About an hour from Mazar-e-Sharif on a desolate, dusty dirt road lies the village of Dast-e-Shor home to refugees repatriated from Iran. The scenery reminded me of southern Saskatchewan, without the benefit of field after field of wheat.
We were visiting a vocational education site where men learn carpentry and welding, while women learn tailoring and clothing manufacture.
Not the usual sort of subject I post, but seriously, there's an oliphaunt walking the streets of a city of 16 million people.
My favorite thing in Paris? The food. This was a cheese and meat shop (honest!) in the ... who am I kidding, I don't know one arrondissement from another, but I do know that it's near a cool little fabric store that my wife spent an inordinate amount of time in. The cheeses and meats smelled delicious, but we'd already had lunch and dinner plans were set, so there was, sadly, no point to buying.
I've been tired and frustrated lately...too many days in a row of work, too much frantic rushing about, trying to catch up. I thought about spending my day off with a fake, plastic guitar, playing Rock Band to decompress. But then I thought better of it and decided to do something far more satisfying...work on old photos in the works in progress folder.
This boat has been sitting there, waiting since July of 2008 for me to do something with it. My first, automatic, thought was to make it a black & white, but clearly, the gorgeous light of a Greek summer sunrise, the faded, once-bold blue and red begging for a return to their former glory and the blue shadows in the water all called for color. Besides, if I had shot this on film, it would have been Velvia all the way. So here you are, from the dry, dusty air of Kabul, a summer morning on the beach in Greece.
My friend Mireille (I'll tell you how to pronounce it later, give you a chance to work through it) and I were stuck at the military base at the Kandahar Airport. We got bumped from what would have been an interesting visit due to lack of space. Mireille is a Press Officer in the State Dept. Her job is to herd journalists, write exciting press releases about Embassy activities and speak officially for the Embassy. I'm sure there's more, but that's a good basic description.
This photo could be called a portrait through still life. Her world on these junkets is made of PDA, cell phone and notebook. Sometimes she's working with all three at the same time. I'm sure many journalists, press officers and publicists will see themselves in this one.
It's pronounced mi-RAY, though being French, the RAY is less emphasized than all caps might indicate.
Abstract Americana. A hot summer night, cars ripping around a 3/8 mile circle, kicking up the dust, making a racket almost as loud as a metal concert. I love auto racing. The environmentalist half of my psyche is offended by the redneck half. But then, the runner half of my psyche is offended by the half that lives for chocolate muffins, too.
More in a set at facebook.com/bhneely.
We recently helped clean out my wife's grandmother's house. Nana passed a few months ago, leaving a full house several states away from where her children and grandchildren live.
The hardest part was trying to find those things that spoke to us, while respectfully leaving for the auctioneer the detritus of a life well-lived. Naturally, I was moved to document, while those more deeply affected sorted through things.
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My father-in-law works part time at South Hills. This gives me a lot of opportunity to ride around the course, taking pictures. I've always liked the symmetry of this set of bunkers as they move up the slope of the 3rd? hole on the West? course. The hot, hot summer has scorched sections of the fairway and many of the greens on the course.
It's also one of my favorite holes to play, because there are few trees for me to tag and no water hazard between the tee and the hole. The sand trap in front of the green doesn't bother me, because, as Pops says, "You have no idea how difficult it is to get out of a bunker." Yeah, the one club I can hit consistently, and moderately well, is the wedge.
There's a willow on an island in a pond on the course that I'm thinking about doing a small photo essay about.
I finally decided it was time to get a point & shoot camera. After some research, and wanting to make sure that the images I shoot with it can be sold as art, I went with the Sigma DP2. It's a 14 mp, fixed lens (24mm) camera. Having shot maybe 20 photos with it, I pronounce it good. Or at least, good enough that I don't have to have my D200 and armada of lenses.
I should probably take my wife's Canon PowerShot out and do some side-by-side testing for image quality, but just for a combination of control and ease-of-use, I love the DP2. With just a couple presses of a button, I can change ISO, shutter speed, aperture, focal point, white balance, image size/quality and several other settings.
I shot this in my in-laws' garden just after they'd watered it. The contrast, detail and resolution are pretty impressive.
So what do you do with all that sand? Make bricks. Between the melon farms are brick factories. See the squarish piles around the foreground smokestack? Bricks. Stacks of bricks larger than a double-trailer semi.
I had a chance to get out the other day. Driving (well, passengering) through the streets I had three observations. A) I need a point & shoot...specifically Sigma's DP2...so I don't have to wave a giant camera around in the car. B) The traffic, though chaotic, is much friendlier than it was in Almaty. C) I am so glad I don't have to drive here.
Updates will be sporadic, though once my hard drives arrive, I'll be able to work on art projects and post those. Thanks for your patience.
