Immersethrough.com
engaging with the world
immerse through photography
woman from Amdo, on pilgrimage to Lhasa
photo: NAOMI DUGUID
Every fall the pilgrims begin arriving in Lhasa. They come in from the high altitude pastures of western Tibet and the Qinghai, from Amdo to the northeast, and from western Sichuan and Yunnan. They circumambulate the temples, the monasteries, the Potala... every sacred place and object gets venerated. Here a woman from Amdo is walking past the tall prayer wheels at the Jokhang Temple, giving each a firm shove to set it rotating, as she walks past.
By Rakas Tal, Kailash region, western Tibet; Tibetan caravan setting up tents
photo: JEFFREY ALFORD
We'll be posting images on our individual pages, jeff's place and naomi's place, along with new writing. Here we want to put up images we've taken over the years that still have the power to transport us.
They were all shot on 35 mm slide film, and after over two decades of shooting, we have thousands of slides, and are of course very attached to our cameras and lenses.
But now we are moving into digital, so that many of the new images we expect to post in the coming months will be digital. Yikes! Like any other new medium (designing and putting up this website for example), digital photography is appealing and also a little scary. There's lots to learn, new reflexes most of all. We'll keep you posted!
ONLINE SLIDE SHOW AT RECCE, NOVEMBER 2008: There's a show of our images from Beyond the Great Wall on the Recce website; go to "Fresh from the Field". Recce is a good place to go for travel writing; it comes out monthly.
A FIRST REPORT ON DIGITAL (September 26, 2008): It's now nearly two weeks since we first put the site up. We're still thrilled, not just to have it, but to be able to edit it and add to it. The next big thing to take on is digital photography. Today we bought our first digital camera, a Nikon D700. It's new on the market, a kind of digital equivalent of the pro-amateur film cameras we have been using, the Nikon F90 series. Because it's a full-frame camera, we can use all our lenses with confidence, from the 20mm to the 180, and that's great. Learning to navigate the push-button menus is where the learning will be steep, and then figuring out how to manage all those electronic images.
We had great advice from a number of people at the Book Passages Food Writing and Photography Conference in August this year about how to store and manage images, and that has given us the confidence to embark. Of course the other push came from people's astonishment that we were still stuck back in the world of film, when they had been shooting digital for years!
So now we have a memory card installed, a battery charged, and some options chosen from the huge menu of choices about many options that we don't yet properly understand. Now to shoot, and shoot, and shoot, to develop some reflexes with all this new technology before we head out on travels. Wish us luck!
AN UPDATE (OCTOBER 21 2008): Naomi's fabulous cousin Jennifer has taken pity on us and on visitors to this website. She's not ony told us our jpeg images are too huge, but she's downsized them, working through them all a page at a time. We've in turn replaced the original images with her downsized ones on many of the pages, and will finish off the process soon we hope. Of course we don't really know how to downsize images ourselves and we don't the difference between Photoshop and Lighbox, let alone how to use either... Jennifer has offered to take us in hand, get us started with some basic Photoshop techniques, etc, and we are grateful. Everyone can do with a mentor, at any time, but especially when making momentous changes!
We have begun to use the camera and are already enjoying the greater range we have for low-light shooting, and also in contrasty situations. It's a reminder of how unforgiving slide film is, in all its loveliness! We delighted with the depth of colour and the sharpness of details. And yes, we are shooting in RAW, as well as jpeg, so we can have handy thumbnails to look at, as well as the fat full-information images that RAW files are. And all this raises the issue of storage and back-up, and organization of files. argh!! We need a system that we can maintain fairly easily, as we had with our slides... Like everything else, tis continues to be a work in progress.
We welcome suggestions and thoughts on the best way of proceeding. Please just go to the comments page and then click on the link, to write to us,
