of the highlights and deep shadows as people walked by. I couldn’t shoot for long. Within a few minutes, the light was gone as heavy cloud cover moved in.
Later in the evening, back roaming the streets shooting the celebrations for the paper, I shot a few more frames with this assignment in mind.
Regarding carnival photos, perhaps next year I should try something a bit different and more daring. I’ve got some ideas in that department so watch this space!
MAPJD Street Photography 3 EDIT - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
ALLEVIATING THE BOREDOM
Originally published February 19, 2009
What an absolute and utter pain it’s been, stuck at home for the past three days feeling rather unwell. On top of that there’s the total frustration of knowing I’m missing good photos out there because there’s so much going on, and also realising that it’s going to be pretty hard to meet my college assignment deadline now. I’ve been trying to alleviate the boredom by reading up on other photographers and by taking pictures round the house – turning the camera on food crumbs left on the dinner table, the goldfish, who must be far more bored by now than I ever could be. The Peter Fraser influence is still there, and I don’t see it waning away too quickly. I guess the goldfish pix are more ‘me’ in a way, there’s a sense of dance in them, which is right up my alley. There isn’t any Photoshop manipulation in the images, apart from adjusting of levels, as well as boosting the contrast and saturation slightly in the RAW conversion software.
STREET WALKING
Originally published February 16, 2009
I finally got cracking on my street photography assignment on Sunday morning. Sun was shining brightly but heavens, was it cold or what! I was squeezing it in between shoots for my newspaper, walking around the main street of the capital Valletta and hitting the Sunday flea market just outside the city walls. Originally I’d planned on just taking one camera after removing its vertical grip and one lens, but because I was still technically speaking working for the paper I had to take my full kit, albeit packed away. So I couldn’t remain as inconspicuous as I’d hoped. I guess my thick blue fleece jacket didn’t help in that respect either. The restrictions of one camera, one lens (a 28, 35 or 50), black and white and 400 ISO remained in force. I opted to stick to 35mm.
I was primarily looking for interplay of highlights and shadows, using deep black shadows to create graphic shapes. At the same time, I had to try capture those decisive moments when everything comes together in a split instant. Though shooting in black and white, it was pretty clear to me that many of the images I was making work far better in colour. Not a problem really, as I was shooting in RAW anyhow, so converting back to colour is pretty straight forward. In some cases, the images don’t work at all in black and white, but once seen in colour, I find them rather more striking.
People can sometimes be a bit confrontational here so I had to try very hard to be discreet. Occasionally someone may take offence at having their picture taken and start spouting all sorts of nonsense about data protection laws, even though it’s very clear they have no idea what the law actually says. Other times people will make it a point to walk around you or avoid you when they see your camera. Lifting the camera at the very last second doesn’t always solve the problem, because in that instant you don’t always get your carefully thought-out composition perfectly right. In one case though, it worked out just fine when I reacted instantly to an elderly man in a slow run across a square. None of it was preplanned, not the angle, not the composition, I even had to instinctively run a few paces after him…. but it’s one of my favourite shots from the morning.
I also found myself thinking hard about how long one should stay in one spot, where the stage is set and you’re just waiting for your actors to walk into the space. Is it time to move on when you’ve made one decent shot of it? Or hang around because something even better might come along? in the end, wanting to get a variety of pictures and also because of the biting cold, I decided to move along once I knew I had an image which felt right.
It took a while to get into the zone, to really warm up to the shoot, but by the time I got to the flea market, I was being more daring. The hustle and bustle of the place naturally helped, as did the presence of many camera-toting tourists, but it actually is the place where one should be most careful about shooting. I afterwards found out that it’s not the first time that a market vendor has practically assaulted someone for taking pix of him.
All in all, I was pleased with the photos. Some were also used on the Reuters wire, so presumably, I did something right.
I’m attaching some of the pictures in both colour and black and white.
LOOKING AT A DUMP IN A WHOLE NEW LIGHT
Originally published February 14, 2009
An online session with British photographer Peter Fraser, considered by many to be the photographer who has most absorbed the post-World War II American tradition – found in literature as well as the visual arts – of finding the sublime in unlikely places, left me looking at places I had become over-familiar with, such as the photographers’ office at the newspaper where I work , in a new light. Fraser (http://www.peterfraser.net/), one of the most important British colour photographers, has made incredible photographs of the most mundane things we see around us all the time – he has a fascinating series on dirt, for instance. Admittedly, I started off the session as something of a skeptic. I wasn’t familiar with his work apart from a quick look at his website before the session began. Pretty much the way I’d felt about American photographer William Eggleston (incidentally a huge influence on Fraser) when I first started going round his exhibition at the Barbican a few years ago…. and yet, then as now, the pictures grow on you, and by the end of the viewing, you’re hooked.
The room I was in is in desperate need of remodelling (in all fairness, it’s due to be done pretty soon), but immediately after the lecture was over, I started shooting details in the room I’d never really given much of a second glance before. Maybe I was wasting my time, but perhaps because I found myself in more of a meditative state of mind due to countless reasons I won’t go into here, there was a new found beauty in the grottiness of the room. As the lecture was drawing to a close, I was already taking pictures.
It’s certainly not really photojournalism in the classic sense, but it is a form of documentary photography.
As soon as I get a free hour or so over the next couple of days, I intend to go over to the apartment I’m currently having done up, and continue doing some pictures along these lines.
An online session with British photographer Peter Fraser, considered by many to be the photographer who has most absorbed the post-World War II American tradition – found in literature as well as the visual arts – of finding the sublime in unlikely places, left me looking at places I had become over-familiar with, such as the photographers’ office at the newspaper where I work , in a new light. Fraser (http://www.peterfraser.net/), one of the most important British colour photographers, has made incredible photographs of the most mundane things we see around us all the time – he has a fascinating series on dirt, for instance. Admittedly, I started off the session as something of a skeptic. I wasn’t familiar with his work apart from a quick look at his website before the session began. Pretty much the way I’d felt about American photographer William Eggleston (incidentally a huge influence on Fraser) when I first started going round his exhibition at the Barbican a few years ago…. and yet, then as now, the pictures grow on you, and by the end of the viewing, you’re hooked.