On the visit to Son Kul Lake, I saw a demonstration of how traditional Kyrgyz felt products are made. The process is laid out in some detail at my Facebook page.
Currently, this particular alakiyiz is in a box in a shipping crate somewhere in Europe. We probably won't see it again for a year, maybe two.
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There are so many things to say about this photo. There's a cow in the middle of the road. Or there's a road across the prairie. Or the prairie is at 10,000 ft, and that line of hills in the distance are 16-18,000 feet high. The mountain prairies (or jailoos) of central Kyrgyzstan are among my favorite places on the planet. Although I'd go out of my mind with boredom (or perhaps not) I would love to live with the shepherds for a year and see life from their perspective.
We were about 2 weeks early for the huge party that's about to descend on the jailoo. Every summer the shepherd clans gather here for festivals, marrying off their children, trading, seeing the children they've married off and games of buzkashi (goat polo - see pictures at siananjim's travel blog). I love the idea of something like a giant Boy Scout jamboree taking over this vast grassy plain.
I had a red 4x4 Nissan Patrol turbo diesel that I loved. I loved it so much I named it after Sammy Hagar, who in the 80's you'll recall was known as The Red Rocker, because he always wore red and even wrote a song as a paean to the color.
Sammy and I drove to the top of a 14,000-ft mountain right to the Kazakh side of the Kazakh-Kyrgyz border. We drove across the open steppe, multiple times. We got stuck in a swamp (you read about that a couple posts ago). I learned about 4wd hi and low and how to drive on "roads" that make the forest service roads in the Cascade Range seem like highways. I drove on highways that make the forest service roads in the Cascade Range seem better than highways. In the city, I could drive as aggressively as I needed to, because he was bright red and had a no-bullshit look. I could say, "Yeah, I'll take out your Mercedes if you won't let me into the traffic stream."
Sammy was awesome. And I miss him.
When we lived in Almaty, I had a job that started at 7 am, so I'd walk through the parks of the city before anyone else was awake. And this being not Greece, most parties were finished and the people home by 5 or 6 am, so I had the place all to myself. It was beautiful and peaceful...
Until I started to realize that every morning Almaty looked abandoned. It was as though every resident of the city had been taken up and dropped whatever they were doing. So I set out to be the crying Indian, in the hopes that if people saw what they were doing, they'd stop.
I began work on an exhibition called Almaty: The Abandoned City. I went out every Saturday and Sunday for a month, shooting from about 5:30 until 7:30 am, taking pictures like this one. It got pretty depressing, because it was so easy to find junk and garbage, and I distinctly remember the moment when I had shot enough when I got excited over finding a huge pile of garbage.
Unfortunately, we were leaving in November, and I wanted to wait until I was sure I could put together an exhibit, so I didn't start looking for a venue until August. And I missed the fall exhibition season. So I may have been crying, but nobody knew about it.
Lest my Kazakhstani friends be offended, know that I remember American cities looking like this, and that what got us to start using garbage cans was a long series of advertising campaigns and exhibitions showing just how much garbage we were throwing out the windows of our cars and dropping in our parks.
Afternoon in the village of Pentalofos, in the Kozani Prefecture. The animated guy to the right is our Greek language instructor, Achilleas. The only woman in the photo is my wife. It isn't that the women aren't allowed exactly, it's that rather than hanging out at a coffee shop, they're hanging out at someone's house. The other thing I noticed, that I hadn't realized before, is that the young guy is sitting on the fringe, waiting for someone to die to clear out a space at the table for him.
Most of these guys grew up together, but now they live in Boston, New York, London or Melbourne, and they only see each other for a month every year. Greeks tend to go on vacation en masse, centered around August 15th, the day many branches of Christianity celebrate Mary's assumption. For the Greeks, it's a bigger holiday than Christmas and almost as big as Easter. They all go to whatever ancestral village they call home and relax in a way that is utterly relaxing...they do nothing but talk and drink coffee, and if the village is on or near the sea, they swim a lot. None of this American-style constructive relaxation where you have be productively relaxing by going to amusement parks, seeing the Grand Canyon or doing something. And they do it for a month.
You invite your photographer friend to the riding school, and what does he do? Make that damn mirror clacking sound and carry his tripod around, just waiting to spook one of the horses. But didn't spook them. So there.
It's been a while since I've been in a situation that I'm completely unfamiliar with, and this definitely counts. It was hard to find subjects, but I got a couple pictures I'm happy with.
Man, graphic design is hard work. Picking the photo to use was pretty easy. Deciding what to put on the card and what to leave out was easy (no phone number, since I move so often and am tired of throwing away 200 cards or saying, "That's my number in Greece. Yeah. Don't call that."). And the photo decides the design as far as where the information slots in.
