Last week the city I live in was utterly devastated by a cataclysmic earthquake – one with a ground acceleration over 2G (twice the force of gravity), making it among the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in the world.

It’s not often you get to start a blog post with a sentence like that.

I live in Christchurch, New Zealand, and although I’ve always known New Zealand lies along a fault line, I mistakenly thought that Christchurch was not at risk of earthquakes. Everyone knows Wellington is the major earthquake prone city. Well, now we all know better.

Map of New Zealand earthquakes from GeoNet – Christchurch is by the pokey-outey bit
on the east coast of the South Island. Looks relatively safe, no?

The 7.1 quake last September was terrifying and heartwrenching. We said goodbye to some lovely heritage buildings, damaged beyond repair – but miraculously no lives were lost. The Boxing Day quake – which caused more damage in the CBD than September – rubbed salt in the wound.

But the February 22 quake was something else entirely. Biblical, I’d call it. Half the CBD is in ruins, the eastern suburbs are a write-off, and over 200 are dead.

I was extremely fortunate to have been at home when it happened. I live in an old character house built around the 1930s – way before earthquake building standards were up to scratch, but also back when homes were made of lovely, beautiful, flexible wood instead of brick. My house shook, bucked and heaved like a banshee. I ran from my desk, gripped the doorframe and screamed hysterically. The door swung shut and crushed my fingers. Things flew off shelves, then the shelves fell over. It was as if a giant dog had picked up the house in its mouth and was shaking it savagely. But the house survived, and so did I.

After the quake stopped I was in total shock. The first thing I did was grab my cellphone to try to call Brence (my significant other of 4 years). It had not even crossed my mind at this stage that people would have died in the quake – I just wanted to hear his voice and tell him to come home. He was at work at the time, in a concrete framed building on the second floor. Thankfully he was unharmed, apart from a massive bruise on his leg he sustained when he bolted for the door frame – the intense shaking caused his desk drawers to fly out and smack him in the leg.

Luckily Brence works not far from our house, on the fringe of the CBD, so he wasn’t caught up in the absolute mayhem that was going on in town. While waiting for him to get home, my next mental impulse was “Find Camera. Take Photos”. It’s funny, but in times of absolute hysterics when all the rules of the world get thrown out the window, finding something methodical to do like going from room to room and documenting the destruction can be calming just because it gives your brain something to focus on.

Our home office, where I was when the quake hit. It was sudden and violent – it was all I could do to run to the doorway. My desk is the one on the left – check out how it’s moved about a foot away from the wall.

Hallway. I was bracing myself between the two doorframes there. Notice our nitestore heater
(which weighs about 3 and half tons) came loose and flew into the hallway. I was so distraught
during the quake that I didn’t even notice it happen, though it was right in front of me.

When the shaking stopped I peeked around the corner and saw this.

The celebratory Happy Birthday sign, leftover from Brence’s party on the weekend, seems a bit out of place. Maybe this is what it looks like after Charlie Sheen’s birthday party.

Two of our three vintage art deco radios were smashed beyond repair.
And yes, I own Step Up 3 on DVD. I like dance movies, okay?

Smashed crockery. The booze survived though, as did my 1940s family photos of my mother as a child.

Our television committed hari kari. Interestingly, we righted it and turned it on to discover it still works – except the left half of the screen is now purple.

Kitchen discombobulation.

Half the stuff in the pantry crashed and smashed on the floor, creating an intoxicating
aroma of 11 herbs and spices, ketchup and fish sauce. It was mighty hard to clean up with
no running water and no electrical power to use a vaccuum.

A potted spider plant got up-ended into the tub, so there’s potting soil all over a tubful of towels and toiletries.

When Brence got home he also shot a bit of video of our place. I’d already tidied up a few things and moved some breakables to the floor, as this time around I knew to expect aftershocks. The soundtrack is from our emergency radio – we had lost power immediately but after the September quake we’d kept a small battery operated radio on hand, ‘just in case’.