The room I was in is in desperate need of remodelling (in all fairness, it’s due to be done pretty soon), but immediately after the lecture was over, I started shooting details in the room I’d never really given much of a second glance before. Maybe I was wasting my time, but perhaps because I found myself in more of a meditative state of mind due to countless reasons I won’t go into here, there was a new found beauty in the grottiness of the room. As the lecture was drawing to a close, I was already taking pictures.
It’s certainly not really photojournalism in the classic sense, but it is a form of documentary photography.
As soon as I get a free hour or so over the next couple of days, I intend to go over to the apartment I’m currently having done up, and continue doing some pictures along these lines.
Friday, May 15, 2009
REVISITING PEOPLE AT WORK
Originally published February 9, 2009
The first tutorial, just under a fortnight ago, with British photographer Homer Sykes went well. A two hour session shared with three other students, giving us around half an hour each going through our first three people at work assignments. We were all free to contribute to the discussion and learn from each other’s mistakes and good points. The main gist of what came out concerned making sure all the elements in the picture contribute something to the shot. Composition is everything, and try getting it right first time round in the frame and avoid having to crop images in order to make them work. The background is as important as the foreground or main subject, as it’s what makes or breaks the picture. Without the luxury of switching lenses or using a zoom lens, you’ve got to really squeeze yourself into tight corners sometimes in order to get the framing right, or use your legs and move when you want to get closer to the subject. Try getting a higher or lower viewpoint, work those thigh muscles. Timing is equally important, catching that fleeting expression or movement, capturing the instantaneous moment when all the elements come together. Homer wasn’t bothered with whether a picture was sharp or not (good job about that, seeing the number of soft images we all had since we were using the long-dormant or lost skill of manual focusing), all he was interested in was the composition, the quality of light and the decisive moment.
I got good critical feedback on my photos of Freddie Fenech at the Association for Abandoned Animals and the silversmith Chris Aquilina. Unfortunately, time constraints meant we couldn’t go through the pictures of the actress Irene Christ, basically because there were too many pictures, the result of doing a six hour shoot with so many different evolving scenarios.
Assignment for the following fortnight was to go do three more people at work, trying to utilise what we’d learnt from the first three. The original restrictions of one fixed lens, a 35 or a 50, manual everything, black and white and 400 ISO remained in force.
My first shoot was at the Malta Mounted Police stables. I wanted to spend some time with a stable hand doing a behind the scenes piece, but learnt that it’s the police officers themselves to take care of all that. I met up with Sergeant Francis Seychell, a twenty-one year career officer one afternoon. He’s been in the mounted section for the past ten years. He quickly tagged on to what I was after picture-wise and he let me get on with it. I photographed him cleaning the stables, giving a horse its shower, cleaning hooves, grooming a horse…all the sort of things he’d do on a quiet afternoon at the stables. I did have the option to return early the next morning when they’d be lots more activity with several more officers around and horses being prepared to go out on patrols or ceremonial duties, but thought the pix when the place was relatively quiet might work better. The afternoon light was better too. Once again, because it was a long shoot with different things happening, I found myself shooting more than the 70 or so images we were expected to take.
The second shoot was with an immigrant named Jimmy from the Ivory Coast, at the Wasteserv Sant Antnin Recycling Plant. Jimmy arrived in Malta a few years ago, one of the thousands of African boat people who have ended up on our shores while crossing from Libya to Europe. Once the would-be immigrants are granted refugee or humanitarian status, they are allowed to work, though practically all end up in manual labour or other low-paying jobs. Jimmy works in a sorting room, where different recyclable materials are sorted. The day I was shooting Jimmy and his colleagues were sorting white from green plastic bottles, and detergent containers. I’d arrived at the Plant unsure of who I would be photographing – their Maltese shift leader asked them there and then if they’d mind being photographed. Jimmy, being the eldest and the only one who knew some English, was acting as a go-between, asking his colleagues if they wanted to be my main subject. When it became clear that we weren’t getting anywhere, as most of the migrants didn’t want their pictures taken because the police might see them (which is odd, they’re not working illegally – this is after all a government-owned plant), I told the foreman that Jimmy would make the perfect subject. Jimmy agreed, and proceeded to ignore the fact that I was there, which was exactly what I wanted in the first place. Catching the moment proved tricky – apart from having Jimmy as my main subject, I wanted plastic materials being flung into their pit in the foreground, the guy opposite side of the conveyor belt to lean forward to grab some bottles at the exact same time Jimmy did a similar movement, and I wanted Jimmy’s face to show up from beneath his baseball cap. Don’t think the elements ever all came together in a single shot, but all in all, results weren’t too bad.
The last shoot proved to be the most challenging in a sense because as I got underway I felt it wasn’t really coming together, though things did improve as we went along. I met up with Kurt Vassallo, a historical re-enactor with the National Heritage Trust (Fondazzjoni Wirt Artna) at the Upper Barrakka gardens Saluting Battery in Valletta. Kurt is one of the full-time re-enactors in Royal Malta Artillery uniform taking care of the battery and its artillery pieces, recreating scenes from the Victorian-era. He’s been doing the job for the past three years, running guided tours and giving talks on artillery and ammunition of the period, as well as being overall commander during the daily midday gun salute.
He was giving his talk in the shade of a canopy in bright sunlight when I caught up with him, a bit late on my part after getting held up on an earlier assignment. The picture possibilities seemed limited but they did improve once he moved out of the canopy and showed the different cannons to the assembled tourists. By the time it came to the midday gun salute, I knew I was getting more usable pictures and making it a relatively successful assignment.
Here’s to hoping Homer agrees :o)
MAPJD People at Work 3-6 - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
LIE IN ON A SUNDAY? FAT CHANCE!
Originally published February 3, 2009
I was hoping to have a bit of a lie in on Sunday morning. Though it was a working day, my shift wasn’t due to start till late morning so I’d planned to sleep in a bit. I certainly wasn’t banking on being woken up round 7.30 by a phone call, quickly followed by a second phone call – ever noticed how particularly irritating a ringing phone sounds when you’re still asleep?
It was our online editor and then a military contact calling me… a group of some 300 African would-be immigrants had just landed outside the pictueresque fishing village of Marsaxlokk, on the south-east side of the island. That would make it the largest single landing we’ve ever had here.
