Wreck on 26

There are no words for what I saw tonight.

Edit @ 3:04 p.m., 27Oct10:

I waited to post the photos because I wanted to allow time for the victims' families to be notified. Not that DarkTopo is a mass media outlet or anything, but I don't want to take any chances.

So it's three days later, five people are dead, and I'm still having nightmares. The Citizen-Times reports that the truck that caused the accident is the sole tractor-trailer rig of Globe Carriers, which has "violated federal regulations 21 times in the past 30 months." You can read all about it at those links.

I have seen a lot of horrible things. I've covered wrecks, fires, suicides, and took a nice jail-yard photo of a man convicted of anally raping his own infant child. I have never seen anything like this. It is unique in my experience.

And that's the worst part: As uniquely terrible as it is, the media uses the same tried-and-true descriptions they haul out for every "horrible tragedy." We see the same photos, and the same tear-jerking pieces on local news. Like I said about the last big tragedy I covered, everyone wants to know why it happened, as if there could be a reason good enough to justify it.

I know that media coverage of terrible events is necessary in our society, but what I've discovered in the last few days is that it's never enough. In the same way that photography reduces all of human vision into 256 levels and three channels, the media reduces human experience into soundbytes, column inches, and photos shot from afar.

The best photojournalists will roll up their sleeves and wade into a situation. That's the reason I got out of my car and jumped the guardrail to get these photos--it's what Annie Griffiths or Joel Sartore would do. But by the time I realized what I was looking at, I had no taste for it. So when the state troopers told me to get lost, I did.

My photos are not very good. I could have gotten better ones, given more time and effort, but I realized that no matter what I did, they'd still just be crash photos. Like all the others out there, they can't begin to describe what it was like to stand there, smell the burning oil, and hear the victims moaning.


[GRAPHIC PHOTOS BELOW]


















Finally got photos of a dead body. Knew it would happen some day. Sure wish it hadn't.

One Day in October

On Second Thought . . .

Screw it. If you take yourself at all seriously, you should be able to persevere in the face of your own stupidity. Plus, I can't really take the site down without major reconstruction, and I just don't have time for covering up my mistakes. So enjoy the award-winning text, and imagine the awesome photos.

I have a hard drive in a safe deposit box that probably contains most of the photos I lost. Of course, all the originals are redundantly backed up. It's just the web-ready files that I was fool enough to let stand alone.

A teachable moment. I take the blog for granted, as a means to an end, and forget how much time and effort it takes in and of itself. And how important it is, and that people actually read it. So I've got a full-site backup running now, and I'll proceed with more caution than before.

New post in 3, 2 . . .

DarkTopo down for awhile.

I just deleted my entire "2010" image folder. FileZilla has four fields, and the cursor was in the wrong one, and I clicked "cancel" and "stop" and "i'm going to kill you if you don't stop" but it wouldn't stop. So . . . no images from this year.

That's alright, the old posts are better anyway.

Two Churches

Rosie (part 2)

Zero Image 2000

As if DarkTopo wasn't nerdy enough, I'm now the proud owner of a Zero Image 2000 Pinhole camera. Woot.







These are both well- and poorly- documented online. It's such a simple product, there's not much to say about it, but if you're a terminally OCD shopper like I am, it's really hard to find the deets you crave.

But it's fall, that narrow window of photographic opportunity that I vainly promise won't pass me by every year. I decided to make the leap, rather than study the photo forums for another six months.

So I called Zeb Andrews at Blue Moon Camera in Portland, Oregon. Zeb, Danielle Hughson, and Scott Speck seem to be the tip of the pinhole spear on Flickr.

Zeb talked me down from a couple of ledges: Specifically, is the cable release adapter worth it, and how dramatically different are the angles of view between the 6x6 and 6x9 cameras? His answers are "no" and "not very." I haven't had the camera long enough to speak to those issues myself, but if Zeb, et al, get along okay with the basic camera, who am I to argue?

Topic for another post: Why doesn't Asheville, which considers itself an art mecca, have someone like Zeb and a store like Blue Moon? All due respect to our camera shops (both of them), but one no longer carries cameras, and the other . . . well, that's an old story.

Anyway, here are images from the first roll. Thanks Zeb!

The Rock

The Path

High Key Flattery

They say imitation is its highest form. I hope Anastasia Volkova won't take offense. If there's anything my training left out, it's creative methods of flattering your subject. Photojournalism doesn't have a lot of latitude for either creativity or flattery, and it's rare that I encounter work that really makes me want to know how it's done. In fact, it's rare that I encounter work that doesn't make me roll my eyes.

So I spent a good bit of time taking screen captures and staring at the histograms in Photoshop. Then I went to the woods with my smoking hot and incredibly patient wife.



It's amazing how hard it is to break the rules you learn early on. Like "keep the sun at your back." By now, it's instinct. But you can do some amazing things if you're willing to break rules.

Furthermore, with all the bitching and moaning about digital this and Flickr that, I personally think it's great that I can encounter serious photographers doing serious work without paying hundreds of dollars to go to a workshop. An APUGer says: "There are no more Walker Evanses or Edward Westons or Richard Avedons anymore." I say put down the grain focuser and look around.



Room for it in the DarkTopo? I don't know. It's awful cheery. On the other hand, this is pretty much what I've been doing all along, just on the other end of the histogram. Hell, I already posted pictures of cats this week. Next it'll be flowers and babies, and then baby footprints, and then babies holding flowers with their toes. And then I'll sell the domain name to the highest bidder and take up knitting.