Day one of our PIX 2015 re:FRAME speaker lineup wrapped up with a moving keynote presentation from Cristina Mittermeier. Formerly a marine biologist, Mittermeier is a founder and former president of the International League of Conservation Photographers.
She's been recognized as one of the World's 40 Most Influential Outdoor Photographers, and while she proclaims her love for photographing wild animals, she's found her calling documenting people - indigenous societies especially. Over a 25+ year career that has taken her to over 100 countries, her photos capture the places where nature and people come into contact. Her talk gives the stories behind some of her images, an exploration of far flung places across the globe, and like all of her work, asks the viewer to think about what he or she can do to help preserve it all. You can see the full video here, along with a 60-second short video introduction to her work.
Very nice videos. I think the resentment is just that that this woman gets to travel and take photos for a living. I say good for her, and if she has an endorsement deal with Sony, it appears mutually beneficial. In fact, if Sony isn't using the short video, they should.
I think it's very refreshing and brave to see someone delivering a keynote presentation about enoughness vs. consumerism and it's effects on sustainability to a photographic community that is constantly driven to buying the latest and greatest gadgets. And on an event that is sponsored by brands that rely on large scale consumerism.
Congrats to DPR and the organization of PIX for the selection. It was a wonderful and moving presentation.
That has to be the worst motivation I have heard. She is a photographer after all and she do travel all around the world to take her pictures. So, how on earth would she have anythng to say to photographers about they saving the worl by using less equipment. And that at an equipment sponsored fair.
Go to a car fair instead and talk about consumerism. There you have one of the major crooks in making a LARGE carbon footprint. An its tiny tries to look environment friendly just makes it fom one af the LARGEST crooks to one of the LARGEST.
Roland, whilst your car analogy is the elephant in the room nothing that ftavares says can be in dispute. Never ending upgrading of any consumer electronic product is, by definition, unsustainable.
Never ending upgrades of products is not unsustainable. Absolutely not. Then food and clothes would be impossible. What is unsustainable is to use more resources than available, like fishing too much or using some raw materials too fast without recycling.
Moreover, it is totally true that the photographer is representing one major brand in the photo industry, and that she do use nice new cameras, and that she travels a lot - which is much more less sustainable than making cameras.
I could not miss the hypocrisy.
I did not make any analogy to cars. Just stated a well known fact. One of our biggest problems is transportation, of goods an human beings. And private cars is one of the worst of the worst. Like it or not.
Reading comments here is like reading comments on a video which displays just the slightest Apple logo, all the PC people are going bananas. Didn't realise Sony was the Apple in the camera industry haha
I got two things out of this video: neither of which have anything to do with what equipment she uses or how well known she may or may not be. The significance of her messages is in their veracity.
1. I know we will not not destroy our planet, but it will change to the point where life as we know it will no longer be sustainable, and that is a tragedy for all species including our own. Denying that, or hoping someone else will sort it is not a solution and we all have a part to play.
2. Not only is a picture worth a thousand words, it does it in a hundred languages. There is a wealth of data on climate change, and there is no debate among 98% of scientists that we are in the middle of it. But the average person is not swayed with tables and graphs, they are moved by images showing these events in action. One such effort by James Balog in his series, Chasing Ice, shows in dramatic fashion the acceleration of glacial melt on a global scale. This is the power of photography...
First it was Global Warming, now it's climate change, so what's next? In the 70's it was Global Cooling. Throw in the the big money of carbon credits and you have some very skewed data by scientists who make a nice living off the doom and gloom. For balance from all the hysteria (and money) :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming
They can make a list of the climate denier scientists because the list is small... It's likely that many of those denying climate change have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. You only have to look at the news over the last few years to see how the number of "rare" major climate events have become commonplace, such as super cyclones, massive droughts, record high temperatures: that is the beginning. It baffles me to see comments like the one above when the evidence is so massively supporting the need to change.
Back to the photographic theme: A third thing I got from the presentation is that less is more, especially for amateurs. I read an article on this site from a photographer who stopped trying to get the latest of everything and was constantly wanting the latest upgrade. Not only was this expensive, but he was never satisfied.
I tried that, and am consciously holding back on purchases of new gear for its sake. I shall wait for a truly major upgrade before I buy, and only if (using Mittermeier's criteria) if I think it will truly enhance my photographic experience and make me happy! :- )
No scientist with a whit of credibility denies climate change, or the fact that it is largely from human intervention. The climate was in balance. It doesn't take much to throw systems off their perfect balance. Deny it all you like. But just like the guy who claimed vaccines causes autism finally admitting he ginned up the numbers and now admits he lied, and yet people cling to what they believe anecdotally or not, the same goes for climate change deniers.