Adrenaline immediately sets in. I leap out of bed and into my clothes…no time for the luxury of a hot coffee or shower, just pick up my kit, dash out of the house, get into my car and drive off, relying on the adrenaline to prevent me from dropping off to sleep at the wheel. All the while I’m working out the quickest route to get there, making sure I avoid the Sunday market in the fishing village. I also find myself thankful that the speed cameras along the route won’t be installed until next week, as I suspect I may have been just a tad over the limit.
Finally arriving on site, I quickly shoot off a couple of frames from a distance, the so-called wide establishing picture, then make my way into the midst of the scene. The wooden fishing boat the migrants have arrived on is stuck fast in shallow water. Luckily the sea isn’t particularly rough, otherwise the boat would have been smashed to bits. Dozens of policemen and soldiers are standing on the shoreline, as a crowd of curious onlookers gathers on the periphery. Getting in close, I notice that most of the migrants are not from the sub-Sahara, but seem to be North Africans. That in itself makes it unusual and perhaps even more newsworthy.
Trying to get the right angle while taking care not to break an ankle on the slippery loose rocks, I know it’s only a matter of time before a larger than the norm wave rolls in and gives me a drenching – sure enough, within a few minutes of arriving, my cameras and I are dripping with water. A quick wipe down, a silent prayer, and I carry on shooting.
I’m looking for different angles, different ways of composing the picture. Though this is different from the countless other landings I’ve covered, I keep the mantra of trying to get something very different uppermost in my mind. Following feedback during my first tutorial on the MA, I’m also more consciously aware of how I’m composing the frame, something which I normally do instinctively, not always successfully I should add.
At least the pressure to wire a quick pic back to the paper’s online section is off, as our videographer is also on the scene so he handles the images for our website.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20090201/local/large-number-of-migrants-land-at-marsaxlokk
Army engineers lash a few planks of wood together to make a rudimentary gangway to enable the migrants to disembark. Part of me wonders ‘wouldn’t it be great if one falls off it into the water?’ Would make a great pic… but the migrant would also get hurt in the process, so I bury the thought. It’s not long before the engineers replace the planks with a proper gangway with railings which has just been brought on the scene. One migrant woman is pregnant and barely able to walk. A senior police officer next to me calls out for a stretcher to be brought up. I tell him thank you, that will make a better pic. The stretcher is however on a gurney, so policemen have to help her hobble down the gangway as best as she can. She cries out in pain and is then lifted onto the stretcher on land. That key moment has to be photographed with a so-called Hail Mary manoeuver, holding the camera over the heads of policemen and paramedics who have crowded in front of me and shooting relatively blindly. I quickly check the frame on the LCD on the back of my camera, and start looking for the next shot.
Chimping, looking at the pictures on the LCD on the camera, is something I try to keep to a bare minimum. I use it to confirm exposure is correct sometimes, cjhecking out the histogram of the image, but try to resist the temptation to keep looking through the images, unless I’m between assignments. Every moment spent looking down at that screen, I may be missing some important action or moment happening in front of me. The only time I do lots of chimping is when I need to edit on the spot to be able to file pictures back to the paper or agency there and then, such as when covering soccer, but one eye always remains on the action.
The last people to be brought off the boat are families with young children. Turns out they’re Kurds. They climb into an army truck, and that’s the point when I feel I’m getting my best shots. The light falling on their faces is terrific, and falls off into darkness the further in the truck they are. One little girl with the most amazing beautiful brown eyes fixes her gaze on me and I shoot a variety of compositions… all the while, she never takes her eyes off me. I wonder what she’s thinking, and what those eyes have seen over the past days, weeks, months as she and her family fled their homeland and embarked on this insanely dangerous journey. At least, she and her family are alive, they are the lucky ones. Thousands have drowned or died in the desert trying to do the exact same thing.
MIGRANTS FEB09 - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
MODERNIST MALTA
Originally published January 28, 2009
Last Friday we had the opening of the exhibition on TWENTIETH CENTURY MODERNIST BULDINGS IN MALTA, organised by The Kamra tal-Periti (Chamber of Architects) together with the NGO Din l-Art Helwa with the financial support of HalMann Vella. The exhibition focuses specifically on MODERNIST architecture which in Malta dates from 1930 up to 1970.
The organizing committee appointed five professional photographers to illustrate between 35 and 40 properties that the KTP included on its list of properties worthy of recognition as part of Malta’s more recent architectural heritage. Photographers Patrick Fenech, Alexandra Pace, Sergio Muscat, Matthew Mirabelli and I were briefed to capture the meaning and the beauty of the Modernist movement. We were left to interprete the subject matter in any way we deemed fit, the only proviso being that we did it in black and white.
A publication to accompany the exhibition has also been launched. Partly funded through the assistance of the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts, Modernist Malta: The Legacy in Architecture includes a comprehensive selection of the photographers’ work as well as two significant essays, a historical account of Modernist architecture in Malta by Perit Conrad Thake, a leading architectural historian, and a personal record of Modernist architecture as seen through the eyes of the architects themselves written by Petra Bianchi, director and council member of Din l-Art Helwa. The event and the publication should prove to be of interest not only to architects and engineers, but also to those interested in art and photography, as well as to lovers of Melitensia and Malta’s cultural heritage.
The whole project aims to raise public awareness about the extent and wealth of Modernist architecture in Malta. It is the organisers’ intention to communicate the qualities, originality and spirit of some of the better Modernist works through a photographic display of black and white prints, with models and drawings from the architect’s own archives.
I got involved in the project at a relatively late stage, so only photographed three properties. Well, four actually, if you count the one I photographed by mistake! I was sent to shoot the government school in Floriana near the Mall, and shot the wrong one. I’d no idea that the somewhat more interesting looking building across the street from it was also a school! Maybe because it’s no longer used as a school…anyhow, that’s my excuse! It’s a crying shame really. I still think some of the best shots I took throughout the project were actually of this wrong school, in other words, totally useless and doomed never to see the light of day – until now, that is.
