Lessons from Baja

I learned lots of important lessons as a photographer on my recent trip to Baja California.  I figure I’d share some of these mistakes with you because I didn’t think I was capable of such incompetence. 

While packing for my holiday vacation in Baja, I was paranoid by the numerous carjacking stories I heard in the media, so I decided to keep my photography equipment simple in case I had the misfortune of encountering trouble on my drive to Mexico.  I packed one old camera, one lens, one portable flash, and the radios to trigger the flash. 

My first big mistake?  I packed the wrong spare batteries for my old Canon 5D which I normally use only as a back-up camera.  I was upset with Canon for not developing batteries that were interchangeable with the Mark I and Mark II.   But of course I had no one to blame but myself. I had the foresight to bring the battery charger....just not the right one.  And, I didn’t put a fresh battery in the camera in the first place, so I only had 5% battery life to play with for my entire two week vacation.

With limited camera power,  I made a decision to skip photographing the gorgeous desert and ocean landscapes in Baja because landscapes are not my primary interest as a photographer. I invested whatever battery life I had left to shoot a portrait of each person I spent my vacation with in Punta San Carlos, a remote stretch of beach on the Pacific side of Baja.

My favorite method to shoot environmental portraits is to balance strobe light with ambient light. I generally never shoot with the Canon 580EX flash because it's not my favorite light source, but it’s small, portable and doesn't weigh as much as my regular strobe equipment. Once I turned on the flash, however, I knew I was in trouble.  The rechargeable batteries, which I’ve had for over a year, were no longer holding their charge so well.  And the cable connecting my radio to my flash was loose and unreliable. Sometimes the flash worked, but over half the time it failed me.

With the limited resources I had to work with,  I had to think like a film photographer and not waste any clicks of the camera.  I was forced to frame my images and set my camera and flash exposures more carefully without wasting precious battery.  Since I didn’t want to haul extra gear to Baja, I also had to think about the direction of the sun and the distance of my flash in relation to my subjects, lighting them without use of an umbrella, soft box or any diffusion material.

I shot between two and ten frames of each person to get these shots.   I’m quite pleased with the images.  Although I would have liked to take more photos, I learned how to make up for my limits and mistakes with my resourcefulness.   Batteries are important, but knowing how to improvise is the best skill a photographer can have.  Or so I tell myself.

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Post-holiday Stuff

 January has come and gone and I’ve procrastinated on posting recent work.  I can’t blame the holiday frenzy anymore because that’s now far behind me.  My task this morning was to clean off my desk, file away bills and put away holiday cards.  As I was handling one card in particular, I thought, “Why not show off some work?”  I took these images for a wonderful client for their holiday card.  I almost feel like I’m cheating when I'm hired to photograph super cute kids.

Here are also personal favorites from the same shoot:

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