<![CDATA[SWAMPTHING - The Bromide Room]]>

<![CDATA[SWAMPTHING - The Bromide Room]]>Sat, 31 May 2025 18:59:28 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[The End of Camera Dangle]]>Thu, 10 Jan 2019 04:04:59 GMThttps://www.swampthing.co.nz/tbr/the-end-of-camera-dangle

The magnifique Peak Design Capture Clip.

First published in Wilderlife.nz with a few alterations.

The last thing you want to worry about when you’re lugging yourself and a heavy pack around the mountains is a wildly dangling camera. Anthony Behrens may have found a solution.

Backcountry photography is really hard on camera gear in New Zealand. The country that has the best scenery is also the most rugged. Mountains literally attract bad weather and that bad weather contains lots of water, dust and general filth.

I’ve had to replace the insides of a less than six-month-old and state-of-the-art Sony a6500 through humidity after walking from Wellington to the top of the Coromandel with it draped around my neck. It was always at the ready for THAT shot, but it was always getting sweated on too. As my partner and I made the 62 day Spine of the Fish hike through sub-tropical rainforest, in a very damp and humid 2017 autumn, the camera, although advertised as weather resistant, lost it’s delicate electronics to corrosion. Yes, it is supposedly Weather Sealed, but that’s a pretty loose description, and probably doesn’t incorporate Greasy Baked on Sweat Seals.

“You must have dropped it in a river!” suggested the guy at the Sony shop when he found out what was wrong. “The motherboard is corroded.”

“Nope,” was my honest reply as my my mind spluttered at the imagined cost of the repair.

One of the reasons that I’ve gone with Sony is the great service I receive from the Palmerston North-based national repair centre. We came to a very amicable arrangement and my beautiful wee camera is now as good as new.

I've lost expensive gear to a river before and it was with this in mind that I set off into the Ruahine Ranges with two cameras, one set up for film (the a6500), the other for stills (the larger Sony A7II). I was there to follow a Whio dog and it’s handler up the Mangatera River. I had both cameras around my neck dangling on their factory fitted and fairly long straps. It was savage work – the dog and its master didn’t care that I was running around after them trying to get the right angles and moments. They were there to efficiently make their way up a beautiful and rugged river looking for ducks.

More than once I found myself in thigh-deep water with my cameras dangling loosely just inches from certain death. As I climbed over logs, up waterfalls and through narrow dark gorges and caves, my cameras constantly swung, knocked and scraped against me and the Ruahines.

“There’s got to be a better way!” I bemoaned quietly to myself as I looked down at my freshly scratched and worn cameras on the chopper ride home.

Thankfully there is a better way.

Mac, his Capture Clip and a monster lens.

It’s three weeks later and I’ve just come in from testing my new Peak Design Capture Clip and hand strap. Mac, A world-roaming and sort-of-professional outdoor gear reviewer recently stayed in our backyard tramping hut while on a tour of New Zealand – he carried his Sony a6500 on one of these smart and tough little buggers that he has attached to his pack strap. I’d seen similar before and talked to people on various forums about them, but never acted.

“They’re just a gimmick,” I and others figured.

Well, sometimes seeing for yourself is the best way to find out about something. When we attached that monster 150-600mm lens to Mac’s a6500 I was sold! It looked hilarious, but it also looked bloody good. Not in a phallic symbol kind of way…just in a hey…this looks like a serious piece of engineering kind of way.

I’ve just come back from my first test run in the mountains. I’ve bought two of the clips, a wrist strap and a “fist” or Clutch Strap. I chose not to go all Rambo with the test on my first outing, so just took the Clutch and Clip attached to my larger camera. I spent the afternoon climbing steep gullies and banks and grovelling around in deepish pools filming water insects (yep…what a nerd). There were heaps of not-too-tough river crossings as well as a few scrambles over large rocks – my camera felt safe and sound clipped to my chest. When needed, it clipped off nicely and the fist strap felt really secure. Of course I still could have fallen in and lost the camera, but that’s what dry bags are for.

