Making useful photographs

I guess (though I don’t yet know) that we drive a bucket of lithium around in the battery our new hybrid Toyota. Whether that’s the case or not, I’m interested in the topic, because getting more lithium (second from the top on the left edge of your periodic table) out of the ground is kind of a big, news-making issue right now. For example, Ivan Penn and Eric Lipton visit the topic in The Lithium Gold Rush: Inside the Race to Power Electric Vehicles, in the 6 May New York Times. At issue is extraction, which “might not be very green.”

But it is blue. Or turquoise. Or aqua. Or whatever colors you see in the photo above.

I took that shot on a 2010 flight between Reno and Phoenix, on my way back from the former to Boston: RNO to PHX to BOS, as the airlines say. I posted 130 photos from that flight in one album on Flickr, plus 17 in Lithium Mines in Nevada and the same collection in a 329-photo album called Mines and Mining. None are especially artistic, though all are useful, especially to writers and publications covering the topic of lithium mining. For example, photos like the one above appear in—

Biden clean energy talk fuels mining reform bills in E&EWhat an ancient lake in Nevada reveals about the future of tech in Fast CompanyTRANSITION TO ELECTRIC CARS NEED NOT DEMAND A TOXIC LITHIUM LEGACY, in Energy MixLeading the Charge…To Lithium And Beyond? in Nevada ForwardLithium: Commodity Overview in Geology for InvestorsLithium mining innovators secure investment from Bill Gates-led fund in Mining TechnologyThe Path to Lithium Batteries: Friend or Foe? in Treehugger

And those are just the first six among 23,200 results in a search for my name + lithium. And those results are just from pubs that have bothered to obey my Creative Commons license, which only requires attribution. Countless others don’t.

Google also finds 57,400 results for my name + mining. On top of those, there are also thousands of other results for potash, river, geology, mining, mountains, dunes, desert, beach, ocean, hebrides, glacier, and other landforms sometimes best viewed from above. And that’s on top of more than 1500 photos of mine parked in Wikimedia Commons, of which many (perhaps most) are already in Wikipedia (sometimes in multiple places) or on their way there.

I have placed none of those photos in any of those places. I just put them up where they can easily be found and put to use. For example, when I shot Thedford, Nebraska, I knew somebody would find the photo and put it in Wikipedia (at that last link).

Shots like these are a small percentage of all the photos I’ve produced. I’ve taken many more photos of people and other subjects on the ground or in buildings. Most of those are on hard drive nobody else looks at, or in albums or boxes likely to be tossed by unsentimental heirs after I’m gone. Meaning that my main calling as a photographer is this kind of stuff.

Which brings me to a camera question.

My main camera is a 2015-vintage Canon 5D Mark III with a 24-105 f4 L lens, both of which are beat up and showing signs of mortality. I also have an iPhone 11 that I use quite a bit because it is far more portable than the Canon. Most of the photos you see in those searches were taken with this Canon or one of its elders: a 5D from 2005 or a 30D from 2000. A few more were shot with a Nikon Coolpix replaced by the series of Canons.

Now an old friend is giving me her Sony a7R, which has been idle since she replaced it with a Sony a7Riii. I’ve played with her newer Sony, and really like how much lighter mirrorless full-frames can be. (And the one she’s giving me is lighter than the newer model.) The question is, what kind of lens do I want to start with here, given that my budget is $0 (though I will spend more than that). The equivalent of the Canon 24-105 f4 L that I used to shoot most of the photos the world is leveraging runs ~$1000. I suppose I could get non-Sony lenses for less, but … I’m not sure. I’m kinda tempted to get a telephoto zoom or prime for the Sony and keep using the Canon for everything else. But then I’m carrying two cameras everywhere.

But I just looked at this, so maybe I’ll find a bullet to bite, and spend the grand.