Mattias Klum: Following Fascination
The gear is worth the trouble, nonetheless. Klum uses his PowerBook G4 nearly every day he’s on assignment to chronicle his adventures, edit audio and video and keep track of still film shots. “It’s really fun — you can sit on a deck of a boat in the Galapagos and have this stunning environment all around you, this living Darwinian laboratory of evolution,” he says. “You could be up in a tree or sit in a monastery 16,000 feet up in the Himalayas — in the middle of nowhere — and show monks a picture of the rain forest thousands of miles away.”
Klum’s laptop can be a window into his life and the cultures he has experienced. “It’s a tool to help me break the ice,” he says. “For example, I met with a tribe in the Amazon. I brought out my computer — they’ve never seen anything like it. They became my friends, my allies, and I could show them stuff from other parts of the world — my children, my dog, my house, my other assignments. It’s just a phenomenal tool.”
Moving to Digital
Klum devours film. On a typical tour, he’ll shoot between 200 and 400 rolls — he once shot more than 1,000. All of it gets shipped back to National Geographic for processing. Once it’s developed, the magazine will fly Klum to the Washington D.C. office, where he and an illustrations editor will sift through the shots.
Until recently, Klum hasn’t had reason to make the move to digital — National Geographic and the other magazines he works for have been willing to wait for his photographs. But he nonetheless added a 16.7-megapixel Canon EOS 1-DS Mark II to his kit. He plans to edit the digital photos in the field on his PowerBook G4 and store them on portable hard drives and send the hard drives in with his film. For Klum, the digital system will be a great addition to his kit, but not a replacement for film.
“If you ask any concerto pianist, they would like a good synthesizer or keyboard, but they would also like their Steinway,” he says. “It’s a certain feeling, a certain look, a certain quality. Some things will be better in digital, but regardless of how brilliant the digital systems are, there will always be a need for film.”
When Klum works with other publications, he doesn’t fly to their main offices for editing. He uses his own studio, which is equipped with two Power Mac G5s and a horde of other Macintosh computers linked to a 5.6-terabyte Xserve RAID. Klum and technical assistant Jan Fredén tweak photographs with Adobe Photoshop CS and organize them with Photo Mechanic.
Klum has used Macs for decades. Unlike PCs, his Macs have allowed him to do his work without being a technical expert. “It’s a more intelligent and intuitive system, a more powerful platform for what I do,” he says. “The work I do is hard enough as it is. To work with equipment that would make things harder than necessary is just stupid.
Pictures Worth a Thousand Words
An adventurer isn’t worth his salt unless he tells others where he’s been. Klum has toured Europe and the United States for the National Geographic Speakers’ Bureau and on the National Geographic Live circuit to talk about his adventures. The prestigious magazine doesn’t settle for a simple slide show, however. Klum tells his stories with Apple’s Keynote presentation software on a 17-inch PowerBook G4, weaving still images with sound and video clips to create stunning presentations.
“It’s so amazing to be in a middle of a sequence of stills and then show a video clip with sound,” says Klum. “The quality is really great — the audience isn’t looking at old dark slides. My goal is to have people see what I have seen, feel what I have felt. Keynote makes it a lot easier to do that.”
Klum and Fredén, his technical assistant, also use Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro to stitch stills and video clips together for a portfolio DVD. “In the past, when you showed a portfolio, you showed some prints in a book,” says Klum. “That’s fine and it will continue to work well for most photographers, but I work with film, sound and stills. I need to show the whole thing.
Future Expeditions
Klum’s schedule is booked for the next two years. “I have different new book ideas and film projects and a lot of lecturing,” he says. “It’s a mix of different things. That’s what makes it fun. One month I’m sitting next to a monk in a monastery. The next month I’m on horseback with Mongols. The next month I have a talk in Washington D.C. That makes it inspiring. This is something I can never grow tired of.”
