Holy Cow Indeed!

As my home library attests, my favorite book genre is the travel narrative. Starting with William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, the collection runs the gamut from P.J. O'Rourke's crazy journey from Tierra del Fuego to Prudhole Bay, to Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, to Robin Cook's solo camel journey across the Australian outback. I just completed one the best ever - "Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure" by Sarah Macdonald (2002, Broadway Books, New York). Part travelogue, part spiritual journey (and what better country for spiritual journeys than India - read the book and find out why), and part autobiography, Holy Cow mixes humor, insight and adventure with the realities of ex-pat community, societal conflicts and the pitfalls of newlywed-ism. As close to a page-turner as an travelogue ever gets.

My favorite passage - a quote, from the guru Krishnamurti: "When one loses the deep intimate relationship with nature then temples, mosques and churches become important."

Vacations Ever Onward

Its Saturday and, as usual, in my e-mail in-box is the weekly Travel Dispatch from the NY Times. Some - or most - weeks, the articles are fairly interesting but not necessarily worth saving. But one this week caught my eye - "Making Vacation Last for Months," about folks that work hard at summer jobs (or winter jobs as the case may be) and then travel the rest of the year on what they've earned. Here's the link: http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/making-vacation-last-for-months/?8td&emc=tda2

Always worth a thought or two.

Festival Photography - The Tango

The Northwest Folklife Festival, held each Memorial Day Weekend in Seattle, provides numerous, though challenging, opportunities for photographers. With over a dozen indoor and outdoor stages, performers, food and arts and craft vendors, tens of thousands of attendees, plus a few Seattle icons like the Space Needle and International Fountain thrown in for good measure, the photographic potential is great. But the crowds, the intense sunlight (on occasion - like this year!) and equally intense shade, and the general milieu provide a challenge for even the best of photographers in creating a worthy image.

One of my favorite Folklife events is the three-hour long Tango Dance, with both amateur and professional dancers. I stake out my spot well in advance of the first group of professional dancers and wait. And the wait is well worth it. This couple, professional dance instructors, know the ritual of the Tango and exhibit the sensuality of the dance in amazing ways - often subtle, sometimes extravagent and always intense. The combination of ritual and sensuality is what draws me to capture the feel of the dance. Hopefully I've succeeded in some small way.

Girl from Ipanema

"Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking, and when she passes, each one she passes goes - ah." The next line goes on to say that when she walks, its like a Samba, ..."

The Tango instructor, between numbers, confidently sashayed along the dance floor. And the only thing that popped into my mind were the lyrics from the 1960's hit, The Girl from Ipanema. OK, so Ipanema is in Brazil, not Argentina. And the Tango's center of the universe in Argentina, whereas the Samba is larger than life in Brazil. But, no matter. The memory creates its own linkages sometimes irrespective of fact!

The image is also clearly reminiscent of the Figment post earlier in May, one of my favorite photographic themes.

Out of the Way Places

In an increasingly small world, its not often I come across a place I've never heard of and immediately want to visit. I came across such a place this morning on the NY Times Travel page - Caddo Lake, Texas (on the Louisiana border). And the quote that really grabbed me: "But what struck me about Caddo Lake the first time I saw it was the powerful suggestion of the supernatural that it evoked. Honestly, it’s kind of a creepy place." The initial photo that accompanies the article fully illustrated the quote - a small steamboat slowly motoring through the baldcypress swamp. Feeling like you've been transported back in time to a primeval world. Gotta go - sometime.

The link:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/travel/escapes/22Caddo.html?8td&emc=tda3

Figment

Its been a little over a year since I flew down to the Bay Area and attended a photo workshop by one of the most intrepid photojournalists around, Ami Vitali. I hadn't been doing a lot of photography recently and needed a jump-start (as we all do from time to time). I had admired her website (http://www.amivitale.com/main.html - be sure to check out her "Intro") for quite some time and when the opportunity arose to attend a weekend workshop, I went for it. One of our "assignments" was to go somewhere - anywhere - and remain there for an hour (not really moving more than a foot or two during that time) and see what photo opps presented themselves. It was a gloomy morning and I walked from my motel room to a nearby bakery, ordered a cup of tea, sat by the window and waited. I eventually started a conversation with two gentlemen who were clearly regulars at the bakery and my photos and conversation with them became my "presentation" back at class.


Fourteen months later, I came across the photos taken that day and noticed this photo for really the first time: "Sunday Morning, Berkeley, in the Rain." The photo represents exactly that. Monochrome photos can emphasize the gloom on a rainy day; the "figment" walking up the street and the red car taillights show that life continues regardless of the gloom. The reds of awnings, the taillights and the no parking strip provide visual linkages. Simple and complex; black and white and red. And a good reason for not deleting photographs the first time around!

Its Root, Root, Root for the Home Team

Having worked on the Safeco Field project (environmental and transportation analysis) in the late 1990's, I occassionally return to the stadium to see how well it is aging and even to see the Mariners play. Camera in hand, I wanted to see what I could do to create a fine art piece within the world of sports. There was a decent crowd that evening and using a slower shutter speed and the zoom lens, I was able to create this starburst photograph. Motion, even if created within the camera, conveys excitement, an important representation of a sports crowd, even if in a somewhat abstract form.