Fleshing Out Vision

Yesterday after morning meditation, Minda invited me and Frank to visit the Carmel International Art and Food Festival. I'd missed this every year since hearing about it two to three years ago so I eagerly agreed.

We had just the perfect weather to enjoy the outdoor festival. Carmel, ever looking affluent and "with it," had blocked Main Street and a block north and south of the intersection on Rangeline Road for the fair. I parked behind an interior design shop and chatted with the muralist, Jacqueline, where she knelt in front of her panel sketching the outlines of flowers in  orangey brown oil. Jackie was voluble and answered questions with great animation. She told us she had always painted. Her parents and grandparents painted but never attempted to sell their works. She broke the mold and has been doing commissions for large and small murals and, when she was not busy with paid work, doing fine arts. She had a thick portfolio of photographs of work she has done.

Mind and Luz had Filipino-style pork and chicken barbecue. Frank queued up for kielbasa served on a pita with sauerkraut. I opted for the sausage, ten inches of hot, freshly grilled sausage dripping in "Mississippi sauce." The owner was retired and lived in Florida in the winter, in Ohio in the summer and fall. I told him he appeared to have found his "sweet spot." He grinned. The sausage was wonderful! I've decided to take healthy eating more sensibly. I'll treat myself while keeping to home-cooked, healthier meals most of the time.
We sat down to enjoy dessert. Frank, Luz and I each had a giant serving of mango "Italian ice" from a couple (she's from the UK, he from France). I couldn't finish mine but Minda was kind to finish my share. Sitting in the shade while the band struck up around the corner, we watched people pass by. People-watching is one of my favorite sports. For the gorgeous weather, there were not that many people at the fair. Most were either young couples or young families with young teenage kids.

After we finished eating, we resumed meandering down Main Street and visiting the artist booths. I was surprised at the international representation there both for food and art. One booth sold typical French beverages. Most exhibitors were painters but other hobby art forms were represented--furniture crafted from exotic woods like burl maple, ceramics influenced by American and Japanese traditions, ikebana creations, leaded glass, dried-flower art, etc. 

I spoke with several painters. Aprill was one of my favorites. Aside from the beautifully colored pastels she had displayed on her exhibit tent walls, she had storybooks that she has illustrated. The books were on wood furniture that her husband, Scott, designed and built. He also designed her book covers. I was won over again by how artists saw. Most took inspiration from Midwest landscapes and plants so their images are extremely familiar to me but I was struck again at how artists select just a few elements from the scene or object they work into art. This process of selection and highlighting is at the heart of art. Art is imitating nature such that it represents something essential about nature. The colors are often not true-to-life but somehow truer to life after the artist is done with them. My excitement about art renewed with the experience about their work and experience that I heard from the many artists I spoke to.

To my surprise, one of the largest exhibit tent was also the most crowded. Windows of the World was a photography studio. At first I thought that the huge pictures were oils. The colors really jumped up. I remember first seeing blown-up photographs at the art fair Tony and I serendipitously stumbled into when we visited Saugatuck two years ago. That was when the idea of printing outside photos first came to me. The photographer I spoke with told me about his ink-jet printer. The cost seemed too high for me then and I promptly forgot about it. 

When I started my sabbatical last December I brainstormed about what I wanted to do. My initial impetus was to make movies but after shooting Kaleb I was hooked on shooting portraits and models. From my trip to the Philippines last year I thought of collecting portraits of Filipinos that I would curate into a gallery show by the time the Indianapolis Spirit and Place November festival came around again in 2009. I may not be ready next year. I imagine artists are already reserving space for next year by this time and I have yet so much to learn about the craft and art of images. It seems to me that the more I learn the more I realized how little I really knew and how much more I need to learn!

At the last booth on Main Street yesterday I was enticed by a woman with white hair and whose head just reached my chest. Holly told me how her family had to escape the Ukraine during World War II when the German army burned and pillages on their way to Moscow. She and her two siblings lived in constantly moving refugee camps for eight years. I was touched by her story. An Indiana Methodist congregation sponsored her to immigrate to Terre Haute where she grew up, attending ISU for four years to earn her teacher's degree. She is not retired from teaching art.

