Always loving to travel & being me, I have had a camera with me since I was 8 years old. Having been on the road so much in recent months, first to Costa Rica in February & then Cuba a few weeks later in March, I have been paying attention to the way I photograph, using my iphone, my Lumix point-and-shoot, and my trusty Nikon DSLR’s: a D700 and a D3s. I also learned a little bit about how to best carry my gear, & found that the same Crumpler messenger style bag I mostly use here at home was my favorite option on the road as well. (Mine is an older version of what they now call their “6 million dollar home” bag).  I have led many workshops, and the one I took to Costa Rica in February was a fabulous blend of garden photography while making new friends with everyone on the workshop, and travel photography, which is all about meeting new friends. The Cuba trip was pure pleasure and learning, which is why I travel: for enjoyment and to learn.

Che Lives! Well, at least he is caffeinated.

And photographing, of course! I believe most of us are so enamored with photography because it allows us an expanded visual method of telling the stories we want to tell.  One of the most basic human social needs is to tell each other our stories. Photography, especially now in the early 21st century, is so uniquely accessible and manipulable that it has become an integral part of how we communicate with each other. Photography is now part of the human vernacular and becoming more so every day. Imagine the explosion in social media without photography; would pinterest, instagram, even facebook exist without photography? Maybe, but not likely or certainly not in the same form and with much less power than they have evolved.  But I digress!

So traveling affords us such a rich and fulfilling opportunity with which to exercise our photographic muscles. One of my favorite quotes is that “The camera is a passport into the lives of others.” (Alas, I have lost the attribution). It is so true. The trick when travelling is not to act like a taker, which is how tourists are usually characterized. Hence the difference between a tourist and a traveler, and between a tourist with a camera and a travel photographer.

These two women worked at a cafeteria in Havana on a busy street. The space is open to the sidewalk, which is why the light sluicing in is so wonderful. It’s bouncing around the street behind me & coming softly into the restaurant to brighten these two friendly ladies’ faces. Three of us stopped in here to see if we could grab a soda. Sitting at the soda-fountain-style seats we were able to learn their names and how many people were in their families. In turn we told them about our families and a little bit about us and about how beautiful we found their city.  Nothing brightens someone up as much as a visitor telling them how beautiful their home is. We were being sincere, but it’s nothing more than the principle that a little flattery goes a long way, especially when it’s true. I promised to send them copies of the photos we took, and I am making good on that promise.

To make these kind of images on the road I have to work fast. I find it’s best to minimize the number of decisions I have to make, such as which lens to use. I travel with one camera and one backup in case the first one goes down but they don’t have to be equivalent. In Cuba I used the D700 as my primary and my Lumix point-and-shoot as the backup. In Costa Rica I used my big gun, the D3s as my primary and my backup was the D700, though I also did use both the lumix and the iphone for some fun street shooting where I wanted to be unobtrusive. I also use the Lumix for scouting photos, so in the garden at the hotel where I was staying I was able to capture this image before breakfast one morning with the Lumix LX-5. It’s a wonderful point-and-shoot camera that has many of the features found in DSLR’s (aperture & shutter priority modes, you control the ISO, high definition video…) but at a fraction of the cost and in a package that fits into my coat pocket.

These street scenes were made with my iphone and processed through an app called “camera +”.

There are more of these in this online gallery (generally speaking, the square photos are from the lumix, the images with extreme color saturation and border treatments were done on the iphone)

In Costa Rica we did a lot of hiking in the forest, where I wanted to reduce the stress on my neck from the Crumpler’s neck strap. For that situation I have a Tamrac modular belt , the smallest (4″ wide) one, since I only have two lens cases attached. I really don’t want to carry lots of lenses, especially when I travel; the fewer decisions I have to make the faster I can work, and the less complicated the entire process becomes. The more technology you use, the more separated from your subject you become. Having two lenses on my belt allows me to keep one lens on the camera, with two in reserve, but without being unduly loaded down. The lenses I used for both of these trips are the 80-200mm 2.8, a 28-70mm 2.8 and a 17-35mm 2.8, and in Costa Rica a 60mm macro. I also carried a 1.4 tele-extender to help give me a little extra boost. Sometimes I left the wide angle in the room & took my macro instead; there is just so much new stuff to see in the tropics at close range that the macro was perfect for, like this passion flower. The pollinators in the second image I am told are “stingless bees”, what we here in the northeast might (mistakenly) call flying ants.