Throughout the shooting process, very different from the stuff I normally do as a news and sports photographer, I found myself seeing things in terms of light and shadow, looking for shapes and patterns formed by the falling light, rather than looking at the architecture per se. I didn’t want to take pictures of the architecture in a forensic way, I wanted to interprete them through the way they form these blocks of light and shadow. The photos below start with the wrong Floriana school then move on to the correct one.
IT'S A DOG'S LIFE
Originally published January 24, 2009
Freddie Fenech runs the Association for Abandoned Animals, taking care of abandoned cats and dogs at two animal sanctuaries. These photos, the third part of my MA assignment on people at work, were taken at the smaller of the two, where he houses puppies. He decided to devote all his time to the care of abandoned animals in 1979 after retiring from the Malta Police Force where he’d served as a close protection officer for visiting heads of state and countless celebrities. His frustration at the perceived lack of awareness and interest in animal welfare within political parties has led him to decide to contest general elections in four years time running on an independent ticket, as even though animals don’t have votes, animal lovers do. His day is spent feeding and playing with the dogs, cleaning up after them, doing administrative work, rescuing abandoned animals, and following up on the dogs he has successfully re-homed.
Twice a day he gets in his car and goes to see the hunting dog Ruby, who he’d rescued five years ago. Ruby is unwell and can’t walk properly, her new owner can’t carry her up the flight of stairs to her apartment, so Freddie pops over and carries the dog into the house. It’s a promise he made to Ruby and one he intends to keep for the rest of the dog’s life. and though he might break a promise to a human, he’d never break a promise made to a dog.
As with the previous shoots on this assignment, I was restricted to one camera, one fixed focal lens, black and white, manual exposure and manual focusing. As opposed to the first part of the assignment when I shot the filigree maker, I actually found the imposed discipline liberating in a sense – it forced me to think more before pressing the shutter button. I reckon that was the whole point of our tutor imposing those restrictions. Going back to those basics is helping rekindle a long lost, or at least dormant, skill.
One thing I did find on this particular shoot was that it’s not so easy to do a fly-on-the-wall reportage on someone when there are so many playful puppies around – you can’t quite tell the dogs to carry on as though you’re not there, you can’t blend into the background until they ignore you. My being there with them meant they had new toys to play with, my camera and its strap, as well as me!
SHOOTING FOR MYSELF, JUST FOR FUN
Originally published January 22, 2009
Following couple of days were taken up with assignments which didn’t wildly fire my imagination. but whilst also fulfiling my brief, I found myself also taking pictures purely for my own enjoyment. Sitting in my car in pouring rain waiting for school vans to stop next to a school to illustrate a story on school transport, I started shooting passers-by through the wet windscreen, creating what I thought were very impressionistic moody pictures. That same effect also ensured they would never be used in the newspaper because once in newsprint, they’d appear as little more than a smudge of ink. Still, there’s always the next Times Picture Annual which one might get into.
The following morning, with a spot of improvement in the weather, I went over to the Ta’ Qali Crafts Village to get some shots of artisans at work, and tourists visiting the various workshops, seeing that there are plans to move the whole village elsewhere. Walking around what felt like a ghost town most of the time, I started noticing details, colours, contrasts, the way light was striking derelict buildings in the older part of the village. Some shots worked better in black and white rather than colour.
Sometimes I feel the need to do this, it helps keep the creative juices flowing.
Here are the results.
CHINESE SPRING
Originally published January 22, 2009
It’s been a busy few days, though a lot of what I think are the better pictures will never get into the paper, in some cases because of lack of space on the day, and in others because they’re not the kind of photos we use. Monday evening I photographed the Jiangsu Art Group of China, brought over by the Chinese Cultural Centre, in their performance at the Manoel Theatre, starting off with backstage shots and then shooting the actual show. We needed an early backpage pic that day, so I quickly filed one shot from the dressing rooms. Sadly it also meant the the pictures of the show wouldn’t be used locally, although several of them did get on the Reuters wire. I’m thinking of doing an audio slideshow with them, but didn’t have the means to record audio that day and I’m still looking for some suitable Chinese music which I can use without any problems rights-wise.
CHINESE SPRING - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
BACKSTAGE WITH AN ACTRESS
Originally published January 16, 2009
Second shoot on this Person at Work assignment went better than the first. I spent some six hours with German actress Irene Christ on dress rehearsal night of the Maleth production of Alan Ayckbourn’s “Communicating Doors” at the Manoel Theatre. I joined her at her home as she went through a final revision of her lines, then moved to the theatre, photographed her getting her kinky dominatrix costume on (!), her frustration at the make-up artist running late, then getting made up, interacting with other cast members and the director, checking all her props were where they should be, the play itself (which I was shooting anyhow for my newspaper) as well as further make-up changes between acts . I went beyond the 72 shots we’re supposed to take, but with its being a long drawn out thing with many different scenarios, I figured I had no choice in that. I really tried to just be a fly on the wall for this one - thank heavens no one brought a fly swatter to the theatre that night!
STARTING OFF MA ASSIGNMENTS – SILVERSMITH
Originally published January 15, 2009
What spurred me off to get this blog going is the online MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography I’ve just started doing with the London College of Communication. Apart from its being a course requirement, I think it could be good fun and would come in useful when I want to look back at the thought processes behind my work. I’ll probably also use it for the occasional rant )
I decided to do this MA to try refine and maybe take my photojournalistic work in a different direction, as well as to develop a more disciplined approach to the genre. After shooting the same things for several years, I feel the need for some new stimulus and think this is the ideal way to do it as the course is highly interactive. It should also help me formulate and bring to fruition a couple of book projects I’ve had in mind for some time.