Climate change, FYI, is global warming. It's not one and then the other. They are one in the same.
Personally, I don't care as much about climate change as I do about the more tangible, immediate reality of pollution on what I drink or what I eat. Throughout history, the world has experienced dramatic climate change. Some of that change (all caused by nature) nearly wiped off all life on Earth. And the last ice age was not so long ago in terms of the total age of our planet. Perhaps the levels of man-made pollution now equals or exceeds that of natural volcanic activity or maybe it's less than the combined volume of dinosaur fart gas. I don't know. But I know that it's getting harder and harder to find fish that isn't poisoned with heavy metals. That is a reality and one that I care about. Whether we believe in global warming or not, I think we have reason to worry about pollution for more immediate reasons.
.....and yet now in the midst of all the panic and non-science about global warming and fry up, we can eat cod again, which miraculously is learning to live in boiling water and blah, blah, blah. How come you can still fly(!) to the Maldives if the oceans are now rising? The beaches are the same now as they were in the 1930s and how come they can still look for Amelia on the atoll? Etc, etc
to Lemonadedrinker. Look up a place called Tuvalu in the pacific... Better still, go there as I did & watch their homes flood with seawater on high tides or during storms. Their country is literally dying from rising sea levels.
Go to the north of Canada where the permafrost is melting. Look at the homes of the Innu who have moved to settlements as they have lost their traditional hunting grounds, only to see those homes sink due to the melt.
Take a trip up north & see increasing numbers of polar bears starve & die because their sea ice has melted & they can't hunt. This drives them to areas of conflict with humans.
See how the orcas are ranging further & further north as the sea becomes ice free, hunting narwhales in their previously safe breeding grounds.
At least watch the film Chasing Ice to see how much one man sacrificed to get the evidence persuade open-minded people, & discredit bigoted deniers that climate change is real & we caused it.
Hi Tronhar, This is just from a Google trip onto a Tuvalu page....
''Low-lying Pacific islands 'growing not sinking' By Nick Bryant BBC News, Sydney 3 June 2010'' admittedly it was 2010 that was written. The people of Tuvalu don't seem to worry about leaving; they just want better satellite coverage. I hope you took all your own water! You seem to have visited a lot of what you might term fragile places. Even though I think man-made climate change is mostly a crock, I do feel there are places that should be left alone to recover from man's depredations if possible; there are so many of now though, flying hither and thither to experience some great new thing and watch some endangered animal get it's rocks off that nowhere gets a chance to recover. Anyway, I don't fly, and you do, so we're about even I guess!
Perhaps I can let the most hard-headed minds I can think of speak for me on the subject of Climate Change and the fact that it's not just about obscure places and insignificant populations and animals, as you seem to think: it will and is impacting you already. Through the weather you experience, the cost of the food and services you consume and the insurance you pay.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have just published their reports on the matter: if you are open-minded then you might invest time to read some of this http://www.ipcc.ch/
The Pentagon, in a report on the subject in October 2014,said:“The impacts of climate change may cause instability in other countries by impairing access to food and water, damaging infrastructure, spreading disease, uprooting and displacing large numbers of people, compelling mass migration, interrupting commercial activity, or restricting electricity availability”
In a test case an individual from Tuvalu applied for status as climate refugees to NZ and Australia. These requests have been rejected as there are currently no legal grounds to consider such a request (despite appeals from the UN), furthermore there is pressure by other nations not to encourage such legislation or set a precedent for likely cases involving large population migrations. The current turmoil in Europe caused by mass migration is nothing that will compare to 156 million people seeking to migrate from low-lying Bangladesh to its neighbours.
The reply with the link to Wikipedia is so ludicrous. Unfortunately, a poster child of modern-day "Google" scientists. 60 names all in all. But iit would be so much smarter to read what is written before concluding.
The first category with 40% of the names is about people that "question the accuracy of the IPCC findings" What does this tell us? Nothing, Does it mean they question global climate change? Not necessarily. So, the humongous list of 60 scientists is cut by 40%. Ouch, we are down to what, 40 ? Contrast this with 500 PhDs that a university like Georgia Tech graduates each year...
Now what? In the remaining I see Claude Allegre. Volcanologist that completely blew up the evacuation of La Soufriere volcano. This guy, even in his own domain of expertise managed to botch his studies. Does that speak volume about what he knows about domains outside of his expertise?
And then there are those from the CATO institute, heralded by the Koch brothers. Enough said there....
* There are very exact sciences like math and logic. * There are pretty accurate, like physics and chemistry. * There are so so, like biology and medicine. * There are not so go as psychology and near in time weather. * And there are very inexact ones as long time weather and climate.
Predicting future climate is VERY hard.
