Through Their Eyes Africa

We are OFFICIAL!

As of today we are now a real Non Profit Corporation with the State of Hawaii and have filed with the IRS for our 501c3.  We are so excited for what is about to happen.  I have been silent for a while because of personal things that have kept me from posting but now things are happening.  We are trying to plan our second trip to Africa for late August.  We will be doing detailed planing for the 1.5 FM project with some of the officials of the Borana tribe and we hope even with their KIng.  You ask what is the 1.5 FM project?  Well you will be learning all about it very soon as we are in the development and branding stages right now and it is going to be very exciting and where our money from our project will be going to.  More to come on that soon.

We are trying to get together our funding for the August trip so if you are dying to give to our cause you can now give to:

Their Eyes Inc.
159 Luakaha Circle
Kihei, Hawaiia 96753

You can also e-mail me at [email protected]

We opened our first bank account today at the Central Pacific Bank and will be contacting those of you who have been close to our project very soon with our latest info.

Many Thanks to Fuji Film Hawaii!

It is about time that I got around to giving out a huge Thank You to FujiFilm Hawaii for their generous donation of 4 point and shoot cameras and the 1 gig Dx Cards that we took to Africa with us.  I was amazed but not surprised at the unbelievable quality of the images that our students were able to take right out of the camera with out even any adjustments.  You can go to our web site to see the images of some of these new photo journalist that we are training and you will not believe the quality of these unadjusted shots they took.  Click here for a link to the site.

So after several months of fishing around for point and shoots to use in the future and me even buying the highest end point and shoot I could find that was not a Fuji, I am back with all my support.  There seems to still be a big difference in the image quality of the Fuji over the other brands.  They have a far greater Dynamic Range in all of their cameras and that is the important thing in digital quality not the Megapixels of the cameras.

I have decided to use the Fuji S5 full time for all of my professional work now except when I need the speeds faster than 3 frames per second.  I have had over 20 Fuji digital cameras and am a huge fan of the color, skin tones and the exposures that they produce.  I still have an old S20 that I will not give up because I believe it takes the best images of any digital camera of all time!

Thanks again Fuji and I hope you will be involved in our future projects.

Sincerely yours,
David Hessemer
Director of Their Eyes.

Looking forward to 2008!

last year was such a great year for me.  I was able to take the first step in making my vision of Through Their Eyes come to pass.  I have not posted here for some time now but not due to a lack of things happening.  So much is going on and I will be sharing it all on a regular basis in 2008. 

We are in the process of a few fund raising activities to get to the next step of the project.  This is where we will be taking 4 or 5 professional photographers to Ethiopia to train some young adults from the Borana village I found last August to be photo journalists.  I am so excited for this part but this will cost a total of about $30,000.  Once we have this we will be off to Africa with the potential of helping thousands of Africans in the Borana tribe overcome AIDS and Malaria.  How cool will that be.  We would be able to help their quality of living without changing their culture.  That would be our goal.

We are in the process of organizing our images from last August into two books that we will use to promote our project and to use as fund raising tools.

We are also involved now in the ground breaking stages of another related project where we will be going to document catastrophic natural disasters to tell the story of the brave and bold people that are the first responders and those that help to rebuild the lives of those effected by tragidy. We will see how this goes. If all goes well we will get in there and teach young adults to shoot and document the rebuilding themselves. 

Well like I said there is soooooo much going on and this is all in my spare time to I will keep posting often but as time allows.

Thanks for checking back.

Leopard Day!!

Apple is such a cool company.  They keep coming out with new and amazing things that keep me labeled by my friends and a Mac Fanatic.  I admit it.  One of my biggest disappointments this past year was the my Verizon Wireless contract does not run out until July, so I can not get an iPhone until then without huge fines since I have 3 phones on that service contract.

Well today is the release of the coolest OS update in a long time.  There is a feature called Time Machine that will blow you away.  It is the ultimate backup program that lets you go back in time and restore your whole computer or just a lost e-mail or document from weeks before.  A new doc that will keep your desk top nice an clean and cover flow built in for looking at images.  Lots more cool features. 

Since they call it Leopard I thought I should post a shot I took in Africa last month.  It is of course of a Leopard that walked right up to us.  Like within 10 yards close.  It was very cool. I ordered my family pack of Leopard and since they wanted to get it to me on the release date it is due to arrive this afternoon by 5PM fed ex at no extra charge.  Since I live in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that means a lot to me. Way to go Apple.

Our New Web Site

Thanks to the crew at bluedomain.com we have an off the chart new web site.  They were kind enough to donate a site to our project and to host this wonderful new site.  Thank you so much.