First online lecture with Paul Lowe was held yesterday. Apart from a few audio glitches, it was a great start and I’m looking forward to the next two years with great excitement. I’d been concerned I was going to miss this session as I was out shooting yet another landing of would-be immigrants, just as I’d been doing the previous day (one of those pix made the Wall Street Journal pix of the day http://blogs.wsj.com/photojournal/2009/01/13/pictures-of-the-day-96/ , that sort of thing is always a huge boost )
A couple of days ago I shot my first of the three assignments I need to get done before my initial tutorial. Person at work is the theme. We’re going back to basics on this one - one camera, one fixed lens, 400 ISO, around 72 shots in all, black and white, manual exposure and manual focusing. It’s been years since I shot in that mode. The shoot proved to be pretty frustrating because of those restrictions, though I perfectly understand why they were there. I was photographing a craftsman named Chris who makes very fine silver filigree in a poorly-lit garage. He sits at a desk against a wall, so most of the time I have to shoot him from behind or the side – his face is in shadow so it’s hard to manually focus on his eyes or face to capture that intense look of concentration. The old Canon manual focus cameras I used to use had all sorts of focusing aids on the focus screen, today’s AF cameras don’t. I think I managed a few half-decent shots of his hands as he worked on small filigree pieces, but that’s pretty much about it. Even though I was trying to take a fly-on-the-wall approach, Chris kept stopping what he was doing to explain the process, which is understandable in a way, but it kept breaking the flow. So all in all, not the best of starts. Perhaps being rather tired as it was at the end of a very long intensive day didn’t help either.
MAPJD person at work 1 - EDIT - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
What spurred me off to get this blog going is the online MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography I’ve just started doing with the London College of Communication. Apart from its being a course requirement, I think it could be good fun and would come in useful when I want to look back at the thought processes behind my work. I’ll probably also use it for the occasional rant )
I decided to do this MA to try refine and maybe take my photojournalistic work in a different direction, as well as to develop a more disciplined approach to the genre. After shooting the same things for several years, I feel the need for some new stimulus and think this is the ideal way to do it as the course is highly interactive. It should also help me formulate and bring to fruition a couple of book projects I’ve had in mind for some time.
First online lecture with Paul Lowe was held yesterday. Apart from a few audio glitches, it was a great start and I’m looking forward to the next two years with great excitement. I’d been concerned I was going to miss this session as I was out shooting yet another landing of would-be immigrants, just as I’d been doing the previous day (one of those pix made the Wall Street Journal pix of the day http://blogs.wsj.com/photojournal/2009/01/13/pictures-of-the-day-96/ , that sort of thing is always a huge boost )
A couple of days ago I shot my first of the three assignments I need to get done before my initial tutorial. Person at work is the theme. We’re going back to basics on this one - one camera, one fixed lens, 400 ISO, around 72 shots in all, black and white, manual exposure and manual focusing. It’s been years since I shot in that mode. The shoot proved to be pretty frustrating because of those restrictions, though I perfectly understand why they were there. I was photographing a craftsman named Chris who makes very fine silver filigree in a poorly-lit garage. He sits at a desk against a wall, so most of the time I have to shoot him from behind or the side – his face is in shadow so it’s hard to manually focus on his eyes or face to capture that intense look of concentration. The old Canon manual focus cameras I used to use had all sorts of focusing aids on the focus screen, today’s AF cameras don’t. I think I managed a few half-decent shots of his hands as he worked on small filigree pieces, but that’s pretty much about it. Even though I was trying to take a fly-on-the-wall approach, Chris kept stopping what he was doing to explain the process, which is understandable in a way, but it kept breaking the flow. So all in all, not the best of starts. Perhaps being rather tired as it was at the end of a very long intensive day didn’t help either.
MAPJD person at work 1 - EDIT - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
HELLO WORLD AND OLD POSTS
Originally published January 15, 2009
Hello world !!!! .. not quite my first bash at blogging, tried it once before and stopped after three posts. This will have to run a lot longer than that. Think that for the sake of posterity, I’ll paste the old stuff without any amendments from my cobweb-draped Myspace page – and then carry on from there.
But before that, a bit about myself. I’m a 40 year-young photojournalist based in Malta. I’ve been working with the biggest newspaper here, The Times, since 1996, and have been a Reuters stringer since 1997. I’ve also just started an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography with the London College of Communication, part of the University of the Arts, London. My photography career started off in 1992 with a newly-launched newspaper, The Malta Independent. I didn’t stay there long, switching to freelancing, getting a terrific taste of what reportage photography should be all about by going to Albania shortly after the collapse of the Communist regime. Convinced more than ever that this is what I wanted to do with my life, I went to the UK to study press photography at Sheffield College. After graduating, I carried on freelancing in Malta and found myself doing the things I really wanted to do, making a couple of trips to Bosnia while the civil war raged there.
The difficulties of surviving financially through freelancing alone led me to jump at the offer to join the Times staff in late 1996. I’ve been there ever since, covering just about everything under the sun. I still love to travel to far-flung places to do reportage features, though it doesn’t happen on a regular basis. I’ve also kept my freelance work going, primarily with Reuters but also for several newspapers, magazines and corporate clients from all over the world.
As for influences, Tom Stoddart was one of the first, though in time I became familiar with the work of Sebastiao Salgado, Don McCullin, Alex Webb, James Nachtwey, Christopher Morris, Steve McCurry, Reza and countless others, all of whom have had a major impact on me.
I haven’t figured out how to embed a flash gallery here, so here’s a link to a portfolio of work I’ve done before coming onto the course
http://pa.photoshelter.com/gallery-slideshow/G0000kksnTHFnAhQ/
I’ve also got a website at http://www.darrinzammitlupi.com , but that’s hopelessly outdated. I’m planning to revamp it completely sometime over the next few months.
So, as mentioned earlier, here are my old myspace posts.'>
'>
'>
Monday June 11, 2007
FIRST TIME BLOG
Category: Art and Photography
Quiet day in the office today, and blogging for the first time ever! Wonder if I’ll keep going at it. I’m updating my galleries on Lightstalkers(http://www.lightstalkers.org/darrin_zammit_lupi), trying to see if I can fit in some of my more recent work.
It’s been one hell of a busy month, both with shooting for The Times and for Reuters. May kicked off with Nicolas Sarkozy unexpectedly popping up in Malta right after winning the French Presidential elections. Those were a hectic but hugely satisfying couple of days. Tight security around the bay the yacht was anchored in made getting photos a huge challenge. I found it weird, and somewhat disconcerting, that security measures only seemed to apply to the media, and not to hunters running around with guns. I don’t know, but if I were Sarkozy’s chief of security, I’d be more worried about guys running around armed to the teeth than I’d be over a handful of journalists. Still, I managed to get exclusive images of him on his friend’s luxury yacht, and later jogging, which ensured the pix got huge play in the international media, particularly in France of course.