But the fonts...the fonts. There are so many. And while it would be cool to have Metal Lord (think Iron Maiden's logo) or Tolkeinesque or Viking Overlord or something along those lines, they neither professional nor artistic (well, unless I take up band photography). My default is to use something classic and with serifs. I hate Arial. I dislike Tahoma. And Helvetica is just so...so...Swiss (though if you want to see a movie about a font, "Helvetica" is the movie to see). All our standard modern fonts exist not to be seen, not to offend, not to put a stamp on anything. And that offends me. I've been using Sylfaen, Palatino Linotype, a few others for awhile.
My cousin Amy suggested going with a font reminiscent of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy album. Which I love - how can you not, with "The Song Remains the Same," "No Quarter" & "The Ocean" - so I thought about downloading it. But it was 29 bucks. For one font. I understand, font makers are artists and need money, but since I'm not a graphic designer, I'm not spending that kind of money for a font. This led to much time spent on font freeware sites, looking at Metal Lord and so on.
I spent about 20 minutes putting together the original design, then about 2 hours experimenting with fonts. Do you need a drum after all that lead up? No, of course you don't. My name's in Galathea, my email, urls and tag line are in Maiandra GD, which came with Vista. I went with italics for the tag line, so that it wouldn't look exactly the same as the urls. I toyed with the idea of three fonts, but that looked crazy and disorganized. So just two.
Democracy, or the appearance of it at any rate, is alive and well and messy in Greece. Unlike in the US, where we apathetically take whatever information is funneled to us from the various administrations through the various information-funneling organizations (don't even think about calling them "news" networks), Greeks demonstrate and march and protest and hold strikes. I don't think they get much more real change than we do, but it makes life extremely interesting. This past weekend, for example, I had to take a different route than I had planned for my run, because the anarchists and the police were having a potentially violent conversation in front of the Vouli (parliament) building.
Anyway, right now, there's a garbage strike on. It was supposed to be a 5-day walk out (yes, they tell you how long you'll be without services usually), but it's gone past that. So garbage is piling out into the street. As one friend says, she hopes the strike ends soon, because she can't find parking near her apartment.
My friend Brad lent me his infrared (IR) enabled DSLR to play around with, and the garbage strike seemed like a good subject for the strange focus and color effects it gives. I kinda like it. I might eventually get my damaged-sensor camera converted to IR for those times when I'm already shooting all the way up and need to go that one more bit to take me over the edge. (C'mon, you know you want to finish the quote. I'll wait.)
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I thought that no place would have a sunset experience quite like this...until I found Utopia Cafe in Plaka, on Milos in the Cycladic Islands.
Yes, I've been working and reworking that joke for nearly two months trying to make it roll just right. It probably wasn't worth all that effort, but isn't that the way with puns?
On a recent photo shoot at the airport, I stumbled across a souvenir shop catering to everyone. Seeing these football (soccer) scarves next to each other so casually is like seeing Red Sox & Yankees gear side-by-side, only with the possibility of blood spillage if drunk fans are nearby.
The plane finally lands, the hands are shaken, you jump in the cars and go. The police have blocked off your route so the 30-minute drive from the airport can be done in 12-15 minutes. People take pictures of your car going past, even when you're trying to be a little subtle and don't put Old Glory all over the cars.
I'm working on a series of street market photos, with a small exhibition in mind for next month. The series is called Markets: Marco Polo to Markopoulo, with pieces shot around the world. In Kashgar, China, I went to a market that Marco Polo wrote about, and this picture is from some work I recently did at the folk market (laiki) in Markopoulo, Greece. The fish vendor saw me trying to get a good shot of the cat, so he entertained the cat with a spare anchovy.
The exhibit is limited to 14 pieces, so it will concentrate on a couple from Kashgar and the rest from around Greece (it is, after all, for a Greek audience). I keep thinking I ought to toss one in from Pike Place Market in Seattle and one from the Spice Market in Istanbul (though I'll call it Konstantinoupoli for the Greek viewers). I have to decide by Monday so I can get them all printed and mounted in time.
I love Nafplio. It may be my second or third favorite city/town in all the world. It's only 9:15 pm, so the people are just starting to come out, and look how vibrant the square is. In one of the cafes off to the left, you can get the best loukoumades (Greek donuts) you'll ever have. At the one next door, you'll get a pizza nearly as good one from Venice or Florence. Just out of the frame to the right is a newsstand with papers and magazines from around the world. Around the corner is a gelato shop owned by Paola, an Italian woman who speaks several languages well enough to get you into the best gelato or sorbet for your taste. A couple blocks away you can walk along the sea and watch the fishermen deliver their catch or the wealthy have breakfast on their yachts. Straight ahead you can wander down some shopping streets and see a beautiful, old Harley Softtail. We've been there at least 6 times and we never get tired of it.