Now, we all know climate is changing. We also know that it currently, and for maybe 300 years or so has been getting warmer. We also know that we have let out a substantial amount of carbon in the air adn that the carbon percentage have been increasing. This is dangerous stuff. We also know that CO2 is a green house gas and can do diverse calculations and predictions of the effect.
But, we do not know the climate in 100 or 1000 years from now. We are totally clueless. There might even be an ice age.
The question is only. Can we predict the climate, say 20 or 30 years from now? And can we predict the difference that us letting out the CO2 has? That I would say is the discussion. Pretending any more I would say is false.
Then, of course, it is a matter of human reality. Some years ago the big drum was sounded and we had to decrease CO2 emission NOW! As far as I jnow, the traffic where I live is heavier now than then.
I think the point is that climatologists, backed by chemists, physicists and mathematicians, are saying that since the industrial revolution, the rise in greenhouse gases has spiked spectacularly, way beyond anything previously recorded in millions of years. As a consequence our world is getting warmer and approaching a series of tipping points which will continue to accelerate gas releases and temperature rises. These will cause major changes in climate, acidification in the seas and rises in sea levels. We are already experiencing these symptoms, along with an increase in major weather events. Marine life is changing: warm water animals are appearing further towards the poles, and those that depend on the cold are struggling. We are seeing tropical pests, such as disease-carrying mosquitos, moving into temperate climates. Crops are failing to yield as they did before.
... cont. With regards to future predictions, climatologists have created models which are constantly reviewed and refined, based on improved data & constant critical scientific analysis. They do not attempt to say what will happen in detail 100 years from now, but they offer probabilities by extrapolating the current trends. Those probabilities will change most depending on our own behaviour: if we cut out or reduce greenhouse gases, or continue to do business as usual.
They are sounding ever more desperate warnings as politicians weigh the cost of changing now to their economies with the costs to our economies and our living space and quality of life if we do not. Sadly, misinformation from vested interests that do not want change, combined with lethargy from an ignorant public have failed to put enough pressure on those politicians to take on the polluters. Ironically it will be those same uninformed, misinformed or lethargic voters who will complain when the full impacts hit.
Stll @Tronhar, increasing the temperature might save us from an ice age in 200 years. But, yes, it is a dangerous experiment to change the atmosphere. We should have invented fusion power before finding the oil and coal.
But, as I said, the climate research and its warnings is just a theoretical pastime. The world is not stopping or decreasing burning fossil fuels at all, and is not going to do it.
@ Tronhar ..you were the one who brought up Tuvalu! and failed to respond to my query about it. next; one of your IPCC scientists ( although really they are computer modellers, not scientists) has said that CO2 is good for the planet! Name of Indur Goklany. If the CO2 level is less than 150ppm we do all die (!) as nothing can grow and in the distant past the level has been about 4000ppm; at present it is about 185-195ppm. The panic is all from the followers of the IPCC who realize they will have to get real jobs when the funding stops when they recognize that what the IPCC say is utter twaddle. Speaking scientifically, of course. As Charles Dickens writes ' ..and just as I do not believe that the end of the world will ever be near at hand, so long as any of the very tiresome and arrogant people who constantly predict that catastrophe are left in it..... My thoughts exactly, from someone who slightly resents being thought of as ignorant and lethargic by someone who knows me not.
By the same token, there are no scientist at NASA. Where are you leaving? In Tuvalu? In Kiribati? Do you really think there is any real science without computers nowadays? Get an internship at CNES, NASA and learn the ropes of being a scientist before admonishing sermons.
What is a scientist according to your metrics? A guy with a notepad below an apple-tree?
Oh and btw, the ppm level of Carbon are closer to 400ppm. If you want to post numbers and look serious, just take the extra 30 seconds of "serious-scientist-proof-checking" to check the very basic of any real discussion about potential climate change. Just sayin..
@lemonadedrinker This is not personal & I refuse to make it so, despite the fact that you jumped to invalid conclusions about how I travel. I have not expressed an opinion about you, because I do not know any more about you than what you say in these posts and I don't need to resort to emotive comments to make my case.
I commented that the list of climate changes deniers in your referene was small. I have based my own opinions on an exhaustive study of material from many sources and over many years. I have also been to some of these spots to confirm data. I don't expect you or anyone else to travel there, but I think my efforts deserve more than derogatory comments.
I recommend you look at the host of other authoritative publications from governments, scientists, and economists. If you read the subsequent posts in my series you will find links to some of those.
... continued. The article from the BBC you referred to is by Associate Professor Paul Kench of Auckland University. I have read his work and reviewed the context of his comments: I hope to meet him in about six weeks time and I will show him your use of his work. You conveniently left out the rest of his comments that did not fit your view. To quote the article:
"But although these islands might not be submerged under the waves in the short-term, it does not mean they will be inhabitable in the long-term, and the scientists believe further rises in sea levels pose a significant danger to the livelihoods of people living in Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia.