passiflora vitifolia aka passion flower

Then there is the trick of capturing nuances of cultural differences without making them seem trite. Many aspiring photographers go out into a scene, especially in a foreign country but also here at home, and try to make photos that look very much like the photos they have seen in postcards or in travel magazines. It’s not the worst thing in the world to do, and in fact it can be a good exercise, to flex your photo muscles by trying to copy the success of others. But ultimately if you do this as your goal, your photos will always be at best a weak reflection of someone else’s vision and at worst just trite or exploitive.  It’s best to find your own vision, your own way of seeing the world and translating that into your photographs. Doing it in a foreign culture is extremely satisfying and rewarding, primarily because it’s harder to be false when you are not totally familiar with the language, the customs or the terrain. You have to be open and more honest in order just to navigate. Keeping this honesty in your photography will lead you to rich imagery and wonderful experiences with the people you meet. This fellow was a farmer working in an urban farm in Havana, where they grow food but also ornamental garden plants, in the area shown to the right. Like almost every Cuban we met, he was friendly and open to talking about his life and he was very interested in us. The rapport these conversations created allowed us to photograph many of our new friends there with integrity and honesty.

You don’t have to travel to exotic locations to incorporate these principles into your photography. Travel photography can be done in the next town, or at your kids’ sports games, anywhere you might find yourself actually! It’s really about being open and honest with your subject and yourself about your intentions and your goals for the images you are about to make.  As Joe McNally, the great National Geographic photographer, wrote recently, photography involves “the head, heart and the hands in equal measure”. What other activities can so engage us?

Despite some ugly freeways San Diego is a pretty cool city. Really good beer, an interesting farm-to-table community, that gorgeous harbor on the one side and beautiful rolling hills spreading away into the distance. Drive down I-5 from downtown heading south and you quickly find yourself in the dry, rural never-never land that abuts the border with Mexico. Yes, THAT border, where just a few thousand feet from the fence, literally right up on the north bank of the Tijuana River and 3 miles from the Pacific Ocean, sits Wild Willow Farm, about to enter it’s third season as an educational center run under the auspices of San Diego Roots, a sustainable food coalition of farmers, foodies, land preservationists and social justice advocates. The farm’s primary mission is education, and it’s program is managed by Misha Johnson, an enthusiastic yet soft spoken and gentle soul who hails, oddly enough, from Norwich Vermont, almost the exact opposite catty corner of the country!Misha has farmed in his native New England as well as France and Costa Rica. He came to Wild WIllow through first working at San Diego Roots, which he joined because he appreciated it’s vision of developing the local food system.  At Wild Willow he oversees herbal tea and mushroom growing operations utilized to generate cash for the farm, in addition to running educational programs for visiting schools and community groups. Wild Willow Farm was chosen last year as one of five regional garden education centers in the city, making it available for community gardens under a program affiliated with the SD Roots Victory Gardens program, a community initiative through which local community members are taught aboput the benefits of healthy eating and how to grow food.  With an outdoor kitchen the farm is equipped for cooking classes in addition to gardening and farming workshops, which are taught by Misha and by outside educators.

Wild Willow Farm is uniquely located in an area that is perfect for agriculture. The area around San Diego isn’t necessarily the best farming climate, especially in the hot summer, but being right on the river and so close the the ocean places it square in a moderated zone. SD Roots is a seasoned organization, anchored by Susie’s Farm, an established organic farm with a popular CSA program just down the road from Wild Willow. Misha did his homework before finding this place; looks like he did a good job!