The eerie sound of sirens and helicopters came within minutes of the quake. It’s almost as if the September quake was merely a dry run for the emergency services, and this time around they locked off the central city almost immediately. I couldn’t have gone in to take photos if I tried, and quite frankly, I would have been risking my life if I had with large aftershocks happening, and the police were ordering civilians to stay out of the central city, so I put aside any feelings of desire to get out there and document the event on camera. Getting in the way of emergency services and causing extra headache for rescue workers = not a cool idea.

Plus I knew that dedicated news photogs would be out there making sure things were captured on camera. Here’s a selection of great news pictures taken shortly after the earthquake.

As it turns out Brence and I spent the afternoon making our way to a friend’s house on foot, wading through floodwater from burst water mains. I couldn’t get hold of her by text message and had visions of her at home pinned under the fridge. Luckily she and her family were all fine. Her husband had been in Cathedral Square when it happened and told us he watched the spire of Christchurch Cathedral collapse into the square. A man had run over and grabbed a woman out of the way right before the bricks came toppling down. My friend said she’d heard on the radio that two passenger buses had been crushed with people inside. It was only then that the true scale of the disaster started to become apparent to me.

We drank some unbroken beers that had survived at their house and felt lucky to be alive.

Our power was restored within a day, but running water was a real issue. The mayor advised everyone in the city to dig their own outdoor toilet in the backyard for the time being. Luckily we had recently spent three weeks in Vietnam where we got some practice in the art of squat toileting.

Our picturesque outdoor toilet area. Brence and I had to discuss the usage protocol regarding proper coverage of toilet matter with dirt after use. “Brence,” I said, “I had hoped our relationship would never have to come to this.”

We decided to escape to the small town of Timaru for a few days to get away from the nerve-shattering aftershocks. The lady that managed our motel got my back up by spouting her opinion that “Christchurch shouldn’t be rebuilt” because it was “too expensive”. And if it had to be rebuilt, they should “put it out by the airport instead”. And do what exactly with the rubble of our former city? Chuck a nice Indian throw rug over it and walk away nonchalantly, whistling and dusting off our hands?

Now, a week on, we are one of the lucky suburbs to have running water back, though we need to boil all water before using as it’s still likely to be contaminated. Again, practice gained in Vietnam with constant use of hand disinfectant and brushing teeth using bottled water is coming in handy.

We may be not so bad off at home, but the central city is still a mess and cordoned off by officials. Search and rescue teams are still pulling bodies from the rubble. They’re saying up to two-thirds of the central city buildings will need to be demolished. Two-thirds! Pause for a moment and imagine two out of every three buildings in your city suddenly vanished. Reports are that the Christchurch CBD won’t be fully reopened until Christmas.

As it happens, Brence and I were just about to sign a lease on a commercial building we were going to turn into a dedicated commercial photography studio. We don’t even know whether the building has survived the quake. Even if it did, it’s in the central city and won’t be accessible for months. And even when the cordon lifts, we’re now a bit hesitant about sinking our savings into starting up a photography studio in a city whose economy has just taken a massive hit. 2011 was going to be the year of making our dreams come true, and now our studio business has gone up in a puff of smoke, replaced by a giant question mark.

It’s going to be a tough, tough time for everyone in Christchurch.

Thankfully people around the world are offering heartfelt goodwill and wanting to help the city. If you want to help Christchurch, this is what you can do:

1 – Donate to the Red Cross 2011 Earthquake Appeal

2 – Send work to Christchurch businesses. There are some great local graphic designers, web designers, writers and creative professionals, most of whom are self-employed or small business owners that are now facing some very uncertain times.

On that note, I’d like to mention that my photography gear has survived and I’m ready and able for assignment work of any kind. Local, travel, editorial, whatever. A long-term assignment somewhere not on a major fault line would be quite nice.

Photograph by Vivian Maier. Reposted with permission.

A few days ago I become aware of the unfolding story of Vivian Maier – and I’m totally blown away.

In case you haven’t heard it yet, the story goes like this:

Vivian was born in New York in 1926 to a French mother, and ended up working as a nanny in the Chicago area from the 1950s onwards.  A keen amateur photographer, on her days off she always went out with her Rolleiflex camera. As far as is known, she never showed anyone her work – she just did it for the love of photography as an enthusiastic hobbyist.