Please check it out.  We are very excited about the images the kids came up with.  I hope you enjoy.  Let us know what you think.

http://www.theireyes.org/

First Images from African Students

One of the first things I was told before I went to Africa was that things would most likely not go as you have planned and I would need to be flexible.  Well that was so true.  The goal of the project was to find young adults that had never used a camera before to shoot photos of their society to give us a look into their culture.  The goal was to find a village that had no exposure to any media, electricity, TV, Movies, or that had never even seen a camera before.  In order to train the students we would need interpretors. 

Here is what happened.  We had contacted some local leaders in each of the communities we were going to so they could line up the interpretors and students for me to try out the project.  Well due to a lot of circumstances the interpretors and students turned out to be the same people for this first trip.  All the kids who go to secondary school (equivalent to High School) learns English.  So the students that were chosen for me turned out to be the interpretors I will use when we go and do the project next year.  I call them Junior Mentors. When I met them they told me that some of them did know what a camera was but never used one before.  The others did not know what a camera was at all.  They understood English and could speak it fairly well.  They also knew Borana so they will be a valuable part of our project.

I spent about 4 hours with them the first day I met them and we talked about what photography was and how to tell stories with pictures.  We went over the camera controls and I wanted to make sure they did not get hung up on the magic of seeing images for the first time but first thought of how to take meaningful pictures.  I wanted them to go beyond the basics right away since I had so little time with them.  We did not take any pictures the first day.  We only had a photo lecture and hands on camera control learning.  We loaded batteries, media cards and just talked about taking pictures.  I showed them a few images on my laptop to get them excited.

The next morning we had a short briefing and while the rest of the medical team I was traveling with went to do the medical clinic I turned my new photography students loose with the cameras.  This was the first time they ever used a camera before. They were so excited and I was amazed at the images they came up with.

I gave them each an assignment.  They were to go and shoot the pictures that represented their assignment and then shoot anything else they wanted as long as they came back with a good shot of their assignment.  The assignments were to shoot:
Joyful Children
Mother and Child
Doctors at Work
Someone in Need

I had two students that really stood out although I got great images from each of the kids.  The thing I could not believe is that two of the students had a shooting style from the first images they took.  Most of us shoot for years trying to develop a style and these students had a style from the first time they picked up a camera.  So here are the first images from two of my star students.

Guyo is great at Environmental Portraits. I could tell which images were his every time.  He had an eye to  capture the emotion of his subject while capturing backgrounds that really helped to tell the story about the subject. Take a look at Guyo's first day images.  Remember that Guyo had never touched a camera in his life before he took these images.  Guyo's assignment was a Mother and Child and here is my favorite image he took for this assignment.

 
You can click here to see Guyo's Showit Slide show of his first images.

Hakana was my other stand out.  He had a way of capturing the emotion of his subjects and to draw you into the pictures.  You just want to look at each image and the eyes of his subject are just trying to tell you their story.  Hakana's assignment was Joyful children.  Here is one of my favorite images for this assignment. Again you need to remember that these are images he took the first time he ever touched a camera. You can Click here to see Hakana's Showit Slide Show if his first images.  I think these guys did an amazing job.                                                               

Faces of the Borana

Today is the start of a series of posts about my trip to Africa.  After searching the world for a traditional isolated village of people that do not have electricity, TV,  movies, or any media at all and have never heard of or seen a camera for my photography project, I found it!  The village we will use for the Through Their Eyes Africa project is located outside of Tuka, a very small town in the southern end of Ethiopia.  It is in the heart of the Borana land, home of the Borana Tribe,  These people live in the southern part of Ethiopia and the Northern part of Kenya.  There are estimated to be about 1.5 millon Borana's.  Our project will be focusing on helping the Borana's which are some of the most isolated and forgotten people on our planet.  After finding this village and spending time learning their culture I fell in love with these unique people.  They live a very simple traditional life with little to no outside help even from their own government.  The rate of HIV and AIDS in these villages is about 20% with Malaria an even larger problem.  Their biggest challenge is finding enough clean water to survive. They need help in a big way and no one is helping them yet.  I hope that my project will bring the attention to these beautiful and unreached people and will help to bring them the help they need.