The pace never really let up after that. There’s been the odd quiet day, but that’s really about it. A lot of it has been the daily, somewhat mundane kind of assignments, but there’ve been some terrific highlights too. The continuous arrival of illegal immigrants has kept me busy. Lots of late nights because of that, as well as a couple of sleepless ones. Going out with the Armed Forces of Malta Maritime Squadron on one of their rescue missions left me with some powerful images. Sea was rough, journey was long and tiring, several colleagues puked their guts out (thank my lucky stars I didn’t join them in that!). You can’t not feel sorry for these immigrants – in this particular case, the 27 Somalis risked everything to escape the war in their homeland. You have to be real desperate to risk crossing the Mediterranean in a small rickety, barely seaworthy, boat.
I also shot a feature on immigrants for Le Monde, one of the largest newspapers in France. We went around different open centres, and tried, unsuccessfully, to gain access to a detention centre. A worrying development in this country is that certain government officials are now trying to restrict the media’s access to the open centres. It’s bad enough that they won’t allow us into the detention centres, but now they’ve gone too far. While on the one hand they complain that the international media isn’t telling the Maltese side of the story, on the other, they then shut the door in our faces when we’re trying to do just that. I have to emphasise one thing – I’m not talking about the Army here. The army have been terrific in that respect, particularly since Major Ivan Consiglio has taken over their PR department. Access, and the flow of information, has never been so good. Would it were the same in certain other official quarters……
Going back to the matter in hand, it’s ludicrous that we had to get Malta’s ambassador in Paris to intervene on our behalf. We only got access at the eleventh hour. Still, I think it’s uncalled for that we still had a government minder accompanying us most of the time. I think it gives off the wrong sort of signal.
Oh well, we got our pictures and story – now I’m just hoping I get a good spread in the paper on Tuesday.
Though I didn’t go to Rome to cover the canonisation of Dun Gorg Preca (got to give my colleagues a chance too!), I still had plenty to shoot on the story, both before and after the event. That’s one thing I’m glad to see is over for the time being, there was too much of it.
Flash floods last week were a pain, literally. Almost a week later, my back still aches like crazy, after I’d spent hours drenched to the bone – no small wonder that my back muscle went into spasm the following day with the slightest of movements. Next time I’ll be more careful, not worth the sort of risk I went through to get my photos.
Couple of nights ago was a more relaxing kind of assignment – covering the concert by world acclaimed Spanish tenor Jose Carreras. Spent the first couple of hours sitting relaxing to some beautiful music, and the last fifteen minutes (the encores) shooting like crazy. Guess there is glamour to this job sometimes.
'>
'>'>'>
'>Saturday June 16, 2007
SHOOTING THE SAME STORY DAY IN-DAY OUT. HOW DO I KEEP IT FRESH?
Category: Art and Photography
'>
Shooting the same ongoing story day in-day out has got me thinking - How do I come up with something new and fresh every time? The continued influx of illegal immigrants, and the strong local and international interest in the story, is keeping me worked off my feet. Every time I get a call from a source informing me that another landing is imminent, or another boatload has been rescued, I wonder if I’m going to be wasting my time, and that of my editors, because the odds are that though the faces of the migrants will be different, the shots will be pretty much the same as the ones I did the previous occasion. Yet, can I afford to take the risk and decide not to go on the scene? There’s always the possibility that things might turn out very different for a change. Sometimes it’s something as simple as the play of colours combined with moving facial expression -
Sometimes there’s an element in the background or somewhere in the picture which just lifts it out of the norm, such as this soldier’s boots, or the Maltese flag.
Other times, it’s just the way the light is catching someone’s face – that’s something which, in my view, can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, and then you find yourself thinking in terms of art.
'>
'>
'>
Thursday, July 12, 2007
DINNER WITH REZA
Category: Art and Photography
If you were strolling along the Sliema/St Julian’s promenade last week, looking at the large photographic prints displayed there, and noticed from the corner of your eye a quiet discreet man taking pictures, then know that you may have been photographed by one of the world’s greatest masters of photojournalism, Reza.
Reza, born Reza Deghati in Iran in 1952, is in Malta to promote his exhibition “One World, One Tribe”, in which he tells the human story from birth to death, using people from all races, ethnic groups and nations to demonstrate the commonality of the human race.
He dropped his last name as the Iranian Shah’s regime collapsed in the late 1970s, when he saw that the new Khomeini regime had even less respect for freedom, particularly that of the press.
I was invited to join him for dinner earlier this week at the perhaps aptly named Paparazzi restaurant (never mind the fact that ‘paparazzi’ is very much a derogatory term if used to describe most serious photographers).
Reza may be the photographer who’s photographed the most National Geographic cover stories (twenty-five and counting!), has the sort of job that thousands of photographers like me can only dream about, but I found him to be extremely approachable and down to earth.
We talked about the differences in working on a daily newspaper and a publication like National Geographic. Many photographers claim that the only reason National Geographic photographers take the amazing pictures the magazine is renowned for is because they have several months to work on a single story. Reza strongly disputes this – “It’s true you might spend a long time to do a story, but in reality, you don’t really that much time to get a picture because it’s actually lots of little stories that you’re shooting and putting together into a package. You have so many places to go to, so much research to do, so you might still have only an hour or half a day to get the definitive shot in a particular location, much as it is on a daily newspaper.”
His first story for National Geographic was about “real life” in Cairo. He found he’d been booked into a five-star hotel and found the disparity hard to handle, going from that luxury to shooting the poorest of the poor, then back into the luxury hotel at the end of the day. So he changed hotel to a no-star hotel, and that’s when he started to get his best pictures. “You have to have passion for what you’re doing, and immerse yourself into that culture, live with the people whose lives you’re documenting,” he stresses.
“Having said that, the photographer does need the little comforts – you need electricity at the end of your day, for example. But sometimes, not even that is possible. In Afghanistan with the mujahedin, I lived with the fighters in the trenches and in the mountains for months, sleeping when they slept, eating when they ate.”
Sometimes the job can get dangerous. He’s been wounded several times whilst covering conflict and social turmoil in Europe, Africa and Asia. On over a hundred occasions he’s said to himself “OK Reza this is the end of your life.”