Photograph by Vivian Maier. Reposted with permission.

Fast forward to 2007 when 26-year-old real estate agent John Maloof was working on a book project about the history of his Chicago neighbourhood. John purchased a box of old negatives at auction (which had come from a repossessed storage unit), hoping to find some historical pictures he might use for his book.

What he found were literally thousands of images of amazing street photography – the undiscovered work a photographic master.

Photograph by Vivian Maier. Reposted with permission.

John managed to find out the name of the photographer amongst the negatives and Googled her – only to find her obituary notice. She had died at age 83 just a few days before he searched for her online.

John posted some of Vivian’s work online to see if there might be an audience interested in her photography and the reception was overwhelming, due to the outstanding quality and vision of her images.

But wait – it gets even more interesting. Out of the 100,000+ negatives John currently has in his possession, about 20-30,000 are still on their rolls, undeveloped from the 1960s and 70s. John and his friend Anthony Rydzon are now engrossed in the massive undertaking of developing, scanning and indexing all of Vivian’s work, while also playing detective trying to shed light on the story of her life.

Since John’s first discovery of Vivian, interest in her work has been mounting and reaching critical mass. There have been exhibitions in the US and overseas, and a book and documentary film are on the way.

FYI John is seeking funding to help make the documentary – prior to March 14, 2011 you can become a supporter on his Vivian Maier Kickstarter page and pre-order your own copy of the movie. I’ve done so myself and would encourage you to join me in supporting the project.

Photograph by Vivian Maier. Reposted with permission.

Vivian was an intensely private and solitary person, and few details of her life are known. The best way to get to know Vivian is through her photography, and what images I’ve seen already are truly, exceptionally wonderful.

Links:

John Maloof’s official Vivian Maier website

The Vivian Maier project Kickstarter page – help support the film project!

Excellent Chicago Tonight video on John’s discovery of Vivian Maier

Online article on the discovery of Vivian Maier and her life (what little is known!)

Finally… after a marathon editing session I’m very pleased to post up the first of my Vietnam photos.

Editing down around 3,000 images to something digestible is a pretty big task. Next time I go on a 3-week photographic holiday I’m going to spend a bit of time every evening on the trip sorting out the day’s photos and doing mini-edits to stop it turning into the world’s biggest editing marathon at home.

I’m going to break the picks down into three blog posts, this being the first and showing images from a week spent in the incredible city of Hanoi. Iconic architecture, colours and details abound in this place. If you ever get there and get lost in the rabbit warren of the Old Quarter you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Here’s my favourite picks of the bunch – scroll down to view or just click on the first one and use the ‘next’ arrow key on your keyboard.

I was recently on a job where I needed to create a photograph of the shiny new Christchurch City Council offices in central Christchurch, New Zealand where I live.

The new civic headquarters is an extensive refurbishment of an existing building, with a rather grand and architecturally interesting main entrance on the north side.

I figured out what time of day I wanted to be there for the best light (I knew I wanted direct sunlight for this shot) and trucked on down with Brence Coghill along as assistant.

The main front entrance is impressive, but the building is set far back from the street and is flanked by a tall hotel on one side an an older wooden heritage building on the other. The trick would be to capture the grandeur and detail of the CCC offices without it getting lost amongst the surrounding buildings.

The ‘obvious’ photo. But it’s not nearly as good as the ‘less obvious’ photo from a less obvious vantage point.

We spent a while moving around the street trying different vantage points and focals lengths. There just wasn’t one obvious ‘best’ solution – close and wide worked to a point (see pic above) but it made the carved pole in the foreground too prominent in relation to the building for my liking.

Backing up and shooting longer presented another set of problems where the framing just wouldn’t work to include what I wanted such as the New Zealand flag atop the building or a good sense of the large courtyard area with its rows of trees, rock wall and long narrow water feature leading up to the building.

After zooming in and zooming out and moving this way and that, I mused out loud to Brence:

“Really what I want is to be higher up so I can get a less foreshortened view of the water feature and courtyard, and to not be so close that the carved pole becomes overwhelmingly prominent.”

Luckily for me Brence came up with a superb suggestion.