Freshly turned field at Organoponico Vivero Alamar, one of Havana's urban farms

I was fortunate to visit Cuba last week, where I was interested to see first hand their urban and sustainable farming efforts. Most folks I speak to in the USA are surprised to hear about the tremendous advances the Cubans have made in organic agriculture. Basically it was forced upon them by circumstances. Up through the 1980’s the Cuban agricultural model did not vary much from historical industrial age methods: the agricultural economy was dominated, as before the revolution, by one major cash crop – sugar cane, which was exported largely to the Soviet bloc countries, in return for food stuffs and industrial supplies like oil and chemical fertilizers used in the classic industrial farming model we know all too well.  It’s ironic that monocultural sugar cane farming maintained a critical role in the post 1959 economy since it was the domination of the sugar industry by non-Cuban companies that created so much of the conditions for the revolution in the first place.  Be that as it may, industrialized farming was considered to be the way of the “future” according to both western and Soviet economic models, so it continued.   When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba’s lifeline to food, oil and chemicals dried up.   Cuban agriculture was oil and chemical dependent, using fertilizers and pesticides and requiring petroleum to run the machinery.   In 1991 the Soviets cut billions in aid and over the next two years the Cuban economy shrunk by 34%. In three short years Cuba lost up to 85% of it’s food imports. Automobiles disappeared from the streets for lack of fuel, electricity would be turned off for up to 18 hours at a time and the average adult daily food intake dropped from 3000 to 1200 calories. Malnutrition became a common health concern in a country proudly known for having one of the best health care systems in the world.  This was the beginning of what the Cubans call “the special period”.

While the early 90’s was extremely difficult for Cuba, it could have been much worse.  Looking back we now see that this time was instead marked by a transition to a more sane and sustainable form of food production.  Using education, which has always a strong point for Cubans, Cuba turned it’s industrial and centralized agricultural system into one run more and more at the local level as a system of community based organic farms. Human and animal labor was reintroduced, older farmers were consulted for their memories of traditional and importantly, local methods, and the population was educated about the benefits of eating less meat and more fruits and vegetables. Today Cuba mostly feeds itself.  The Cubans are still considered to be quite poor relative to their neighbors to the north, but when political pundits discuss and wonder how and why the populace tolerates the privations of the ’special period’ and the sacrifices they still live with, the answer is simple: They are solving their problems their own way, using their own methods.  They are standing on their own feet, doing it for themselves. That’s quite a powerful incentive.

irrigation & carrots

In Havana alone there are close to 300 urban farms of varying sizes serving the neighboring communities.  Alamar is an outer neighborhood in east Havana, consisting of dreary post revolution apartment blocks acknowledged to be some of the least desirable housing in a city with serious housing problems.  Yet this farm, Organoponico Vivero Alamar is one of the larger and more successful ones.  Containing 11 hectares, which is approximately 27 acres, it is certainly is very beautiful and well run.  Our group had a warm and enjoyable two hour tour by the amiable Miguel Salcines López who has been managing the place since the beginning. He oversees a crew of more than 140 workers, all of whom receive a living wage and many of whom, as collective owners, share in the profits the farm brings in.  The land they farm was re-distributed to them by the centralized soviet-style system that held it previously, and which divested nearly two-thirds of the country’s agricultural land under this system in an effort to create incentives for workers to not only grow their own foods but to create surplus that they would then sell to others. It worked. It’s not truly socialism, and it’s not truly capitalism, but who cares? It’s healthy and it works.The Alamar farm grows flowers and houseplants too, and they have a sizeable compost operation, in which they bag and sell the organic soil supplement. In fact, this entire farm is built using supplemented soil, as the original earth is heavily compacted and clay filled. They have built up the soil with organic amendments to allow them to grow their crops, which is the basis of one theory explaining the made-up word “organiponico”, being a reference to organics as a basis for the farm. The fellow above was one of the workers, all of whom were friendly and like most Cubans I met, very happy to stop for a few minutes and share his story and have a photo taken.

I hope to return soon, and might offer a photography trip to Cuba, if I hear of enough interest! Let me know if you might be interested.

For more images of this Cuba trip, including portraits, street scenes and lots of photos of the old American cars, take a look at these three web galleries – http://t.co/o1NUCEDb http://t.co/Tg6×6HAU and http://t.co/yRWzzn5i.

Wilson!...On the beach at Casa Orquideas

Eight days of moving around and photographing Costa Rica with six fantastic new friends, from San Jose (the capital) to the central mountains, down to the Wilson Botanical Garden near the southern border with Panama & then up the Pacific coast, photographing birds, flowers, gardens and the locals and looking at photographs in between enjoying great meals. Wilson (above) and Spike the dog greeted us at Casa Orquideas, an amazing isolated private botanical garden about a 30 minute boat ride from Golfito, populated by toucans and rare macaws.Among other things, the tropical rainforest provides enormous opportunities for macro photography, like this torch ginger or these leaves. We have been having tons of fun!

