Evaluating tripods for Maya ethnobotanical photography: Gitzo with Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III

Our initial video is to assist archaeologists (and botanists, zoologists, geologists) to see which features on a tripod make it useful for photographing outside the studio. Outside in rough terrain.

So this first video shows us at over 2300 meters elevation (over 6000 feet high), near Quetzaltenango (Xela), Guatemala, Central America. We are photographing flowers used as flavoring for cacao and atole beverages (in this case a variety of the marigold, native to Guatemala and Mexico).

Our first publications on Maya agriculture were in the 1970's. Then the 1985 PhD dissertation of the director of FLAAR, Dr Nicholas Hellmuth, showed the Surface of the Underwaterworld: water lilies, sea anemones or columnar sponges. The Maya created a Cosmology that mixed both fresh water and salt water.

There are hundreds of capable and experienced archaeologists doing excavations every year. Dr Hellmuth has plenty of excavation experience (starting in 1965 as a student at Harvard). But since the 1970's our primary focus has been tropical flora and fauna, to better develop a picture of what the Maya environment was like from 600 BC to AD 900 (the Preclassic, Early Classic, and Late Classic periods).

So we will begin our videos for YouTube with reviews of camera equipment for zoologists, botanists (and geologists, epigraphers, iconographers, and archaeologists).

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People & Blogs

Tags:

• Gitzo
• tripod
• reviews
• digital
• ethnobotanical
• photography