She and another lady from the Hamilton County Art Center tried to get me to create art with watercolors. She made it look so simple. I resisted but watching her dab watercolor on a bookmark-size piece of vellum I realized without picking up a brush that I too could be an artist! Bit by bit my vision of what I want to do with myself takes on more details. I am becoming an artist not only with photographs and later videos but more important also with life itself. Even more than I used to believe, life takes shape as a surprise-full adventure!

Wander Fall Indiana

Tony and I started out at eight this morning equipped with his Magellan GPS wandering Hamilton County in search of fall images. This was the first time I'd drove out specifically to shoot photographs of Indiana. This was also the first time in some 30 year that I went driving in Indiana.

Despite forecasts for sun, the morning was dark, cold, and foggy. I took side streets, confident that if we "lost" our way we could always consult Tony's newfangled gadget. The most fun for me was simply finding my way by zigzagging through roads I had driven on before when I used to visit my friend, Aldo, near Cicero. And the fun was almost rapture when I would guess right trying to recognize wayside images I had not seen in years. Remembering can be sweet.
The lack of color actually worked well for me. It allowed for images that I would not have taken in the cacophony of colors in full sunlight. In fact when the sun did come out close to noon I found it too bright and didn't take many more pictures after that.

There is incredible build-up north of Indianapolis. Looking at how farms have disappeared to be replaced by estate housing and luxury apartment complexes I can understand how the country finds itself in a housing crisis. Builders have used the last 10 years to build, build, build.

At Morse Lake I could have used sunshine but again the gray light encouraged me to take pictures in a different way. I looked for colorful objects to shoot; I looked for contrast as though taking black-and-white photographs. The park was largely empty. I felt I was shooting a photographic essay of the world after summer abandons it. Everything looked sad but there was also a peacefulness that feels antithetical to the buoyant activity focus of summer in Indiana.
Tony remembered Gatewood, a farm produce store in Noblesville, that his GPS led us to find off Route 19. In 1940, James Gatewood, with the help of his son, Bill, started an egg-delivery business that grew into the present produce store on 206th Street. For me the charm of Indiana is not roaring falls or soaring mountains or scintillating oceans: it's the countryside establishments like the Gatewoods'.

Driving on the small Indiana roads with no specific destination in mind, certainly under no time constraint, suggested another way to enjoy my adopted home. I realized this morning that as much as I've inwardly and outwardly complained of being stuck in Indi-no-place, I've grown to love it. Hay rolls on empty fields, the yellow soy bean fields, cornfields with brown empty stalks against wide blue skies, pumpkins and mums in the fall, bags of apples: these have insinuated themselves into my imagination, into my core of memories.
I had not visited Morse Lake in some 20 years. Aldo and I have drifted apart, which one might expect as we grew older and memories of our friendship back in the Philippines fade against the many more and more recent new memories. It is as sad as deserted post-summer parks where only old men are left fishing on the reservoir. A young couple was playing disc golf, a game I didn't know until Tony pointed to some contraption on the green and I asked the young guy what they were playing. 

All in all this was an amazing day. I enjoyed the company of Tony but plan to go on photographic safaris here in Indiana by myself so I can take the time to really plan my photos. I could have, for instance, taken clearer pictures in the foggy morning had I mounted my camera on a tripod which I did bring along. I need to recognize that if I want to take professional photographs I need to be willing to take the time to do this well.

Whither Now, Voyager?

Zac was the second model I shot since the hiatus when Scott and Arron decided not to do any more shoots. I have been chatting up a few of the muscle boys at the gym but after agreeable, even enthusiastic starts, they have all been procrastinating. Their bodies just are not good enough. It's the old adage: more is less, less is more!

I have not really been too active recruiting models.  I have been devoting time instead to improving my photo-editing skills. I have a ways to go before I'd think my images are ready to compete with those of other professional photographers.

Editing Zac's images is the first time I am using some of what I've learned from Deke McClelland's tutorials. Batch-editing on Bridge has revolutionized the post-production workflow. I am certain there are many more major "revolutions" ahead. I am just really skimming the surface of the soup!