Who needs tinder and small branches? This was right next to our table in the taverna.
My mother-in-law likes to be well-prepared for the invasion of xmas guests. We were legion, and in little more than a week, she got her counter back.
Coming home from the market in late August.
Sitting at a cafe, enjoying a cappuccino after a trip to the meat market, we were joined by this dog who decided the planter was a great place for a late morning nap.
Near our apartment there's an abandoned lot that's home to a fairly large troop of homeless cats. One evening as we were saying hi to them, this little guy decided to aggressively get his scent all over my shoe.
Remember a month or two ago when I talked about monks carving steps into the cliffs at Meteora? This is what I was talking about. These steps aren't much wider than your foot, and certainly not as wide as your hiking boot, running shoe or Birks. And the old sandals are essentially flip-flops of fairly smooth leather. It made me wonder how many of the monks died for their beliefs without even confronting heathens and pagans and Muslims.
The ancient theater at Epidavros, designed in the 4th C. BCE, is an incredible place. From the stage, particularly the center stone, you can hear clearly into the farthest reaches of the seats. Usually, this is demonstrated by people calling for silence by saying, "Sssshhhhhh," or by dropping coins, or by rubbing paper together, striking matches or clapping. My father-in-law, Pops, is a community-theater actor, and he went out and sang a song for the 200 or so people scattered around. It was the first time I've heard total silence in the amphitheater except for the person at center stage. He got a call for an encore. I'm proud of Pops.
Λυπάμαι πολύ. Εχεις καλή θέα, και την καταστρεύεις με σκουπίδια. Αυτό είναι το μόνο πράγμα που μισώ στην Ελλάδα.
People who know me well know that I have no love for doing work. But among the jobs I've seen people do (and those I've done myself), this has to be one of the coolest (except that he's doing it on a naked plateau in southern Greece). When putting together ancient marble pieces with modern patches, you have to match the grooves and holes and posts and so forth so that they all fit together well. And he's measuring and sanding to fit the shiny, white, new header to the ancient, orange header. That's cool. I wonder if he thinks about that.
So you went out drinking until 3 am. What do you do? Get up at 9, get down to the beach and swim it off. Or sleep in the sun for several hours. The thing that makes me mad about Greeks is that they can spend all day in the sun, apparently without using sunscreen, and you know what happens? Do you know what happens to them? They brown. With my Irish skin, if I even think about going out without SPF 30, I'll burn. And then you know what? I peel and am left with freckles. No browning, just reddening and freckling.
Anyway, if you're looking for a great beach, Katerini is fantastic. It's all sand, all the way into the water. And when it isn't hazy, you can see Mt. Olympus from the beach. And the water's nice.
So this is about as good as it gets for the handicapped in Athens. Immediately to the right of the frame is the Parthenon. The flag that the handicapped path doesn't lead to is at the point of the mesa, and the view from there is incredible.
I'm sure this guy's 450th-great-grandfather had the same job. Which is to say, entertain the people wondering why the hell an artist visiting the Acropolis is doing a piece on a homeless dog rather than ooohing and aaaahing along with the other 2000 people there. Really, I heard English in three accents wonder aloud why someone was taking a picture of a dog. I have to assume the Germans, French & Italians talking about me were saying the same things.
I think this was at our friends Brad & Maureen. Since we have a cat (who's somewhat larger than this guy) that tries to get into envelopes and very small boxes sometimes, I guess we can't make too much fun of this one.
"Run to the hills/run for your lives..."
I love metal concerts. Love, love, love. It's a place where the socially awkward can congregate and feel powerful for a few hours.
A fishing boat in Nafplio harbor, resting at the end of hard day's work. The anchovies and sardines and red mullet she brought in will be served tonight at one of the wharf side cafes.
We knew it was going to be a good taverna. Unfortunately, the kalamari were about 30 euro per kilo, and we just didn't feel like spending that. So we had fresh anchovies instead. Yum, yum, yum.
So somebody went a little crazy, but as Tom Cruise showed us on Oprah, if you're in love (or an actor), you might go a little crazy. I love Georgia. I love Georgia. I love Georgia.
So yesterday I said the restaurant was overpriced, but this was the view from our table. Great view, won't eat there again. We'll just go to the belvedere around the church.
I've seen things. Strange things, surprising things, interesting things, things which made me think I'd seen nearly everything. And then, I saw an ATV driving down the avenue. I'm not talking a major side street like this one, I'm talking the 6-lane, highway-like, motorcycles doing 80 (mph) avenue. Crazy. I'm hoping to have my camera handy when I see one in use on the road.
There's a flea market in Monastiraki, where you can buy the usual over-priced crap that you find at flea markets, but you can also get newly-refinished furniture.