“Why don’t we shoot through that window?” he said, pointing behind us to a small window in the side of the Christchurch Art Gallery directly across the road. The side of the Art Gallery is a large looming expanse of concrete, but it does happen to have one small window on the top floor, which just so happened to face directly out on the CCC offices. Bingo!

We gathered our gear and lugged it into the gallery. The window is part of the top floor display area and we easily set up a tripod right next to it. It was a bit persnickety to get the framing just right: keeping lines nice and straight, including what I wanted (like a foreground tree in the lower left corner), and excluding what I didn’t (like bits of window frame, as the window had many sections rather than being one giant expanse of glass).

Given that we were dealing with direct sunlight the dynamic range of the scene was fairly broad, so I anticipated making three frames – one ‘correct’ exposure, one ‘dark frame’ to hold detail in the bright white high rise to the left and the concrete paving stones, and one ‘light frame’ to pull more detail out of the building’s entranceway under the large awning, which was in shadow.

I also decided I wanted to include some people in the image for scale and a greater sense of life, but I wanted to show them with a little motion blur. In order to achive the slight blur I had to max out my settings to get a slow enough shutter speed while maintining correct exposure. I shot a series of frames at ISO50, f22 and 1/13th to achieve this. Initially I figured I’d shoot various frames as people walked past and then mask the people together later in order to get enough foot traffic in the image that was also nicely distributed, but as luck would have it I managed to get a frame that had a great spread of people happen naturally and it saved me some work later.

I then rejigged settings to get an overall good, dark and light frame – keeping an eye on that flag to capture it at full flap.

The frames were then masked together in Photoshop to even out the dynamic range. A pit of post-pro polish was added: slight colour pop and sharpening, and an annoyingly unavoidable power line that cut horizontally across the entire image was carefully cloned out as it was hugely distracting.

And voila – we’ve got a nice vantage point of the Christchurch City Council offices that shows off the building and gives a great sense of the interesting courtyard area, keeping focus on the subject rather than being swalloed up by the buildings surrounding it.

And doesn’t that flag look snazzy?

Christchurch City Council offices by Sharon Blance, Christchurch photographer

The other day I did a PR job for a story about a tech project undertaken by our local city council in conjunction with two other tech companies.

Part of the job required individual portraits of three key team members. We were on location at the new Christchurch City Council building, which is fantastic because it’s got some great ‘readily available’ backdrops for this kind of thing.

Everyone involved in the photo shoot had a tight schedule (it took many weeks and several reschedules just to be able to get everyone to attend the shoot) so I wanted to get the portraits done as quickly as possible to let everyone get back to work.

I scouted the building prior to the shoot, and I knew I could shoot againt three good backdrops in the lobby. I barely even had to move – I just shot one portrait, swung around to point in a new direction to shoot the next one, etc.  Highly efficient.

For these first two portraits a single speedlight on a lightstand was shot through an umbrella, with a reflector held just out of frame on the opposite side. Again, it was a nice quick setup with minimal fuss but giving a great look.

For the third portrait I changed up the lighting a little to have the flash more on-axis, keeping the lightstand next to me.

The textured concrete wall in the lobby provided a great backdrop with light skimming across it coming from the main glass entrance doors on camera right, and you can’t even tell that a giant Christmas tree is jusssssst out of frame on the left

So it’s been a wee while now since my 3-week adventure in Vietnam and I’ve yet to finish editing all the photos. Between myself and my partner Brence Coghill we took over 6000 pictures – which is a fair number.

Since we’ve been back work has been busy busy busy and I’m dying for some down time to finish shortlisting and editing all the best images. We want to make a coffee table book of the best stuff, as well as putting up some blog posts and maybe even making a slideshow to inflict on our friends.

I’ve managed to whittle mine down to a long list of 1157 images, so at least I’m getting somewhere. We don’t have any huge plans over the holidays this year (for the first time in 4 years!) so we might knuckle down and have a Vietnam Editing Frenzy.

