PHOTOGRAPHY BLOG

I woke up on Saturday morning, picked up the papers and almost cried when I read the headlines -

5000 people Dead in Bam. 20,000 injured

On that Friday morning after Christmas, a massive earthquake, measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale, destroyed both the 2000 year old ancient abandoned City of Bam in S.E. Iran, as well as its 150 year old replacement city. As I write this, the death toll has risen to more than 20,000, and the injured and the maimed now exceed 40,000. It was a tragic day for the people of Bam, and I grieve deeply for them. Although I knew Bam only briefly, I have several images of Bam that I want to share with you, to show you what this calamity has destroyed, besides the human suffering, and to urge you to send a small donation to the survivors in Bam.

My pictures were shot on film with my spare EOS1X, and scanned, because I had dropped and ruined my Nikon Coolpix 990 on just the third day of my 20,000km Old Silk Road expedition. I tell you, if you are dependent on Digital like me, going back to film is quite unsettling. I felt “normal” again only after I managed to get a replacement Coolpix 995 two weeks later in Pakistan.

Bam and its surrounding villages was home to about 80,000 people, so with 60,000 dead or injured, it means three quarters of the population of Bam have directly suffered. Among the remaining one quarter, many will be wishing that they too should have died. Everyone lost someone they were close to - a son, a daughter, a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, or a friend . In many cases, entire families were wiped out…. Full Article.

I’ll start by explaining where RAW format comes from.

All digital cameras take their original image in some kind of RAW format. RAW files are usually proprietary to the camera manufacturer and sometimes to the specific model of camera. That means, only the camera that takes the picture can understand the information collected on the camera sensors. That information is then translated by means of firmware (software) built into the camera and the usual result is a more user friendly format called JPEG. That is why most cameras produce images with an .jpg extension. JPEG is a compressed format (and has the ability of varying degrees of compression). JPEG has become a fairly universal digital standard for photo images.

What happens is that all digital cameras use firmware to apply various qualities to the RAW format before it is written to the memory card in JPEG form. The firmware in the camera will apply varying degrees of sharpening, varying degrees of saturation, varying degrees of contrast, etc. Most cameras have facilities to change these settings to the photographers liking. The only hint you have of what that photo will look like is the small LCD on your camera. This is usually too small to tell enough to make changes until it is too late. Often the photographer doesn’t want to mess with those changes on the field anyway. So you set your camera based on the last experience. Many people never experiment with changing these settings anyway….. Full Article.

Hong Kong is a city of light, it is full of power and the life is never stop. The night life of Hong Kong displays another face of the spectacular of Hong Kong. As a busy man, I don’t have much time to give details on the photos at the moment. I will keep this page update when I have spare time, come back regularly for more description and new photos….. Full Article.