Ben Shute, Hearty Roots Farm

Meeting some of the people at the core of the young farmer movement has been gratifying and fun. I’ve reported about some of them already in earlier versions of this series. One man I have wanted to spend a little time with and photograph right from the very beginning is this fellow, Ben Shute, of Hearty Roots Farm in the Hudson Valley.  In fact, Ben was one of the farmers I met during the creation of the book Hudson River Valley Farms who inspired me to start this project. Ben is one of those soft spoken, easy going guys whose under-the-radar demeanor betrays a powerful engine of creativity and thoughtful intelligence humming along beneath the surface.

Hearty Roots Farm, now 8 years old, is moving this year to 70 acres Ben and his wife Lindsay Lusher Shute just purchased in Red Hook, a few miles from the land they have been renting for the last few years.

Ben Shute in a potato field at Hearty Roots Farm

Hearty Roots follows the classic CSA model, which has been successful; the farm now feeds 600 families who pick up at a number of locations, including Woodstock, NY and four neighborhoods in New York City.

Ben came to farming through working for non-profits which introduced him to the need for local agricultural models to feed communities. Building community is what motivates him. He is one of the founders of the Young Farmer’s Coalition “a group of young and sustainable farmers organizing for collective success…defining the issues that beginning farmers face, fighting for the policy change that we need, and bringing farmers together in person and online to learn, share and build a stronger community”. (You can go to their website or scroll down below to the post about Severine von Tscharner Fleming for more about them). Perhaps the greatest attribute of the YFC is that it is farmer led and serves only the interests of the young farmers, not the interests of academic or corporate agriculturists telling young farmers what to do because it serves the interests of the corporation or the academician.  Ben’s wife Lindsay is the current YFC director, helped by other farmer-activists and interns.

2011 Young Farmer Conference at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture

Ben is very active in educating other young farmers. He speaks at the annual Young Farmer’s Conferences at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture (where the YFC was founded a couple of years back). He travels the country meeting young farmer groups wishing to learn about the economics of sustainable and small scale farming as well as the nuts-and-bolts.  Young farmer wannabes learn directly from Ben’s financial spreadsheets, seeing the capital outlays, the cash inflow and expenses he faces year-to-year to give them a real world view of what they need to know about farming. With encouragement he shows them that it’s not just growing plants and making compost.

But wait, there’s more!The tractor in this photo is an Allis Chalmers Model G which has been modified to eliminate gasoline as its fuel source & replace it with battery power, using rechargeable batteries. Basically it is a solar powered tractor! Ben did the conversion using plans provided for free online by Ron Khosia from Huguenot Street Farm in New Paltz, also in the Hudson Valley. It’s an extraordinary experience to watch this tractor silently glide down a farm row, where you normally expect to hear the noise of the typical diesel engine and see the exhaust smoke spewing from the engine pipe. The plans for converting these tractors are free for the taking right here.

Ben and Lindsay will be using this baby on their new homestead, seen behind them in this photo below. Speaking of babies, Lindsay was pregnant when I photographed them just before Christmas; the baby was born in January, just in time for the closing on the land to be finalized.

Ben and Lindsay Lusher Shute

It's time to think about when to take your Garden Photography Workshop; This one was at Tower Hill Botanic Garden.

It’s time to start planning the spring season workshops and we have a bunch ready to go. This spring I will be conducting garden photography workshops here in beautiful Litchfield County and at the NYBG as usual, but we have added a few new locations, including Central Park (May 1)  the High Line (May 2 and June 2), the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s garden at Elm Bank In Wellesley MA (May 6) and the Maine Coastal Botanic Garden on June 12, among others! It’s going to be a full season, and that’s just the spring! To get the full list, click here and you will see the entire schedule. I can also do special workshops for private groups, as some garden clubs and several state chapters of the APLD have done. I’m happy to travel to your area for this.  I also do private one-on-one’s if you want to have an intensive and private learning experience, or you can pull one together with a group of friends, just ask me how to do it!