Meanwhile, now that I've acquired some familiarity with the Canon D5 and the two new L Canon lenses I want to set about taking photography more seriously. I love shooting models and will always shoot models whenever I can but my interest in other types of images is resurrecting. I'm afraid I've caught the "L Disease." I am getting addicted to L images which in my own myopic view are astounding. Increasingly I am finding the sweet spot in photography. The sky's literally the limit!

Autumn Landscapes

With these photos in Flickr and on Smugmug I begin working with an expanding knowledge of light, color and the digital processing of images.

I shot a model last week and enjoyed working with Zac. I shall always probably enjoy working with people, working with personal energy and discovering new ways of seeing human lives. But I don't quite know what direction I want to take with my photography and videography. I started out with some ideas. In just 8 months, these have metamorphosed beyond recognition. Truly we make our path by walking.
Last night, after reading Pogue's NY Times digital post about using Google to locate sites on the Internet without using bookmarks, I entered "duende arts photography" in the search box. Lo and behold, the first item on the search results was my own Flickr site!

I did another search just with the words "duende arts," and the Flickr site was listed fourth from the top on the first page and again listed on the next page of search results. I typed in "duendearts blog" and two of my blogs with duende arts in the title were at the top of the search page, each one including a citation for another entry under each. Activating my accounts with Flickr and Blogger.com has put me on the Internet map. Myspace will probably have an even better chance of searchability. Little by little what I conceived of doing is coming about but the details of the "Plan" are morphing.

Doing Deke McClelland's tutorial on Lynda.com and Scott Kelby's book are irrevocably changing the landscape of what I want to do. Meanwhile these changes in my work are also impacting the rest of my lifestyle changes. Work and love, Freud wrote, are the two unchanging main issues that a person deals with in life and he was right. 

Love for me is love for life. More than the love for a person is one's passion for what makes life worthwhile. We might address love songs to a woman or man but for many of us that object of love changes in time. The Christian or Jew mystic or Sufi may know the better way. They write love poems and sing love songs and the object of their love never changes. The details of that deity's identity change as the devotee's love changes. In this Buddha was right. Everything under and above the sky changes. 

We locate ourselves in a certain direction of love with a certain object and we think we are directing ourselves. It's love that directs us.

Simply Ordinary

I am not anxious to do more model shoots right now. I loved the shoot with Zac last Saturday. Working with models satisfies a deep urge but I am ever more aware of how much I need to learn about digital photography.

I spent the whole afternoon yesterday with Deke McClelland on lynda.com. I didn't even finish one chapter of the first of his three "essential" tutorials on Photoshop CS3. I have decided I need to put in real time to learning the image-editing software. I can't just limp along, learning the little I need to do a specific job on a shoot. I need to learn not only advanced techniques but, sadly and seriously, I must build from scratch. I need to learn the basics.
St. Paul wrote to the Christians in first-century Corinth: "When I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully..."

We think of life as a journey. Where we are at the moment we can see a little of the future but only dimly. Only by taking the steps do we change our perspective. Experience changes us. We understand what we have gone through. It is foolish to think we can jump hoops and land where we want to be and skip the necessary steps to get there.

Buddhism teaches there is no unchanging person. There is the "I," the mind that reviews what has gone by and using what it knows tries to see into the future but it is no longer that person of long ago that sees what it sees today. We are not what we were a minute ago.

I have plenty of digital images to practice the new skills I am acquiring. I will continue to look for opportunities to shoot models. Meanwhile there are images around me just waiting to be captured, and the thousands of images already captured that I could see with the new eyes study is giving me.

The Digital Bonus

Digital images have a potential I am only now realizing. 

I procured my first digital camera because I didn't want to spend a fortune developing rolls of film. I came back with 60 Kodak rolls when I visited the Philippines the first time in the mid-1980s. I threw the bag of films in my closet and forgot all about them when I got home. 

My first camera, a Sony digital, that saved files to an Apple floppy disk, re-ignited my interest in photography that my first SLR camera, a Minolta, began. Not only could I shoot as many pictures as I wanted but tilting the camera just so changed the angle of the light coming into the sensor. Photography became exciting again.

