Well, I now have a $170 Epson V600, and “The Light Panel” by Porta-Trace. Lay one on the other, and you can make a fantastic — and I mean, incredible — high-quality contact sheet in a minute.

Believe me, a 1200 dpi contact sheet is amazing. Yowza!

Rik Myslewski in San Francisco just wrote an article about predicted iPad sales, which I found here. With almost 30 million sold by June, he predicts another 20 million sales to come. That’s a lot of potential customers to buy your book.

“As of Apple’s last fiscal quarter, which ended in June, 28.7 million iPads had flown off the shelves in the year and a quarter that they had been on sale. And if history is any guide, we’re going to see another iPad sales surge: during the holiday quarter of 2010, Apple sold 7.3 million iPads, a nearly 75 per cent bump up from 2010′s third calendar quarter sales of 4.2 million.

“Now, we’re not saying that this holiday quarter will see an equally ludicrous leap – after all, in 2010 the iPad was rampaging through early adopters like a voracious virus – but just for giggles, let’s say that those 20 million Foxconn iPads get sold this quarter, and that the 2010 holiday-buying bump-up repeats itself: that’d mean that 35 million iPads would be found under Christmas trees, Hanukkah bushes, and Kwanzaa candles this year.

“Ain’t gonna happen, of course – but 21.9 million? Sounds doable.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/01/20_million_ipads/

In brief, he has a self-updating iPad app that follows his trip, a kind of growing book. It is rough around the edges, the future is clear. I bought it for $3.99, and at that price, who could resist? I only 10,000 people (across the globe) buy one, he has paid for a large piece of his trip.

http://www.viapanam.org/viapanam/

However, I’m feeling more and more frustrated with the questionable user interface of the camera! The biggest problem is that when I use a Leica lens, it is hard to switch to the “zoomed” focus. They could simply have allowed the function key to be a quick “zoom” key, but they didn’t. Instead, you have to set the viewing mode to the “zoom” mode, then press a hard-to-feel center button on the back. If, by any chance, you want to see any information on the screen — aperture, for example! — you have to switch out of the zoom mode! It’s ridiculous!

I still can’t justify the cost of a Leica M9, however. So, until Olympus fixes the designs, I’m stuck.

While the approval was unusual, what is stranger is that no other journalists have sought to stay there. Frankly, I’m baffled — the young men were very nice, understanding, and open. I never felt threatened, even though the guard suggested I avoid getting boxed in. Speaking realistically, there are not many fights there. Gang affiliation exists but is kept down (compared to “the institution”, the main lockdown facilities).

I recorded interviews with a number of the men. Some of the stories are brutal — beatings, shootings, stabbings — but I’ve heard the same from soldiers and cops. Context is everything, and the context of the camp is not conducive to violence toward a visitor. Besides, a visiting journalist is a source of amusement, an entertainment, a novelty. As long as I’m not threatening, and I remain a novelty, I think that not only will I not be attacked, I’ll be defended in case I were attacked.

It turns out that the incident team I was working with believes that once a journalist gets their help, he is now their charge. More importantly, he’s now their legal liability, and it isn’t worth their while to let him get hurt. They were afraid of being sued. Therefore, they did not want me, nor any other journalist they took in, anywhere near anything that might get him or her hurt.

So, while I got some great stuff from the night fire, the rest of the trip was a wash. Sure, there are some good images, but I never saw action again.

So, I’m waiting for the PIO to reach the Incident Team 3 folks, to confirm I’m OK. If I get the go ahead, well, it’s a long drive to LA from here.

• Wildland firefighters work during the heat of the day, for the most part. That is, they get up before dawn, eat, then show up on the line after the morning golden light. Often, they’ll return before the evening golden light. So, you’re stuck shooting with bright, flat light that sucks. However, if you can get below the plume, the smoke will filter the sun into a soft, reddish light that works great.
• You have to work with Hotshot crews for a few hours, at least, before they’ll let you shoot portraits. The problem is, they are super-tough, so you’d better be ready to carry a lot of water over rough terrain, and bear with bad light, to get anything from them. Nice guys, however.
• You can shoot the fire fast, or slow — it’s a different animal either way. Fast gives fantastic shapes, slow gives painting. Something not to forget when you’re there.
• Consider a split filter. I wish I’d had one.
• Work through the PIOs. They have the power to get rid of you as a danger to their people, and they will. I didn’t feel limited by them, and the more I learn about fire, the happier I am to have people watching out for me.

What if, instead, you do wish to talk about tales gone by? I’m going to try photographing scenes, as Kratochvil did about Abu Ghraib. As a photographer, perhaps it’s legit to make comments about what I know, what I read, as well as recording actual events. Toward that end, I’ve purchased a fancy toy gun and contacted actors via Craigslist.org. Now, the question is…will it work? Or will this experiment just look like, well, cheap shots?