A World of Change

Gina Barros

     I remember hearing a question back when I was a child in elementary school asking if I thought I was going up in the right
period of history. I cannot clearly recall what the question stemmed from, but I have been asked either that or related questions multiple times throughout my life. With the nature of current events—Egyptian protests, Libyan revolts & slaughter, Japan’s earthquakes & tsunami, the question has recently entered
my ponderings again.

    The most recent renewal of the time period query occurred to me when I realized that even given me having the exact same
personality, my question today might vary greatly dependent upon where in the world I was located. As I consider the broader implications to people at large, I wonder if the Japanese hit by the dual disasters of earthquakes & tsunami might be asking themselves that question.  Given the advances in earthquake-proofing construction, the country has suffered remarkable little damage from the major and less-major quakes that have
been rattling the area for the last week or so. A 9+ magnitude quake would have been a city-killer in 1911 Japan. But when photographs of tsunami damge are viewed, it leads one to wonder how much has advanced since that time.

  For the most part, I tend to take the long view on natural disasters. The planet is much more complex, beautiful, and dangerous place than it seems to someone who spend the majority of life in 1^st world cities. Every so often, nature reminds us of that. Though some disasters have roots in the workings of man (i.e. the flooding of New Orleans after Katrina), there are a small subset of disasters that fill me with awe, because there is little man can do to prepare or counteract nature on that scale.  The subset is:

Hurricanes – once you get up past Category 4, there is little that can be built (short of a bunker) that can withstand the storm without taking damage.

Krystine Garcia

Tornados – again past Category 4, you are pretty much looking at whatever is hit being wiped out.

Tsunamis – like taking a giant eraser to the affected coastline, these events tend to wipe out most structures along coasts, particularly since the majority of structures are designed for asthetic, commercial, or industrial function and not designed for wave-damage resistance.
Volcanic eruptions – these are dual-threat problems: in addition to the potential for magma/lava damage, the eruption tosses pollutants into the air that can suffocate, block sunlight access, and the ash can contaminate soil & groundwater.
    Today’s images come from a group photoshoot event I participated in May of last year. These images are outtakes that have been directly formatted for web without any post-processing. As each year passes and the number of images in the virtual stockpile increases, I have now implemented the outtake strategy for images I think are interesting, but not critical nor recent enough to spend the precious hours of time to edit. This blog gives an opportunity for the images to be presented and not forgotten.
    The shoot was organized by a model I had wanted to work with for quite some time and the venue was a large event hall arranged in the architectural style of a castle-palace. This was a free-for-all type shoot where the photographer could pick whatever models they wanted to work with, the models brought whatever wardrobe they felt met the fashion theme, and the equipment & lighting was whatever the individual photographers brought.  As I’ve discussed group shoot events in previous posts, I’ll broach my biggest disappointment from the shoot instead. As a free-for-all, I never had the opportunity to work with the organizer, a then 19yr-old female model whom I had been trying to work with for months and had based attendance for the event upon her emailed confirmation that we’d have an opportunity to work together. For the more experienced models, group events are often the only times the models have low enough rates for individuals on student-budgets to be able to work with them.

Sammie M

  The organizer had brought in some photographer she had previously worked with to the event and she spent about half of the little time she had free shooting nude work with them, for free. This was after announcing at the opening of the event that she would be charging for any nude work.  So not only did these particular photographers basically steal away the opportunity I or other individuals would have had to work with the organizer, they exploited an existing relationship to undervalue whatever an unfamiliar
individual would have paid the model to shoot nude work.