Concerning Photography

The question has been raised earlier this week as to classifying a photographer as pro, amateur, sub-amateur, etc. As I was called out in said post, I felt compelled to respond in kind. Yes, I know I haven't finished the posts from the wedding or El Salvador. Chill, I have one final left before Christmas break, then I'll get rolling again.

What is a "Pro" photographer? What is an "Amateur" photographer? Perhaps we might even have to start more basic than that with what is a "photograph"? This is a question I often pose my customers looking at SLR cameras when I'm actually supposed to just be selling them a camera. In my mind, there is a significant difference between a "snapshot" and a "photograph". To me, a photograph indicates a conscious effort to analyze the composition of the photograph, be aware of elements in the background that may be distracting, get the focus correct, and last but not least, expose the picture correctly. When you take these elements into account, you begin creating art instead of letting the camera capture what it may. At this point you are taking control of the camera and light and manipulating how you see and capture them to create a desired image. Now, this is not to say you must know how a given picture is going to turn out after you press that little button, but it generally helps to have some idea, even if it's an idea of how to do trial-and-error adjustments for the shot you're about to do.

Now, given that definition, what is a photographer? I believe a photographer is someone who continually strives to better the photographs he or she creates. Whether it is through shooting, or reading, or observing another photographer, you are trying to create the most accurate representation of your idea possible. Ask any photographer if they have ever created the perfect picture. Unless they are extremely arrogant or extremely naïve, they will probably say no. But that does not mean there are not excellent photographs out there. What would be the point of doing something if you could never do it well?

Now the designation of a professional vs amateur is also very vague. A professional has a rather strict definition when it comes to careers, including mainly doctors, lawyers and military officers. But in a field such as golf, you become a professional as soon as you get paid to play. One of the greatest golfers who ever played, Robert Trent (Bobby) Jones, was an amateur his entire career. There is also a great deal of difference in skill between professional golfers on local circuits and Tiger Woods, Ernie Els and Arnold Palmer. People insist on assigning labels to things that are completely unrelated to what they are trying to judge. People often ask me at work if I am a professional photographer. I respond that I love taking photographs, I love studying and learning about photography, and I am available for hire for portraits, weddings and other events. I don't compare myself to Ansel Adams or Annie Leibovitz. Here is my card with my website at the bottom if you would like to take a look at my portfolio and judge for yourself whether you would consider me a professional.

Questions, comments, concerns? I know I haven't totally covered this topic and my explanation has been somewhat haphazard, but alas I am not getting paid to write this, nor am I getting a grade. I would still love to know what you think, but until then, I need to get some sleep so I can head back to Gainesville tomorrow to work and study.

-Z

Arrival in El Salvador

I realized as I was writing the first draft of this post that it was turning into a essay, so I'm going to break this guy up into a few different posts with pictures. That ways you won't have to put aside an hour of your life to read about my adventures. Anyways, I flew in Tuesday night from El Salvador but just finished doing the preliminary run on the photos right now. We had such a blast down there, and I can't wait to go back.

My father arrived in San Salvador on Thursday afternoon because there was a parents' dinner the night before. Apparently that was interesting, but alas, I was not there so I can't really comment on it. I arrived the next afternoon and got a shuttle up to the Sheraton in San Salvador. My father and grandparents were on a tour so I called up Roger and Sandra and had them come over and pick me up. We were supposed to meet Dan and Anne so we could drive up to Ataco and spend the night, but while I had pulled up at the hotel about an hour after I landed, Dan and Anne had not arrived. Roger was getting a little worried because they had rented a car and therefore had a very high probability of getting incredibly lost.

While we waited, we drove back to Sandra's house to hang out for a little while. I met Sandra's mother again (I had first met her in Kansas City the year previous for the civil ceremony) and I also met her German Shepard mix, Oso.

After a very tense few hours, we finally got a call from a slightly frazzled Dan. They had finally found there way back to Villa Serena, the hotel they were staying at, about three hours behind schedule. Apparently they had skirted with the border of Guatemala before realizing where they were in relation to where they were supposed to be. The three of us piled back into Sandra's car and rode on over to the hotel. Along the way I pulled out my camera and started shooting away, simply because I could. It was a little difficult out the window of the car, but really I just wanted to look around.

Fifteen minutes later we rolled up in front of the hotel and were greeted by Dan and Anne. They were now standing behind their rental car because Dan refused to drive anymore that day, especially in that city. Understandable because the drivers in El Salvador are psycho. Good, I didn't see an accident the entire time I was there, but psycho nonetheless. Anne also pulled out a map so Sandra could show them where everything had gone wrong.