Last year the multiple blizzards here in the northeast made photographing the winter garden one of the few pleasant activities possible amid the mountains of snow. Here’s a blog post about it to give you an idea of the great beauty I found in a snow filled garden, and here’s another about photographing NYC’s High Line last winter. But this winter is different, to say the least!Photography, as has been written in this blog and elsewhere, is primarily about light. It’s what the word means: drawing (some say painting or writing) with light. At the most basic level photography is not about pretty flowers, or smiling children or most other things that happen to be the subject of our attention. It is also most certainly not about what kind of camera is being used.  It is first and foremost about light. Add to that the fact that when we photograph we are creating an image within the four corners and four sides of a frame, usually a rectangle, which places us firmly within the construct of our culture’s artistic conventions, meaning there are certain compositional rules that we can follow to make imagery that we like to look at. The rule of thirds, leading lines, use of patterns, color and contrast, all these tools help us make beautiful photos. So into the barren winter garden we bring these ideas, and voila! Another aspect to photographing a snow-free winter garden that I enjoy is capturing plant portraits & studies of plants that are dried & past their prime, as opposed to only photographing pretty flowers in April, May, June and July. Looking closely at plants in winter gives me an even deeper appreciation of the garden than if I just am looking at and photographing them when they are at peak and also gives me insights into how to photograph them in the warmer months. I love to find and photograph seed pods and seeds or other plant parts that are only released or become visible once the plant has died or gone dormant.  Adding a human component helps the viewer understand scale, and also places the viewer in the scene, as we relate to people (or parts of people) that we see in photographs. One last thing about this winter as opposed to last year, it’s a lot easier to move around without  all that snow to slog through!

It’s seed buying time! Most gardeners use the dormancy of this season to peruse the many seed catalogues that arrive in the mail. It is a traditional ritual: Look for the seeds that worked in the prior season and try out some new ones in the coming year.  The format typically follows the normal commercial habits we are all so used to: choose from a catalogue or website, pay for those we want and away we go.  But a new method is taking hold.  The idea of using the lending library format to distribute seeds is slowly gaining traction around the country.  In the last two years several public libraries (Fairfield, CT, Berkeley, CA, among others) whose regular stock in trade is literature have started or assumed local efforts aimed at preserving the genetic diversity housed in the seeds of “heirloom” varieties of plants grown for generations by families or communities, but which have never seen commercial circulation.  However the idea has several earlier geneses, one of which is the Hudson Valley Seed Library.

Ken Greene, right, with Doug Muller in the field at Hudson Valley Seed Library

Housed in the sparse remains of an old resort in Accord, New York, the Seed Library was founded four years ago by Ken Greene who runs it with his partner Doug Muller. Ken was working at a small town library in Gardiner, NY, (how appropriate is that?) where fishing poles were lent out to local residents along with the books. Channeling his growing concern about the loss of biodiversity he started the seed library, where for a low annual membership fee you can “borrow” seeds with a promise to collect and return seeds from the crop you grew from your original choices. As an added incentive, the more seeds you return the more “seed credits” you accumulate, which lowers your next membership bill. Ken’s original goal was to share seeds with people, seeds with a local history which were geographically adapted to the Hudson Valley region.  In addition to preserving and making available these heirloom varieties, they also  have a more traditional sales model with the annual seed catalogue, so you can simply log on and buy them if you wish. They offer 60 varieties through the exchange with over 100 available in the catalogue.

Ken also teaches seed saving, as even for experienced gardeners, the best time and method for collecting seeds is not always obvious. And as he speaks around the country to groups interested in creating seed exchanges, Ken reports that interest in this and related types of seed saving and sharing is skyrocketing.  The Seed LIbrary is also known for it’s beautiful seed packets, designed by a cadre of local artists. The spoon collection is unique, assembled from Ken’s travels and allowing him to portion the exact number of seeds into each packet that is required by the seed size and expected germination rate. Who knew a ‘pinch’ or a ‘dash’ were actually quantified?

