I’ve been spending the last few days shooting an independent project on the border of Mexico, tying in to our masters program new group theme of “borders”.
I’ve joined the minutemen of Texas to document part of their October round up. It’s an interesting mix of people with a variety of motivations. The main event is night watches along the border, watching for travelers (aka illegal aliens) and reporting any findings to border patrol. It usually is a group of people sitting in the dark with walkie talkies, night vision, and beef jerkey until midnight.
The picture here is from my night vision from my current post.
I’ve been shooting this project entirely with a medium format range finder, the mamiya 6. It’s been an inspiring switch back to film, having to slow down, make each image count, and putting much more though into the whole image making experience.
I’ve also been doing some audio capture for the first time so I’ll hopefully be making a multimedia presentation soon.
It’s nice I can blog from my iPhone, maybe that means I’ll finally make more regular entries.
Well I’ve got another 3 hours on my post here so back to “protecting the border” I go.
Hi Brett, I sent you a line on Pronto and ended up saying hello to your girlfriend in stead. Hope Mexico went well. How are you getting on with the iphone? I am heading to NYC in a couple of weeks and was thinking of getting one after taking my cell for a dip in the sea last week by accident. Bit worried about the battery life on the i-phone as I’ve heard that they have a habit of dieing around mid afternoon. What’s your experience?
Do you have any additional details about the night vision shot? Did you have special lens or did you shove your camera up to night vision goggles and shoot?
howdy dean! yes, the night vision photo is the only one I took without my Mamiya 6.
i just stuck my iPhone camera up in the night vision to share my view.
sounds like a brilliant opportunity and series Brett………looking forward to the output….
and as for the i-phone; how do you rate the picture quality coming from it?
well i wouldn’t get an iphone for the camera.
but it’s pretty decent and i can drop photos into blog postings, emails, etc instantly.
and there is talk of streaming video from an iphone too