At this point it was just after 5PM, three hours after we were supposed to have left for Ataco to go up and spend the night. It was starting to get a little bit dark and the tour was supposed to return soon, so I opted out of heading up to Ataco and waited in the hotel for Dad, Grandpa and Grandma. I got a little hungry, so I decided to go walking to find some food. Well as I walked down the hall from my room, who do I run into but Dad coming out of the elevator? So we put some things back in the room, grabbed Grandpa and Grandma and went out to dinner at this little sandwich shop down the street.

Later that night Dad, Grandpa and I stopped into the hotel bar to get ourselves acquainted with the local fare. The Cerveza Nacional Pilsner is nice and light, and Suprema is also very good. We caught up on some of the news on the TV and then headed up to bed to be ready for the wedding the next day. Meanwhile, I couldn't sleep, so I dropped back down there a little later that night to check out their gin and tonics, once again very satisfactory.

I know, not an overly exciting first day, but I enjoyed it and there wasn't too much pressure so it allowed me to adjust to the country. The next three days, however, were when I fell in love with the country.

Travels

Let me start by saying that I've changed my mind and I really need to learn Spanish in addition to my French. However, this is not so I can get ahead in the job market or communicate with immigrants who haven't learned English yet. It is simply because I would love to spend more time in Central America learning about the country and culture, talking to the beautiful ladies they have down here, and so I can sing along with all the music down here.

I arrived in country on Friday afternoon, made it smoothly through customs and met up with the shuttle to the hotel. Upon checking into the hotel, I called Sandra's house to let Roger y Sandra know I was all set. They came and picked me up about an hour later, but nobody had heard from Dan and Anne yet, and we were getting a little worried. You see, they had rented a car at the airport rather than take the shuttle up to the hotel. Well 3 hours later, they finally called Sandra's house when they made their way back to the hotel. Apparently they had been making pretty good time towards Guatemala. =P . Anyways, since it was almost time for the other part of the group to get back from their tour, I opted to stay in San Salvador rather than going up to Ataco for the night. Went out to dinner with Dad, Grandpa and Grandma, then hung out and went to sleep at a pretty decent hour.

Roger y Sandra's wedding was today up in Ahuachupan, near Ataco, and the reception was at the Jardin de Celeste. Overall a very, very nice wedding. Sandra looked absolutely stunning, Roger looked sharp, and from my point of view everything went off without a hitch. I got a bunch of nice pictures from both the wedding and reception, but naturally I forgot my card reader for my camera, so they will be uploaded when I get home.

Tomorrow was going to be a rest day, but that was planned when Dad and I expected to be celebrating well into the morning hours, rather than stopping at 9PM, so instead I'm probably going to go work out tomorrow morning, find myself a coffee shop in town, and generally enjoy the city until we meet up with Roger y Sandra tomorrow night. Monday I think we're planning a beach trip, then flying home Tuesday before driving up to Gainesville for a 930AM fluids test on Wednesday. Fun fun.

All in all, I'm in love with this country and wish I had more time to stay here. I think I'm going to have to come visit again in the spring, preferably with more linguistic skill and some dive gear. =) . Hope everyone is having a great time and I'll see y'all in a couple days.

-Z

Philosophy of Diving

OK, so perhaps I jumped into the details too quickly on that last post. I apologize, I just started writing about the first thing that came to my head when I was going to write an article about learning to dive, Rule number 1 seemed a natural place to start. But now I realize I must go back even farther for people to understand why I dive.

Aside from the television shows and movies you see growing up with divers jumping in the water and blowing up sharks with oxygen tanks, my first real encounter with diving was in high school. My freshman biology teacher, Mr. Lopatka, sponsored a Spring Break dive trip to Bimini each year. I would have loved to go on those trips, but alas, we never really had the money for me to take them (I kind of used up my share going to Ireland in '01). Nevertheless, a young lady who would eventually become one of my closest friends did get certified as a PADI Open Water diver and began furthering her diving education.

And so it passed, high school went on and was a good time for the most part. I made some awesome friends, watched three kickass football seasons, played horn under 3 different directors and 2 principals, but never did learn how to dive. That's all good, there's not much diving at the US Air Force Academy anyways. Now the Academy was an experience in itself, and there's a whole blog about that here so I will not get into the gory details. I was signed up to take a dive class my firstie year, but never got that far before I left the Academy and returned to Florida.

I took a semester off and began working at Best Buy to get a little spending cash until I went back to school. Well it turns out that I really like cameras, and I'm genetically predisposed to talking to everyone I meet, so Best Buy worked out rather well. I continued working there while I went to school at UCF in the spring, then upon my acceptance to UF for fall semester I transferred up to the Gainesville store and started working there over the summer.

Enter my new supervisor, Lance Briner, new to the camera business as well as new to Best Buy. It's all good, I'm more than happy to pass on knowledge I've acquired from my previous store because we're all on the same team. Well it turns out that before Lance became supervisor, he actually owned his own dive shop. He is also certified as an instructor in almost anything you can think of. So, through this series of fortunate events, I ended up with one of the best instructors around and I will probably never meet a person that is more passionate about diving than him.