I’m looking forward to a real test – with two cameras. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Pros: It’s just a relief not to have dangling cameras!

Cons: The strap attaches to the Peak Clip’s baseplate which in turn is attached to the screw mount at the bottom of the camera. The Anchor Clip tie dampens the sound of a clean click when attaching the camera to the Capture Clip so it’s hard to feel completely safe when attaching the camera. I’m sure this won’t be a problem as I get used to the system, but it was a little unnerving on my first day in the field.

Watch the vid...

]]><![CDATA[Is the Daily Rag Really Yesterday's News?]]>Wed, 04 Oct 2017 01:11:30 GMThttps://www.swampthing.co.nz/tbr/yesterdaysnewsp1

"A 6-year-old newsie who tried to “short change” me." Photo: 1915 by Lewis Wickes Hine.

I love newspapers and mourn their cruel and imminent death every time I see the delivery guy rocket around our cul-de-sac on his scooter. He flicks about three papers onto the drives of the ‘hood’s last subscribers and rockets back out again. In the good old days paperboys and girls used to bike around the street delivering to three quarters of its boxes.

It’s tragic for the people who work (and have worked) in the industry and probably us as a society, but I can’t stop watching this hideously prolonged auto-asphyxiation without hoping that something might come along and rescue the purpling old stiff.

I do have a couple of observations to make about a possible future for something resembling traditional newspapers, but thought I'd bore you with a trip down memory lane first (it's my blog and I can reminisce if I want to).

I started my professional design “career” as a newspaper designer. Don’t laugh. Newspapers are a very specialised area of design. Fonts have to be readable, columns have to be narrow and photos have to be chosen. Words also have to be mispeld and designers are pros at that.

There were probably only a couple of us in the country when I started, but it caught on slowly and at the height of the newspaper design craze all metro papers had small editorial graphics departments and many regional papers had them too. Any designer working in the industry had to be tough (by a designer’s standards) and able to take huge amounts of pressure (compared to agency designers). 24 hour deadlines were an everyday thing and if a big story broke, a deadline for a graphic could be less than half an hour away. I only cried a couple of times. I threw my toys more often.

But the savage deadlines weren’t the hardest part of the job. Working with journos was.

It took a brave editor to hire a designer when technology first made such luxuries possible. It took a naive (and desperate?) designer to walk into an editorial department. Most self-respecting journalists were word people and couldn’t see why the powers-that-be would waste money on some artsy-fartsy illiterate whose only job was to make their perfectly perfect stories look pretty.

“Why employ this hairy beatnik? I need a new bowls reporter!”

The more adaptable journalists knew that a designer was probably a good idea, but most didn’t really know why. I never told them that I didn’t really know why for a few years either...it took a while for me to figure it out

My first job, at the Otago Daily Times, was to design the plug boxes every day and make any maps that might need whipping up.

The plug boxes are the little coloured rectangles that promote (plug) stories from inside the paper. They sit under or above the masthead (the newspaper’s name) on the front page.

When I first started I was given an old Mac Quadra that the Illustrations Department (the photographers) had rejected. I used Freehand 4 and the whole process took almost the entire four hours of my shift. These days sub-editors in India, or robots, make them.

Part of this fancy new job involved inputting the date manually onto the Freehand file. Many meetings were had with skeptical editors about my trustworthiness to perform this task and I soon proved the naysayers right. Not long after I started, several thousand copies of the ODT were binned in the wee small hours because not only am I illiterate, I can’t count either - I'd made Monday's paper Sunday's paper. Someone from the production department had to manually set the date onto the colour separations while I slept blissfully through the night at the end of my shift. I got called into the editor's office and rightfully given a bollocking the next afternoon when I started work. It was devastating and I may have shed a tear as the constructive feedback rained down upon me. Little did I know that this was a result of working in a functional and quality newspaper. I’m not sure anyone would bother these days*.

My first memorable map was of the Cave Creek Disaster in 1995. It was a shocking story but the news team told it well, with very little time and with what now seems like primitive resources. My second memorable map was a drawing that I had to put together of the Oklahoma Bombing. These two sad events helped me earn my stripes in the newsroom and got me addicted to the actual news process. If it bleeds it leads and it was often quite exciting.