And then maybe I’ll get around to tidying up the 8 trillion gigabytes of random music in my iTunes library…

In the  meantime, here’s another teaser image. This place turned out to be our favourite restaurant that served up the best food we’ve tasted in Vietnam (or just about anywhere else for that matter). It’s at 50 Bat Dan in the Old Quarter, and if you are lucky enough to go there we highly recommend the Cucumber and Bean Sprout salad and the Fried Corn with Chili. I’d just about give my right eye to eat those dishes there again.

This week I got a call from Aiotec Limited, an electronic design and development company that needed some PR shots for an imminent press release. The usual group-shot-of-managers and group-shot-of-staff were on the list, plus some portraits of the Managing Director.

Shayne is one of the nicest clients I’ve met. He’s completely open, friendly and chatty, was not in any way nervous about having his photo taken, and did whatever I asked of him. Rockstar!

There weren’t many options in the office for clean backdrops so I scouted out a location in the kitchen/lounge area and rearranged the furniture a bit to get a nice backdrop and colour scheme. Shayne had a blue shirt on so I swapped the blue couch for a purple one that was against another wall so we could have a bit of colour contrast in the image. I also carefully stocked the bookshelf behind him

Lighting was partially using the ambient, with the main light source a single shoot-through umbrella positioned fairly close to Shayne, just next to the sofa. It would have been easy to simply bounce a flash off the ceiling for lighting but I like to use directional lighting whenever I can. Some people use flash just to get an even exposure, whereas I like to try to use it to also add depth and shape to the image.

For his portrait he wanted something ‘not too formal’. We spent about 15 minutes playing with slightly different poses – here’s my favourite:

Shayne then asked if I would do a second portrait for him that was more ‘unusual’ saying he wanted something a bit quirkier he could use online in social media for a profile picture that was a bit more ‘out of the box’.

I scouted round the office and decided to use a very small meeting room that had an interesting triangular table and a large whiteboard it in. It had some great directional light coming from a bank of windows, so I just used a bit of on-camera bounce flash on the ceiling to even things out and keep the ratio workable.

My idea was to create a ‘Hi, this is me!’ image that would be fun to use online that was a bit quirky but still shows Shayne in an office-y setting. I like the total simplicity of the image. I like the basic-ness and human-ness of the scribbly fat arrows pointing at Shayne, and I’ve echoed them by turning the triangular table so it acts as a giant arrow pointing at him from the bottom of the frame.

I also knew that for this image to work he absolutely needed to be holding the pen.

I recently got back from spending 3 weeks in northern Vietnam (or Việt Nam, as they say over there) and boy oh boy do I have a lot of photos to edit. Over 2000 in fact. Many water buffalo, many rice paddies.

It’s going to take a few weeks for me to sort through my pictures and do the final edits and tweaks before I can post the best ones on my blog, but in the meantime I thought I’d throw up a couple of teaser images.

This shot is in Singapore – we had a 14 hour layover in Singapore on the way out so we went into town for the evening. My one goal was to ride the Singapore Flyer – the world’s tallest Ferris wheel (30m taller than the London Eye). It takes 30 minutes to go around and we rode it just as dusk was falling, the absolute perfect time for photos.

This image is from a rice paddy in Mai Chau, in a Thai minority village a few hours’ drive from Hanoi (or, as they say over there, Hà Nội). We saw a lot of rice being harvested – this paddy’s rice is destined just to provide food for the village, none of it is sold for income. It’s hard life over there.

It’s now been 4 and a half days since the massive magnitude 7.1 earthquake hit my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand. My previous blog post had some photos taken the day of the quake.

Today I went out and took a few more pictures in my local vicinity. It feels a little weird to be actively looking for damage to photograph, but at the same time I feel utterly compelled to document what’s been happening around me.

Since the quake first hit, the City Council has had the central city cordoned off to the public as there is quite extensive damage in some areas. Supposedly tomorrow the cordon is being lifted – I have to say I’m apprehensive as to what we’re all going to see.

