Robert Caplin: Cuban Life

© 2009 Robert Caplin-All Rights Reserved
I came across Robert Caplin's work through a recent interview published in The New York Times' Frugal Traveler. Moving from this interview to his website, I immediately saw that much of his work was typically that of a quintessential travel photographer.

Caplin started out in Athens, Ohio, with a Nikon N50 film camera, but subsequently moved over to Canon, currently crams his expensive gear into a cheap bag and is enamored of one of the least sophisticated cameras on the market today: the iPhone.

He is also a full-time freelance editorial, corporate and portrait photographer based in New York City, and works regularly with The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News, and has also been published in the National Geographic.

It's been a while that this blog hasn't seen work from Cuba, and Caplin's lovely work on Cuban Life fills this gap. Drop by and it will transport you to the streets of Havana. If only there was an audio track of Cuban Son!!!

Landon Nordeman: The Sugar Train (Cuba)

The Atlantic magazine recently featured this slideshow (they call it video) of photographs by Landon Nordeman during a train journey in Cuba.

It's accompanied by an evocatively written article by Michael Scott Moore titled The 12:39 To Matanzas, which I enjoyed. However, I can't say the same of the slideshow. Clearly cobbled together by someone with an inordinate affection for panning and camera movements, I don't think I've seen a single frame in the slideshow (or video) that doesn't have the annoying pan from one side to the other, or going from one direction to the other, without a real reason for the movement.

I always start off my multimedia classes and workshops by telling participants to keep their projects simple, and to use effects sparingly, and only when it's absolutely required to underscore a visual point. In fact, I'll use this slideshow to demonstrate to my future classes what not to do. As to the use of a sound track from a Buena Vista Club album, ambient sound recorded in the train, peoples' voices, perhaps an impromptu song by a passenger...would have helped turn this feature around. Heck, what about the guy with the accordion in the train?