Looking back, he can find the funny side to a particular incident. “In Beirut, I saw an Israeli air raid coming in. I ran for shelter, and dived into a gully passing under a road. Bombs exploded either side of the road, and then I noticed that the ground beneath me didn’t feel right. Suddenly I realised I’d wrapped himself around an unexploded bomb from a previous day’s air raid. In every language that I knew, Farsi, Arabic, French, English, I kept telling the bomb, ‘You will not explode, you will not explode’.
Like many photographers, Reza is irked when asked about the photographic equipment he uses. “When a beautiful poem is written, do you ask the poet what pen he used?” he gently retorts.
He feels it is important that photojournalists give something back to society. After several years training local photojournalists in places he’d travelled to, in 2001 he founded a non-profit organisation to train local journalists and set up independent media in Afghanistan – Aina, meaning ‘mirror’.
A talk by Reza is to be held on Friday July 13 at 20:30hrs at the Mediterranean Conference Centre. A short DVD about Reza’s work will follow, together with a reception and sales of the images. The proceeds from the sales will go towards various charities. The event is free of charge, but strictly by invitation. Those interested in attending may call the event co-organiser Keith Marshall on 9947 1813.
Reza would welcome the opportunity to meet Maltese photographers at his exhibition. He’s interested in knowing about the photography scene in Malta, what training opportunities there are, what seminars, workshops take place, what sort of work the local photographers do, what the standard of photography is like.
The exhibition “One World, One Tribe” can be seen at the MCC from July 14 until the end of the month.
A selection of Reza’s photos can be seen on the web at http://www.webistan.com/index.html
Hello world !!!! .. not quite my first bash at blogging, tried it once before and stopped after three posts. This will have to run a lot longer than that. Think that for the sake of posterity, I’ll paste the old stuff without any amendments from my cobweb-draped Myspace page – and then carry on from there.
But before that, a bit about myself. I’m a 40 year-young photojournalist based in Malta. I’ve been working with the biggest newspaper here, The Times, since 1996, and have been a Reuters stringer since 1997. I’ve also just started an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography with the London College of Communication, part of the University of the Arts, London. My photography career started off in 1992 with a newly-launched newspaper, The Malta Independent. I didn’t stay there long, switching to freelancing, getting a terrific taste of what reportage photography should be all about by going to Albania shortly after the collapse of the Communist regime. Convinced more than ever that this is what I wanted to do with my life, I went to the UK to study press photography at Sheffield College. After graduating, I carried on freelancing in Malta and found myself doing the things I really wanted to do, making a couple of trips to Bosnia while the civil war raged there.
The difficulties of surviving financially through freelancing alone led me to jump at the offer to join the Times staff in late 1996. I’ve been there ever since, covering just about everything under the sun. I still love to travel to far-flung places to do reportage features, though it doesn’t happen on a regular basis. I’ve also kept my freelance work going, primarily with Reuters but also for several newspapers, magazines and corporate clients from all over the world.
As for influences, Tom Stoddart was one of the first, though in time I became familiar with the work of Sebastiao Salgado, Don McCullin, Alex Webb, James Nachtwey, Christopher Morris, Steve McCurry, Reza and countless others, all of whom have had a major impact on me.
I haven’t figured out how to embed a flash gallery here, so here’s a link to a portfolio of work I’ve done before coming onto the course
http://pa.photoshelter.com/gallery-slideshow/G0000kksnTHFnAhQ/
I’ve also got a website at http://www.darrinzammitlupi.com , but that’s hopelessly outdated. I’m planning to revamp it completely sometime over the next few months.
So, as mentioned earlier, here are my old myspace posts.'>
'>
'>
Monday June 11, 2007
FIRST TIME BLOG
Category: Art and Photography
Quiet day in the office today, and blogging for the first time ever! Wonder if I’ll keep going at it. I’m updating my galleries on Lightstalkers(http://www.lightstalkers.org/darrin_zammit_lupi), trying to see if I can fit in some of my more recent work.
It’s been one hell of a busy month, both with shooting for The Times and for Reuters. May kicked off with Nicolas Sarkozy unexpectedly popping up in Malta right after winning the French Presidential elections. Those were a hectic but hugely satisfying couple of days. Tight security around the bay the yacht was anchored in made getting photos a huge challenge. I found it weird, and somewhat disconcerting, that security measures only seemed to apply to the media, and not to hunters running around with guns. I don’t know, but if I were Sarkozy’s chief of security, I’d be more worried about guys running around armed to the teeth than I’d be over a handful of journalists. Still, I managed to get exclusive images of him on his friend’s luxury yacht, and later jogging, which ensured the pix got huge play in the international media, particularly in France of course.
The pace never really let up after that. There’s been the odd quiet day, but that’s really about it. A lot of it has been the daily, somewhat mundane kind of assignments, but there’ve been some terrific highlights too. The continuous arrival of illegal immigrants has kept me busy. Lots of late nights because of that, as well as a couple of sleepless ones. Going out with the Armed Forces of Malta Maritime Squadron on one of their rescue missions left me with some powerful images. Sea was rough, journey was long and tiring, several colleagues puked their guts out (thank my lucky stars I didn’t join them in that!). You can’t not feel sorry for these immigrants – in this particular case, the 27 Somalis risked everything to escape the war in their homeland. You have to be real desperate to risk crossing the Mediterranean in a small rickety, barely seaworthy, boat.
I also shot a feature on immigrants for Le Monde, one of the largest newspapers in France. We went around different open centres, and tried, unsuccessfully, to gain access to a detention centre. A worrying development in this country is that certain government officials are now trying to restrict the media’s access to the open centres. It’s bad enough that they won’t allow us into the detention centres, but now they’ve gone too far. While on the one hand they complain that the international media isn’t telling the Maltese side of the story, on the other, they then shut the door in our faces when we’re trying to do just that. I have to emphasise one thing – I’m not talking about the Army here. The army have been terrific in that respect, particularly since Major Ivan Consiglio has taken over their PR department. Access, and the flow of information, has never been so good. Would it were the same in certain other official quarters……
Going back to the matter in hand, it’s ludicrous that we had to get Malta’s ambassador in Paris to intervene on our behalf. We only got access at the eleventh hour. Still, I think it’s uncalled for that we still had a government minder accompanying us most of the time. I think it gives off the wrong sort of signal.