Three Canon SLRs later I am discovering what images comprised solely on bits, of digital information, are about. I'd read how art was imitation of life but imitation that was more true of the experience than reality. I just never knew why writer and artists made this claim. The truth about a subject, a person, a place or a situation is not what meets the eye at first glance. To see as an artist sees is to use other mental faculties than just the retina and vision center of the occiput!
I lent Arron my first Canon camera so he has a good camera for the photography class I had encouraged him to take. He brought it back at our last shoot. The camera was not reading Compact Flash card correctly. The images captured by the camera were being dislocated with resulting images that were surreal. Body parts were not where they were supposed to be nor were the colors correctly situated either. The images were phantasmagoric. 

When I looked at those images again this morning, my eyes were miraculously opened. I saw and what wonders there were in colors and the unimaginably new ways they interacted with shapes and total design!

Aaron and Scott Take Photos

I shot Aaron and Scott at four occasions in June and July. Our last shoot came when I began to realize I needed to work on color correction so most of the photos from that shoot have not been posted.

I aspire to something I have never had. My mind is used to taking analytical, rational approaches. I want to learn to take the scenic route. I am always surprised at the viewpoints other people, especially young people, take confronted with situations I face. Experience overwhelms us into seeing the world one way. For me art is taking that scenic route, not through tourist-infested landscapes but through unfamiliar byways. We see the world again as God must have seen it minutes he brought it into existence!

I have been reading Amal Naj's book on hot peppers. Creating art is like eating hot peppers at the start of a meal. The pepper burns tongue and mouth and awakens us to taste sensations again. Heaven is too near us to only dream about it. We must find it here now.

Unusual Energy

Energy today was unusually high but I did not get to work on digital images until I came home tonight from the gym.    
I spent the morning writing before it was time to prepare lunch with a friend. 

Summer bounty is even more treasured knowing my pots of salad greens and herbs will soon be gone when fall turns to winter. I have come to love the bitter cress that mixed with the tiny Vietnamese basil leaves and baby red-leaf lettuce is wonderful with just some balsamic vinegar. 

For entrée I quickly seared chicken breast in a stick-proof pan with olive oil and fresh rosemary leaves, topping that with freshly made salsa. Lime juice is another late object of my love. It imparts to simple dishes a tartness I associate with South American cuisine. 

A third recently acquired love is seedless cucumber which is crisper than ordinary cucumber. The snap of biting into chunks of the dark-green-skinned vegetable satisfies some deep hunger for the sounds of festive eating.

Homemade raspberry jam topped chunks of late summer cantaloupe that we ate while discussing Harry Potter star, Daniel Radcliffe, coming to Broadway this fall. The latest Details also featured salumi as the latest food craze. I came away from Jungle Jim, the fantastic food emporium north of Cincinnati with several hard European sausages. Mario Batali's father who followed his son's example and spent time in Italy learning authentic Italian cooking is making sausages in the States said to compare favorably with those in the Old Country.

I did not get around to working on Minda's shoot until tonight, after coming home from the gym. It is now after one, Thursday morning, way past my bedtime. 

When Duende Dances!

Yesterday was a struggle, today danced! The way of energy is incomprehensible. Why is it high one day even when indicators (read superstition) are contrary and some days is eminently absent?

I spent much of the morning on finances. I cleared some issues and although they are not completely resolved I see the way to resolution open and unobstructed. It's a matter of time. I decided not to break at noon for the gym, just broke for lunch and returned to doing tutorials. I am pleased with myself. My Flash web project is recognizable though I am barely a fifth through Morris' book. Video tutorials are definitely easier.

I did close to an hour of Photoshop video tutorials with Deke McClellan then spent half an hour with Scott Kirby's book. I am working on Photoshop with four different instructors which is not a bad way to do it. Doing one program at a time gets onerous. Deke is very easy to follow but Scott jumps into practical ideas that I can immediately apply to my work with photographs. Just reading a few pages from his 7-Point System book I created this headshot of Aaron.

When the energy is present it buzzes. Zack emailed me that he wants his shoot next week. At the gym, Rich is finally over his cold. He was busy this evening bulking his muscles up again. I'd give him another week to get back in shape and we'll shoot.

I walked seven miles at the gym and did weights too. It's my best workout in over two weeks! Maybe the sunny day with little humidity that followed last night's rain and hail storm cleared the air for duende to come through. I suspect this is just how energy patterns go. Unpredictable, it is either famine or feast and I'll just have to moan or dance whichever phase of it I get.