One scientist in Kiribati said that people should not be lulled into thinking that inundation and coastal erosion were not a major threat."
So if you are going to quote, make sure you tell the whole story.
What we are saying [to island-dwellers] is that now there is a slightly better prognosis, that you will have land. We are not trying to undersell the fact that you have quite serious environmental challenges ahead of you. In the short term, coral dying from warmer seas could feed more sand to vulnerable islands. As sea levels rose, more waves hitting the reefs could push more sand on to the islands. But what that also means is that in storms waves go right over the top of these islands. Some changes could destroy the groundwater needed to support villages and crops.
In coming centuries it was possible some islands could be abandoned while they built up and re-inhabited once they increased to a stable level.
He said more work was needed to tell residents which islands would be the most stable, which would grow and which would move over time.
See my first post, point #1. We won't destroy the planet, we will change our ability to inhabit it.
Wow, you two guys are really indoctrinated and you may well be Scientologists as well. I'm not the one who brought up Tuvalu, you did.
Did you take your own water? That was the question asked of anyone thinking to go there, but you seem a bit too important to carry your own water. Dickens was so right and now I've met 2 of you on the same post!
I think that last comment says more about you than anyone else.
I have offered you material upon which you can discuss logically. To support your own views you have responded with quotes selected to twist the views of the author and I have exposed them as such. There is no further value in this interchange and I shall waste no more time on you.
Good job. You never answered my question anyway, or responded to the part about Tuvalu getting larger, or as to whether you were intending to take your own water to an island that apparently has none! You may well be a very nice person, but this global warming nonsense screws everything up and even though I really know nothing, I do know when my electricity bill goes up and up and the windfarms aren't turning and the Diesel generators are working hard to make up the missing power and the subsidies for this madness just keeps getting larger that this green technology is anything but. Take care on your travels.
If you know nothing as you claim, just go and educate yourself to build better working windfarms instead of trolling around, diffusing garbage and quoting self-made-up numbers. Ignorance is a voluntary misfortune.
"I read an article on this site from a photographer who stopped trying to get the latest of everything and was constantly wanting the latest upgrade. Not only was this expensive, but he was never satisfied.
I tried that, and am consciously holding back on purchases of new gear for its sake. I shall wait for a truly major upgrade before I buy, and only if (using Mittermeier's criteria) if I think it will truly enhance my photographic experience and make me happy! :- ) "
Well if (like me) you shoot Canon ... then at the moment you could save a FORTUNE with that approach !! (seeing that Canon have done nothing groundbreaking / new sensors / mirrorless EOS etc for many many YEARS now).
Weird how I can watch the videos and enjoy hearing about the thoughts, efforts and photos of a talented woman. Her camera body and lens were never on my mind. Then I read some of the garbage comments. On the one hand we have a woman who is dong something very well and on the other we have people sitting at ther computers complaining she gets air time. Thank you team DPReview! When will people ever realize that the most important thing in photography is not the brand on the front of the camera, but the person behind it.
Agreed. What's interesting is that she sprinkled in a few "new sensor technology" comments, correlating it to what it has enabled her to do. Those were the only parts of her presentation that didn't seem genuine to me - they almost seemed like afterthoughts to appease the sponsor. Which is fine, I take no issue with that - the perfunctory mention of technology in her speech only serves to further support your comment that technology isn't really what photography is about.
It's inspiring and ultimately a positive message she's giving in her speech. The stunning images were just icing on the cake. It's good for those who are open minded enough to be educated by their noble cause, what we need is not having to feel guilty or shamed, but simply, through common sense and compassion more proactively finds ways within our immediate resources to begin to do something about it to make a positive and lasting changes for the better.
Those who moan about who's sponsoring the speaker (Sony) and who sponsored the keynote speech (Olympus) are missing the point totally and quite simply barking up the wrong tree. We should be gratified that at least her monumental work is supported by philanthropists as well as corporate sponsor, whoever they may be.
A few people seem to be highly strung and ready to argue as if they have something to prove.
We all have in us at least a bit of passionate photographer. Try to invoke that part of you and be happy and appreciative. Leave the ego aside and look for the good in things. You'll feel a lot happier and at peace with yourself and the world around you.
It was an inspiring keynote and you should have taken away something positive from it.
I hate this that it bugs me but what does she gain by having a crooked/slanted horizon in this pict? At first I thought it was due to the slope of the beach but then there would be less sky on the left not more.
Is she straigtening the kids that may be leaning because they are pulling on the net? I have no idea but when I see that I want to hit R and use the alignment tool to fix the horizon.
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