I will be going into the detail plans of how our project will assist or partner Global Hope Network International (GHNI) in helping these people.  Along with shooting photos I was able to participate in the first ever medical clinics conducted in Borana villages.  We were able to help over 600 people but our goal to help did not stop there.  GHNI wanted to evaluate how to best help these people long term and had no intention of just coming in, doing a clinic and leaving.  GHNI had been planing this trip and developing relationships with some of the leaders in the communities over the past year.  There was a lot of ground work done prior to our getting there and the medical clinic was an introduction to the bigger picture of what GHNI wants to do to help the Borana tribe long term.  The thing I was so impressed with was the philosophy that GHNI works by.  They go to help unreached people by providing a "hand up"  not a "hand out".  They know the best way to help these people is to help them help themselves  and that will provide sustainable help.

Here are the first images of these beautiful people.  Click here to see a Showit slideshow of the faces of the Borana people. The show starts with some people I shot at some of the medical clinics we did in Isiolo and Merti Kenya, then some shots of some AIDS orphans and their homes in Ethiopia then from another medical clinic in Mega Ethiopia, then finally the village we will be doing the project at located outside of Tuka Ethiopia. 

I extracted the audio for the show from a video I shot of a traditional Borana dance that is about their cattle. You can see the video of the dance by clicking here.  Notice the women with their arms up like the horns of cattle.  One is suppose to be a young cow and one an elder cow.  They do not have any sophisticated musical instruments. They dance on dried cow hides that are stitched together and that acts as a drum.  They also use beads made of cattle and camel bones as percussion instruments. The rest is all vocal.  I love the trill that the women do when they get excited or like something.  It is a sound I will never forget and brings back many memories. 

I will post some images from some of the children next.  You will be surprised at how great their images are.

No Place Like Home

I have returned from Africa and can not wait to share some images and tell all about of my adventures as soon as I get a little rest.

I am exhausted but wanted to at least share one of my favorite images from the trip.  I will post more tomorrow.

Ethiopia Was Amazing!

We just got back to Nairobi for the long trip home.  We did not have any way of communicating in Ethiopia but I found the village we will use for the project.  It is called Tuka Ethiopia.  I spent 36 hours driving there and back but found what I was looking for.  A traditional Borana Village that has had no contact with the outside world.  It is hard to believe that there are still places like that on earth but seek and you shall find.  It was amazing spending time with them and I have images to share when I get back that will blow your socks off.  I  can not wait to start planing the real project now.  The trip to Ethiopia was like being in a real episope of a National Geographic special.  We were in such remote places few outside people have ever experienced their lives and culture before.  I know this project will be a huge success and can't wait to start posting slide show and images.  I am off to a game reserve tomorrow for two days.  Can't come to Africa and not see all the animals.  I have seen baboons, the worlds smallest deer in Ethiopia, camels, monkeys, zebras, ostriches and I am sure I am forgetting some but tomorrow we will see lions and elephants and more.
I am off to London for a day on the 3rd then home to Maui on the 4th.  I am very excited to get home but this trip has been amazing.  Thanks for checking in and you will here a lot more when I return.

Africa Trip 1/2 Way.

Back to Nairobi

Our trip is half over and we are leaving Kenya and flying to Ethiopia today.
So far this trip has exceeded every expectation I had for this project.  It has taken a few new turns but has been very successful. I was able to get 5 young men that had little or no experience with cameras and my star student had never touched a camera and did not know what one was before I placed one in his hands.  Wait until you see the images this young man shot right out of the blocks.  Internet service in Kenya is very slow and uploading photos is not going to happen before I return so you will have to wait.
We flew into a small town in North Kenya called Merti.  The las missionary to this area left 10 years ago and there had never been a medical team of doctors there ever until we arrived.  We did a clinic a day for 2 days and saw over 400 patients.  I found my 5 students and we went to work.  I am still in shock at the quality of images that we got out of these students with no experience at all.  Most of us try for years to develop a style of shooting.  Two of the students have there own style that is very strong from the first few pictures they took.  And one of them takes amazing environmental portraits that I can not believe.  He captures people in action in their settings and tells stories in their photos.  I told them that is what I wanted but never thought that they would just pick up the camera and do it. 
In Ethiopia we will be traveling to a traditional Borana village and try finding another student to work with.  I could go on for hours but will stop here for now.
I now know that the Through Their Eyes Africa project is not only possible but will be a huge success!  I am sure we will be able to bring the attention to these needy people and bring help to them and in the process help to save their culture.  That is the addition that I have for the vision of these people.  Global Hope as a very doable model in place now to help these people help themselves.  I will share a lot about that later but for now we have added that this project will be focusing on the traditional culture of the Borana tribe that reaches from Ethiopia, south to Kenya and even over to Somalia. 
I am so excited for what the future holds for this project now.  Thanks for all your interest and support up to now and we are off to a very good start thanks to all of your interest and generous support.
I do not know if I can post in Ethiopia but will keep you posted when I can.