Now, to the important part of the post, yes I know it was a long time coming but here it is: Why I Dive. I do not dive to go deeper than someone else, nor do I dive so I can look cool or act macho. I do not dive to push the limits, nor do I dive to prove anything to anyone. The reason is simple; I dive because when I am underwater I feel a sense of freedom and being alive that I feel very few other places. It is soaring through the sky with nothing but the air holding you up, and it is floating through 3 feet of powder as the third track down Alberta Peak. It is riding the melody of the horn as it seems to play itself, and it is painting a picture of the world as you see it through the lens of the camera. That is why I dive.

In the end however, the best part of the dive is always hanging out with my buddies afterwards. It's getting home to my family or calling them up on the phone just to tell them I love them and I miss them. Never will I do anything during the dive that would jeopardize those things afterwards. There is nothing under the water or in a cave that is worth losing that. If I ever lose sight of that, it is time for me to stop doing what I'm doing, whether it be diving, flying, skiing, or even playing my horn. But right now I am living life and loving life.

That is why I dive.

-Z

Rule Number 1

So in light of my mother finding another article outlining why I should not SCUBA dive, I would like to put up a post every once in a while explaining why putting on a giant rubber suit, strapping 60 pounds of gear on my back and proceeding to breath underwater for anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours is merely an absurd idea and not a dangerous one.

Rules of diving:
Rule number 1: Never hold your breath (mostly for ascending, just easier to remember this way)
This was the first rule Lance told us when we started our Open Water class. It was probably because it was the one that applied to us standing in 3 feet of water. Reasoning behind it is while underwater, you are breathing compressed air. The air then enters your lungs at a pressure corresponding to the depth you are diving at. For those of us who have had physics or fluids or thermodynamics lately, for a gas PV=nRT. n (number of moles of gas), R (Universal Gas Constant), and T (Temperature) remain constant throughout this whole process (negligible differences, so it's a safe assumption). Therefore Pressure and Volume are inversely proportional at all times.

When standing at sea level, the atmospheric pressure is appx 101 kPa, 1 atm. That is caused by the weight of about 80 miles of air stacked on top of us. Now water, being about 1000 times denser than air, exerts much more pressure than air as we descend through it. For this reason, we reach a pressure of 2 atm at 33 feet below the surface of the water. That means the 33 feet of water above us is exerting the same weight on us as the 80 miles of air above it. It also means that the same amount of air at 33 feet takes up half as much space as it did at the surface. By the same logic, if you fill up your lungs at 33 feet (represented by a balloon), when you ascend to the surface holding your breath, the volume doubles and, as succinctly put by my instructor, Lance Briner, "Pop, pop."

In conclusion, don't hold your breath, it's bad. That's kind of why it's rule number one.


SO, there's your first lesson on things that I've learned and now have zero ability to forget that keep me safe while I'm underwater. There will be more posts, perhaps tonight if I can't sleep. I fly out to El Salvador in 30 hours, so I'm rather excited right now.

Dive safe.

-Z

Statement of Purpose

So apparently Blogspot is the LiveJournal for adults, therefore I decided to make one. Contrasting against my other blogs that I've posted over the last seven years or so, I'm going to try and make this one coherent and readable to the average person. My previous attempts, though they served their purposes, were more aimed at venting or communicating with people I already talk to.

For those of you that are not aware, I am no longer at the US Air Force Academy. I am currently working on my BS in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Florida in Gainesville. I'm taking the extra time to finally enjoy college with a little less pressure than I had at USAFA and getting a more diversified experience. I'm studying photography on the side and have recently gotten SCUBA certified. I also work at Best Buy selling cameras for a part time job.

As far as the subject of the posts in this blog, I haven't quite decided on that yet. It may be slightly politcally leaning or touching on economic issues, but most of those discussions are better left to my brother Roger's blog. Many of my posts will probably be related to photography since I am continually learning and reading on that subject. A couple of my favorite websites on that subject are Fredmiranda.com and the Strobist blog.

Other topics could include diving, engineering and physics concepts, the new television I'm going to get, or anything else people would like me to write about. If I take any cool trips, i.e. El Salvador for my older brother's wedding, you can expect pictures here as well as a link to the album on my photography website. As of right now I am sitting in the recitation class for Fluid Mechanics learning about normal shocks and isentropic compressible flow, so I should get back to that for a little while.

Oh and finally, due to the public nature of this blog, some topics and comments will have to be censored and restricted since in the near future I will be looking for internships and full time jobs and also because my brother is in a a public position out in Lawrence, KS and my name naturally pops up at the same time as his in Google, because there aren't that many Zalneraitis' floating around.

But for now, au revoir et bon chance.