So this season, if you garden in the northeast, head over to the seedlibrary.org and take a look at their offerings. You’ll be helping to preserve local varieties and biodiversity and supporting a creative green entrepreneur and farmer with a truly original idea well worth supporting.

farmer Zach Pickens (seated) with chef/entrepreneur Sisha Ortuzar at Riverpark Farm

The local sustainability movement is not limited to rural areas or smaller cities where land might be cheaper than the sky-high real estate market of New York City. There are a number of farming initiatives gaining a foothold in the big apple. One that caught my eye recently is Riverpark Farm, affiliated with an eponymous restaurant located in a neighboring skyscraper at Kip’s Bay at the east end of 29th Street. The restaurant, a partnership of chef-entrepreneur Sisha Ortuzar and celebrity chef Tom Colicchio is located at the base of the first tower of the Alexandria Center for Life Science, billed as New York City’s first life science park, a development designed to foster scientific entrepreneurship between scientists, the medical community and financiers.  Sisha is the brains and legs behind the successful and popular WichCraft chain of healthy sandwich restaurants and the cookbook they inspired.  A second tower is part of the real estate plan, but due to the economics of the last few years, it’s construction has been put on hold, leaving a large (for New York) open space sitting available right next to the restaurant. It is one of 600 “stalled sites” in New York City, so-called due to the extended permitting allowing for delayed completion of the development which has been granted by the city as a result of the economic downturn.

Riverpark Farm, 29th Street in NYC

Enter the creative mind and boundless energy of Sisha Ortuzar with his business partner Jeffrey Zurofsky, who together came up with the idea of using the space to grow fresh produce for the restaurant, right in sync with current local eating/farm-to-table thinking, and then helped the NYC bureaucracy create the necessary permitting process to allow for a farming on a site previously approved and permitted for a building without losing that approval or threatening those permits.  Riverpark then partnered with Scarlet SHore of Alexandria Real Estate Equities. Once Sisha got the go-ahead, he had to develop a method for farming on the site without impacting the pad and basic infrastructure that had been placed there. As the photo above shows, the solution was ingenious: milk crates!

Is it still a farm if it's all grown in milk crates? Hint....can you still eat it?

I was chatting with one of the scientists who works in the tower while I was waiting to speak with Sisha & he said there is a continuing debate in the building about whether this is a farm or a big garden. I assured the fellow that I have seen much smaller farms feeding hundreds of families, so this certainly qualifies. The milk crates are a red herring; what does it matter where the roots of the plants sit? Certainly all the hydroponic farmers out there, not to mention many rooftop and other urban farmers, would raise an eyebrow if a farm had to be defined by only dirt in the ground. Riverpark may be dedicated to only supplying the restaurant, but that is just at present, and Sisha told me the permitting process he went through can be used for any stalled site in New York, and I would think can also be set up as a framework for similar sites in other cities. So what happens to the farm when the economy picks up enough for the development to proceed?  Until it happens nothing is certain but the plan is for the farm to be integrated into the development on the plaza. I would think that it could also migrate to a roof, or take shape in some other as yet unknown way. New urban farming ideas are sprouting through the pavement in cities all over the world, every day. This is a fantastic example of an alternative use of a stalled site which creates additional economic activity, is good for the environment and creates green space, all of which benefits the neighborhood. Moreover, until the economy recovers and development proceeds, the notion of growing food in the city is developing deep roots.   This is just one of many initiatives taking place in urban America. Before we know it eating locally produced fare will be more common not just out in the country, but also in the cities. Look at a company like Bright Farms which is developing rooftop greenhouse technology for supermarkets to grow all of their own produce, and you can see that this is an idea that is on fire all across the culture.

Zach Pickens, pictured above is one of the farmers ar Riverpark, previously farmed in Queens and Brooklyn and is developing a seed saver program aimed at sharing seeds of plants that will thrive in the unique New York City growing environment. This past season at Riverpark he and his colleagues are grew over 6000 individual plants of over 100 varieties, including the usual suspects (basil, tomatoes, peppers) as well as some you normally don’t see in our northern climate, like okra and collard greens, which apparently find the hot New York City climate quite friendly. The plants thrive in more than 7000 milk crates, feeding the patrons of the restaurant 2000 lbs of produce monthly. Talk about making lemonade from lemons….

Sisha Ortuzar