Every now and again I get a photo or two that looks semi-professional, and so I think that qualifies me to offer other people advice on photography. So here are a few points I’m currently trying to remember as I take photos, that another budding photographer might find useful:
- Don’t get so fixated on the subject that you ignore what is going on in the background. Pay special attention to the background immediately around your subject.
- Don’t use your camera’s “black and white” mode unless you have filters and you know what you are doing. Take the shots in full colour and use your editing program to experiment with different amounts of the RGB colour channels. The shots below were converted to black and white using Photoshop’s “Green filter” preset.
- When taking a shot with several people – keep hitting that shutter button. People’s expressions change continually, so you want to up your chances of getting that one shot where everyone looks their best.
- Aim a flash at someone and you’ve got a 99% chance of taking an ugly photo. The mirror shot below was taken using my external Sigma flash and bouncing it off the ceiling.
- Use your editing program’s levels function to get a good lighting range from pitch black to bright white (not appropriate for every shot…but usually works well).
- Be adventurous with your composition. This is the hardest one for me, as my first instinct is always to go for a very classical composition.
I got a Sigma 10-20mm lens while I was in the states which I used for the shot of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s a fantastic lens – and the 10mm opens up a whole world of shots you wouldn’t get with a regular lens – particularly good for trying to get a sense of scale shooting big monuments in DC!
I recently read Unlocking Horns by David Niyonzima – a brief and personal introduction to forgiveness and reconciliation in Burundi. I was struck by the quoted poem by Wingert – a Christian relief worker in Burundi in the 60s, which uses the story of the good Samaritan to challenge us to not look away from the suffering of people in the developing world…
Two donkey hours away
From Zion city lay
A beaten man.
Levite and Priest espied
And heard the man who cried,
But passed him by.
A few jet hours away
From San Francisco lay
More sore-beat men.
We fly too high to hear
The cry and see the tear-
We eat our lunch.
I think if we’re honest, we make a lot of excuses for not acting when we see suffering in places like Burundi. We tell ourselves that that is just “how it is”, that’s what “Africans” are used to, the problems are “too big”, that “we’ve got enough of our owns problems to worry about.” We look away and eat our lunch.
I got back from the states on Monday, and have slowly been readjusting my body clock since. Slowly, because it requires getting up in the morning when you’re still tired. Chicago, St. Louis and Washington DC were all amazing. I made it up the SEARS tower in Chicago. Went to a baseball game in St. Louis. Walked around the Capitol Building in DC.
People in Europe generally like to hate the states, look down on it, blame it for everything. But I find it refreshing. Everything is new. There is space to breath. There is more of a “go for it” attitude. And everything is so cheap compared to the UK! You can eat out more often, and when you do you get way better service. You can buy a camera lens (Sigma EX 10-20mm) and not feel so guilty.
I might have blogged sooner but my laptop is a little broke at the moment. I used to happily dual boot Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux. But a few days ago Vista started refusing to boot on account of a hard drive issue that I suspect was caused by Vista’s inability to share a PC with another OS. If Adobe made Photoshop and Dreamweaver for Linux I would ditch Windows in a breath.
The latest news on the Rwandan job is that I’ll be heading out there at the end of August.
So after much waiting and wondering, I’ve been told I have job with Partners in Health in Rwanda. I’m going to be mentoring students in computer programming, so that they can then work on an electronic medical records system for the country. It’s exciting and a bit scary. They haven’t figured out the details yet, but I could be leaving pretty soon, and be there for 6 months to a year. Time to start working on my French and Kinyarwanda!
I’m currently chilling in St. Louis, Missouri, visiting friends from my DTS. I’m surprised how much I like it here. Maybe I’ll live in the states some day…but only if Obama is president 
Will update you all with the details when I know them.
Tomorrow morning I fly off the US for 2½ weeks. I’ll be visiting friends in Chicago, St. Louis and Washington DC. I’m very excited to see my friends again, and excited to be in the states again (where I haven’t been since my life changing year in San Diego).
I’m not so excited about getting up at 6am tomorrow and spending all day on planes or in airports.
I got some pretty nice macro shots in Donegal recently using my Sigma 50mm. Here’s what Thrift and Clover look like when you’re up real close…
I’m hoping when I’m in the states (I leave on Friday for 2½ weeks) to pick up a Sigma 18-50mm since such things are always a lot cheaper there. I think I’ve out grown my Canon kit lens.
Ijuru (ee-joo-roo) n. sky or heaven in several Bantu languages
I might not be in Central Africa right now, but one thing I can do at the moment is assist groups in developing and maintaining websites. Most people don’t use a fraction of the bandwidth, disk space, databases that their hosting offers, so it makes sense for someone like me to offer to host websites on my own hosting.
