Burning Man - Photography

I got the opportunity to talk directly with two of the best known photographers on the playa. I asked each one of them for the one bit of advice they had for someone who is a beginner at working with people. It was great to see their different style and approach and listen to their advice. One of them snapped my photo while we were chatting and you can find it at: http://webbery.com/galleries/burningman/bm08/faces/index15.html .

I also got the opportunity to work with some friends of mine who volunteered to model. I learned a great deal from the experience. I hope to be able to post some of the photos on-line soon. I have those to upload as well as thousands from the hiking trip.

I found it hard to go out and take as many photos as I wanted because of a combination of work schedule, dust condition, low energy, etc. It was a challenge this year.

Speaking of dusty conditions - one incident of note was a particularly bad dust storm we had this year. It started with a cyclone of dust that went right by my camp - just one hundred feet away. It was a opaque tower of swirling dust. About seventy feet up was a four-person tent. It's door was open and it had been plucked from the ground. The wind continued to keep it inflated so that it had little chance of coming down any time soon. I watched as it passed by and headed for the open desert. When I last saw it, it was about a thousand feet in the air and a quarter mile out still dancing around the shifting column of dust. It was at that point that a wall of dust overtook me from behind and blotted out everything that was more than twenty feet away. It didn't let up all afternoon after that.