Photographers Blog

By Jorge Duenes

Just outside Tijuana there’s a section of the USA-Mexico border wall that follows very irregular terrain and where, attracted by its curves and steep drops, I’ve taken many pictures. It was there that I decided to photograph the Border Patrol making its nighttime rounds along the winding road in the dark.

After two months of waiting for the right weather, I asked my father and brother to drive me to a place on the highway from where I could hike to the spot I had marked on my map.

My backpack weighed heavily on me, as I carried two cameras, three lenses, a tripod, binoculars, a tent, jacket, food and drinks. With all of this gear, I walked quickly through the scrub in a region frequented by robbers and illegal migrants. It took me an hour and a half to reach my destination atop a hill some 400 meters high.

I started taking some photos before nightfall, but only around 9 p.m. was it dark enough to begin my mission — to take time lapse photos of the Border Patrol. To keep the shutter open, I used a piece of an aluminum can to jam the button down.

I waited the whole night to make a total of 14 photographs of the patrols and their unpredictable movements. Around 3:30 am, a patrol crossed in front of my view from east to west, with enough fog to make the image even more interesting. The majority of the photos were taken with exposures of between five and seven minutes each on my Canon 40D set at ISO 500.

What does a typical day at the White House look like?

I set out to capture a sense of everyday life at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, armed with basic knowledge from a course in video editing at the Kalish workshop. Starting with a couple of early experiments of the Marine Guards at the West Wing and a daily press briefing, I was hooked on time-lapse sequences that came to life when they were played at high speed.

I began taking along extra cameras, tripods, clamps and pocket wizard radio remote triggers. This involved slightly more work as I had to start thinking of the best place for a time lapse sequence that may not make a good still image itself, but rather as part of a larger project.

From the East Room, where most official functions are held, to the Rose Garden, the South Lawn and the West Wing, I set the cameras up to fire one picture every 5 to 10 seconds before, during and after the events. Thousands of pictures were shot over the course of those weeks, and I slowly began to put together a narrative that follows what we typically photograph on any given day at the White House.

Photographer Tim Chong captures the momentus Singapore Grand Prix, the first Formula One race to be held at night.