So I went looking for a nice domain name, and was well pleased to find ijuru.com available. Apparently all the 4-letter domain names have been bought up so I think a catchy 5-letter name is a good find.
Having setup a few Wordpress blogs recently, and having found it vastly superior to Blogger, I decided I wanted my own!. After a bit of googling I figured out how to migrate my posts and comments from Blogger to Wordpress. The import function built into Wordpress was giving me timeouts, but I found this guide which describes the magic trick to make it work
- Setup a temporary wordpress.com blog
- Import your posts from blogspot into that
- Export your posts as a WXR file from that
- Import into your new wordpress.org blog
- Delete the temporary wordpress.com blog
Course all the shiny blog software in the world can’t make this blog interesting unless I keep posting…
So I got back from Africa about a month ago, and a week later, after many difficult goodbyes, it was all over. And like all of my former fellow students, I was left wondering – what on earth do I do now? And what just happened?
Africa was amazing. I’d been to Zambia before for a short trip with Habitat for Humanity two years ago so I had some idea of what Africa could be like, but this was the first time I really got to see how people live in the poorest places on earth, and the first time I really got know people there. I’m not going to describe the entire trip now. If you want the details you can check out my friend Kellen’s latest post. But I will mention my two major revelations of the trip:
Firstly – I love Africa and could happily live in a place like Rwanda or Burundi. I had a great time in Zambia previously, but I did get an awful dose of food poisoning that wiped me out for a few days (we were only there two weeks), and in my capacity as a youth leader, I probably spent more time making sure certain members of our youth weren’t off kissing local boys, than actually making a difference to Zambia. The only real work we did was building houses, and suffice to say, I’m a much better software engineer than a builder. So the whole experience didn’t leave me dying to jump on the next plane back…as fun as it was. My time in Rwanda and Burundi was very different. I quickly got comfortable with the local culture, and picked up a little of their language. I loved it.
Secondly – they really need and want people with IT skills in those countries. When your view of Africa is mostly based on what you see on the TV, you imagine that the only thing going on in a country like Burundi, is people queuing for rice, and waiting for rain. It comes as a surprise to find cities where there are shopping malls and universities (albeit rundown ones with bullet holes in the walls). Even more of a surprise to see Rwanda really making an effort to develop it’s IT infrastructure.
So where does that leave me? Very keen to go back to Africa. There are countless people here who can do any job I can get here, but probably very few people with my skills in Central Africa. Right now, I’m exploring my options. I could jump on a plane next week, but what would I do when I get there? All big questions. And of course the biggest question of all: what is God telling me to do?
[This is my favourite photo from the trip. The children live in an internally displaced people's camp in north-eastern Burundi. Their living conditions were shocking. Their excitement and joy in this photography... difficult to understand.]
I can’t believe it but by Tuesday morning I will be in Addis airport in Ethiopia, and by the evening, if everything goes to plan, we will be at the YWAM Rwanda base.
We will be spending 2 weeks at the YWAM Rwanda base helping them out and getting involved with their ministries. Then we’ll travel to Bujumbura in Burundi. During our time in Burundi we’ll be helping at orphanages, visiting refugee camps, military camps, prisons, and running conferences for pastors.
It’s easy to act bravado about all of this – I confess I do delight in telling people about all the possible dangers – tropical diseases, wild animals, rebels, but I think its important to say that none of us really feel that way. At times our task seems daunting, and it feels like the people we’re coming to have very high expectations of what we can offer them. Burundi is also the poorest country in the world, so I’m pretty sure I’m going to culture shock. But we know that this is something that God has called us to, and so we can faith that despite our weakness, God will do amazing things.
We’ll be using a mailing list to send out email updates of how the outreach is going. To signup for these updates visit here. I promise to take lots of photos but I doubt I’m going to have much email contact in the next 2 months so you’ll have to wait a while to see them. Please pray for me and the team…we need it!
The only thing sadder than an abandoned blog, is one full of apologies for not posting anything interesting. Suffice to say, it has been a roller-coaster couple of months, and I’ve struggled to get my head around it, nevermind find the words to explain it to whoever reads this.
I’m starting to see now how much work God has been doing in my life during this DTS, and how much there is left to do. I think I joined the DTS partly with an immensely naive idea of selflessly serving an area of Belfast and becoming a super-Christian. However, with every week that has gone past I have more and more realised the need for change and healing in my own life, and though I would probably settle for the appearance of have my life sorted, God seems determined to bring real healing to my life, which is a much harder process.
So what I been up to..
- Trip to Derry where we working a youth club in the fountain estate, and joined a group of “Street Pastors” in working with young people drinking on the streets.
- Retreat to Donegal for the team I’m part of that is going to Rwanda and Burundi (photos).
- Fundraiser table quiz which pulled in £436 which we’re bringing to Burundi to give to local projects.
- Making a cheesy video of all the DTS students…
