Note to Readers: There are about a dozen of these Burning Man posts. They are mixed in with our regular coverage at Planet Waves, though I am doing my best to keep them published in groups of three or four posts. We will have them tagged properly soon within our blogging system; for now, scroll down for additional ones, some of which are on the next page or two. The first in the series has a photo of Centercamp.
Looking toward the playa down 4:30, this is a typical evening scene at Burning Man. You can see the Man himself floating in the haze of playa dust above the camp, providing directional orientation from anywhere with a clear view. Travel around the camp is generally by foot, bicycle or art car.
I’m abut to leave Reno after extending my stay here for a few days to catch up with myself. I’ve been tidying up from my trip to the playa, getting back into the groove of writing (these photoblogs are a warmup, and my notebook from the trip) and spending a lot of time resting — it’s been a couple of years since I backed off of the astrology side of Planet Waves, and I do appreciate the time to have some fun and sort my priorities.
Thank you Len for keeping astrology warm. I’ve written the lead article in tomorrow’s Planet Waves, looking at the symbolism of “The Man” of Burning Man fame: the transformational power of that ritual. Nobody comes back from Burning Man the same. It’s a little like living through a solar eclipse, directly under the alignment.
This weekend I’m traveling fairly close to home, to the Loving More East Coast conference near Saratoga. I’m grateful to be able to get off the Internet and attend this series of events that I’ve been exploring all summer. I think it’s vital that as part of our community-building project, that we meet in person and actually have the opportunity to experience one another’s energy. I’ve done my best to make this week a networking extravaganza, collecting the email address of everyone I’ve met and including them in Planet Waves. I’ve met some incredible people from many corners of the United States, the UK, Europe, Russia and beyond. The people I meet are making me want to visit everywhere — to go back to Belgium, and the Bay area, and many other places.
My soul has been feeling restless after two years in sleepy little upstate New York (it’s been that long since I left Brussels, hard to believe but true), settling down in Kingston from a full 10 years of living in transit — and now I seem to be back on the move.
Today I’ll have a couple of posts about the camp I stayed at, called Poly Paradise. Tomorrow, if all goes according to the grand scheme, I’ll have my photos of tbe Burning Man ritual from Saturday night. We’ll see if it was worth taking my cameras and lenses out into the dust storm…stay tuned…
dust is the enemy of photographers…we will do anything to keep it away, in a dusty universe. And here I took my best gear out there into this pounding storm…I think it held up pretty well…my first project on returning was to get a USB vacuum cleaner, get into my hotel and clean the exteriors of the cameras and lenses, vacuum out all the joints and contact points, then take off the lenses and do my best to vacuum out the inside. I already planned for one camera to go back to the factory for a minor repair after BM and Mercury direct…so that will get a proper cleaning from the inside out…this one has a prism that tends to attract dust…the other I will take to my local camera shop for a cleaning there and see how that works out…you cannot imagine the force of the wind and the powdery dust in contrast to how much effort I usually go through to keep the dust away…it was a typical Burning Man kind of letting go process…all the photographers with serious equipment were having the same conversation with themselves…I talked to anyone I saw and lots of people stopped me and asked me how I was dealing with it and whether these cameras would not be trashed.
The thing is, cameras are outside toys…and they have a job to do…
I met one guy from London running around with a Canon 1DS Mark iii – about the best – who said: don’t baby your cameras. Use them.
It was worth it. 🙂