Today has (so far) been a relatively quiet day, aftershock-wise. According to GeoNet (now the most popular website in New Zealand), we’ve had 14 aftershocks so far today. In the first hours and days after the main quake we had some real window-rattling doozies, but today’s have been relatively minor; I’ve only felt three of them – although one woke me up just after 3am this morning, and it’s so hard to get back to sleep after you’ve been shaken awake by your bed swaying and your windows rattling

Ack, I spoke too soon – another seismic bump just hit the house as I’m uploading the photos for this blog post. Just a small one – I’d say that I’m almost getting used to them, but right now my nerves are so frayed from the constant aftershocks that I feel like this woman:

On to the photos – it’s so sad to see Christchurch’s lovely old heritage buildings trashed by the quake – there’s a groundswell happening on Facebook right now to try to preserve and protect as many of the heritage buildings as possible without blindly rushing into full-scale demolition. I certainly hope the city officials listen and that Christchurch’s character isn’t lost forever.

Extensive damaged to the much-loved Repertory Theatre – although they’ve now had it inspected and at least most of the damage is just to the front facade.

Walking around town, it’s like every third building has vomited a pile of bricks onto the sidewalk

The army has been called out to assist the police and civil defence staff, who are all doing an amazing job

Demolition of ruined buildings in the central city.
The beautiful red brick building with the yellow window arches in the background is a category 1 Heritage Building but it’s been condemned and is going to be demolished (leaving us with eyesores like the horrible white office block in front)

More of the central city cordoned off and undergoing inspection

“Christchurch: Let’s spring back!” chalked on the pavers in Cathedral Square

As a showing of support for locals affected by the quake, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra makes its upcoming concert free for residents

An art gallery in town has evacuated its premises, taking all the artwork and shop fittings. The only thing they poignantly left behind was this poster in the window.

All buildings in the central city have been assessed by inspectors and have been given either a green card (safe), a yellow card (unsafe, restricted use) or a red card (very unsafe, no entry under any circumstances)

We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this rather unsettling news bulletin…

I live in Christchurch, New Zealand and yesterday morning I was jolted awake at 4:35 am by the biggest earthquake to hit this area in the last 80 years. The quake measured a sizeable 7.1 in magnitude – that’s comparable to the 1989 quake in California that famously interrupted a World Series baseball game and collapsed a stretch of two-tier highway as well as the recent devastating quake in Haiti.

I have never experienced anything like it in my life. And that includes my favourite carnival ride ‘The Zipper‘.

The quake rocked and rolled for 40 seconds, during which time I jumped out of bed and ran for the door frame and braced myself there in the pitch dark while the room pitched, rolled and slammed and I could hear things in the house crashing and banging and smashing.

Afterwards I was ecstatic to discover that my photography gear had miraculously stayed on its shelf in my office, with the single exception of my Canon 70-200 f2.8, which had taken a nose-dive from the shelf (about head height) onto the hardwood floor. Uh-oh.  It had its lens hood reverse-mounted and the hood had a major crack in it, but the actual lens looks fine. No discernable damage and the Autofocus and IS both seem to be in working order. I’ll have to do some more thorough testing and it may need to be sent to Canon for calibration, but it seems that the lens hood acted as a sort of crash helmet and took the force of the fall. PHEW!

Luckily our house seems to have come through pretty much unscathed. We had our power restored by the afternoon and have running water (although we have to boil it before using due to potential groundwater contamination).

After doing some initial cleanup at home I grabbed my camera and went out for a walk with my partner Brence Coghill to see what we could see, just within a few kilometres of our house. There’s definitely been some major damage to particular buildings. Christchurch has a lot of lovely brick heritage buildings and many of them have suffered greatly. It’s going to be quite a while before the city gets back to normal.

Here’s some initial video from the local news:

Amazingly, so far there have been NO reports of any fatalities, and only a handful of people seriously injured. This is partly due to the timing of the quake, striking when everyone was (relatively) safe in bed, and also due to New Zealand’s strict building code which requires lots of earthquake-proofing measures. Many old buildings here have been retroactively earthquake-strengthened, but unfortunately not all.

Here are some quick pictures of the Christchurch earthquake damage I took yesterday, shortly after the quake hit.

How my kitchen looked at 4:36am after the quake. You can’t see it but there’s smashed glass scattered around the floor as well. Urgh!

Lots of brick chimneys went flying

It’s a bit hard to tell, but this building has actually sunk down into the street as well as have its walls fall off

My partner Brence Coghill also posted some photos on his blog – you can check them out here.