Article: "Close-ups in a Widescreen World"

(Published July 2008 in Murray Bolesta's "The Borderlands Photographer" in Tubac Villager.)

How can the bronzed and windblown borderlands photographer take his or her eyes off of our famously widescreen panoramas to focus on the minuscule?

In the movies, a young Ava Gardner or Grace Kelly, among other starlets new to their career, yearned for a first chance to have a classic cinema close-up: a photograph of her face, or even closer, of her eyes, which would stamp an indelible impression upon the audience.

A tender wildflower against a prickly pear cactus.

This close-up had the power to make someone a star. Here in Arizona's borderlands, a simple, blown-up image can be more memorable than one depicting a wide-open panorama stretching beyond the horizon.

Today’s borderlands photographer has the chance to make a star image out of so much that resides here just out of range of normal sight. Taking the time and effort to photograph the little things yields big rewards.

Vigorous effort often is needed to reach the object or critter ready for its first great photo close-up. Bending over, kneeling down, even lying flat on your stomach with your elbows in the dirt is often the physical price to pay for a good close-up shot. The intrepid photographer always is ready to contort to achieve the right proximity.

Distance and angle in relation to your close-up subject are crucial to obtaining a great result. 

A horned lizard is ready for a star turn.

Distance affects how much of your subject will fill the frame in order to achieve a high level of detail. Distance will also affect the depth of your focus zone. Angle will help capture the “good side” of your subject and create visual impact. Angle will help achieve the right lighting contrast for an artful image.

Very close-up images can become truly abstract – removed from context and hard to define – presenting an entirely new option for photographers. Abstraction provides an escape from the bounds of literal photography, setting the artist free.

The fruit of a barrel cactus provide some unexpected color and shape.

Technically, folks often use special-purpose lenses for close-up work. These “macro” lenses are designed to focus sharply on very small area, leaving the surroundings blurred. Further afield is microscopic photography.

But close-up photography doesn’t require the purchase of special equipment if you’re careful about the variables influencing depth-of-field, or focus depth. These variables include distance from subject, lens focal length, and aperture setting. An inexpensive 300-mm zoom telephoto is what I use as my “butterfly lens," allowing me to achieve the right distance to fill a frame sharply with a small subject. Also, there are many opportunities using a standard lens that comes with your camera and the close-up settings on most of today’s digital equipment.

As a borderlands photographer, you'll spend most of your time “panning” your camera across this region's expansive landscapes, but instead, go ahead and add close-ups to your mix. This will provide refreshing variety to your collection of images. 

Live large by thinking small!

Opinion: A Way Forward - NYTimes Op-Ed: Dr. King Weeps From His Grave

By Cornel West, August 25, 2011

THE Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was to be dedicated on the National Mall on Sunday — exactly 56 years after the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi and 48 years after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (Because of Hurricane Irene, the ceremony has been postponed.)

These events constitute major milestones in the turbulent history of race and democracy in America, and the undeniable success of the civil rights movement — culminating in the election of Barack Obama in 2008 — warrants our attention and elation. Yet the prophetic words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel still haunt us: “The whole future of America depends on the impact and influence of Dr. King.”

Rabbi Heschel spoke those words during the last years of King’s life, when 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts to eradicate poverty in America. King’s dream of a more democratic America had become, in his words, “a nightmare,” owing to the persistence of “racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.” He called America a “sick society.” On the Sunday after his assassination, in 1968, he was to have preached a sermon titled “Why America May Go to Hell.”

King did not think that America ought to go to hell, but rather that it might go to hell owing to its economic injustice, cultural decay and political paralysis. He was not an American Gibbon, chronicling the decline and fall of the American empire, but a courageous and visionary Christian blues man, fighting with style and love in the face of the four catastrophes he identified.

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.

As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.

The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.

King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice. We rightly celebrate his substance and sacrifice because he loved us all so deeply. Let us not remain satisfied with symbolism because we too often fear the challenge he embraced. Our greatest writer, Herman Melville, who spent his life in love with America even as he was our most fierce critic of the myth of American exceptionalism, noted, “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.”

King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.

Opinion: Big Food and obesity are a disgrace

Friends - Support FoodCorps http://foodcorps.org/ and fight the national disgrace of obesity and Big Corporate Food.

Click the above website and find out how we can all help to reverse this trend over the past 30 years when this country's health really started to go to hell.

Folks must renew pride in fitness; it's time that patriotism be equated with physical fitness.

Help out!

Article: "Vanishing Ranchlands"

(Published June 2008 in Murray Bolesta's "The Borderlands Photographer" in Tubac Villager.)

Preserving open spaces in Arizona’s borderlands doesn’t always require the ultimate conservation measure of setting aside pristine landscapes untouched by development or agriculture.

A scene of wide-open freedom in a pristine valley
on the Arizona-Mexico border.

Ranchlands, whether private or leased from the government, represent an expansive rural heritage of Arizona as significant as the natural heritage of undisturbed desert habitat. Importantly, for you, the borderlands photographer, they also provide great picture-taking opportunity.

Some of the various habitats, or biomes, of the Sonoran Desert and surrounding areas here in southern Arizona have enabled ranching to various degrees of success. From desert grassland to the pine forests, grazing continues.

Photo opportunities abound within both the living and the preserved, or converted, ranchlands in our area. I describe living ranchlands as domains of folks who still lead a classic western life on a range with cattle, horses, and other livestock.

I categorize preserved ranchlands as those tracts which have been set aside from prior ranching use and allowed to revert more or less to their original natural form. These ranchlands have been protected by a wide variety of conservationist interests, from private activists to non-profit foundations and the federal government. Examples locally are Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge at Arivaca, the Empire Ranch/Las Cienegas Conservation Area at Sonoita, and the Audubon Society’s Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch at Elgin.

Historic, precious ranch structures add character
to an image of the vanishing ranchlands, here
seen in Muleshoe Ranch in south central Arizona.

What great destinations these places are for the borderlands photographer! You can't beat the wide-angle thrill of an afternoon monsoon storm bursting over the yellow grassland vista.

Constantly, the living ranchlands furnish artful western scenes, from cowboys at the corral to horses galloping to cattle grazing to spinning windmills (one of my favorites). 

Further, both the living and the preserved ranchlands contain structures of character and historic significance, such as adobe barns and mesquite fences, also fertile subjects for the photographer.

Go wide! Often the wide open, sprawling country begs for panoramic photos of grasses bending to the breeze and distant mountain horizons reminiscent of western films likely made there.

Men of the range, Empire Ranch, Sonoita, Arizona.

The borderlands photographer uses a wide-angle lens or instead, stitches two or more digital shots together to seize this widescreen grandeur. He or she remembers that quality landscape shots require a tripod for maximum sharpness.

Early morning or late afternoon is best for capturing these landscapes Also, the lucky photographer shows up when there is some weather happening, when skies are filled with more than the dreaded plain blue sky. Landscape shots beg for skies filled with feature and definition. Often the drama of ranchland skies is the highlight of a borderland image.

At day's end you'll have recorded a very fine part of America's heritage. And finally, when you leave for home, after immersing yourself in big-sky country, don’t forget to close the gates!

Roads Caller