Minda Debuts

Minda posed for her first shoot with me this afternoon. Most of the models that I have shot before were young, Caucasian male models. Today's shoot gave me for the first time a sense of what it is like to shoot a female model.

In a way, shooting models, whether male or female, is an identical process but seeing a woman as opposed to seeing a man requires a different way of looking.

It may be that in observing these differences I am simply succumbing to societal ways of looking at models but I think the difference is justified. In a woman model configurations of body parts that comprise the composition or focus of an image are vastly different. 

I would not focus on a man's nape when composing a shoot of a male model but in a woman the nape seems to me somehow an appropriate focus. It is an erogenous zone because in women this body part is often hidden by hair. Photography seeks not only to present familiar images from our lives in arresting ways but also to create an effect by the studious choice of elements rather than the whole sum of what is available to portray.

Then again the nape of a man might figure into my choice of elements to portray again depending on the effect on me of the model's pose. In a man, the nape might suggest vulnerability rather than erogenous attraction. But then, the curve of a shoulder whether that of a man or a woman often strikes me as a sensual focus, something elementally graceful that surmounts gender.

In any event, despite all these words that might signify nothing, today's shoot felt to me a different phase for exploring human images. Processing images after a shoot I am always full with gratefulness for what the model gives and gives with such kindness and generosity.

Amalfi Coast Joins the Travel Galleries

Just as at Cinque Terre the previous year, the day we went to Amalfi was cloudy. The tour bus dropped us off where we visited a souvenir shop and later crossed the street to steps that led down the cliff to the Emeraldo Grotto below. Before taking the steps I bought huge, fist-size lemons from a man with a cartful of fruit.

After a tour of the grotto accompanied by our guide singing Neapolitan songs in Italian, we took a launch that followed the coast to the inlet harbor of Amalfi. These are images I shot from the launch. They didn't capture the awesomeness of the spectacle as the boat sped through the waters making me giddy as I stumbled around for a seat to grab images I knew would not do justice to the experience.

Nonetheless, these photos start a third travel gallery on my duendearts.smugmug.com website.  Bit by bit I am building the site, a gallery here, another there. I have thousands of images to process and upload. Right now I am doing several lynda tutorials to learn the basics of Photoshop while processing a few photos every day to start a new gallery.
For now, my images are divided into two categories: models and travel photography. Each category has subcategories that make navigating from one part of the site to another. I am happy with what has evolved (because I am not planning as much as just doing what I can day after day). Eventually, once the site has taken a more definite shape I might look at the whole and do some other revision.

I imagine I will always have so much to learn that I won't lose this feeling I am always behind where I should be. This could be a good thing, humbling me because my state of knowledge increasingly is shown to be quite inept. The journey, as I have learned again and again, is what life is about, not the end that keeps receding into the unknown.

En Route to the Milky Way

For the last two hours and a half I have been using Photoshop for the first time in the creative way I had envisioned the software allows an image-maker to do.

I have been doing tutorials on basic operations of Photoshop on lynda.com. There is much more for me to learn about the basics of this program I've owned for years but frankly never sat down to learn to use. I thought I'd take a break from the back-breaking, peon work and try something more imaginative.

A book I bought at the 20% sale at Half Price yesterday was the vehicle for this fun activity, Michelle Perkins and Paul Grant's 2002 Traditional Photographic Effects with Adobe Photoshop (Amherts Media). I wanted to try the book out in case the instructions are no longer applicable to CS3 Photoshop. They are, with very slight variation. I like how the software builds on previous emendations without deleting these when adding innovations.

I've always wondered how other photographers applied different-color tones to their photographs. I thought what they did was simply amazing and an example of the great advantage digital images have over film ones. Employing Photoshop we can modify digital images not only for over-the-top alterations like composites (the book authors use "grandma with a monkey on the moon") but also to recreate traditional effects when photographers processed film in their basement labs.

This afternoon's exercise is encouraging. I am eager to explore the creative potentials of the software and of digital images. I feel I've gone the distance from here to China in what I've experienced with digital photography but the road stretches as far away, it seems, as other galaxies on the Milky Way!