Oh well, we got our pictures and story – now I’m just hoping I get a good spread in the paper on Tuesday.
Though I didn’t go to Rome to cover the canonisation of Dun Gorg Preca (got to give my colleagues a chance too!), I still had plenty to shoot on the story, both before and after the event. That’s one thing I’m glad to see is over for the time being, there was too much of it.
Flash floods last week were a pain, literally. Almost a week later, my back still aches like crazy, after I’d spent hours drenched to the bone – no small wonder that my back muscle went into spasm the following day with the slightest of movements. Next time I’ll be more careful, not worth the sort of risk I went through to get my photos.
Couple of nights ago was a more relaxing kind of assignment – covering the concert by world acclaimed Spanish tenor Jose Carreras. Spent the first couple of hours sitting relaxing to some beautiful music, and the last fifteen minutes (the encores) shooting like crazy. Guess there is glamour to this job sometimes.
'>
'>'>'>
'>Saturday June 16, 2007
SHOOTING THE SAME STORY DAY IN-DAY OUT. HOW DO I KEEP IT FRESH?
Category: Art and Photography
'>
Shooting the same ongoing story day in-day out has got me thinking - How do I come up with something new and fresh every time? The continued influx of illegal immigrants, and the strong local and international interest in the story, is keeping me worked off my feet. Every time I get a call from a source informing me that another landing is imminent, or another boatload has been rescued, I wonder if I’m going to be wasting my time, and that of my editors, because the odds are that though the faces of the migrants will be different, the shots will be pretty much the same as the ones I did the previous occasion. Yet, can I afford to take the risk and decide not to go on the scene? There’s always the possibility that things might turn out very different for a change. Sometimes it’s something as simple as the play of colours combined with moving facial expression -
Sometimes there’s an element in the background or somewhere in the picture which just lifts it out of the norm, such as this soldier’s boots, or the Maltese flag.
Other times, it’s just the way the light is catching someone’s face – that’s something which, in my view, can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, and then you find yourself thinking in terms of art.
'>
'>
'>
Thursday, July 12, 2007
DINNER WITH REZA
Category: Art and Photography
If you were strolling along the Sliema/St Julian’s promenade last week, looking at the large photographic prints displayed there, and noticed from the corner of your eye a quiet discreet man taking pictures, then know that you may have been photographed by one of the world’s greatest masters of photojournalism, Reza.
Reza, born Reza Deghati in Iran in 1952, is in Malta to promote his exhibition “One World, One Tribe”, in which he tells the human story from birth to death, using people from all races, ethnic groups and nations to demonstrate the commonality of the human race.
He dropped his last name as the Iranian Shah’s regime collapsed in the late 1970s, when he saw that the new Khomeini regime had even less respect for freedom, particularly that of the press.
I was invited to join him for dinner earlier this week at the perhaps aptly named Paparazzi restaurant (never mind the fact that ‘paparazzi’ is very much a derogatory term if used to describe most serious photographers).
Reza may be the photographer who’s photographed the most National Geographic cover stories (twenty-five and counting!), has the sort of job that thousands of photographers like me can only dream about, but I found him to be extremely approachable and down to earth.
We talked about the differences in working on a daily newspaper and a publication like National Geographic. Many photographers claim that the only reason National Geographic photographers take the amazing pictures the magazine is renowned for is because they have several months to work on a single story. Reza strongly disputes this – “It’s true you might spend a long time to do a story, but in reality, you don’t really that much time to get a picture because it’s actually lots of little stories that you’re shooting and putting together into a package. You have so many places to go to, so much research to do, so you might still have only an hour or half a day to get the definitive shot in a particular location, much as it is on a daily newspaper.”
His first story for National Geographic was about “real life” in Cairo. He found he’d been booked into a five-star hotel and found the disparity hard to handle, going from that luxury to shooting the poorest of the poor, then back into the luxury hotel at the end of the day. So he changed hotel to a no-star hotel, and that’s when he started to get his best pictures. “You have to have passion for what you’re doing, and immerse yourself into that culture, live with the people whose lives you’re documenting,” he stresses.
“Having said that, the photographer does need the little comforts – you need electricity at the end of your day, for example. But sometimes, not even that is possible. In Afghanistan with the mujahedin, I lived with the fighters in the trenches and in the mountains for months, sleeping when they slept, eating when they ate.”
Sometimes the job can get dangerous. He’s been wounded several times whilst covering conflict and social turmoil in Europe, Africa and Asia. On over a hundred occasions he’s said to himself “OK Reza this is the end of your life.”
Looking back, he can find the funny side to a particular incident. “In Beirut, I saw an Israeli air raid coming in. I ran for shelter, and dived into a gully passing under a road. Bombs exploded either side of the road, and then I noticed that the ground beneath me didn’t feel right. Suddenly I realised I’d wrapped himself around an unexploded bomb from a previous day’s air raid. In every language that I knew, Farsi, Arabic, French, English, I kept telling the bomb, ‘You will not explode, you will not explode’.
Like many photographers, Reza is irked when asked about the photographic equipment he uses. “When a beautiful poem is written, do you ask the poet what pen he used?” he gently retorts.
He feels it is important that photojournalists give something back to society. After several years training local photojournalists in places he’d travelled to, in 2001 he founded a non-profit organisation to train local journalists and set up independent media in Afghanistan – Aina, meaning ‘mirror’.
A talk by Reza is to be held on Friday July 13 at 20:30hrs at the Mediterranean Conference Centre. A short DVD about Reza’s work will follow, together with a reception and sales of the images. The proceeds from the sales will go towards various charities. The event is free of charge, but strictly by invitation. Those interested in attending may call the event co-organiser Keith Marshall on 9947 1813.
Reza would welcome the opportunity to meet Maltese photographers at his exhibition. He’s interested in knowing about the photography scene in Malta, what training opportunities there are, what seminars, workshops take place, what sort of work the local photographers do, what the standard of photography is like.
The exhibition “One World, One Tribe” can be seen at the MCC from July 14 until the end of the month.
A selection of Reza’s photos can be seen on the web at http://www.webistan.com/index.html
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