Dempsey Williams

I allowed myself to go back to Haiti this morning.  I threw an emotional breaker last week…amped out, freaked out, stressed out…whatever you want to call it.  If you know me then you know I don’t do emotion very well, not even on a good day.  So I pulled myself out of the apocalyptic (yeah, I think that’s the right word for it) destruction and pain before I got lost in it.  Yeah, I would still check the headlines and rejoice when another person was pulled from the rubble alive but I wasn’t allowing myself to “go there” emotionally because I couldn’t process it.

Sitting here this morning, not feeling well, I went to the Compassion blog to catch up on what’s been happening and try to get my mind off of my illness. I read the latest updates from Dr. Scott Todd who’s leading a medical team in Haiti this week and was processing it just fine…and then I saw the video.  I was completely taken aback by the emotion that burst forth out of me and over me.  A profound sadness was upon me and tears came instantly.  And then shame.

Two girls that had been trapped for hours under the rubble of their own home but were now being treated by our team, showed an incredible resolve.  After receiving medical care how did they both respond when asked what they wanted to be when they grow up?  Both answered “a doctor.”  I realized that my heart wasn’t breaking for what they were experiencing – it was breaking for the courage that these two girls had shown.  In the face of death and all the horror they had seen, they weren’t shrinking back from it – they wanted to face it and help others in need, the same way they had been helped.  It made me proud to be part of a group that’s helping them (and children like them) and at the same time shameful that there’s not more of that in my own heart.

If I’ve learned anything from my 12 years at Compassion, it’s that you can’t out-give the poor.  That’s what I want to learn from these two little girls.  That’s what I want my kids to learn.  We think we’re helping them…but really, they’re helping us.

I got a copy of Joe McNally’s (www.joemcnally.com) new book The Hot Shoe Diaries for my birthday last month. I read Joe’s blog pretty regularly, so I knew he was a pretty funny guy (for the uninitiated his language can get pretty “colorful” sometimes) and I also knew that he’s probably forgotten more than I’ll ever know about photography.  I try to glean as much as I can from every source I can find, so I figured his book would be a good source to have on hand to refer to.  His specialty is lighting – especially speedlights – and that is what this book is all about.  He can do more with one small strobe than I’ve seen others do with a room full of equipment.

I have preferred to keep my necessary gear to a minimum – less expensive and less to haul around – so I haven’t wanted to invest in a big lighting setup.  My preference is to shoot outdoors anyway, but I’ve had some clients over this long, cold winter that wanted to shoot when the weather was really not cooperating with us.  I had to break out the speedlight and start learning, which is where Joe’s book came in.

It’s not a reference manual or even an owner’s manual, and it doesn’t try to be.  Joe is very upfront about that.  The charm in this book is hearing a lot of the “behind the scenes” stories of how he got the shots you see in the book and what his thought process was as he worked through the shoot.  That’s what makes this book worth the read (and the purchase, in my opinion); hearing from a world-class photographer how to get the shot.  He’s also very forthcoming with the info of where he screwed up and how to avoid those problems yourself.

But that’s the thing that makes photography a lot like golf in my mind.  You’re going to shoot a lot and take a lot of bad shots but inevitably you’ll get that one shot that was perfect (hit it true | dialed in the perfect exposure) and you suddenly develop amnesia and forget about all the horrible shots that you took that day.  That one shot will be the shot that gets you back out for the next time.  Photography can be a cruel mistress in that way but I find solace in knowing that someone who’s been doing it as long as Joe still has to “hunt” for it – it’s not just me.  That’s the challenge that keeps me shooting.

Happy shooting!

With the Haiti earthquake hitting this week, it’s been difficult to maintain focus on work.  My day job is as a Technical Architect at Compassion International (www.compassion.com) and we have over 70,000 children in Haiti that we provide for.  Over 6,000 are located in the Port-au-Prince area.  The scale of the destruction is hard to fathom.  With all that destruction information is being communicated but it is painfully slow in coming.  At this point we’re still trying to locate our office staff there (40 are well, 35 unaccounted for) and determine the condition of the projects and children.  If you haven’t already, please consider donating to the relief effort – if not through Compassion then the Red Cross.  The need is beyond imagining.

You’ll see this same banner on my blog for awhile.

Haiti Earthquake

As an official test, I’m going to embed some photos and see how the layout works.

Tim and Kara - Small

Tim and Kara - Medium

That works pretty well!  Now onto the next learning opportunity.  WordPress.org rocks!

It’s been quite an ordeal getting the website and blog revamped for the new year of 2010.  I wanted to streamline the landing page at my photo site (www.dempseywilliams.com) and simplify it.  It was much too busy for my taste but those were the options that my photo hosting company were offering me.  I started to research writing my own landing page in Adobe Flash but with a family and a fulltime job I just wasn’t getting the time I needed to make any real progress.  That was when Zenfolio (my hosting site) announced what their next release was going to contain and I couldn’t believe it – they were already building exactly what I wanted.

I waited impatiently for the release to go live and the very night that it did I started working with the new features/options.  They saved me days worth of coding with that release!  I got most of everything done that I wanted on the photo site so then I turned my attention to getting the blog going.  I started out at WordPress.com but quickly found that they wanted to charge me a monthly fee to have a custom URL pointing to the blog (blog.dempseywilliams.com) but I was already paying GoDaddy to host the site so I wasn’t about to pay somebody else also.

Enter WordPress.org.  It’s a free version of WordPress that you can install on your own hosted site.  You have the freedom to install any themes or plugins that you want and GoDaddy had a 1-click install option, so I went with that.  Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of the story.  It took 3 different techs from GoDaddy to figure out why the WordPress install wasn’t working correctly on my site but, since you’re reading this, they obviously got it figured out.

With a few more finishing touches I’ll have everything wired up like I want it and I can call the remodel done.  Then to get back to some things I actually want to do – like shooting, editing and posting photos.