My most famous work. Picture: Fairfax

My most famous work is still seen on TV regularly. I had moved to Palmerston North and got a job in the spectacularly dysfunctional Evening Standard where I was unleashed on another room of unsuspecting, and this time, very unhappy journalists. A local kitchen sink salesman had slaughtered his wife and daughter, and the only picture we had of the unhappy family was one that a photographer had snapped through the lounge window. It was a family portrait that sat on the telly. It showed the three unfortunates and an unsuspecting grandparent.

Any self-respecting editor knows you can’t go publishing photos of people who weren’t involved in such circulation-boosting stories of carnage, so I was brought in. With forensic precision I cut Pops out of the picture and painted the background white. I performed a subtle blur around my cut lines and cloned the occasional piece of missing hair into place. This is the picture that gets wheeled out in the media every time Mark Lundy farts in his sleep now. Do I feel proud every time I see it? Nope. I feel vaguely sick and dirty.

Sadly there isn’t enough money for such luxuries as people like me in the newspaper industry these days. When the Smiling Assassin, a Fairfax Change Manager from Melbourne, called me into his office a couple of weeks before my newspaper career ended he put me on notice with one of the bluntest appraisals of my work I'd ever experienced.

“What’s a person like you doing in a place like this?” he said matter-of-factly.

My time was clearly up, so I went out and got a "real" design job - in an agency. My days in newspaper ended as online news and Facebook took over. A local newsroom still pumps out stories for a newspaper that is printed in Wellington, but you only have to look at how little advertising each edition carries to realise that its days are numbered.

I sent all of my Society of News Design annuals to the Red Cross a while back. They had been my bibles and I figured that since I was no longer a believer, they were taking up valuable space in my bookshelf.

It was probably the right decision, but...

The business model may be choking on its old school tie, but I reckon that there is a possible future for the format. By format I mean several large sheets of cheap paper that are covered with short stories, photos and headlines that are then folded into unruly bundles and delivered to people who like to be informed about stuff.

Am I dreaming? Does it matter? Shouldn't I just go get a real job?

NEXT POST. Can digital printers bring back the dead? It's taking a while to write this post...but I'll get there eventually

* The ODT probably still cares.

]]><![CDATA[A Blast From The Past]]>Tue, 12 Sep 2017 04:44:01 GMThttps://www.swampthing.co.nz/tbr/a-blast-from-the-past

My “career” in design didn't start at design school. It didn't start with computers. It started with pen and ink

This must make me old.

I didn't get into graphic art (as it was called when I left school) because of some slick tertiary marketing campaign. Or because of advice received from a well-meaning school guidance counselor.

I've never really known why I do what I do or why I might be good enough at it that people pay me money for it, until today.

It's just a theory but I'm starting to think that I became a designer because my mum gave me a set of Speedball nibs and the amazing but bewildering “How To Guide” that came with them when I was about eight. They had been in her family as she'd grown up so were old when I got them.

Hours were spent looking through my guide’s mystical pages but not much time practising the techniques described inside. Of course I didn't read any of the copious instructions and I didn't realise that I could possibly become a calligrapher if I put some effort in. I tried to copy the occasional stroke, but it never looked as good and as easy as it should have.

I loved that book...but didn't get it and eventually cast it aside.

Then I forgot about it. Until today when I found it on a table at my parents’ house. I think it was waiting for me to take it away...so that's what I did.

Looking through its pages has awakened a strange mass of memories and emotions. Frustration. Ignorance. Ambition.

I never got taught design and have always wondered where my feel for leading, kerning, spacing, letter weight, and letter character came from. I always thought it must have been instinct...but finding this beautiful little bible has put me straight.

Did the book's careful, handcrafted black lines burn themselves into my fairly empty and impressionable mind at just the right time? It feels that way.

Is a designer born or made? I have no idea, but I'm happy to think that a designer occasionally just happens along by chance. I think that's what may have happened to me. Then again...

Speedball gallery

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